The consequence argument attempts to show that incompatibilism is true by showing that if there is determinism, then we never had, have or will have any choice about anything. Much of the debate on the consequence argument has focused on the “beta” transfer principle, and its improvements. We shall show that on an appropriate definition of “never have had, have or will have any choice”, a version of the beta principle is a theorem given one plausible axiom for counterfactuals (weakening). Instead of being about transfer principles, the debate should be over whether the distant past and laws are up to us.

For a theist, a man's duty is to conform to the announced will of God. Yet a theist who makes this claim about duty is faced with a traditional dilemma first stated in Plato's Euthyphro—are actions which are obligatory, obligatory because God makes them so (e.g. by commanding men to do them), or does God urge us to do them because they are obligatory anyway? To take the first horn of this dilemma is to claim that God can of his free choice make any action obligatory or non-obligatory (or make it obligatory not to do some action). The critic claims that the theist cannot take this horn, for God cannot make bad actions good.

Is capitalist production unjust? It is easy to think, upon first reading Marx, that he answers this question in the affirmative. And I shall argue that this naive reading is correct. This needs to be argued, however, for a more careful scrutiny of Marx's writings reveals passages in which he seems to call capitalist production just or fair. Relying upon these passages, Robert Tucker and Allen W. Wood have urged that, in Wood's words,

What Marx regarded as false and mystified, however, is not the practice of assessing social institutions as just or unjust, but rather the picture of those institutions, and especially of capitalist production, to be found in bourgeois ideology.

Ecumenical Alethic Pluralism (EAP) is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright’s Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists.

In this paper, I shall investigate Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument,’ that is, the argument to be found in Philosophical Investigations 243-315. Roughly, this argument is intended to show that a language knowable to one person and only that person is impossible; in other words, a ‘language’ which another person cannot understand isn't a language. Given the prolonged debate sparked by these passages, one must have good reason to bring it up again. I have: Wittgenstein's attack on private languages has regularly been misinterpreted. Moreover, it has been misinterpreted in a way that draws attention away from the real force of his arguments and so undercuts the philosophical significance of these passages.

Since the publication of Gilbert Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, the distinction between dispositions and occurrences has loomed large in the philosophy of mind. In that enormously influential book Ryle set out to show that much of what passes as mental is best construed as dispositional in character rather than, as traditionally supposed, being made up of private “ghostly” occurrences, ‘happenings, or “episodes.” Many philosophers, including some of Ryle's ablest critics, have accepted the terms of Ryle's contentions. They have either agreed, with respect to certain kinds of mental states, that they are not occurrent because dispositional, or have undertaken to vindicate their occurrent status by showing Ryle's dispositional account to be inadequate. Thus U. T. Place in his essay, “The Concept of Heed,” while agreeing with Ryle's dispositional account of belief; memory, intention, and desire, rejects a similar account of heeding, attention, and consciousness, and defends the traditional account according to which they are construed as distinctive sorts of internal activity. And Terence Penelhum, in “The Logic of Pleasure,” defends an “episode-view” of pleasure as against Ryle's dispositional account.

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the (philosopher's) history of science. To judge from recent writers (Feyerabend 5-9, Kuhn 18), every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs (theory) about the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories.

In this paper I discuss the so-called problem of creeping minimalism, the problem of distinguishing metaethical expressivism from its rivals once expressivists start accepting minimalist theories about truth, representation, belief, and similar concepts. I argue that Dreier's ‘explanation’ explanation is almost correct, but by critically examining it we not only get a better solution, but also draw out some interesting results about expressivism and non-representationalist theories of meaning more generally.

According to the well-known Kripke-Putnam view developed in Naming and Necessity and ‘The Meaning of Meaning’, proper names and ‘natural kind terms’ - words for natural substances, species, and phenomena (‘water’, ‘rose’, ‘light’) - are non-descriptional and rigid. A singular term is rigid if it has the same referent in every possible world (and with respect to other extension-determining parameters, such as the passage of time), and is non-descriptional if, roughly speaking, its referent (at a possible world or other parameter) is not secured by purely descriptive conditions analytically tied to the term. Thus, ‘the inventor of bifocals’ is nonrigid and descriptional, while ‘the unique even and prime integer’ is rigid and descriptional, and ‘Noam Chomsky’ is rigid and non-descriptional.

The majority of philosophers believe that the existence of spatially coincident entities is not only a coherent idea but that there are millions of such entities. What such philosophers do not countenance are spatially coincident entities of the same kind. We will call this ‘Locke's Thesis’ since the denial goes back to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is there that Locke wrote, ‘For we never finding, nor conceiving it possible that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude that, whatever exists anywhere at any time, excludes all of the same kind, and is there itself alone.’ It is not clear to me that the believer in spatially coincident entities can draw the ‘ontological line’ where Locke does. Many of the reasons that lead Locke and others to maintain that there exist spatially coincident entities of different kinds would also suggest that there are spatially coincident entities of the same kind. To illustrate this claim, a scenario of spatially coincident roads will be presented.

Introduction

In this paper I examine William Ockham's theory of judgment — in particular, his account of the nature and ontological Status of its objects. ‘Judgment’ (Latin iudicio) is the expression Ockham and other medieval thinkers use to refer to a certain subset of what philosophers nowadays call ‘propositional attitudes’. Judgments include all and only those mental states in which a subject not only entertains a given propositional content, but also takes some positive stance with respect to its truth. For Ockham, therefore, as for other medievals, a judgment is a type of mental State that includes attitudes such as belief, knowledge, opinion, doubt, faith, and so on.

Some of us believe in giving priority to people who are badly off in designing social policies and in acting ourselves to help others. As Thomas Nagel puts it, the badly off should be first in the queue when benefits are distributed. This idea is one way of explaining moral views that are called ‘egalitarian.’ Egalitarian moral views can depend either on the idea of valuing equality itself or on the idea of giving priority to the interests of the badly off (some egalitarians might accept both ideas). This paper is concerned with the second kind of egalitarianism.

The purest form of the idea explains the priority in this way: a benefit for someone badly off can be more important morally, or can have more value, than a benefit of the same size for someone better off. This is to suppose that the priority in question cannot be explained by thinking in utilitarian terms and accepting the principle of diminishing marginal utility.

The moral right to act in self-defense seems to be unproblematic: you are allowed to kill an aggressor if doing so is necessary for saving your own life. Indeed, it seems that from the moral Standpoint, acting in self-defense is doing the right thing. Thanks, however, to works by George Fletcher and Judith Thomson, it is now well known how unstable the moral basis of the right to self-defense is. We are in the dark with regard to one of the most basic problems raised by this right, namely: the problem of the innocent aggressor. The disturbing question is simple enough: Is a potential victim allowed to kill, in self-defense, a morally innocent aggressor?

With twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy of science's unfolding acceptance of the nature of scientific inquiry being value-laden, the persistent worry has been that there are no means for legitimate negotiation of the social or non-epistemic values that enter into science. The rejection of the value-free ideal in science has thereby been coupled with the spectres of indiscriminate relativism and bias in scientific inquiry. I challenge this view in the context of recently expressed concerns regarding Canada's death of evidence controversy. The worry, raised by Stathis Psillos, is that as constructivist accounts of science demoted the previously secure status of evidence for drawing justified conclusions in science, we were left with no rational delineation between the right and wrong values for science. The implication for the death of evidence controversy is that we may have no rational grounds for claiming that the Canadian Government is wrong to interfere with scientific enterprise. But he does offer another avenue for reaching the conclusion that the wrong social values are directing the current stifling of some sectors of Canadian science. Psillos draws from standpoint epistemologies to devise a salient defence of ‘valuing evidence’ as a universalizable social value. That is, government bodies ought to enable scientific research via adequate funding as well as political non-interference. In this paper, I counter that (i) non-epistemic values can be rationally evaluated and that (ii) standpoint epistemology's universalizable standpoint provides an inadequate framework for negotiating social values in science. Regarding (i), I draw from the evidence-based medicine debate in philosophy of medicine and from feminist empiricist investigations into the science–values relationship in order to make the argument for empirically driven value arbitration. If social values can be rationally chosen in the context of justification, then we can have grounds for charging the Canadian leadership with being ‘at war with science’. (ii) I further argue that my recommended empiricist methodology is preferable to Psillos's search for universalizable perspectives for negotiating social values in science because the latter method permits little more than the trivial conclusion that evidence is valuable to science.

Philosophers writing on forgiveness typically defend the Resentment Theory of Forgiveness, the view that forgiveness is (or crucially implicates) the overcoming of resentment. Rarely is much more said about the nature of resentment or how it is overcome when one forgives. Pamela Hieronymi, however, has advanced detailed accounts both of the nature of resentment and how one overcomes resentment when one forgives. In this paper, I argue that Hieronymi’s account of the nature of forgiveness is committed to two implausible claims about the norms bearing on forgiveness. Her account is highly instructive, however, for it brings into relief how certain intuitive views about the norms of forgiveness should be used to constrain our theories about its nature. I conclude by defending this methodological proposal.

It is possible to wholly exist at multiple spatial locations at the same time. At least, if time travel is possible and objects endure, then such must be the case. To accommodate this possibility requires the introduction of a spatial analog of either relativising properties to times — relativising properties to spatial locations — or of relativising the manner of instantiation to times — relativising the manner of instantiation to spatial locations. It has been suggested, however, that introducing irreducibly spatially relativised or spatially adverbialised properties presents some difficulties for the endurantist. I will consider an objection according to which embracing such spatially relativised properties could lead us to reject mereology altogether in favour of a metaphysics according to which objects are wholly present at every space-time point at which they exist. I argue that although such a view is coherent, there are some good reasons to reject it. Moreover, I argue that the endurantist can introduce spatially relativised or adverbialised properties without conceding that objects lack spatial parts. Such a strategy has the additional advantage that it allows the endurantist not only to explain time travel, but also to reconcile our competing intuitions about cases of fission.

In contemporary free will theory, a significant number of philosophers are once again taking seriously the possibility that human beings do not have free will, and are therefore not morally responsible for their actions. (Free will is understood here as whatever satisfies the control condition of moral responsibility.) Free will theorists commonly assume that giving up the belief that human beings are morally responsible implies giving up all our beliefs about desert. But the consequences of giving up the belief that we are morally responsible are not quite this dramatic. Giving up the belief that we are morally responsible undermines many, and perhaps most, of the desert claims we are pretheoretically inclined to accept. But it does not undermine desert claims based on the sheer fact of personhood. Even in the absence of belief in moral responsibility, personhood-based desert claims require us to respect persons and their rights. So personhood-based desert claims can provide a substantial role for desert in free will skeptics’ ethical theories.

In my 1984 book on The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, I addressed two main questions: (1) Are the analyst’s observations in the clinical setting reliable as ‘data,’ and (2) if so, can they actually support the major hypotheses of the theory of repression or psychic conflict, which is the cornerstone of the psychoanalytic edifice, as we know? In the book, I argued for giving a negative answer to both of these questions. Clearly, if the evidence from the couch is unreliable from the outset, then this defect alone suffices to jeopardize the very foundations of the clinical theory. But, as I strongly emphasized, even if clinical data were not contaminated by the analyst’s influence, the inability of the psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation by free association to warrant the required sort of causal inferences leaves the major pillars of the theory of psychic conflict ill-supported (1984, 172). Thus, I see a two-fold threat to the psychoanalytic case-study method as a means of scientific inquiry.

It is an immediate corollary of my challenge that it applies not only to Freud’s own original hypotheses, but also to any and all post-Freudian versions of psychoanalysis that rely on his clinical methods of validating causal inferences, though the specific content of their theories of psychic conflict is different. After all, the alteration in the content of the hypotheses hardly makes their validation more secure. Therefore, as Morris Eagle documented in a recent publication (1983), those analysts who have objected to my critique as anachronistic have simply not come to grips with it. For example, such inadequate engagement is present, in my view, in the recent Freud Anniversary Lecture ‘Psychoanalysis as a Science: A Response to the New Challenges,’ given by Robert Wallerstein (1986), the current president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. As he tells us (1988, 6, n.1), ‘The Freud Anniversary Lecture was intended primarily as a response to Grünbaum.’ Yet he does not come to grips at all with the gravamen of my challenge: Even if clinical data could be taken at face value as being uncontaminated epistemically, the inability of the psychoanalytic method of clinical investigation by free association to warrant causal inferences leaves the major pillars of the clinical theory of repression ill-supported.

The paper builds upon familiar arguments against identifying the proposition that Brutus stabbed Caesar with a given sequence containing Brutus, Caesar, and the stabs relation. It identifies a further problem, one that affects not only traditional Russellian accounts of propositions, but also the recent act-theoretic approach championed by Scott Soames and Peter Hanks. The problem is that there is no clear content to the idea that the pair  < Brutus, Caesar> instantiates the stabs relation. It is argued that this further problem presents a decisive objection to the act-theoretic approach to propositions.