In a fascinating and challenging article in this journal, Kadri Vihvelin presents a spirited and vigorous critique of the strategy of defending compatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility that employs (in part, at least) the ‘Frankfurt-examples.’ Here is her presentation of such an example:

There is one important point about which Fischer and I are in agreement. We agree that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. We disagree about the best way of defending that claim. He thinks that Frankfurt's strategy is a good one, that we can grant incompatibilists the metaphysical victory (that is, agree with them that determinism means that we are never able to do otherwise) while insisting that we are still morally responsible. I think this a huge mistake and I think the literature spawned by Frankfurt's attempt to undercut the metaphysical debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists is a snare and a delusion, distracting our attention from the important issues.

In recent work on a priori justification, one thing about which there is considerable agreement is that the notion of truth in virtue of meaning is bankrupt and infertile. (For the sake of more readable prose, I will use ‘TVM’ as an abbreviation for ‘the notion of truth in virtue of meaning.’) Arguments against the worth of TVM can be found across the entire spectrum of views on the a priori, in the work of uncompromising rationalists (such as BonJour (1998)), of centrist moderates (such as Boghossian (1997)), and of uncompromising empiricists (such as Devitt (2004)). My aim is to dispute this widespread opinion.

The outline is as follows: first, §§II-III consist of preliminary stage-setting. Then, in §IV I will argue that some of the most prevalent arguments against the worth of TVM — in particular, one which is given clear expression by Quine (1970), and is recently reinforced by Boghossian (1997) — do not engage with the core idea motivating TVM. After deflecting this charge of incoherence, the aim of §§V-VIII is to work toward developing a useful conception of TVM.

The question of content externalism's compatibility with a plausible account of self-knowledge has been the subject of much debate in recent years. If the very content of my thoughts depends on external factors beyond me, factors that can only be known a posteriori, what happens to the traditional assumption that we know our own thoughts directly, without having to rely on any empirical investigations of the environment?

Two decades ago, Tyler Burge presented what has become the standard compatibilist reply to this challenge. Burge focused on a certain class of judgments, what he calls ‘basic self-knowledge,’ such as I think (with this very thought) that water is wet. Exploiting the fact that reflexive judgments of this sort reemploy the content of the first-order thought, such that no ‘content mistakes’ are possible, Burge argued that externalism is perfectly compatible with the traditional view that we know our own thoughts directly and authoritatively.

In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant wrote that ‘freedom of the power of choice has the characteristic, entirely peculiar to it, that it cannot be determined to action through any incentive except insofar as the human being has incorporated it into his maxim.’ This is an obscure statement, in both meaning and provenance. Yet almost all recent interpreters of Kant's practical philosophy find it crucial for understanding his theories of freedom and motivation, since it seems to indicate what we are required to do in order to act by our own free choice. Here I refer to Kant's statement expressing the requirement that incentives be incorporated into maxims as his ‘incorporation requirement.’ How that requirement is best understood will be the leading question in what follows: a question I shall answer by showing why the incorporation requirement, and Kant's theories of freedom and motivation, should be understood differently from the way they are now usually understood.

In this paper I wish to defend a minimalist version of arithmetical Platonism — which I shall refer to as ‘minimal Platonism’ — from an objection which alleges that an advocate of this view is committed to an unduly capacious ontology. The objection, which I shall call the ‘Lightness of Being’ objection, runs as follows. The minimal Platonist is committed to the claim that arithmetical objects, such as numbers, exist provided that two conditions are met. The first is that terms for numerals are singular terms — where something's being a singular term is judged on the basis of purely syntactic criteria. The second is that some sentences in which these singular terms feature are non-trivially true. However, the names of fictional characters are also singular terms (when judged by the metaphysically lightweight criteria used by advocates of minimal Platonism).