Much recent political philosophy has focused on the role of responsibility within liberal-egalitarian theories of justice. John Rawls's theory, in particular, has come in for criticism in virtue of its account of responsibility, which Rawls takes to be tied to his account of primary goods. Primary goods themselves have been rejected as the appropriate ‘currency’ (or metric) of distributive justice, while Rawls's treatment of responsibility has been criticized as implausible or even inconsistent. These criticisms have given rise to much of the constructive work political philosophy has done after Rawls's Theory — one may think of the work of Richard Arneson, G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, and John Roemer, for whom a major concern is to make more room for a suitable notion of responsibility. Their efforts are shaped by a distinction between ‘choice’ and ‘circumstance’: individuals should possess distributive shares in accordance with their choices (for which they are responsible) and be compensated for disadvantages they have because of their circumstances (for which they are not).

Amongst the virtues extolled within analytic metaphysics are universality and parsimony. We value an account of what there is that includes everything, and we want a metaphysics that not only excludes what there isn't, but that also avoids the vice of double-counting. This vice leads to redundancies in one's ontology, such as asserting or entailing that there are, for example, minds over and above matter (if one is a materialist in the philosophy of mind), or groups of people over and above the individual people in those groups (if one is an individualist in the social sciences). An ontological view must be sufficiently pluralistic to achieve universality or completeness, yet sparse enough to respect parsimony or non-redundancy.

Husserl's theory of perception is remarkable in several respects. For one thing, Husserl rigorously distinguishes the parts and properties of the act of consciousness — its content — from the parts and properties of the object perceived. Second, Husserl's repeated insistence that perceptual consciousness places its subject in touch with the perceived object itself, rather than some representation that does duty for it, vindicates the commonsensical and phenomenologically grounded belief that when a thing appears to us, it is precisely that thing, rather than some other thing (its ‘appearance’), that we perceive. Third, his distinction between empty and intuitive acts, and his descriptions of their complex interplay in perceptual consciousness, provides a way of making sense of the fact that an object can be perceived even when some of its parts and properties are not. Finally, his theory of perceptual acts as constituents of higher-order acts of fulfilment provides one of the few detailed accounts in the philosophical literature of how a perceptual experience can transform a mere thought into knowledge, despite the fact that the relation between perception and belief is not a logical or inferential one.

According Leibniz's thesis of universal expression, each substance expresses the whole world, i.e. all other substances, from its particular, unique viewpoint, or, in other words, the complete individual notion of a substance — the comprehensive notion which includes, in internal terms, everything truly attributable to a substance — is such a universal expression of, or ‘involves,’ every other substance, or, as Leibniz also frequently states, from any given complete individual notion one can ‘deduce’ or ‘infer’ or ‘demonstrate,’ or from it ‘follows,’ or it ‘leads to,’ (all truths about) the whole world. On the other hand, in Leibniz's view each (created) substance is internally individuated, self-sufficient and independent of other (created) substances, and the complete individual notion of a substance is such that it respects this requirement. Leibniz also says, with an apparent intention of pronouncing his doctrines of expression and self-sufficiency at the same time, that each substance is ‘as if a world apart,’ or like a ‘multiplication’ or ‘concentration’ of the world.

This paper is about the relationship between Frege's discussions of informative identity statements in the Begriffsschrift and ‘On Sense and Reference’. The question of how these discussions relate to one another has a more-or-less standard answer that goes like this. In the Begriffsschrift Frege proposes a metalinguistic solution to the puzzle about how an identity statement can be informative. He says that what you find out when you discover that, for example, Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus, is that the two names ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are names for the same thing. In ‘On Sense and Reference’ Frege rejects this solution on the ground that it treats identity statements as statements about names rather than statements about objects. His new solution is that if ‘a = b’ is potentially informative for co-referring ‘a’ and ‘b’ this is because ‘a’ and ‘b’, though they refer to the same object, are associated with different ways of being presented with the object: finding out that a = b is finding out that the objects presented in these ways are the same.

A widely held view in current philosophical theory says to be wary of conceptual analysis and its quest for analyticity. The major source of this suspicion traces back to reasons W. V. Quine gave 50 years ago in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ — namely concerns about reliance on notions of meaning and synonymy that are unclear. Since that time, there have been new sources of suspicion. In the philosophy of mind, for example, debates over consciousness have some philosophers doubting whether conceptual analysis can furnish as hefty a metaphysical conclusion as the denial of physicalism (Block and Stalnaker, 1999; Chalmers, 1996). And in epistemology, Stephen Stich and others worry that conceptual analysis of epistemic norms can only end up endorsing local intuitions about good thinking — intuitions that depend arbitrarily on the culture in which they were formed.