Here is a traditional way of thinking about human knowledge.

• (1) Knowledge is a species of true belief. The crucial difference between knowledge and other kinds of true belief is that propositions that are known have a special property (they are justified, or warranted).

• (2a) Justified (warranted) propositions either have intrinsic justification (they are self-warranting for the knower) or else they are obtainable by means of a justification-conferring argument from other justified propositions that the knower believes.

• (3a) The only propositions with intrinsic justification are those that fall into one of two classes: the set of a priori truths (logic, mathematics, etc.) and the set of propositions recording the sensory experiences of the knower.

Plato himself would be pleased at the recent emergence of a certain highly Platonic variety of platonism concerning mathematics, viz., the structuralism of Michael Resnik and Stewart Shapiro. In fact, this species of platonism is so Platonic that it is susceptible to an objection closely related to one raised against Plato by Parmenides in the dialogue of that name. This is the Third Man Argument (TMA) against a view about the relation of Forms to particulars. My objection is not a TMA against structuralism; the position avoids that objection, but is vulnerable to a different one precisely at the point where it avoids the TMA. The way structuralism avoids the TMA has in fact been considered, as one of Plato’s options, by at least one commentator on the Parmenides, Colin Strang, who explicitly rejects it on logical grounds. In the course of the discussion, I shall clarify the reason that I believe led Strang to reject this option, and shall modify his own statement of that reason.

Over the last twenty years, John Rawls has developed an approach to political philosophy which appeals to the notion of reflective equilibrium. This notion has proven suggestive to those attracted to coherence approaches to justification, in ethics and in other domains as well. In this paper, I explore the question whether Rawls’s approach provides a model for a coherentist account of justification, concluding that although the discussion of reflective equilibrium has provided helpful insights it has not produced a coherentist model of justification.

Over the past decade or so the term ‘communitarianism’ has been applied to a wide range of positions with great variation between them. This is not in itself an objection to its continued use, for a concept may be coherent and illuminating even though it shelters considerable diversity. What is troubling about the body of literature now labelled as communitarian is that it frequently appeals to images of community without giving the notion the analytical attention it deserves and that we have come to expect in relation to other central political concepts such as ‘liberty’ and ‘justice.’ What I propose to do in this paper is to focus on a particular understanding of community which I think has been neglected in recent discussions, largely because it has not been sufficiently distinguished from others, and then to raise a question in the light of it which has been at the forefront of the debate: viz., can liberalism in its currently dominant form truly respect the value and importance of community? Several writers have responded to the critiques of liberalism develoged in the work of those such as Michael Sandel and Alasdair Macintyre by arguing that the basic framework of liberal thought is fully compatible with a due appreciation of community. Joel Feinberg, for example, attempts to show that ‘one can preserve one’s allegiance to personal autonomy in the way that liberalism requires while fully acknowledging the central and indispensable importance of community in human lives.’ I shall register some doubts about whether liberalism can show proper respect for community when ‘community’ is understood in the way I describe.

Hume begins ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses,’ Section 2 of the Treatise, Book I, Part iv with the claim that it is otiose to ask whether or not there are bodies since belief in their existence is unavoidable. The appropriate question is rather ‘What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?’ (§2, 187-8; his emphasis). For Hume, belief is lively conception. Hence, he is also undertaking to answer the logically prior question: What causes induce us to form the concept of body? Hume wants to explain the ordinary notion of, and belief in, external objects as part of his science of human nature.

John Christman, in ‘Autonomy and Personal History,’ advances a novel genetic or historical account of individual autonomy. He formulates ‘the conditions of the [i.e., his] new model of autonomy’ as follows:

• (i) A person P is autonomous relative to some desire D if it is the case that P did not resist the development of D when attending to this process of development, or P would not have resisted that development had P attended to the process;

• (ii) The lack of resistance to the development of D did not take place (or would not have) under the influence of factors that inhibit self-reflection;

and

• (iii) The self-reflection involved in condition (i) [sic] is (minimally) rational and involves no self-deception. (11)