Recent developments in game theory have shown that the mathematical models of action so widely admired in the study of economics are in fact only particular instantiations of a more general theoretical framework. In the same way that Aristotelian logic was ‘translated’ into the more general and expressive language of predicate logic, the basic action theoretic underpinnings of modern economics have now been articulated within the more comprehensive language of game theory. But precisely because of its greater generality and expressive power, game theory has again revived the temptation to apply formal models of action to every domain of social life. This movement has been fuelled by some notable successes. Game theory has provided useful insights into the logic of collective action in the theory of public goods, and strategic models of voting have illustrated important aspects of institutional decision-making. But this extension of formal models into every area of social interaction has also encountered significant difficulties, despite the fact that contemporary decision theory has weakened its basic assumptions to the point where it teeters constantly on the brink of vacuity.

René Descartes, one of the dominant figures in the history of philosophy, has been accused of one of the most obvious mistakes in the history of philosophy — the so-called cartesian circle. It is my goal in this paper to arrive at an understanding of Descartes's work that attributes to him a theory that

• (a) should be of philosophical interest to contemporary epistemologists,

• (b) is consistent with, and suggested by, the actual text, and

• (c) avoids the circle.

I begin with a brief explanation of the supposed circle. In his search for absolute certainty Descartes requires that in order for a proposition to be an instance of knowledge it must be indubitable for the knower, and in order for it to be indubitable for the knower she must be able to eliminate any possibility of the belief's being false. It is to provide a means to satisfy this requirement that Descartes proposes the principle

And it seems that Descartes's defense of CD traps him in the circle.

There seems to be nearly universal agreement that society cannot do without some form of criminal punishment. At the same time, it is generally acknowledged that punishment, involving as it does the imposition of hardship and suffering, stands in need of justification. What form such a justification should take, however, is a matter of considerable contention, in part because of basic theoretical disagreements on the nature of moral obligation, and in part because of disagreements concerning the nature and purpose of criminal punishment itself.

These disagreements have given rise to a number of rival ‘theories’ of punishment - rival accounts of the purposes of punishment and the conditions which justify it. The traditional theories can be broadly categorized as deterrence theories, incapacitation theories, retributive theories, and rehabilitative theories (broadly conceived to include moral education theories). My purpose here is to contribute to this discussion on punishment by introducing a largely overlooked theory of punishment, one whose outlines can be found in the writings of Simone Wei!, but which has yet to be fully developed and discussed. This theory, which I call the ‘reintegrative theory,’ has, I believe, a number of advantages over more traditional theories of punishment.

It is often supposed that there is a relationship between desert and responsibility: that to be deserving we must be responsible for that which makes us deserving. Indeed, there seems little doubt that a supposed relationship between desert and responsibility, combined with a growing tendency to view less and less as the responsibility of the individual, contributed to the reluctance to appeal to desert which has been a feature of much recent moral and political philosophy. Certainly, if to be deserving we need to be responsible for that which makes us deserving ‘all the way down,’ it is not easy to see how anyone could ever be deserving of anything.

I will argue that the claim that we can deserve only on the basis of that for which we are responsible — the desert-responsibility thesis — is false. There is no conceptual connection between desert and responsibility. Nevertheless, it is true that many claims to deserve are undermined if there is a lack of responsibility.

In his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (hereafter RM), John Searle attacks computational psychology with a number of new and boldly provocative claims. Specifically, in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘The Critique of Cognitive Reason,’ Searle targets what he calls ‘cognitivism,’ according to which our brains are digital computers that process a mental syntax. And Searle denies this view on grounds that the attribution of syntax is observer relative. A syntactic property is arbitrarily assigned to a physical system, he thinks, with the result that syntactic states ‘do not even exist except in the eyes of the beholder’ (RM, 215). This unabashed anti-realism differs significantly from Searle's earlier work. The Chinese room argument, for example, was intended to show that syntactic properties will not suffice for semantics, where the syntax was realistically construed. But now Searle claims that physical properties will not suffice to determine a system's syntactic properties.

I would like to offer an interpretation of the Genealogy of Morals, of the relationship of master morality to slave morality, and of Nietzsche's philosophy of history that is different from the interpretation that is normally offered by Nietzsche scholars. Contrary to Nehamas, Deleuze, Danto, and many others, I wish to argue that Nietzsche does not simply embrace master morality and spurn slave morality. I also wish to reject the view, considered simply obvious by most scholars, that the Übermensch develops out of, or on the model of, the master, not the slave. And to make the case for all of this, I want to explore the relationship between Hegel's master-slave dialectic and the conflict Nietzsche sees between master morality and slave morality. That Nietzsche does not intend us to recall the famous master-slave dialectic of Hegel's Phenomenology as we read the Genealogy of Morals, I find difficult to believe. Yet very few commentators ever notice, let alone explore, this connection.