Hilary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, he originally introduced his brain in a vat scenario to help illustrate a point about the ‘mind/world relationship.’ In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's discussion has already inspired a substantial body of criticism, but it will be argued here that these criticisms fail to capture the central problem with his argument. Indeed, it will be shown that, rather than simply following from his semantic externalism, Putnam's conclusions about the self-refuting character of the brain in a vat hypothesis are actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world.

On the question of the conclusion of a piece of practical reasoning, few have been willing to follow Aristotle's lead. He said the conclusion was an action. These days, the conclusion is usually described either as a proposition about what one ought to do, or as a psychological state or event, such as a decision to do something, an intention to do something, or a belief about what one ought to do. Why favor these options over the action-as-conclusion view? By far the most oft-repeated answer is that these views, unlike Aristotle's, can accommodate the case in which a conclusion is drawn but not acted upon. The conclusion cannot be an action, it is said, because it is possible to reach a conclusion about what to do without doing the action. My thesis is that this objection fails, and that as a consequence no radical departure from Aristotle's proposal is warranted.

Pleasure and displeasure have been suffering from intellectual neglect in the philosophy of mind. In contemporary work, the mode of experience which effectively dominates discussion is vision—David Marr's work on visual representation and L. Weiskrantz's work on blindsight are familiar to many philosophers of mind, as are the philosophical uses of such work, and no one seems to tire of working out what the frog's eye tells the frog's brain. Who, though, can name a leading theorist of pain? As a source of examples and intuitions, pain is a perennial favorite in ethics and the philosophy of mind, but in both disciplines pain is taken for granted far more often than it is the object of analysis. Equally significantly, forms of displeasure other than pains are very largely neglected. Pleasure, for its part, has been the nigh-exclusive province of moral theorists; few other than Strawson seem to have taken a special interest in it in the philosophy of mind. The object of the present work is to rectify this neglect, and to give an account of pleasure and displeasure which reveals a striking degree of unity and theoretical tractability underlying the diverse phenomena: a representationalist account.

Intuitionism—in some form or another—is the most widely recognized and thoroughly discussed method of justification for moral theories. It rests on the claim that a moral theory must not deviate too much from our pre-theoretical moral convictions (or at least those that we are prepared to hold on reflection). In some form or another, this methodology goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and has been discussed, refined, and defended by such contemporary philosophers as John Rawls and Norman Daniels.

There is, however, another methodology for constructing and defending moral theories. It draws on premises about human nature or the nature of persons to support conclusions about the nature and structure of morality. This method—which I will call the nature to morality methodology—evaluates a moral claim or moral theory on the basis of its relation to some (alleged) facts about the kind of beings we are. For brevity, I will use the term ‘nature-claims’ to refer to claims about human nature or the nature of persons, and the term ‘nature-facts’ to refer to true nature-claims. The nature-claims that have been used to support or criticize various moral theories include claims about human motivation, personal identity, the human soul, and the conceptual features of personhood or rational agency.

'May one be pardon’ d and retain the offence?’ asks King Claudius in his tormented monologue in Hamlet. Forgiveness appears incompatible with the retention of the offence, both in the sense of enjoying its consequences (Claudius's arrogation of the Queen and the Kingdom of Denmark) and in the sense of the subsistence of the attitude which underlay the offensive act (his cold-heartedness and ambition). There are, however, views which allow for, even admire, an attitude of forgiveness towards people who have ‘retained’ their offense in some way. This idea of forgiveness is harder to justify, since no change (like repentance) has taken place in the agent. We suggest that the concept of toleration can serve as an illuminating clue in such an analysis. The tolerant attitude involves a certain kind of reconciliation with people who not only have done something wrong in the past, but insist on sticking to their objectionable conduct in the present and the future. Tolerance, in other words, is not conditioned by repentance or by commitment to behavioral transformation; it is a kind of unconditional ‘forgiveness’ in advance.