Forgery is one of those topics that philosophers find fascinating but, with a few notable exceptions, don't pursue with anything like vigor, or at least anything like the vigor with which they pursue other topics. That's one reason why I suspect that their interest in forgery isn't due so much to their being philosophers as it is to their being human beings. In other words, I suspect that they, like everybody else, enjoy a virtuoso flim-flam job — provided they aren't the victims. Countless short stories, novels, movies, and situations in real life in which normally decent people cheer for the bad guy to get away with it, to pull the wool over everyone's eyes and make off with the cash, the girl, status, or whatever, are all evidence that the con artist warms the cockles of our hearts at least a few degrees.

Natural selection explains why humans have eyes: eyes are useful for getting around in an illuminated world; without them we would get around a lot less effectively, at much greater risk, and with a great deal less appreciation of potential mates. One might think, therefore, that natural selection explains why you or I—humans as we are—have eyes. But the inference has been contested by a number of able philosophers, starting with Elliott Sober and going to Joel Pust. The disputants divide as follows. Sober, Denis Walsh, and Pust hold that though natural selection explains why humans as a species have eyes, it doesn't explain why particular humans have them.

By a ‘visual representation’ I mean roughly an item that is both visible itself, and which purports to represent some actual subject (that in paradigm cases is also visible), in such a way that the representing item is in some way similar to, or recognizable as, the purported actual subject; and which item has a representational content or subject matter that may or may not accurately characterize any actual subject. Pictorial representation is one species of visual representation. However, one of my main concerns in this paper will be to argue that there are no less than three additional varieties or species of visual representation, none of which are currently adequately recognized, and which together comprise a category of visual representation distinct from that of pictorial representation.

Roughly a half-century ago, R.M. Hare gave us a potent argument against attempts to account for the meaning of moral language in non-normative or ‘descriptive’ terms. The argument relies on the idea that in order to have genuine moral disagreement, we have to be talking about the same thing. Real disagreement requires agreement in meaning: if the words we use in our disputes mean different things, then we're just talking past, and not to, one another. Using this simple observation, Hare argues that if the meaning of an evaluative word such as ‘good’ were primarily descriptive, then groups with sufficiently different standards for applying ‘good’ wouldn't be able to enter into a real evaluative disagreement. But these disagreements are possible. Hence, he concluded, it's the evaluative meaning of ‘good’ that's primary — and any descriptive account is bound to fail because it doesn't capture the crucial element of endorsement that's central to normative language.

Proving the immortality of the soul was a common challenge for the religious metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century. One attractive line of argument was premised on the ‘unity,’ ‘simplicity,’ or ‘indivisibility’ of consciousness (‘mind,’ or ‘soul’). While the religious issue of the soul's immortality dropped to a lower place on the philosophical agenda in the eighteenth century, the question of the unity of consciousness continued to run high as philosophers attempted to apply material atomism to mind and to vital phenomena in general.