Discussions of the morality of the Gulf War have tended to embrace the traditional theory of the just war uncritically and to apply its tenets in a mechanical and unimaginative fashion. We believe, by contrast, that careful reflection of the Gulf War reveals that certain principles of the traditional theory are oversimplifications that require considerable refinement. Our aims, therefore, are both practical and theoretical. We hope to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics both of war in general and of the Gulf War in particular.

Marx’s social theory seems to involve a sharp case of a well-known paradox in sociology of knowledge. The puzzle arises when we discover on the basis of scientific inquiry that belief in scientific claims is produced and maintained by noncognitive social interest or positions. The worry is that belief so produced is for that reason suspect. A cognitive interest is an intrinsic interest in the truth or warrant, or more broadly in the epistemic properties, of some claim or belief. But according to Marx’s theory of ideology,

Though much has been written about when paternalistic intervention is justified, and about how it is justified, much less has been written about who may do the intervening. This is a substantial lacuna in our understanding of the nature of justified paternalism. By examining the question of who it is that may most appropriately interfere with the course of our decision-making, we can learn something useful both about paternalism and about the nature of friendship.

In this essay I will argue that friendship and paternalistic intervention are linked. Friendship of the close, intimate variety that I will be discussing is in part constituted by the fact that one friend is morally justified in interfering with the other’s (problematic) decisions. Intimate friendship involves a partial meshing of identities. This meshing of identities manifests itself in part by the liberties that one friend takes in guiding the life of the other. Paternalistic intervention between friends can thus be justified because it expresses the union of the friends, and because it preserves that union.

It has been widely accepted in the past and it remains accepted in many quarters even now, that an ontologically economical (nominalist or fictionalist) position is to be rejected if the corresponding Platonic or otherwise ontologically prodigal discourse cannot be translated, paraphrased or otherwise ‘reduced’ to discourse exhibiting a more economical ontology. Such an attitude is often accompanied by

1. (a) the claim that the prodigal ontology explains some important truths

   and

2. (b) the demand that the nominalist or fictionalist or economicalist provide an alternative explanation for those truths — perhaps in terms of ontologically economical ersatz substitutes for the prodigal entities.

Most philosophers of action have seen little or no connection between the individuation of action and questions of freedom and responsibility. Is this a mistake? According to a recent suggestion by Fred Dretske it may be. Dretske views overt actions not as observable events with a distinctive sort of causal history, but rather as causal sequences, in which a distinctive sort of inner cause produces the appropriate outcome. So when Jimmy voluntarily wiggles his ears, the motion of his ears is not his action; it is only a component of the action, its result. The entire action consists in an event-causal sequence wherein an inner event C causes the result: it is C’s causing the motion of Jimmy’s ears.

Christopher Peacocke has recently made an important and insightful effort to fashion a non-verificationist method for distinguishing sense from nonsense (or, as he puts it, genuine from spurious hypotheses). The argument is subtle and complex, and varies somewhat with each of his three target ‘spurious hypotheses’: that if a perfect fission of one person into two were to occur, one and only one of the resulting persons would be identical with the original; that another person’s visual experience can be qualitatively different from your own when you are both seeing the same object, even though your relevant brain states are physically identical and so are your environmental conditions; and that the entire material universe is moving undetectably at a particular uniform velocity with respect to absolute space. My own assessment of his efforts is that they are most successful against the third of these hypotheses, and that this is a function of the fact that of the three, it alone (from both Peacocke’s and my perspectives) clearly employs a problematic concept- that of absolute location. However, my purpose here is not to engage in a comprehensive evaluation of Peacocke’s project; it is rather to defend the extreme inverted spectrum hypothesis (henceforth EISH) against his attack. I shall argue not only that his argument against EISH fails, but that he is himself independently committed to its intelligibility. Beyond that, I shall point out some striking and, to my mind, welcome consequences of his plausible claims concerning the relations between his own proposal and certain other views concerning content theory; the consequences in question depend both on his positive proposal and on my reasons for rejecting his argument against the extreme inversion hypothesis.

The correspondence between Leibniz and Arnauld was judged by Leibniz himself to be very useful for understanding his philosophy. Historians have concurred in this judgment. Leibniz did not find any philosophy of independent interest in the letters Arnauld sent him. Historians have, for the most part, also concurred in this finding. I shall argue that on one set of issues at least — modal metaphysics and free will — Arnauld accomplished more than facilitating Leibnizian elucidations. He held his own in this dispute. Indeed, were it not for the general sophistication and superior handling of such issues as identity, unity, and the nature of body enjoyed by the Leibnizian system, the Cartesian position on modal metaphysics and free will espoused by Arnauld might have won the day in the eyes of later philosophers. A proper appreciation of the Cartesian framework should also make it of considerable interest to philosophers presently at work on the metaphysics of modality. I shall argue that Descartes and some Cartesians like Arnauld espoused a strongly actualist doctrine. This means they thought that all philosophically interesting uses of possibles were analyzable into facts about actually existing things.