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The essay is at its core a criticism of a significant tendency in contemporary philosophy, which has been coined moral rationalism. It started out as a commentary on an article by Harry Frankfurt, called Rationalism in Ethics, in which the tendency in contemporary moral philosophy to reduce the domain of morality to that of reason is critically judged, but soon took off into directions unthought-of by Frankfurt. The aim of the inquiry became twofold. Firstly, to advocate a certain style of doing moral philosophy, one in which analytic argument is restored to its proper place in the philosophical hierarchy, namely as being but a tool to gain more clarity on what we already are, and not as being an all-powerful lever with which to lift ourselves up to a platform from which to judge, as if from a vacuum, the concrete contexts in which we are immersed. Secondly, to highlight a phenomenon that is highly undervalued in current ethical debate, that of moral contingency. Contingency refers to the morals intrinsic vulnerability, the fact that it is prone to unforeseeable shifts and breakdowns, which might make all we love turn into its opposite. One of the main things the inquiry purports to do is to show that this basic fact might be reacted to in different ways, and how different attempts to cope with it have resulted in different existential positions. I begin with a general outline of moral rationalisms main tenets and Frankfurts criticism of it, to which I add some considerations of my own. From this, we move to the genealogical question of how a theory as outlandish as moral rationalism managed to become popular in the first place. My contention is that its deeper causes lie neither in mere philosophical confusions, nor in any practical problems, but in a less obvious moral unease, namely the fear of contingency. Contrary to moral rationalism, I claim that contingency is not only a possible source of terror but also of the most profound meaningfulness.

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The leading question which should guide the analyses contained in this work is, apparently, a very simple one: What is habit according to Husserl? However, a closer look on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy easily persuades of the difficulty to find an answer to that question. Habit, in fact, belongs to the range of the “operative concepts” of Husserl’s philosophy, i.e. concepts he routinely employs without making them explicitly thematic. Given this premise, we decided to limit the scope of our work to the modest attempt of describing the ‘operative functioning’ of the concept of habit in three different contexts of Husserl’s analyses. Chapter One is devoted to an investigation of Husserl’s first employment of the concept of habitus in Ideen II. In the first paragraph (1.1), we offer a basic definition of the so called transcendental or absolute consciousness by making reference to the introduction in Ideen I of the phenomenological epoché. In the second paragraph (1.2), we tackle the problem of immanent constitution, i.e. the formation of unities in the flowing sphere of mental processes. Since Husserl conceives of habits in Ideen II in terms of possessions of a pure ego, we take into consideration in paragraph 1.3 the static notion of ego developed by Husserl in Ideen I. In section 1.4, we discuss the notion of habit with reference to Husserl’s introduction of a genetic conception of ego in Ideen II. As a consequence of Husserl’s interpretation of habit as “abiding remembering” in § 29 of Ideen II, we undertake in the following paragraph (1.5) a brief analysis of the intentional structure of recollections as laid out by Husserl in the lectures on time from 1905, and compare it to the peculiar form of remembering associated with habitus. Our last analysis in 1.6 is devoted to a possible understanding of habitualities in terms of passive, associative motivations, as it appears in § 56 of Ideen II. Chapter Two undertakes a cl

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This paper is a critique of some liberal theories of the family qua natural. It looks particularly at Jeffrey Blustein's theory of parenting who argues that parents are mere caretakers of children's rights and interests. On such basis, rights of traditional parents may be questioned not only in cases of abuse, for example, but in principle, according to Rawlsian egalitarian principles of fairness and equal opportunity. Such reasoning, however, involves an individualistic reduction of the natural dimension of family. Procreation is seen as merely physiological. Family centres formalistically on parent-child relations, while the relevance of biologically influenced child-parent belonging, marital relations or sibling relations are obscured. Similarly in Hobbes, the state of nature is the locus of a brutal individualism, wherein there is little account for any socially unitive dimension of family as a natural phenomenon. Likewise, Blustein draws on the original position wherein all natural endowments and familial ties are excluded for the sake of equality; he draws also on Locke's largely voluntaristic basis for parenting. However, the natural dimension of marriage-based family is more important and complex than this suggests. In broad terms, MacIntyre in Dependent Rational Animals, emphasises the naturalness, animality of humans involving a deep interdependency, a premise de-centralised in the liberal theorists' formal views of family. Other natural law theorists, such as John Finnis emphasises a more harmonious and comprehensive view of the marriage-based family qua its central natural features. In light of this, one wonders at the absence of a fuller account of the natural phenomena of family in liberal theories. Instead the paper argue that a fresh, positive view of marriage, based mainly but not exclusively on natural law theory, is a key to re-comprehension of the natural harmony of the traditional natural family.