a collection of philosophical essays

Philosophical Essays, Volume 1

• Scott Soames

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Philosophical Essays, Volume 1: Natural Language: What It Means and How We Use It

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The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world’s foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays. The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts. The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics—including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind. The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language.

Scott Soames is director of the School of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. His books include Reference and Description (Princeton), Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century , Volumes 1 and 2 (Princeton), Beyond Rigidity , and Understanding Truth .

"Soames's work is of an exceptionally high quality, the selections made here are truly excellent, and the organization is well thought out. Having these papers available in this form is a great boon to scholars." —Stephen Neale, CUNY Graduate Center

"Since many of these important papers are relatively inaccessible, it is particularly useful to have them collected together, and Soames has done an excellent job of selecting and arranging them. These two volumes are really terrific." —Alex Byrne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The Philosophy of Time

A Collection of Essays

• Richard M. Gale

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Table of contents (5 chapters)

Front matter, “what, then, is time”, the static versus the dynamic temporal, the open future, zeno’s paradoxes of motion, back matter.

Book Title : The Philosophy of Time

Book Subtitle : A Collection of Essays

Editors : Richard M. Gale

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15243-8

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages : Palgrave Religion & Philosophy Collection , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1968

Hardcover ISBN : 978-0-333-00042-7 Published: 01 January 1968

Softcover ISBN : 978-0-333-03761-4 Published: 01 January 1968

eBook ISBN : 978-1-349-15243-8 Published: 24 February 2016

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XI, 514

Topics : Epistemology , Modern Philosophy

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Moral Problems: A Collection of Philosophical Essays Paperback – January 1, 1979

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Chapter 1 Introduction: Depicting Desire

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Definitions

Desire has many names: desire, want, will, wish, longing, craving, need, lust, greed, aspiration, appetite, and hope among others. Dictionaries make many of these, in different patterns, synonyms and they can be used as metonyms. They may indeed be synonyms but as well they can be given a specific meaning. For instance what is will and how is it related to desire? The problem is that the specific relations between such ordinary language terms are impossibly messy. It is a bad idea to start analysing them. Of course, we feel they all somehow belong together. Each of them represents a subject’s vision of a better world or a transformation of the actual world into something better, or at least into a more desirable place. Even greed does so, although in a perverted manner. Perhaps this indeed is the common core of them all and thus they would represent variations of one and same theme. This is possible and I presume it is the case. Perhaps we may even assume that only one basic type of desire exists. At the same time we must agree that to find its proper definition is impossible. You cannot define ordinary language terms because they are used in such variable ways.

In what follows I review some attempts and later on we will find more. All of them are inadequate, which is to say that desire is a fuzzy concept. My own favoured characterization of the concept of desire is below. In the course of my deliberations on desire in this book, I am afraid I will deviate in many ways from the following ideas, but as a first approximation it may be useful:

Desire or rational desire means, by definition, a subject’s propositional attitude, that is, the subject recognizes and prima facie presents a claim to a salient feature of an imaginary possible world that one also hopes to get, or the intentional object of desire, which object is such that (a) its meaning can be disambiguated, (b) it is intrinsically attractive or desirable and can be socially understood as such, (c) it is plausible to consider the success of the claim in an accessible, new possible world; moreover, (d) the object is more desirable than any of the relevant features of the actual world, (e) the object is more desirable than any other object in those alternate possible worlds that are at least equally accessible, and (f) the possible world where the desired object is located is acceptable in toto.

Let me explain. “Rational” means that we are not interested in, say, plain urges or addictions; desires are motivated by some reasons that are based on the desirability of the desired objects. The basic idea is that I recognize an object, consider it attractive, and make a claim to it as if I demanded it. I want to move over to a possible world in which my demand is satisfied. It can happen that some objects of desire are initially too vague or figuratively expressed and this must be corrected. The subject must not already possess the desired object, and it must be possible to get it. Also, the designated possible world must be better than the actual world. If this is not the case, one has no reason to consider that possible world and thus no desire emerges, but it is not enough to consider one possible world, and I cannot only consider the object in question but I must check what comes along with it, that is, the world. Too much extra bad baggage there means that I cannot afford to choose the given object, because it is located in a bad environment. I want to kill Bill but that spells twenty years in prison, which is to say that the object of my desire is located in a bad possible world. I may then reject the desire or the world. I drop the idea of killing him; I now want Bill dead or, alternatively, I accept the actual world where Bill and I both live. We may say the desire must not be too costly in the possible world where its object is located.

Richard Wollheim argues that “[o]ur desires do not generate a possible world.” His argument for this is as follows: “Each desire offers us, as it were, a view through a keyhole, but there is no reason that there should emerge from these views of a coherent picture of what lies on the other side of the gate.” He compares desire to belief and says the latter, all things considered, forms such a coherent picture. But all the (true) beliefs together form the picture of this actual world, which is of course also a possible world, too. Desires, on the other hand, sketch an aspect of a novel but accessible possible world, which is better than this actual world; that is the whole point of desiring. The possible world revealed by beliefs may be a coherent totality and in this sense a reconstruction of what we already have. However, when I desire something and tell the full story of its desirability conditions that I expect to be there, I sketch an aspect of the world that does not exist. It is a non-actual possible world such that the world where the sketch holds true is similar to the actual world in all other respects. It is not the actual world because of its novel features but it is a whole possible world because it is its novel features plus the remaining features of the actual world. In this way, desire constructs its own possible world. 1 When I want to drink beer the new world contains me drinking beer and the rest remains the same.

Any idea and concept can be employed either as a definiens or a definiendum, or as that which explains or that which is to be explained. I may try to say something about desire or about something else by means of desire. In the first case I am interested in desire per se and in the second case of something else. If I am interested in desire, as I happen to be, the definition or characterization of desire is bound to be long, complicated, and yet incomplete. 2 Actually, it may look like a theory rather than a definition. But in the case of desire as a definiens one may be brief – the briefer the better. It all depends on what one tries to explain and what kind of explanatory machinery one needs; of course, one makes an attempt to use tools that are as simple as possible. For instance, Mark Schroeder uses “desire” as a “stipulative abbreviation” that is fit to explain his key cases and examples. But he consoles the reader by saying that “desires in this technical sense really are desires.” 3 Minimal features create minimal problems but technical stipulations may lose contact with reality. Perhaps for this reason we have so many simplicistic definitions of desire, some of them too brief and some rather strange. Let me list a random sample plus some comments.

Richard Brandt in his “Rational Desires” says, “a person who desires S is in a state such that, were he to think of S, S would seem attractive to him” (italics in the original). I wonder why he uses a counterfactual construction here. He sums up his view as follows: “These two aspects of desire appear to be logically distinct: Seeming attractive seems to be somewhat different from being ready to do something if one sees it will produce something else. But psychologically I suppose they are connected in a law like manner.” 4 This is to say, according to Brandt, that desires are motives, which I think is not true, and most philosophers today would approve. 5 Sometimes desire as an explanans is part of action explanation, if action is called for, but never as a motive. Of course we also have contexts like “Q: Why are you here? A: I wanted to see you,” which justifies what I have done, but this is a different matter. Anyway, the idea that the person who desires O is, for that reason alone, also motivated to act on one’s desire for O has been quite popular earlier (we will return to this). What comes to Brandt’s characterization of desire, I find it too simple to be plausible. It indeed spells out a necessary condition of desiring, namely, that one finds the object desirable but of course it is not sufficient. I read classic car magazines and find most cars attractive so that I could consider myself as owning them, but yet I for all kinds of reasons do not desire any of them. Say, the possible world where I own such a car is alien to me. Moreover, I cannot see why Brandt talks about “seeming attractive.” An object is or is not attractive to me and thus one cannot make sense of a qualification like seeming in this context. If an object seems attractive to me it is attractive to me and also the other way round. Also, some features of an object may be attractive to me without making the object desirable. I see an attractive painting that I do not find desirable because I see the painting in a disinterested aesthetic perspective. I may find little kids very attractive but I abhor any ascription of desire to our mutual existence. Desirability means attractiveness in a special way that is open to desire. 6

Allan Gibbard says, “What’s desirable, we can say, is what one ought to desire,” when “ought” here is what he calls the “basic normative ought.” Such ought is at work when we consider what we ought to believe given some positive and negative evidence. 7 The question about the nature of desirability is as important as it is difficult. Think of it in the past tense: “I ought to have believed he is a crook,” when the relevant evidence was there but I refused to believe what it entails. However, it does not make sense to say, “I ought to have desired it,” when I failed to desire something I had found desirable. Belief and desire behave differently here. Evidence forces belief and we should accept that, if we are rational. When I see you I must believe you are there. If counterevidence is present I ought to handle it properly. Nothing similar can be said of desirability and desire. Desirability does not force desire because it only allows for desire. We can say, “I ought to have chosen it,” if my utility calculations indicate it is so. But it does not make sense to say “I ought to have desired it.” Considering desirability, the normal strategy is to pass them by. You recognize a desirable object and you pass it by without normative consequences. Given that an ought is at work, this is impossible. Think of belief: if I accept some evidence I ought to formulate a corresponding belief. If I do not, I am irrational and that is a negative characterization and an unfavorable evaluation. Desirability is a prima facie invitation to explore the situation further in order to see whether you desire the intentional object in question. You start from its desirability and you narrate the case; finally you watch your desire to emerge or fail to emerge. In this sense desire generation is not an act but rather like a spontaneous mental event. Desirability is prima facie invitation to explore, and that entails permission. Therefore, evidence forces belief, which is a two place relation; desirability considerations do not force desire because a third variable is needed here, which indicates a three place relation: subject, desirability, and desire. I desire ice cream not only because it tastes good, which is its desirability condition, but because all people around me eat ice cream.

Desirability is a problematic notion, though. Think of the following desire and its motivation, when motivation is based on desirability conditions: “I want to hurt people because I do not want they hurt me.” First we need to eliminate the second reference to wanting, for instance, by saying hurting is bad. Now we have an inconsistent looking sentence: “I want to hurt because hurting is bad.” Perhaps the person wants to say: “I hurt people so they cannot hurt me,” which sounds like an implausible strategy. If we accept it, the original picture of the desire changes accordingly: what I really want is not to get hurt and, thus, hurting others is just my instrumental desire or need. Another strategy is to find a set of mediating propositions between “I want to hurt” and “Hurting is bad.” One can imagine that the mediation will prove to be complex and controversial and also that the person herself may not have much to say about it. Perhaps it has something to do with childhood traumas. I suspect such cases have given some psychologists and psychiatrists a motive to speak about unconscious motivation. Anyway, my basic idea is that the gap between a desire and its desirability conditions must be spelled out by means of a narrative that concerns the details of the case. Our motives tend to be deeper and more complicated than they first appear. Another lesson, as we saw, is that when we spell out the desirability conditions in full, our picture of the intentional object may change, too. What looked like the object appears as a grammatical construct that hides the psychological topics we need to discuss. The object disappears and a topic of desire appears in its place. We can ask, when I desire an object, what do I desire?

Graham Oddie puts his point in an impressively exact manner: “Goodness = df that property X such that, necessarily for any state P whatsoever, if one believes […] that P has X, then one desires that P.” 8 This is to say, if I believe an object is good, I also desire it. However, if an object is good it is, therefore, intrinsically desirable, but I do not desire all desirable objects, as I already argued above. If desire is a mental state or episode, to desire all that is desirable must be an overwhelming task; it defies all the laws of cognitive economy. To kill Bill is a desirable idea to me. I can kill Bill in two different possible worlds, in the first one with no risk, and in the second with the risk of dying myself. It is misleading to say I want to kill Bill in both worlds just because the idea of killing Bill sounds so good. In the theory of desire, one must make a clear distinction between desire and desirability. For instance, many desirable things are impossible to get and, hence, you cannot desire them.

The simplest possible desire theory comes from Brian Loar: “I shall use ‘desire’ and ‘want’ interchangeably for the general pro-attitude.” He continues: “The contents of desire are a matter of their potential interaction with certain beliefs leading to decisions.” 9 Here again we find a confusion between desire and desirability, or pro-attitude. Actually, I may have a pro-attitude towards something I do not find desirable. Moreover, most of our pro-attitudes have nothing to do with our decision making. My son introduces his new girlfriend whom I instantly like but I have no power to make any decisions in this situation. Loar’s idea resembles Brandt’s definition. Michael Smith’s definition is as follows, “desires [are] states that represent how the world is to be.” 10 This focuses on the thesis of different directionalities of desire and belief, which says that desire determines a possible world and the actual world determines belief. In other words, when I say I desire something I hope the world will change accordingly. I may say, “I want you to do X” and thus I issue a command to you to change the world so that X. In this sense desire is an immodest propositional attitude. Smith also is sympathetic to the dispositional model of desire, that is, if I desire to act I am disposed to act accordingly, given that my beliefs concerning the relevant circumstance are correct. 11 To put it simply, desire indicates a disposition to act. But this idea applies only to desires that one may label actionist. Many, or most, desires are not actionist in the sense that they do not mention action. For instance, John desires that Mary loves him vs. John wants to make Mary love him. Desires of the type “I want to act” are a special case. The source of the overemphasis on the actionist cases seems to be Elizabeth Anscombe’s idea, so elegantly formulated, “The primitive sign of wanting is trying to get.” 12 Yes indeed, one may add, if one has something to get. I find it strange that so many writers on rational action explanation use such an idea of desire; for instance, Richard Holton, “Desire in the sense we are after is a state that preoccupies an agent’s attention with an urge to perform a certain action.” 13 Holton gives the reader an ad hoc definition of desire tailor made to serve action explanation, but then he needs a desire in a special sense. When a gourmand says, “I want that dish,” we cannot infer what he may do in order to get it, perhaps nothing. So, the problem is that an expression of desire may leave the relevant action ambiguous, or the very possibility of action is uncertain. In some cases action is impossible: “I want that you forget what I did.” I may do something that is somehow relevant to the case, like pleading her or confusing her, but it is not quite like the action that I have in mind, namely, an act that makes her to forget. No such action exists.

Here is a simple argument against the idea that desires logically entail actions. I say, I want that I do not act, when I could act ceteris paribus. I may desire that I do not act, not in the sense of an omission that may itself be an action, but in the sense of bypassing all considerations of action. Action is then out of the question. This argument works also in those cases where one says that a non-actionist context excludes desire and calls for wish or hope. I do not think this is so but it of course is a possible standpoint. I say, I want her to want me, implying that I cannot directly, do anything about it. You may say, then you only wish or hope that she will want you. My first argument is immune to this caveat.

What about the dispositional theory of desire? This theory says desire logically entails the desiring agent’s disposition to react by acting, if he could, in order to secure the subjectively desirable change of the world. A lover would act if he could in order to get the partner he wants. He cannot act but still it is true that he would if he could. Such a disposition is said to be a mark of the mental state properly called a desire. I cannot actively better my situation in the life-boat on the ocean but of course I am disposed to do so – if I could. The counterfactual here is true. Obviously desire and disposition to act are closely connected. Yet it is easy to show that this is not a necessary connection. Suppose you desire a change of the world such that its voluntary production is, for you, impossible either factually or normatively. In such a case it is irrational to want it in the dispositional sense. Suppose I want Bill dead. That does not imply I am disposed to kill him, if I believe that killing is wrong and I am a moral person. A young man wants to be a soccer star but he is too lazy to practice; hence, he is not disposed to act in terms of his desire. If he thinks he is a natural soccer star he has a reason that backs up his desire without allowing for any disposition to act. Suppose I want Bill dead but I have no disposition to kill him because I think I am no killer. Under no conditions would I kill him, or act with the intention to kill him or otherwise facilitate the relevant change of the world. I am not disposed to do so even if I want him dead; I have my good reasons for my omission. Of course someone may argue that I as a desiring person I am disposed to act regardless of the relevant impossibility, namely, in the following sense: suppose it were not impossible and then I would be disposed to act. This is too far-fetched to be plausible. The basic point is, I am not a person who kills and that is why I am not disposed to kill even if I desire him dead. The dispositional theory supposes that desire rests on a two place relation S – O, which is not true.

In this book I am interested in desire qua desire, or desire independently of action explanation. Human existence is so much more that action and hence desire as an explanandum should be taken seriously. William James puts it well: if the satisfaction of a desire, or obtaining its intentional object, is dependent on action, the mental state is called the will. 14 Given that I want to kill Bill, I can say it is my will to kill Bill: this usage does not seem to exist today in the relevant literature, which is a pity.

Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder famously promote a reward theory of desire: “[T]o have an intrinsic desire regarding it being the case that P is to constitute P as a reward,” when aversions indicate punishment. 15 This only says that if I desire P, P must be a reward, which is to say that the only way an object can be desirable is to be seen as a reward. Therefore, here we meet another theory of desirability in disguise. To say whatever is desired must be rewarding, sounds like a prima facie plausible idea. Of course, a reward is not something like a social prize but some kind of subjective positive experience that tends to make me want more of it – but this sounds circular: if something is desirable it is rewarding, but only those things are rewarding that are desirable. There are desirable and undesirable rewards. I can imagine rewards that I find undesirable all things considered. I may find sexual voyeurism personally rewarding in the sense that I want more of the same; perhaps I feel like a potent predator and at the same time I shun from it. I may find it fearful and repulsive to find it rewarding. Voyeurism is rewarding to certain people, I know it is, but it also is too costly, or I may not find it fit for me as a person. If it is not, one’s voyeuristic desire does not seem to be based on rewards. A good example is revenge. I consider personal revenge, and to get it is typically deeply rewarding; yet, I refuse to see it as a desirable strategy because I know revenge is unethical and I am an ethical person. Hence, Schroeder’s idea looks dubious: I may find a reward repulsive, and yet I want it; if I want it its desirability conditions must be found elsewhere.

In what follows, I will work under the assumption that whatever is attractive may also be desirable, and many types of attractive things exist. An attractive object pulls me towards it. Finally, it seems that the reward theory focuses on actions, which I said above is not a valid idea. Normally we think that some actions deserve their reward. Reward entails merit. If I get something from you, without my own effort, merit, or desert, I may be happy but where is the reward? Many desires are desires to get the object without personal effort. In a non-actionist context the idea of reward does not seem that attractive. One final point: instead of reward, we should talk about expected reward. Desires are often connected with time consuming projects where rewards are endlessly delayed. If my desire stays alive it must be for other reasons than expected rewards. I try to learn French pronunciation, which I know is endlessly frustrating. Where is my reward now?

Let us next take a peek on empirical psychology in order to see how psychologists may understand desire. Here is an example: desire is defined “as those wants and urges that are intricately linked to motivation, pleasure, and rewards.” 16 Like Schroeder’s definition this mentions rewards. However, as I said above, most philosophers do not like to link desire directly to motivation of action. The main problem, however, is that wants and urges are desires or at least so closely related to desire that the definition now becomes patently circular. The authors also say desires they are mostly interested in are appetitive desires, and they seem to mean desires that aim at some desirable object. This is the pull theory of desire based on the idea that the desiring person gravitates towards some desirable objects, or desire is based on reasons that motivate it. The opposite theory is a push theory that is normally understood as a naturalistic causal theory: some physiological states called drives push us towards certain objects that are believed to extinguish them. 17 No reasons are mentioned here. Such push-desires aim at their objects that signify the return of physiological equilibrium or status quo, which also can be seen as pleasure. 18 In this sense, desire entails a specific physical and, hence, mental disturbance, which can be understood as a lack or a consequence of an experienced lack. Pull theories do not presuppose such a disturbance although some theorists have assumed otherwise, perhaps under Platonic influence. Push and pull theories must not be conflated.

Finally, let me mention a strange new definition of desire, which “concerns the various things one would like to have or to do even if it is impossible.” The first part is typical of such short characterizations of desire and hence I need not comment on it, but the last part is truly strange. What could it possibly mean to argue that the intentional objects of desire are impossible to get? 19 What does it mean that I want to be the richest man of the world now; I may entertain this idea but that is all. I can say I wish I were rich, but then I use a counterfactual formulation. Of course, some varieties of desire, like longing, happily take an impossible object, as in “I long for my lost youthful vigor.” Or, “I wish Bill would not be here,” when he already is present, but here again we are dealing with a counterfactual possibility. If an object is believed to be impossible to get, we must first ask whether this impossibility is a logical or practical problem. In both cases, one cannot keep it as the object of one’s desire. But if the problem is practical, we may still wish. If it is a logical impossibility, we cannot even wish for success. Thomas Hobbes wanted to square the circle; had he understood the self-contradictory nature of his efforts he should have dropped the project and quit thinking of it.

Now, one cannot desire objects one believes to be impossible or non-existent, or if they exist, impossible to get. I cannot desire my youthful years back. I cannot want to see a centaur. These objects do not exist. I cannot desire that President Trump would serve me tea each morning from now on. I believe that it is a practically impossible scenario. I have no chance here and to entertain the idea is wishful thinking or daydreaming. Of course one can define desire so broadly that it includes such items as daydreaming and irrational desires but I cannot see why we should do so.

It is easy to confuse wish, hope, and desire. About hope, I want to use “hope” mainly in the following context: Desire logically entails hope – I cannot desire an object that I already have or that I cannot have. And hope entails desire. Thus, when I desire or even act according to my desire, I also hope to have or get it. Of course, I can say, for instance, “I hope to see you tomorrow,” but then I want to see you and I hope that this will be the case tomorrow. If I wish, I may have no hope and therefore no desire: “I wish I were younger,” All this is controversial and my view is partly stipulative, of course. But we need to standardize the use of these concepts for theoretical and argumentative purposes. 20

Concerning rational desire, Brandt’s idea in his above mentioned paper looks attractive: A desire is rational if no amount of additional information can change and correct it; otherwise it is irrational. 21 This is end-state rationality meaning a situation in which all our relevant reasoning and information gathering is already done. However, a more natural way of thinking here is process rationality: A desire is rational if and only if it responds to new information in a positive manner, that is, becomes better adapted to its environment of beliefs, values, and other desires. If it does not respond at all, it can be called obsessive-compulsive. If it responds only partially and too reluctantly, it is defective. Brand’s theory looks obviously wrong if you look at it from the process point of view: fixed desires are indeed obsessive-compulsive. One may view the theory from the end state perspective and then it looks better. It says, if you cannot fix your desire it must be irrational. If any new thought makes a woman endlessly vacillate between her desires to marry her fiancé or leave him, her desire is in bad shape, that is, irrational. Obviously, we can approach the problem of rationality in two mutually incompatible directions. Another well-known way to understand rational desire is to ask whether I desire my desire or not. I want to smoke but I do not want to want to smoke, hence my desire is irrational. I want to be a good father and find no reasons against it, so my desire is rational. 22

Two Types of Desire

Historically speaking, desire was an emotion, feeling, or passion of the soul, of which the paradigmatic type is love. Anthony Kenny says, “Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Hume all included desire among the passions of the soul.” 23 Love indeed is a perfect combination of desire and emotion, but I love what I already have, which is an anomaly. Normally we desire what we could but do not have, but I cannot love what I do not have. However, love is loaded with emotion and feeling. Moreover, when you say you love him, you express your desire but you do not specify the object, or what you want. Proper, virtuous love does not want anything, does not demand anything, or seek personal satisfaction – desire does all that when it is considered as a propositional attitude. Think of sexual love. Sexual love wants sex, and that is why it differs from virtuous love that wants nothing. Yet, virtuous love entails desire, pure benevolent objectless desire that is like a feeling or emotion. It does not want anything. Yearning and longing are good examples, too. Both of them contain objectless desire. I long for something better in my life without knowing what it is. Here desire blends with feeling, or a feeling that something better should come about. When I long for something it cannot be said that I want something. This is to say, the modern discussion of desire as want is one sided. Let me take a historical example, Thomas Aquinas. Nicholas Lombardo writes, “Desire is a movement towards a good, while love is an inclination or a kind of complacency, and, as such, the principle of pleasure and the rest of passions.” Next, “It is difficult to imagine how love’s intentional object might be defined without compromising love’s status as a distinct and elemental passion. Only for love and hatred does Aquinas avoid any clarification of the nature of the intentional object vis-à-vis presence and absence.” According to Lombardo, Aquinas fails to specify “exactly how love is different from desire.” 24

Above I have sketched some basic ideas of desire as a propositional attitude that has its intentional object and whose desirability conditions are subject to their own motivational considerations. However, a different, Platonist context exists, where desire is a universal notion or a principle that lives its own life regardless of its instances. It is like the idea or form of desire as such and its role in human life and existence is far more fundamental compared to particular petty propositional desires. For instance, male desire as a phallic idea is not just a collection of propositional desires that happen to bother some men. Male desire is a universal principle of man and malehood and is only imperfectly or partially reflected in men’s life understood as male life. Like in Plato’s cave, men live a life determined by their propositional desires at the same time failing to understand that this is not what defines them. That is done by male desire and its phallic references. In Hegelian terms, men are alienated from their essence. Such a philosophical theory may sound dubious but in actual fact the concept of desire is still used in a way that corresponds with the Platonic usage.

In an analytical perspective, desire is a propositional attitude. Its paradigmatic form is “Subject S desires that P,” when P specifies the intentional object O of S’s desire. When P occurs and S obtains O we say the relevant desire is satisfied and, as we may add, S is gratified. S got what she wanted. In this sense one can say that desire tracks satisfaction. In the same way, belief tracks truth, and therefore, G.E. Moore’s famous “The cat is on the mat but I do not believe it” sounds so paradoxical. Also, desire is synonymous with want; or “I want P” and “I desire P” are synonymous: they are connected with the idea of motivation in the sense that both are conative states or episodes that focus on a goal or an object that one finds desirable in a suitable, non-actual possible world, which means a world the subject may actually reach. Such a possible world is accessible when the idea of accessibility can be operationalized by saying one knows what, realistically speaking, will realize the new possible world. Sometimes our own actions may do it, sometimes not. Mere wishes and day-dreams are then another thing. They do not depend on any considerations of realism.

I hope this view of desire may sound convincing but, as I said above, we also can find an alternative characterization of desire. From the analytical point of view, its existence is dubious, but this is no reason to reject the idea. What I am saying is that desire is desire but the two contexts of the use of “desire” are radically different. 25 Let me illustrate this by means of two quotations from a popular philosophical text:

Freud argued that the female homosexual is a woman with a man’s desire for a woman-phallus.

This sounds grammatically correct and thus prima facie familiar. Regardless of what it means, one can see that woman’s intentional object of desire is a woman-phallus. So far so good, but then we find something new and disturbing (my italics):

Irigaray calls for a more adequate treatment of female narcissism, which psychoanalysis undermines by repressing the woman’s perspective in the imaging and symbolizing of her sexuality. Irigaray deconstructs phallocentric desire by replacing the single male organ with multiple female sex organs, and in this way addresses a female auto-homo-erotic desire not mediated by phallic intervention. 26

In this second quotation “desire” is used in a new context. The question is, can we reduce phallocentric and auto-homo-erotic desire back to some oratio recta reports of propositional mental states and episodes called desire? I suggest this is not the case, which is to say that the second, Platonic way of using the concept of desire is both plausible and interesting. I am not saying that the reduction is always impossible; on the contrary, sometimes it is possible and such cases open up new vistas on desire and its objects. As I said above, we can distinguish between conatively based desire, which makes want and desire synonymous, and feeling based desire that defies this synonymy. Let me illustrate. Prison as a social environment is infused with desire. Inmates, guards, and visitors wallow in an emotional whirlwind that oscillates between apathy and passion, hopelessness and hope, calm and anger etc. All this entails desire that is not reducible to individual wants. It is related to shared and culturally construed feelings as a frame of mind (I use feeling, in spite of its obvious inadequacy, but I cannot find a better term) that penetrate the whole social world that is prison.

Think of a football stadium just before the start of the match, or a boxing arena. All the spectators pack in to share the feeling and participate in collectively shared desire. What desire? The desire to win and conquer is evident but equally well the desire to be there and share the multiple, complex desires that one can feel but not conceptualize. We desire to share the desire, which is then objectless. I want to be there, that is all I want; what is the object of this desire? It is “to be there,” which is not an object but a feeling and an ever so ambiguous state of social existence, an altered state of mind and new normal. It is not an object of desire but desire itself coming into being, or desire in flesh, the essence of being there. Of course, this kind of desire is never satisfied, it is not satisfiable at all. Of course it does not track satisfaction; on the contrary, it feeds itself until it collapses to apathy and then returns with vengeance. It is then stronger than ever wanting more of the same, not any object but itself as that special desire and its associated feeling. 27 Football riots in England and elsewhere are a good example of the collective frustration that follows.

My last example is hospital, although school would be almost the same. What we have in a hospital is desire as quiet desperation and exaggerated hope, which means desire to get out of there – by the patients of course. For the staff the same environment is diametrically opposite, but let us focus on the patients. Their desire cannot be reduced to individual desires and their intentional objects. They want to be healthy, that is true, they all want to be painless, some want to die, etc., but I am not talking about that. I am talking about an environment where desire rules as a kind of feeling of hope and hopelessness, in this case as an expression of all that is undesirable; in the same way a prison works as a social frame. The desire in question is “Let me out of here,” “I wish I were somewhere else” or “I’d love to be somewhere else” or perhaps most accurately “I’d rather be anywhere else.” They all hate the desire they share. Formally, this is desire to get away from the desire. In the sport stadium scene the same is expressed by “This is what I love, let it stay forever like this.” The feeling we now understand as desire is objectless as it concentrates first on the situation and ultimately on itself. Or, as Jacques Lacan puts it,

The enigmas that desire seems to pose for a “natural philosophy” – its frenzy miming the abyss of the infinite, the secret collusion with which it envelopes the pleasure of knowing and of joyful domination, these amount to nothing more than the derangement of the instinct that comes from being caught on the rails – eternally stretching forth towards desire for something else – of metonymy. Hence its perverse fixation at the very suspension point of the signifying change […] There is no other way to conceive the indestructibility of unconscious desire. 28

All this relates to an aspect of desire already known to Plato, that is, desire is unsatisfiable and always demands more. Or perhaps we want to read it as follows: Every instance of desire is satisfiable as such but desire itself is not – it has nothing to do with satisfaction because what it wants is more, first more of the same and then of something else. In that way desire is scary and anxiety ridden so that we want to control and even prevent it as much as we can. 29 But notice, to prevent all desires distributively is a different project from eliminating desire itself. One can still act on particular desires after desire is eliminated from one’s life. Someone can say “I want to go to bed early,” in which case his desire is part of the explanation of his action; at the same time we can say in his life desire plays no role, which happens in the life of, say, a Buddhist guru. Desire can be eliminated unlike the effects of desires.

The main example of desire is sexual desire but others can also be mentioned, for instance hatred and revengefulness in addition to many violent urges. 30 The analytical idea of desire fails to explain this; on the contrary, satisfaction of desire looks like a simple fact. I want ice-cream and I get it, which satisfies my desire. I want to kill Bill – why would I want to kill other people? How about hoarding desire? 31 I want stuff and then more until I drown in it, but the more I suffer from this mania the more stuff I want. It is easy to dismiss this as irrational behavior. It may be irrational but it is also real. Think of a hospital without desire. Sam Shepard puts all this into a wonderful literary form when he writes about unsatisfiable and ever increasing desire, “When it comes back there’ll be nothing left but the hunger eating the hunger when it comes back. […] Nothing left but the hunger.” 32 Here, analytically speaking, the object of desire is the desire itself understood in a self-referential manner. Desire that desires itself is unstoppable even in those cases where desire is something negative like it is in a prison and a hospital. Even there, desire desires itself or feeds on itself. It is eternal and self-perpetuating.

I have used some mid-sized social frames as examples above, but what I said can now be said of individual cases as well. I love to be where I am now and I desire what I have; analytically, I cannot desire to be here now because I already am here. Yet, my desire is evident and unquestionable. I say I love the place. The explanation is, I want something one cannot conceptualize as an intentional object and that is why this something is not an object and, accordingly, my desire is no desire, or it is another kind of desire. The key to this mystery is feeling-for-here-and-now, or what we simply call feeling. I do not want as there is nothing to want but still I desire in the sense that I feel it all at the emotional level of my being.

Now, more analytically, we can dub this kind of desire that is not reducible to propositional attitudes feeling desire or for short f-desire, in contrast to propositional desires or p-desires. F-desires have their own properties, namely, they are typically but not necessarily shared, they stay unsatisfiable, and most of all they are self-focused and self-perpetuating, as if their intentional object or goal were the desire itself. Think of an expression like “male desire,” which as an f-desire is not the sum total of men’s p-desires. On the contrary, it is like an oration obliqua report on the male attitude towards male life understood as lust and striving after sex or whatever might work as if it were sex. Notice here the circularity, which replaces the linear drive towards the intentional object. Male desire is man’s life as if constituted of, say, sex and violence, now understood as topics and fields of desire where the relevant feelings roam. And part of this desire is that man wants to be man because this desire actually constitutes him. All f-desires are circular in the sense that they, as desires, focus on desire itself, which is natural if you think that f-desire means feeling for what there is, really or in imagination. These feelings are not directed towards some better possible words as p-feelings always are here-and-now. Hence, male desire understood as an f-desire is what men, as reported by others, desire as a feeling of the typical enjoyment of what they already have. Male desire is never what man reports oration recta. When I visit a hospital, prison, or a sports stadium I feel and share the relevant f-desire but then it is not my desire in the sense p-desire is, or de se. F-desire is ambiguous since I may have it but at the same time it is a social construct to be reported oratio obliqua.

As a male I share what is called the male desire and in this sense it is my own desire but as well it is what is reported as if from outside of me. An essential feature of male desire is male gaze. As a male, perhaps I never actually look at anybody in that way but still I may be accused of male gaze; I do not even know how to perform a male gaze but I find it easy to be guilty of it; that is, I do it according to others. The same can be said of male desire. Anyway, the main thing about f-desire is the feeling of being in a special place so that the desire reinforces my desire to be there. In what follows, I deal with p-desires. However, in some places, and especially in the case of Girard’s mimetic desire, we will witness the return of f-desire.

Finally, here is a note on desires, important and less important. Jürgen Habermas says about concepts like knowledge as true, justified belief, or the classical Socratic definition, that it cannot be the correct definition because knowledge is something important and the definition does not reflect that. 33 In a sense this is true, knowledge is power but much what we tag as knowledge is not, like I know that it may or may not rain today. Perhaps the Socratic definition indeed is lacking, or it is not. In the same way one may say desires are important so that “I want ice cream” is different from “I want to be a good father to my children.” Real desires introduce a new possible world, mere whims do not. From the point of view of my theory of p-desire this looks embarrassing: my theory requires that the subject situates the intentional object in a better possible world where it looks desirable everything considered. In other words, we consider the new possible world to be similar to our actual world except for the intentional object but then we allow the world change to see how much the emergence of the object changes it. When a good father emerges, much will change. But why talk about possible worlds and their changes if I just want a cone of ice cream? Minor desires that come and go like whims are different from major desires that alter and make the world better.

Why name such minor desires desires? They indeed seem to be p-desires and they possess all the necessary features of a desire, as it is easy to see. They have an intentional object and they track satisfaction. My solution is that the minor desires behave just like the major desires but the changes to the world that they entail are less important to us so that we do not bother to think about them. Therefore, minor desires are not really minor; what is minor is their effect on the world and that is why we are not interested in them or their full description. Their desirability conditions are seemingly simple: I like ice-cream and that is all. I want it, I get it, and I forget it; and to get it extinguishes the desire. It is an occurring desire that is conditional on its own satisfaction. If I want to be a good father, I know only approximately what the object is and what its requirements are. The object is intrinsically fuzzy. Hence now I never can reach the goal, except in the Pickwickian sense. I also must explain why I want what I want, and by doing it, I start playing with the idea of a novel and better possible world.

All this resembles Habermas’ idea that knowledge is important. Real desires are important but one still must admit that minor bits of knowledge and small desires cannot be dismissed. Certainly, certain varieties of unimportant things are so unimportant that we need to pay no attention to them in practical life. Nevertheless, they can be used as examples, at least in philosophy, because they are so simple, but then we should not forget that the big and complicated things are what we really should be interested in. That is where the money is. Knowledge is power and desire makes us switch between worlds. It is interesting, though, that those perfectly good examples of minor knowledge and desire are meaningless as such. When a Buddhist says desiring makes us unhappy, he cannot mean such things as ice cream. 34 It is perfectly plausible to say that I can satisfy such a desire even if we know that all desires are in principle unsatisfiable. The answer to this dilemma is that ice cream desire is unsatisfiable but if we discuss it as an object of choice it may well happen that I got what I chose and in this sense wanted. I have already explained and will explain later what it is to desire ice cream in the full blown sense of p-desire. Its desirability conditions may grow until they look too grand to take seriously. Like Marcel Proust’s little madeleine expands the narrative until it covers all his life world.

Wishful Thinking and Wish-Fulfilment

Let us start from an idea of Thomas Nagel,

That I have the appropriate desire simply follows from the fact that these considerations motivate me; if the likelihood that an act will promote my future happiness motivates me to perform it now, then it is appropriate to ascribe me a desire for my own future happiness. 35

Here we see once again the dubious view of the essential connection between desire and action but let us forget and forgive it now. My point is, you may replace “an act” with “a thought” and rewrite. We get “if the likelihood that a thought will promote my future happiness motivates me to think of it now, then […]” and now we find something interesting, namely, the key idea behind wishful thinking. It is certainly possible to become happy by thinking of happy things. We want to think pleasant thoughts and we arrange our other thoughts in a way that satisfies the desire. All this comes to us naturally and it contributes significantly to our happiness levels. People who are unable to do it will find it difficult to live. They suffer from depression and other similar ailments.

Wishful thinking is somehow related to f-desires, although it is not always easy to see how. What is wishful thinking? The man from La Mancha, Don Quixote, is guilty of it for the following reason. He imagines a possible world of noble knights, a world that is inaccessible to him simply because it is fictional. It is not his private fiction, that is, it is not idiosyncratic, but derived from the contemporary genre of popular novels. His mimetic wish is to live in that exciting world and do heroic deeds. He imagines he lives there and he dresses accordingly, performs heroic deeds, and treats the people around him as if they were living members of his new brave world. Don Q says he wants to be a hero and then he is gratified; he believes he is a knight. His wish is fulfilled.

The main point about wish and wish-fulfilment is that the same thought that constitutes the wish also satisfies it. This fact clearly distinguishes between wish and the other relevant types of mental states discussed here. When I read a book of poetry and see myself as a fellow poet, the thought itself is fulfilling or satisfying. I may not believe I am a poet – that would be both unnecessary and irrational. I simply think of myself as a poet and thus satisfy my wish. We do this all the time even if we seldom notice what is going on. It is also remarkable that such wish-fulfilment may also be guilt ridden and anxious, think for example of nasty sexual thoughts and various types of unclean fantasies. This is to say those wishes are not idle thoughts but on the contrary they are mental episodes we feel are part of our personality and something we are responsible for. Many wishes are delightful but they also can be anxious, or both at the same time. Now, the main point is that the same thought that constitutes the wish also satisfies it or is a sufficient condition of its fulfilment.

I argue that wish-fulfilment is spontaneous in the sense that wishes, if understood in the way I described above, are self-satisfying. This is the case because the wish in its new possible world is construed in a suitable manner. Think of Don Q. He imagines a world where he is a knight; he believes that he is a knight in a world that satisfies his desire to be a knight. He wants to be a knight and hence he constructs in his imagination a world in which he is a knight. To verify his success, he acts and deals with other people as if he were a knight. 36

Don Q’s new world is imaginary in two ways: first, as a literary construct (what he reads about) and, second, as his own mental construct (what he imagines). The first world is devoid of him but the second contains him as a knight. Such a double jeopardy is not necessary, though. A small man wishes he were tall and buys platform sole shoes. His favourite world (where he is tall) is not available to him, even if the new world where he thinks he is tall is possible. No known path from here to there exists and, thus, the only way the short man can get there is in his imagination. Now, when he responds to his imaginary world he verifies its existence and validity by buying those shoes. Thus the world is construed in such a special way that his wish is fulfilled, or his desire is satisfied.

I do not say that all wishes are fulfilled in this spontaneous manner. I only say wishful thinking has this occasional property. Many wishes are not instances of wishful thinking. I may refuse to construct such a special possible world where I am spontaneously gratified. I say “I wish this cancer goes away” but I do it without constructing the world where my cancer has disappeared. Hence, I have a wish that is not an example of wishful thinking.

As we know from psychoanalysis and elsewhere that wishful thinking can also be painful. I may imagine a bad possible world and place myself there, which makes me bad. As I understand it, wishes are not necessarily good and personally flattering. I suffer, say, from guilt feelings and by constructing a suitably bad world for myself I make myself guilty, which is a painful feeling. Suppose a person has paedophiliac wishes, which play with the ideas of acts he knows are both socially condemned and dangerous. He tends to agree that he should not entertain them and thus he should free himself of them. Perhaps he should get psychological help, although his abnormal sexual preferences have remained latent. His problem is that he tends to construct imaginary possible worlds where he is an active paedophiliac predator, a world that is modelled after the real world, as he knows it, containing real paedophiliacs. He knows he must not try to satisfy his sexual desires in the real world. He sees it as a royal road to a personal catastrophe, which is probably a valid belief. Next, he imagines it all and in this way satisfies his abnormal wishes. It is easy to see why this is painful to him because now he is an active paedophiliac, which promises him not only gratification but also the sense of personal catastrophe and verifies his belief that he is an abnormal, dangerous, and bad person.

Wish fulfilment does not necessarily entail a p-desire because desire entails an accessible possible world. Think of Don Q. However, the sexual case above shows that desire and wish-fulfilment are systematically connected. Our paedophiliac possesses the relevant desires because he has an access to the relevant possible world. He just thinks he must not take that path. Instead he constructs an imaginary world where he can satisfy his wishes. Empirical evidence shows that wish-fulfilment is often related to some surrogate actions, that is, it is not solely imaginary. As I said, such actions verify the success of wish-fulfilment to the person himself. Don Q actually starts wandering around dressed funny and followed by Sancho Panza. He attacks windmills and wine barrels. A small man buys platform shoes and the paedophiliac tries, innocently, to relate to young people and, less innocently, say, collects their suggestive pictures. Wish fulfilment may have its typical behavioural correlates. To move to the imaginary world where spontaneous wish-fulfilment is to occur one needs some behavioural items also as indicators of the pseudo-realism of the effort. In anxious cases, this makes one’s anxiety ever more real and true.

My last question is, how are f-desire and wish-fulfilment related? We already saw that the Don Q case can be approached from both sides with an equal success. The difference is this: the existence of f-desire explains wish-fulfilment. If we do not mention f-desire we have hard time understanding why Don Q starts acting as he does, that is, what motivates his wishes. He starts a new life focusing on desire which he loves. He is a supreme expression of unadulterated desire. What desire? The desire to desire knightly things in the world where he believes he resides. Notice that only f-desire can do that, p-desire cannot. We know that p-desire always tracks satisfaction in an accessible possible world, unlike f-desire that loves the actual world of the person’s desire. Don Q’s desire does not track satisfaction because it is already satisfied. But that does not stop our knight. When he rides out dressed and equipped as a noble knight, he indeed sees himself as a noble knight. The negative case of the short man of course requires its own explication, which must somehow be consonant with the Don Q’s case – the difference between the two cases is illusory. Both agents create their own imaginary worlds where their f-desires flourish, and then they can proceed to the next stage, that is, wish-fulfilment. The construction of the imaginary world in question is now guided by the agent’s f-desire, which he cannot enjoy in his actual world. An f-desire is the desire to stay in this new world, and wish-fulfilment handles it as if it were the actual world.

De Re and De Dicto: a Paradox

I will argue for the following paradox: Suppose that desire is a three place relation Subject – Object – Desirability Conditions, that is, all desires are conditional in this sense. 37 A desire sentence is open to de re and de dicto readings. The problem is, if you read it de re you miss the desirability conditions. If you read it de dicto you miss the object but retain the desirability conditions. How can you tell that both interpretations concern one and the same desire? Desire is de dicto if in the context of the sentence that expresses the desire is referentially opaque; if it not, the desire is de re. I love Mary who happens to be a nurse. De dicto I do not love a nurse but de re I do. Notice that Frege’s Morning star/Evening star puzzle is an epistemological variant of de dicto/de re, in the sense that once we know that the two observed stars are actually planet Venus we have our de re object of belief. Incidentally, we have now a good reason to say that desire de dicto has no object, except in grammatical sense; instead it has what one may understand as a topic. As long as I pay attention to the fact that she is a nurse, Mary is not an object of love to me. I will clarify this in what follows.

From a grammatical point of view, a de dicto desire is, for instance, “I want that my car is red and fast,” which picks a red and fast car as a desirable object. Compare de re: “I want a car that is red and fast,” which picks a car that happens to be red and fast among other things. Here the de dicto topic is my car together with its essential properties, or its satisfied desirability conditions. These conditions are part of a narrative concerning the good-making features of the car, and their function is to motivate my desire. As I said above, no desire is without its reasons, which is to say that desire is a three place relation. De re desire has its object that is complete in the sense that its context is quasi-extensional or minimally intensional in such a way that the context is not referentially opaque – even if we have an intentional object here. The object has all the properties a car has. The car that I want may be red and fast but its colour may also fade fast. In de dicto context this does not make sense because the topic can handle only desirability conditions.

Think next of the following textbook style example of de re and de dicto desire (S) “I want the fastest car on the planet, that is, F.” Then the world changes so that F no longer is the fastest car on the planet. If I originally read (S) de dicto, I no longer want F. I want B that is now the fastest one. If we originally read it de re, I wanted F and I still want F. In other words, I want the car, whatever car happens to be the fastest one now; or, I want this given car that once happened to be the fastest one. De re I desire the object in such a way that its change of status does not matter. In the de dicto case, to be the fastest car is an essential consideration: without it I cannot fix my desire. In a de re case this is not true. Once I have picked my intentional object of desire I have picked a real thing that has certain accidental properties. It remains the same thing even if it no longer is the fastest car on the planet. All this looks perfectly sound and understandable.

Alas, once you start thinking it in psychological terms you notice a troublesome fact, namely, the desirability conditions of the de re interpretation of sentence (S) have mysteriously vanished, yet you cannot desire without them. Why did I originally want that car that used to be the fastest on the planet. We have no hint. Desire is a three place relation but now the third place holder is missing. I say I want a car that is red, which does not mean that I desire the car de re because it is red. I say it happens to be red, among many other things. I must have a reason for desiring it, but now I cannot tell what it is. This is to say that de re interpretation of desire does not pick a desire but a bare object. In this way, desirability conditions figure only in de dicto interpretations of S. Let us look into this. As I said, the de dicto interpretation is clear: “I want F because F is the fastest car on the planet,” specifies high performance as the essential or necessary desirability condition in the sense that I desire F if and only if it is the fastest car on the planet. If it is not, I do not desire F. It follows that, given the new possible world where F fails to be the fastest car, I no longer desire F de dicto. In other words, if the world changes so that the desirability conditions of a given desire do not hold, the desire vanishes. According to its de dicto interpretation, to be the fastest is, ceteris paribus, necessary and sufficient for the desire to emerge and endure.

How can one and the same desire have two interpretations one of which is a three place relation and second a two place relation? This looks as if de re and de dicto desires were two different desires, a fact that leads to a problem concerning the individuation of desires. 38 It is not possible to say only that de re and de dicto interpretations concern the same desire if and only if both of them are concerned with F as the given object of desire. When F fails to be the fastest car, the de dicto desire changes, unlike de re; therefore, we now have two different desires. Let me specify: I say “I want the fastest car on the planet, F” and then F loses its elevated status. If I lose my interest in F, my original desire was de dicto, if I do not, my original desire was de re. Now the question is, as I said above, why did I desire F de re in the first place? The question is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that it is F that I desire de re. De dicto it does not matter that it is F because the only thing that matters is the speed. I have a hard time seeing that behind the two interpretations we can find and see one individual desire. First, we find no object and an explanation for desiring, and then no explanation and an object. F does not join the interpretations and neither do the desirability conditions.

To solve this problem we need to give de dicto reading a priority position. I love the most beautiful man in the world (de dicto) and he happens to be Archibald (de re). When he no longer is so beautiful, I switch my love to Felix who now is aesthetically the best and my de re object changes accordingly. Why cannot I love Archibald now? The reason is that my de re reading of the situation mentions no desirability conditions, which is to say that I need to derive them from my current de dicto reading; hence, I de re love Felix. De re specifies the object but only de dicto tells us what the desirability conditions are in the given case. Archibald has de re all kinds of properties none of which are, considering my love, essential and hence I can love him for any different reasons. But only one set of properties is essential in the de dicto case and exactly those properties I must find in my de re object, if I am going to love him so that the de re and de dicto readings pick the same desire, or they are mutually complementary. If I still love ugly Archibald I must find myself a new desire de dicto. Most mysteriously, if I picked Archibald (de re) when I still desired the best beauty (de dicto), why did I pick him in the first place? If I still love him in the new world, I must have picked him for reasons that do not show in “Archibald is the most beautiful man in the world.” The world has changed and I still love him – why did I originally pick him? Here we see two different desires at work. To get back to one desire, we must require that de re tracks de dicto desirability conditions. In this case, when the world changes I no longer love Archibald.

Summary: Suppose I desire X because of Y, or my topic is XY. The object of my desire is X. What is the name of my desire? If you identify XY and X, you must tell why you do so. You can explain it by starting from XY and deriving X form it. In this way, the solution is by rank ordering the two interpretations so that de re becomes logically dependent on de dicto; or, de dicto is original and de re derivative in relation to it.

A de dicto desire may have no intentional object but rather a topic, which runs together with the description of the object and its desirability conditions; for instance “the fastest car.” Think of a non-definite description “Fast car” and think of de dicto “I desire a fast car.” De re this picks the class of fast cars, and any member of the class satisfies the desire. Now, it is strange to say that a class of fast cars would be the object of desire, except in a grammatical sense. This class is intrinsically fuzzy and anyway, it is a class of things, which to a non-realist is not a legitimate object. Hence, a definite description like “the fastest car on the planet” is misleading. It suggests that de dicto desires have objects. The dilemma is this: de dicto desire has no object and de re, while it has an object, does not specify any desirability conditions and thus one cannot say why it, and not something else, is the object of desire. Obviously, de dicto and de re must go together so that they are two aspects of one and the same desire. We need to know what the intentional object is and why it is an object of desire. This also becomes evident when we think of the following example. I want to marry John who is a serial killer, although I do not know it. De dicto I do not want to marry a serial killer, I want John. De re my object of desire is a serial killer.

De dicto: I want to marry John because John is so tall. De Re: I want to marry a serial killer, who happens to be tall.

In this case the de re and de dicto desires do not share a common concept that would unify them and justify the idea that we have only one desire here. How do we individuate the desire? As I said, we must consider de dicto first and find the object in this way. I cannot say I want to marry a serial killer because I want to marry John. It may happen, of course, that I get a serial killer but that is another thing. De dicto desire fixes the de re object, which is the only object of desire, by specifying some desirability conditions that it alone possesses. Sometimes de re objects are not real objects. In that case, your desire fails altogether or you need to think of a very strange possible world where the object becomes real. I say, “I want you to know everything.” This allows for no object in the real sense of the term but we may construct a possible world where one knows everything. In this sense the topic is this world and de dicto is the all the knowledge in it. Again, we need to proceed from de dicto to de re.

Let me make a couple of additional remarks. If I desire de re F that is not so fast, I need to tell why. Desire logically entails desirability. When I tell why, I refer to a desire that is different from the original that focused solely on speed. That is why in the de re case F must be speedy too. We only speak about F as if this fact were irrelevant. Of course I may still de re desire F in a world where it is not that fast, but then my desire has changed or the earlier desire de dicto was not a desire for the fastest car. It was for something else.

R. Wollheim, The Thread of Life . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 53.

A relevant example is knowledge. My favourite definition of knowledge as a definiendum is by M. Swain, Reason and Knowledge . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981, pp. 223, 231. It all started from E. Gettier’s challenge and ended in an impasse.

M. Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 9.

R. Brandt, “Rational Desires." In his Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 38–56, p. 42.

A.H. Goldman, Reasons from Within . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 7, 87; J.M. Russell, “Desires Don’t Cause Actions,” Journal of Mind and Behavior 5 (1984), 1–10; and T. Schroeder, Three Faces of Desire . New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 16ff.

For a Renaissance notion of desirability, see M. Mertens, Magic and Memory in Giordano Bruno . Leiden: Brill, 2018, p. 175. Mertens discusses Ficino and the idea of binding: certain perceptions bind us to the objects, that is, we find them desirable. Desirability is a bond between an object and the perceiver.

A. Gibbard, Meaning and Normativity . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 14.

G. Oddie, Value, Reality, and Desire . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 13.

B. Loar, Mind and Meaning . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 87.

M. Smith, The Moral Problem . Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, pp. 7, 9, 116. This book has been quite influential.

Smith, 1994, p. 113.

E. Anscombe, Intention . Ithaca, NY: Cornel University Press, 1963, p. 1. See G.E. Schueler, Desire . Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1995, pp. 1ff.

R. Holton, Willing, Wanting, Waiting . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011, p. 102.

W. James, Psychology , Vol. ii . New York: Dover, 1890/1950, p. 486.

N. Arpaly and T. Schroeder, In Praise of Desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 128. This point is originally made in Schroeder, 2004. I feel uneasy about the idea of punishment. How can avoidance indicate punishment in any sense of the term?

W. Hofmann and L.F. Nordgren, “Introduction." In their (Eds.) The Psychology of Desire . New York: Guilford Press, 2015, pp. 1–14, p. 5.

See B. Russell, The Analysis of Mind . London: Allen & Unwin, 1921; and Schueler, 1995, p. 16.

S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Tr. J. Strachey. New York: Norton, 1921/1961, pp. 3–4.

F. Grammont, “Introduction.” In Naturalizing Intention in Action , F. Grammont et al. (Eds.). Cambridge, MA: mit Press, pp. 1–17, p. 9.

See T. Pataki, Wish-fulfilment in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis . London: Routledge, 2014.

Brandt, 1992.

See C. Norris, “Frankfurt on Second-Order Desires and the Concept of a Person,” Prolegomena 9 (2010), 199–242.

N.E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion . Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011, p. 8; and A. Kenny, Action, Emotion, and the Will . London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1969, p. 100. However, the case of Aristotle is quite complicated; see G. Pearson, Aristotle on Desire . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Lombardo, 2011, pp. 58–59, 61. Edmund Burke writes: “curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite that is very sharp, but very easily satisfied.” In his The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful . Ed. P. Guyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1757/2015, p. 27.

Think of G. Doherty’s book title Pathologies of Desire (New York: Lang, 2008) and its subtitle, The Vicissitudes of the Self in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Its index does not mention “desire.” The question is, in what sense does Doherty mean desire here? Whatever the sense is, it is based on the literary uses of the term.

S. Phoca and R. Wright, Introduction to Postfeminism . Cambridge: Icon Books, 1999, p. 109.

S. Shepard, Seven Plays . New York: The Dial Press, 2005, “Tongues,” p. 310.

Quoted in A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan . London: Routledge, 1991, p. 195.

See about how to minimize desire, G. Agamben, The Highest Poverty : Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life . Tr. A. Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

See E. Berkowitz, Sex and Punishment . London: Westbourne Press, 2013.

See R.O. Frost and G. Steketee, Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things . Boston: Mariner Books, 2011.

Shepard, 2005, p. 310.

J. Habermas , Knowledge and Interest . Tr. J.J. Shapiro. London: Heinemann, 1972, pp. 62–63, 67.

Actually, the Buddhist case against desire is complicated, see M. Kozhevnikova, “Desire in Buddhism.” In Desire , T. Airaksinen and W. Gasparski (Eds.). New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2016, pp. 135–155.

T. Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 29–30.

On imagination, see S. Nichols, Ed., The Architecture of the Imagination . New York: Clarendon Press, 2006.

See K. McDaniel and B. Bradley, “Desires,” Mind 117 (2008), 267–302. Desires can be conditional in many different ways.

Cf. P.T. Markie and T. Patrick, “De Re Desire,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68 (1990), 432–447, p. 433.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Philosophical essays.

by Richard Cartwright

ISBN: 9780262530927

Pub date: August 15, 1990

• Publisher: The MIT Press

312 pp. , 6 x 9 in ,

ISBN: 9780262031301

Pub date: October 9, 1987

• 9780262530927
• Published: August 1990
• 9780262031301
• Published: October 1987

Out of print

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• Description

Richard Cartwright is one of the most clearheaded, astute, and penetrating philosophers in this country. Because of his own strict standards, however, his work has been published only sparingly and is not as well known as he himself is. Philosophical Essays is a welcome first collection. It includes fifteen essays spanning three decades of Cartwright's thought and focusing on central problems in the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language, and metaphysics. The introduction offers an excellent guide to Cartwright's mode of thought and pedagogical style.Some of these essays are now regarded as classics; six others are published here for the first time. Each of them, from "Macbeth's Dagger" to "Negative Existentials" and "Propositions of Pure Logic" is a model of craftsmanship and clarity of thought. They span a variety of topics, including identity, truths, essence, implication, and philosophical method.

Richard Cartwright was Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT.

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Vagaries of Desire: A Collection of Philosophical Essays

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Desires matter. What are desires? Many believe that desire is a motivational state: desiring is being disposed to act. This conception aligns with the functionalist approach to desire and the standard account of desire's role in explaining action. According to a second influential approach, however, desire is first and foremost an evaluation: desiring is representing something as good. After all, we seem to desire things under the guise of the good. Which understanding of desire is more accurate? Is the guise of the good even right to assume? Should we adopt an alternative picture that emphasizes desire's deontic nature? What do neuroscientific studies suggest? Essays in the first section of the volume are devoted to these questions, and to the puzzle of desire's essence. In the second part of the volume, essays investigate some implications that the various conceptions of desire have on a number of fundamental issues. For example, why are inconsistent desires problematic? What is desire's role in practical deliberation? How do we know what we want? This volume will contribute to the emergence of a fruitful debate on a neglected, albeit crucial, dimension of the mind.

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In this essay we'll analyze the relationship between pornography and desire, moving from hints and suggestions offered by the most diverse subjects, such as philosophy, religion, literature and art. In the first part we will focus on desire, observing how it puts and at the same time destroys a subject in relation to an object. In the second part we will focus on pornography, differentiating it from eroticism mainly because of its purpose: arousing and satisfying (sexual) desire. We will see how pornography, in order to reach its goal, creates a 'subset of the world' that somehow 'obeys' the subject of the desire; finally, to make the illusion 'believable', pornography involves techniques that are similar or identical to those of the arts. In conclusion, we will emphasize how desire transcends illusion by appealing to 'details' outside the rules that break its mechanism, so revealing pornography's nature as a 'mise-en-scene of desire'.

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The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays

Christel Fricke (ed.), The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays , Routledge, 2011, 212pp., $125.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415885430.

Reviewed by Linda Radzik, Texas A&M University

Christel Fricke's rich collection of essays arose from a conference held in Oslo in 2008 on Charles L. Griswold's 2007 book Forgiveness . However, very little of the text is spent critiquing Griswold's work. Instead, Fricke's authors use Griswold's text as a map that points to areas worthy of further exploration. Like Griswold, most of these writers resist the temptation to develop simple, unified accounts of forgiveness and instead dedicate themselves to plotting the complexities of human interaction in the aftermath of wrongdoing. The examples the authors use along the way range from subtle, personal failings to large-scale atrocities. While most of the contributions are works in moral theory, the volume also represents other disciplinary approaches to issues of forgiveness, including literary criticism and linguistics. The result is a satisfyingly diverse range of perspectives on the nature, justification and limits of forgiveness.

Part I includes a pair of essays dedicated to the interpretation of particular, historical traditions of forgiveness. In "Forgiveness and Forbearance in Ancient China," Christoph Harbsmeier surveys the language of forgiveness in Chinese, arguing that, "for a Chinese person to forgive, is always to forgive 'in terms of' one of the concepts outlined" (21). Harbsmeier goes on to present twenty-nine different terms in ancient and modern Chinese related to "forgiveness." To me, their differences were not as remarkable as their similarity. All seemed to portray forgiveness as a matter of letting the wrongdoer off, in some way, from the possible consequences of wrongdoing. Shù , which Harbsmeier suggests as the best translation for 'forgiveness,' involves a general sort of empathetic forbearance.

So far, the virtue of shù will seem familiar enough to contemporary Westerners. But Harbsmeier emphasizes that it must be understood in a hierarchically structured culture, where, he tells us, "egalitarianism is not in any way envisaged or aspired to at any level, practical or psychological" (13). Shù is something one shows to people below oneself on the social scale. What one owes to people above oneself is, in contrast, zhong , "doing one's moral best" (22). When those above oneself commit wrongs, then, the question of forgiveness does not really arise. Instead the question for the underling is how to continue to do his duty to his superior in this new context. Harbsmeier's analysis helps explain, for example, why in China the question "whether they forgive or do not forgive Deng Xiaoping [for the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989] has become purely academic (i.e., quite irrelevant)" (14).

Ilaria E. Ramelli's contribution on forgiveness in Christian thought argues that what is almost invariably labeled as "the Christian view" is historically inaccurate. It is commonplace for contemporary writers on the ethics of forgiveness to assert that Christianity requires its followers to forgive wrongs unconditionally , that is, to forgive whether or not their abusers have met any conditions, such as apologizing, repenting or making amends. Ramelli painstakingly reviews an impressive range of ancient sources to show that, throughout the early history of Christianity, forgiveness was always predicated on repentance. Her argument is so convincing that I was left wondering how it has come to be that most contemporary writers -- and, I would add, all my students who self-identify as Christians -- have come to see a commitment to unconditional forgiveness as central to Christianity.

Part II on "Forgiveness and Selfhood" begins with Fricke's contribution, "What We Cannot Do to Each Other: On Forgiveness and Moral Vulnerability." Fricke provides an admirable description of the normative terrain of forgiveness and specifically the interconnections between moral and social norms. Fricke anchors her discussion of forgiveness in a social, relational understanding of the nature and consequences of moral wrongdoing. Wrongdoing damages the trust that normally marks relations among victims, wrongdoers and their communities; forgiveness is one way of repairing that damage.

Fricke goes on to emphasize that, as complex selves, we relate to one another, not just as moral agents, but also as friends, partners and neighbors. This leads her to distinguish between personal forgiveness, in which personal relationships such as friendships are repaired, and moral forgiveness, in which victims come to once again see their abusers as having intrinsic moral value as human beings. She argues plausibly that one may morally forgive a wrongdoer without personally forgiving. I was less convinced by her claim that "personal forgiveness always implies moral forgiveness" because "any close personal relationship includes mutual respect of moral value or dignity" (63). Might not someone who does not value humanity as such (say, a mafia hitman) value his personal relationships (with other mafiosos)? This combination of attitudes may not be able to be held in a fully, rationally consistent way, but it seems psychologically possible. The last portion of the essay poses the question of whether wrongdoers can deserve forgiveness and victims can be morally required to forgive in either of the two senses of forgiveness; however, Fricke provides no clear answers to those questions.

The next pair of articles pursues Griswold's claim that forgiveness requires a narration of the past, one which will both acknowledge its wrongful character yet allow for the forgiver to overcome her negative attitudes toward the wrongdoer. Garry L. Hagberg and Peter Goldie each ask how this might work in cases of self-forgiveness. Both worry whether "in self-forgiveness there is not the possibility of a narrative accounting from an appropriate distanced perspective" (Goldie, 83-4). In "Self-Forgiveness and the Narrative Sense of Self," Goldie suggests that such distancing is enabled by the wrongdoer's ability to think about herself in a way that is "essentially ironic" and involves seeing one's past, wrongdoing self as, in a sense, another person (87):

This opens up the epistemic and evaluative ironic gap that is at the heart of the notion of narrative: an epistemic gap because one now knows what one did not know then; and an evaluative gap because one can now take an evaluative stance which differs from the stance that one took then (87).

Hagberg, in "Forgiveness and the Constitution of Selfhood," rejects this dyadic view of the self as phenomenologically inaccurate. Instead, he believes that self-forgiveness is enabled by "one identity seeing bi-focally, not two persons gazing from a distance upon each other" (75). Hagberg draws on literary concepts to explain his view, comparing self-forgiveness to the experience of reading fiction, wherein "we simultaneously identify with a character in fiction but also stand apart from that narratively-entwined persona" (75). For Hagberg, this narrative process is not performed by a later self that is independently distinguishable from the wrongdoing self, but is instead what constitutes the new, forgivable self. Both Goldie's and Hagberg's essays provide satisfyingly complex examples of processes of self-forgiveness. Goldie's essay is also notable for its discussion of the odd case of self-pardoning, in which one regards one's own action as involuntary on the grounds that the circumstances overstrained one's nature without actually undermining one's freedom.

Part III includes six essays that address the limits of forgiveness, that is, a variety of possible restrictions on the possibility or permissibility of forgiveness. For example, almost all theorists of forgiveness claim that forgiveness is not possible where there is no wrong. But in "Forgiveness Without Blame," Espen Gamlund defends the position that forgiveness can occur even when harm-causing is not blameworthy but rather excused or justified. Cases of agent-regret (such as the regret felt by an unlucky driver who faultlessly kills a child), disagreements over culpability between the harmed and the harm-causer, and moral dilemmas all present disruptions to peace of mind and social relations that can be solved by the sorts of interactions and changes in view that we associate with forgiveness and self-forgiveness. While critics may insist that forgiveness requires culpability by definition, Gamlund's discussion will lead many readers to find such a stipulation unsatisfying.

A major debate in the literature on forgiveness is whether forgiveness is "conditional," meaning that forgiveness is only appropriate in cases where the wrongdoer has met some sort of requirement, such as repentance or moral improvement. Jerome Neu's essay, "On Loving Our Enemies," defends the conditional view. Drawing on work by Jeffrie Murphy, Neu argues that resentment is a morally appropriate reaction to being victimized that can be set aside only for a moral reason. Also working within a conditional framework, Arne Johan Vetlesen asks whether there are cases where no moral reason could justify forgiveness and where forgiveness is, therefore, wrong. In this rather unwieldy essay, Vetlesen emphasizes the relevance of the characteristics of the wrongful acts themselves, rather than the characteristics of the agents who perform the acts, claiming that "some acts are worse, morally speaking, than any individual agent" (161).

Eve Garrard and David McNaughton, in contrast to Neu and Vetlesen, defend the position that forgiveness is unconditional by addressing objections posed by Griswold and others. The authors argue that some critics of unconditional forgiveness conflate two senses in which forgiveness can be unconditional: "(1) forgiving no matter what condition the wrongdoer is in; and (2) forgiving no matter what the reason for doing so is" (102). While defending the view that "there is sufficient reason to forgive a wrongdoer whatever his state of mind" (97), Garrard and McNaughton go on to identify reasons for extending such unmerited forgiveness. While the points made in favor of unconditional forgiveness are perhaps not novel, the skill with which the issues are explained and defended makes this essay a good candidate for course syllabuses on forgiveness.

Geoffrey Scarre strays slightly from the theme of forgiveness to look at issues of apology. In "Apologising for Historic Injustices," Scarre dives into the controversy surrounding Australia's official apology to the "Stolen Generations," which addressed the century-long practice of removing aboriginal children from their parents' care, a practice that ended only in the late 1960s or early 1970s. In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered an official apology for this history, which was met with general approval from both the aboriginal and settler populations. Scarre argues that the apology was not appropriate because the people doing the apologizing did not have "ownership" of the wrongful deeds. While he defends the legitimacy of "insider-regret," a particular form of negative reactive attitude towards one's group's historical injustices, Scarre denies that this attitude can ground the practice of apology. Debates about the nature of collective responsibility are well established in the literature and are not much advanced by the arguments to be found here. However, Scarre's essay does provide opportunity for reflection on the nature and functions of apology. Scarre's clear and straightforward account of when an apology can be given and what functions it can perform is quite narrow and so leaves the reader reflecting on what a broader concept of apology might look like.

Finally, literary scholar Jakob Lothe provides a reading of W. G. Sebald's novel Austerlitz . Sebald was a writer who was born in Germany in 1944 but who lived most of his adult life in England. His fiction and non-fiction writings have become important to current discussions of how German identity has been shaped by the memory of World War II and the Holocaust. The narrator of the novel, who, like Sebald, is a German exile of the immediate postwar generation, develops an unusual friendship with a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust as a child and is now attempting to recover the story of his parents' lives and deaths in the camps. Lothe argues that Sebald's narrative techniques reveal that the main theme of the novel is forgiveness. This claim remains puzzling for much of the essay, but by the end it becomes clear that Lothe's theme is not 'what is involved in granting forgiveness,' but instead 'what it is like to feel the need to be forgiven for the injustices of previous generations.' As such, the essay is fruitfully paired with Scarre's contribution.

Griswold, C. L., Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration , Cambridge University Press, (2007).

Murphy, J. G. and J. Hampton (eds.), Forgiveness and Mercy , Cambridge University Pres, (1988).

Murphy, J. G., Getting Even , Oxford University Press, (2003).

Essays and Soliloquies

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Essays and Soliloquies (original title in Spanish: Ensayos y Soliloquios) is a collection of essays and philosophical musings written by Miguel de Unamuno, a prominent Spanish philosopher, writer, and existentialist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The book contains a series of Unamuno''s thought-provoking essays covering various topics related to existentialism, culture, literature, and the human condition.

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Harry G. Frankfurt Leibniz A Collection Of Critical Essays

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