Gaps in the Trenches of Struggle: A Critique of Mohammad-Mahdi Ardabili's "Principles of Struggle in the Age of Nihilism"

Gaps in the Trenches of Struggle

A Critique of Mohammad-Mahdi Ardabili's "Principles of Struggle in the Age of Nihilism"

In the years since the publication of Principles of Struggle in the Age of Nihilism by Mohammad-Mahdi Ardabili, news of discussions and events around the book reached me now and then. Whatever the source of this attention, it finally made me curious enough to read the book itself. In this work Ardabili tries to build, on the basis of the theory of "systems of allegories," a philosophical system for confronting nihilism, one that extends from logic and epistemology to ontology, ethics and politics. What struck me most while reading were the gaps that appeared in some of the foundational links of this system. Some of the book's decisive conclusions rest on premises that they cannot establish, and at times claims that have not yet been adequately justified themselves become the basis for later claims. In this essay I set aside local objections and the book's secondary discussions and turn to the problems that undermine the system's main claims or the necessary links between its parts, and that the author's answers elsewhere in the book also fail to resolve.

In this essay, page references to Ardabili's book are to the second edition of the first volume of Principles of Struggle in the Age of Nihilism (Based on the Theory of Systems of Allegories), titled The Level of the Subject (winter 2024–25).

From Nihilism to the Necessity of Struggle

The book begins by accepting a situation in which even the effort to overcome nihilism is not immune to its negating force. Ardabili suggests that this very force of negation might be turned against nihilism and a new value created out of it. But on page 56, from posing this possibility he arrives at a categorical verdict: "Under conditions of the absolute dominance of meaninglessness, struggle against (or within) meaninglessness is the only act that can be justified and can make life meaningful" (p. 56). On the next page he also writes: "Since nihilism reigns, struggle is meaningful" (p. 57).

From the possibility of turning negation against nihilism, it does not follow that the effort is justified. Even if we grant that it is justified, we still have no reason to regard struggle as the only meaningful way out of nihilism. This exclusivist verdict requires an independent argument.

Ardabili does explain, on pages 40–41, that the book's addressee is someone who has acknowledged nihilism and decided to find a way out. At the first level, he deems this very decision justified because it is directed at escaping a blockage, and he leaves its subsequent evaluation to the system as a whole. This explanation can justify the initial decision, but it does not establish the exclusivity of the author's proposed solution.

In the methodology chapter, struggle is presented as the "condition of possibility" of meaningful living and of the creation of justified value (pp. 205–206). Here too, describing the features of the desirable struggle does not take the place of an argument for its exclusivity. Ardabili himself states on page 142 that his text is "not the only possible form of transcendence" and allows that "other kinds of transcendence" might be constructed. In that case it must be made clear whether, when struggle is called the only justified act, what is meant is any form of transcending nihilism or the particular form of struggle the book defends. On the first reading, the verdict of exclusivity derives largely from the breadth of the concept. On the second, the possibility of other forms of transcendence raises the question of the basis for preferring the author's proposed system. In the afterword, too, struggle is called "the only justified and meaningful act" (p. 739). The exclusivity of struggle is therefore not a passing verdict in the book's introduction, and its argumentative flaw bears on one of the system's enduring claims.

Logic and the Criterion of Judgment

To explain the necessity of a "plastic logic," Ardabili gives the example of a fighter moving across floating logs who must step to another log before each one sinks. In his words, "dogmatic two-valued logic cannot comprehend this combative plastic logic," because for this logic foundations are either reliable or not, and in the second case they cannot be relied upon (pp. 71–72).

The flaw lies in conflating the truth value of propositions with our degree of confidence in them. In classical logic every proposition has one of two truth values, true or false, but it does not follow that we can determine its truth with certainty. Without denying the two-valuedness of logic, one can provisionally accept a hypothesis, reason on its basis, and abandon it when contrary evidence appears. Nor does the validity of an inference in itself guarantee the truth of the premises.

In classical logic, adding new premises does not invalidate a conclusion inferred from the earlier ones. Non-monotonic logics serve to formalize inferences whose conclusions can be withdrawn in light of new information. Epistemic dogmatism cannot be inferred from the two-valuedness of logic.^[1]

In the methodology chapter Ardabili speaks of other capacities of plastic logic, among them confronting contradiction and preserving diverse possibilities alongside an actual decision. Even if we accept these capacities, his opposition to two-valued logic in the floating-logs example is not justified. One of his reasons for the necessity of moving to plastic logic, namely the inability of two-valued logic to rely on fallible foundations, falls away. Of course, this error alone does not invalidate the logic he proposes.

Ardabili does not regard Łukasiewicz's many-valued logic, or the continuous logic he attributes to Ben-Yaacov, as "truly many-valued." In his words, these logics are "the same two-valued logic" with "the same relations as classical logic," which merely take into account a spectrum of probabilities between the true and the false (p. 190). This description occurs in a discussion that ultimately links many-valued logic to relativism and the "logic of nihilism."

A truth value is not the same as a probability of truth. In Łukasiewicz's three-valued logic, in addition to true and false there is a third value, which is part of the system's semantics.^[2] It therefore does not mean that the proposition is true with fifty percent probability. The difference also shows in the rules for the operators. If a proposition has the intermediate value, then under the standard interpretation of "or" in this logic, "that proposition or its negation" also takes the intermediate value, whereas the same form is always true in classical logic. So to speak of "the same relations as classical logic" is incorrect.^[3]

Many-valued logic can be represented with mathematical tools and even with a suitable two-valued semantics, but representing a system in another framework does not reduce its truth values and rules to classical relations. Moreover, a plurality of truth values does not in itself lead to the absence of criteria. Why this plurality should lead to epistemic relativism or the "logic of nihilism" requires an argument that cannot be obtained from mere many-valuedness.

On page 193 Ardabili says he does not intend an internal critique of existing logical systems. Such a limitation does not excuse him from reporting their structure accurately, especially when he makes the limits of those very systems the basis for proposing a new logic. His later criticism of fuzzy logic for lacking suitable metaphysical foundations and for the dominance of functionalism (p. 204) likewise does not correct the inaccurate description on page 190. Ardabili's incorrect account of many-valued logics therefore cannot support the claim that a transition to plastic logic is necessary.

In explaining "plastic inference," Ardabili has the subject, before deciding, face many possibilities and then realize one of them when acting. On page 218 he writes: "In the moment of undecidability, the principle of contradiction does not govern," but in the moment of action "the principle of contradiction returns." On page 219, likewise, as new possibilities open up, "the impossibility of contradiction disappears." He calls this back-and-forth "plastic inference."

But a plurality of possibilities creates no contradiction. A person may still be able to do something or refrain from doing it. "He may do this" and "he may not do it" are not negations of each other, and both can be true. A contradiction arises when the occurrence and non-occurrence of an act are held to be true at the same time and in the same respect.^[4] Nor does the realization of one possibility bring the principle of non-contradiction back onto the scene. That principle was valid before the decision as well.

On page 217 Ardabili distinguishes between a practical option and its negation, and between that option and other possible choices. So the problem is not that he is unfamiliar with this distinction. The question is why, despite this distinction, he makes the openness of possibilities for action depend on the absence of the principle of contradiction, and the realization of one action on its return.

Describing the oscillation between weighing possibilities and decisiveness in action is not in itself problematic. Ardabili also uses "logic" in a broader sense than formal logic. Nevertheless, on page 216 he explicitly names the "principle of non-contradiction." If the suspension and return of this principle is merely a figure of speech for the subject's condition when making decisions, then neither the incapacity of a logical principle nor the need for a new kind of inference can be inferred from it. If what is meant is a real suspension of its validity, it must be shown how the subject's practical situation affects the validity of a logical principle. No such explanation is offered in the formulation of "plastic inference," and the link that is supposed to turn the plurality of possibilities and the unity of action into a different logic remains unsupported.

In criticizing the coherence-based criterion of truth, Ardabili, besides the objections of self-reference and detachment from pre-logical experience, also invokes Gödel. In his words, the coherence criterion pursues an impossible ideal, because Gödel has shown that incompleteness reigns even in mathematics, and "self-sufficient internal coherence is nothing but a myth" (p. 279). This verdict is one of his reasons for moving to the plastic criterion of truth.

But Gödel's theorems do not have this consequence. The first theorem shows that consistent formal systems strong enough for arithmetic are, under certain conditions, incomplete. A system's being incomplete does not mean it is inconsistent. The second theorem, under its own particular conditions, limits the possibility of proving the consistency of such a system within that same system, and from this limitation too one cannot conclude that the system is inconsistent.^[5] Epistemic coherence also differs from the deductive completeness of a formal system. An epistemic system can be internally coherent and yet have no verdict on many questions.

Ardabili needs to show that the coherence criterion entails the same formal completeness that Gödel deems impossible in qualifying systems. No such link is established in his argument. Of course, his two other objections to coherentism, namely the danger of self-reference and detachment from experience, are independent discussions, but neither corrects his inference from Gödel. Consequently, the claim that self-sufficient internal coherence is impossible, which is one of his reasons for discarding the coherence criterion in favor of the plastic criterion of truth, is not established in this way.

Teleology, Desire and the Critique of Kant's Ethics

In his discussion of teleology, Ardabili sees Kant as caught in two problems: moral formalism and reason's inability to motivate action. On the first, he writes that to make morality independent of desire Kant was forced to ground it on "formal logic (the principle of non-contradiction)." In his words, a morality obtained in this way is indifferent to the content of action, to the point that "an absolute good free of contradiction is as justified as an absolute evil free of contradiction" (p. 430). This conclusion rests on a reading of Kant's moral test that Kant himself does not defend.

It suffices to consider the maxim of the false promise: "Whenever it benefits me, I make a false promise." As a proposition, this sentence contains no formal contradiction. Kant too is not looking for a contradiction in its linguistic form. He asks what happens if such a maxim becomes a universal law. A deceptive promise needs a trust in order to work, and the universal prevalence of that very maxim destroys it. In other cases, too, the issue is not merely whether a universal law can be conceived: the agent must be able to will that law consistently. Furthermore, in the formulation of humanity of the categorical imperative, Kant binds the treatment of a human being to respect for that person's dignity as an end in itself. None of this is reducible to the mere non-contradictoriness of a proposition.^[6]

One can ask how successful these tests are in settling difficult situations, or whether Kantian practical reason can really supply sufficient motivation for action. Ardabili himself also offers other criticisms of Kant's autonomy and motivation on pages 429 to 431. But these questions do not rescue the claim that good and evil are equally justified. If the failure of Kant's ethics is to be one of the reasons for the necessity of a new system, this particular reason at least is inconsistent with the actual formulation of Kantian ethics.

After examining various ends, Ardabili concludes on page 433 that even "inner desire" is in principle "external," because it arises from political, social, cultural, biological and environmental conditions, and that following it would therefore be another form of heteronomy. This argument returns in the politics chapter, where he calls living by desires arising from one's environment a form of heteronomy (p. 654). But the origin of a desire does not yet settle our relation to it.

Someone may have acquired a desire under the influence of upbringing, social relations or bodily condition, yet later reflect on it, weigh its motives and consequences, and consciously endorse it, or refuse to let it determine his action.^[7] Of course, such endorsement alone does not guarantee the realization of autonomy.^[8] The question is why the external origin of a desire should rule out any possibility of freely following it. Ardabili himself accepts that the initial decision to struggle may have psychological, social or even genetic roots (pp. 438–439), without this causal dependence preventing the possibility of struggle.

In the ethics chapter too, he links freedom to the subject's awareness of its singularity and of "the desire's being an effect," to cultivating readiness, and to decision (pp. 553–554). If awareness, readiness and decision can open the way to freedom despite the subject's causal dependence, it must be made clear why this same possibility is excluded in the case of desire. Desires may perhaps be insufficient for other reasons to determine the end of life, but from the externality of their causes of origin it does not follow that any following of them is heteronomous. This inference, which is one of Ardabili's reasons for removing desire from its place as the source of an autonomous end, still requires justification.

Alongside the discussion of desire's origin, Ardabili also appeals to its fate after satisfaction. On page 419 he writes that desire "is destroyed by satisfaction," and from this he concludes that, in order to preserve itself, desire at the same time tends toward non-satisfaction. He then extends this verdict into a psychological principle, saying that the realization of an end brings, in place of salvation, redoubled frustration and new, more intense desires. His argument has a missing link. Why should desire, besides wanting its own object, also want its own survival? A desire's ending after satisfaction may be precisely what that desire was heading toward. From its ending one cannot derive a desire for not ending.

This critique does not deny the complexity of the relation between desire and satisfaction, or the possibility of boredom and the emergence of new wants after satisfaction. Ardabili himself leaves the detailed discussion of this relation outside the scope of the first volume (p. 419), but in the politics chapter he also counts the frustration that follows the satisfaction of desire as a reason for discarding ends based on it (p. 654). From the possibility of such consequences, the necessary failure of all desire-based ends does not follow.

Necessity, Freedom and the Ethics of Struggle

At the start of the ethics chapter, Ardabili tries to take as his basis a necessity whose validity does not depend on proving causality in nature. On page 563 he writes, "Meaning is a kind of commitment to living." Living, in turn, depends on "being-there," and necessity, by his definition, is the condition of being-there. From these premises he concludes that every conferral of meaning on living rests on a commitment to necessity. On the same page he carries this acceptance into ethics, calling it "acceptance of the responsibility of necessity" and counting it the system's first principle of ethics.

Even if we accept all the premises, it is still unclear why the necessity of being should place a moral responsibility on the subject. A person can know that his act arose from a necessary connection of causes and that he himself had a share in its occurrence. This awareness tells him how the act came about and what his place in it was. But being responsible in the moral sense also involves a further judgment. Why should awareness of necessity yield a commitment to the act and its consequences?^[9]

On page 564 Ardabili speaks of the subject's simultaneous awareness of itself as product and as agent. On pages 568–570 he also stresses that the acceptance of necessity must be active and must not lead to surrender before the status quo. These explanations clarify what he expects of the first principle, but they do not supply a reason for the transition to moral responsibility. If "responsibility" is merely a name for recognizing one's participation in the occurrence of an act, it is still unclear how virtue and vice follow from it. If responsibility has a further meaning, that meaning itself requires justification. On page 576 Ardabili adds to this principle responsibility for the behavior of others, and even of everyone, without filling the gap between awareness of necessity and the obligation to accept this responsibility. This gap concerns the very foundation of the ethics of struggle and persists in the politics chapter, since on page 655 the author makes this same principle the basis of political action.

The relation between causal knowledge and ethics also arises in the discussion of hatred. Ardabili asks what becomes of our hatred if we learn the cause of the behavior of someone who has harmed us. His example is a person who has been forced to slap another in order to save his kidnapped child (pp. 579–580; also p. 591). Awareness of his predicament may reduce our hatred or even turn it into empathy. But from this possibility the author arrives at a sweeping verdict. On page 594 he writes that "every awareness carries with it a kind of compassion, or at least a compassionate understanding of the causes of a person's behavior," and he links awareness, in its highest realization, to absolute compassion.

In Ardabili's own example, awareness of the kidnapping may shift our hatred from the person who slapped to the kidnapper (p. 591). Knowing more distant causes can also change a person's judgment, but it is still unclear why expanding awareness must necessarily lead to compassion, or even to a compassionate understanding of another's behavior. One can know the causes of someone's behavior, understand his situation and motives, and even be aware of his suffering, without feeling compassion for him.^[10] The distinction between understanding another's situation and adopting a compassionate stance toward him does not disappear with the expansion of causal knowledge.^[11]

Of course, for Ardabili compassion is not limited to a feeling of pity. He connects it with liberation from the dominance of emotions, acceptance of the responsibility of necessity, and understanding of the inner link between individual and collective happiness (pp. 593–594 and 617). But these explanations still do not show why awareness of causes and of the relations among subjects must necessarily lead to a compassionate encounter. If compassionate understanding is built into the meaning of desirable awareness from the start, it must be shown why awareness has such content. If compassion is instead supposed to be the product of awareness, the transition from knowledge to this ethical orientation requires justification. This problem concerns the foundation of Ardabili's ethics, since on page 612 he regards compassion and authority as two manifestations of freedom.

In the politics chapter, Ardabili extends this discussion to the concept of "struggle without an enemy." On page 692, from the dependence of individuals' behavior on prior causes, he concludes that "the expression of no hatred, and here no enmity, toward any individual or group of individuals is justified." On the next page, appealing to holistic causality, he says that the subject and what it calls its enemy arise from a common cause, and that therefore the factor that obstructs its will and the factor that realizes it must be "a shared object of feeling" (p. 693). But the commonality of the causes that constitute individuals does not by itself determine that the emotional and moral response to their behavior must be the same. Awareness that the harming person and the harmed person are both situated in a shared network of causes still does not show why hatred or enmity toward the former is necessarily unjustified.

Ardabili distinguishes between hatred and resistance and holds that confronting an agent of oppression is possible even without regarding him as an enemy (pp. 694–697). He also counts the dominance of emotions over the subject's awareness and freedom among the reasons why hatred is unjustified (pp. 680–681). These explanations show why struggle without an enemy does not necessarily lead to passivity, but they do not justify the inference from shared causality to the unjustifiability of hatred. If hatred means nothing more than the subject's subjection to emotion, its unjustifiability depends on a critique of that subjection. If Ardabili's verdict covers every kind of hatred and enmity, he must show why knowledge of shared causes entails such a verdict. This link still requires justification in the founding of the concept of struggle without an enemy.

Ardabili's defense of the subject's freedom in its encounter with moral rules also plays a decisive role. On pages 600–602 he even considers a case in which a person, free of fear or greed, has arrived through rational argument at the correctness of a moral law. Even so, he says, following such a law at the moment of action is also heteronomous. In his view, instead of deciding, the person obeys an authority accepted in advance, even if that authority is "the subject itself in the past." Ardabili calls the delegation of a decision to one's past self the foundation of dogmatism (p. 602).

But why should having accepted a law in the past deprive a person of the freedom to judge today? Someone may earlier have arrived, for convincing reasons, at the correctness of a moral principle and may now, in light of the circumstances of action, still regard those reasons as valid. He can judge how the principle applies, and if he finds a new reason, he can reexamine the principle itself. In such a case, adherence does not mean handing the decision over to an inaccessible person in the past. The very person who is now deciding continues to affirm the law and accepts responsibility for his act.^[12]

Ardabili rightly warns of the danger of complacent reliance on moral commands and of flight from the responsibility of decision (p. 601). But from the possibility of such flight he arrives at the verdict that "any explicit moral prescription" is heteronomous (p. 602). This generalization is not justified. A moral law can be present in a person's current judgment without taking the place of that judgment. The problem bears directly on the second principle of Ardabili's ethics. On page 603, from the heteronomy of rules, he concludes that there is no clear a priori rule for determining the moral act, and he then brings forward "decisiveness amid undecidability" (pp. 603–604). If conscious and revisable adherence to a law is compatible with freedom, discarding rules in the name of preserving freedom no longer follows from his argument. The possibility and value of decisiveness in action remain open to discussion, but the reason Ardabili offers for the necessity of this departure from rule-based ethics is not sufficient.

The Foundations of Political Struggle

Before stating the principles of political struggle, Ardabili turns to utopia, since he considers its critique necessary for establishing these principles, especially the third (p. 648). There he writes that "the very idea of utopia is inherently paradoxical," and on page 649 he claims that even if utopia were realized, it would immediately turn into its opposite. In explaining this verdict he speaks of narratives that end with the hero's salvation or the tyrant's overthrow and leave the day after that victory unspoken, as if history too had ended once the knot was untied (pp. 649–651).

This critique applies to a conception of utopia that promises, with the realization of the ideal, the end of conflict and of history. But why must every ideal horizon take this form? One can have a desirable state of affairs in view, strive to realize it, and accept in advance that this state itself will not be the end of the road and will need critique and transformation.^[13] Nor does holding a political ideal require us to derive the value of every action solely from its final outcome. Someone may struggle for justice and at the same time permit no unjustified conduct on the promise that justice will be realized.

On page 655 Ardabili mentions the efforts of Bloch, Benjamin and Adorno to rethink utopia critically, but he counts these too as a remnant of the deceptive manner of narration. This judgment does not take the place of an answer to the question that the very mention of these thinkers raises. If some forms of utopian thought are compatible with the openness of the future and the criticizability of the ideal, for what reason do they inherit the same contradiction as the end-of-history utopia? The critique of external ends in the teleology chapter is an answer to this question only if it is shown that every political ideal is necessarily an external end that determines the value of action.

On page 678 Ardabili extends this negation to the third principle of political struggle and rejects any reliance on utopia to justify or motivate action. But from the critique of the end-of-history utopia, no such sweeping prohibition of political idealism follows.

Ardabili calls the acceptance of the responsibility of necessity the first principle of political struggle. In his view, the subject must accept the past in the necessity of its occurrence and, instead of projecting blame, come to know the causes of the situation in which it finds itself. But on page 659 he draws another conclusion from this position. He writes that the question is not what else could have happened at a given historical moment, since "this question itself already shirks the acceptance of the responsibility of necessity." His reason is that nothing other than what actually happened could have happened.

Suppose that, given the whole set of actual conditions, the occurrence of an event was necessary. This supposition does not prevent us from asking what consequence might have followed had one of those conditions been different. In the second question, no one wants to change the past or deny that it happened; he only wants to understand what contribution a given factor made to the emergence of the outcome. For example, asking what difference the absence of a particular political decision would have made to the fate of a revolution can be part of knowing the causes of that very revolution. This question cannot be dismissed simply by recalling the necessity of the event that actually occurred.^[14]

On pages 658–660 Ardabili stresses the possibility of new interpretations of the past. In his words, every interpretation is itself a new event and can change the arrangement of forces in the present and the future. Even if we accept this explanation, the validity of a counterfactual examination of past causes remains a separate question. Reinterpreting an event in the present does not excuse us from weighing the role of the conditions involved in its occurrence. Nor should the counterfactual question be confused with the regret of "if only so-and-so had...," though on page 658 the author places the two side by side.

The effect of this conflation bears on the system's way of knowing politics. The first principle of struggle is meant to confront the subject with the roots of its situation and to open up its possibilities for action. But when a question about the effect of alternative causes is counted as a sign of projection merely because it is counterfactual, part of the possibility of analyzing those roots is set aside without reason. One can accept responsibility for the present and still ask of the past what, under what conditions, would have produced a different result.

In defending the third principle of political struggle, Ardabili says that an action must be justified at the very moment it occurs and that an unjustified means cannot be justified by the promise of a desirable end (p. 679). One of his reasons for this verdict concerns the fate of the outcome itself. On page 680 he writes that a struggle that draws strength from deception, anger or hatred, even if it apparently triumphs, "will preserve and reproduce the same anger, hatred, love, infatuation, rancor and deception at the heart of the struggle and its results." On page 682 he likewise says that deception employed to achieve a lofty goal is reproduced in the very realization of that goal.

The means plays a part in the emergence of the outcome, and its effects may persist after the action ends. But from this causal link one cannot conclude that the same feature is necessarily reproduced. Deception used in a political act may contribute to the emergence of relations based on deception, or it may be that later relations abandon that method. To judge between these possibilities, one must speak of the specific mechanism of continuity or change. The mere fact that a historical outcome is not separable from its genesis does not prove that the moral or emotional character of the means will be repeated in it.

Nor does the dynamism and continuity of events in Ardabili's ontology make this inference necessary. On pages 680–682 Ardabili also offers another reason: the dominance of emotions within the action itself distorts the freedom and awareness of the agents. Even if this reason is accepted, it does not prove the necessary reproduction of the same emotions in the later results of the action. Therefore, even if the justifiedness of the action itself is acceptable on independent grounds, Ardabili's argument for the necessary reproduction of the means' features in the outcome remains unsupported.

At several decisive points, Ardabili's philosophical ambition outruns the power of his arguments. Two-valued logic is accused of dogmatism; from the external origin of desire, the heteronomy of following it is inferred; from awareness of necessity, moral responsibility is inferred; from the expansion of awareness, compassion is inferred; and the critique of particular forms of utopia leads to the negation of utopian thinking in politics. These are gaps in the trenches of struggle, precisely at the points where the system's strength depends on the link between its premises and its conclusions. A system that counts finding and building justified foundations for action among the most difficult tasks of struggle, and that itself claims to be justifiable (pp. 150, 163 and 742), fails, in some of its most foundational links, to justify its own claims.

Footnotes

^[1] Sarit Kraus, Daniel Lehmann, and Menachem Magidor, “Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Preferential Models and Cumulative Logics,” Artificial Intelligence 44, nos. 1–2 (1990): 167–207, esp. 167–168; Graham Priest, An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic: From If to Is, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3–5; John F. Horty, Reasons as Defaults (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7–8.

^[2] Jan Łukasiewicz, “On Three-Valued Logic,” trans. Rose Rand, The Polish Review 13, no. 3 (Summer 1968): 43– 44, esp. 44.

^[3] Merrie Bergmann, An Introduction to Many-Valued and Fuzzy Logic: Semantics, Algebras, and Derivation Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76–79.

^[4] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Γ.3, 1005b, 19–22.

^[5] Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I,” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38 (1931): 173–198, esp. 187, 196; Peter Smith, An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 165–166, 189–190, 235–236.

^[6] Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Bernd Kraft and Dieter Schönecker, 2nd rev. ed., Philosophische Bibliothek 519 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2016), AA 4:421–423, 429.

^[7] Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, The Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): 5–20, esp. 10–16.

^[8] Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Bernd Kraft and Dieter Schönecker, 2nd rev. ed., Philosophische Bibliothek 519 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2016), AA 4:440–441.

^[9] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.1.1.27 (SBN 469–470).

^[10] Max Scheler, Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, in Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 7, hrsg. von Manfred S. Frings (Bern und München: Francke, 1973), 24–25; Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 310–314, 319, 342.

^[11] P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962): 187–211, esp. 193–194.

^[12] Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93–94, 100–101; Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 240–241, 287–288.

^[13] Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Bd. 1, 3. Aufl. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 221, 225–227; Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 102–105.

^[14] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 183–188; James Woodward, Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 32–36, 112–114.