In the course of a lengthy interview, Descartes is reported to have claimed that ‘the axiom is common and true: the effect is similar to the cause’(AT 5:156). There has been much discussion in the recent secondary literature about whether Descartes’ various causal principles require a sort of resemblance between cause and effect that rules out the interaction of substances as distinct in nature as mind and body. However, it is clear from the record of the Descartes interview that the axiomatic principle that effects are similar to their causes- call this the ‘Similarity Principle'- applies primarily to the case of God's production of created substances, and of created minds in particular. This record thus provides one reason for the focus here on that particular case. Another is that a consideration of this case broaches difficulties for the Similarity Principle that have an interesting though somewhat neglected role in the history of Cartesianism.

Pity is an emotion which is intimately connected with virtue. If I were impervious to anger I could still be a paragon of rectitude. My emotional peculiarity might even be explained by moral saintliness. If I had a pitiless heart my entire life would surely be an abject moral failure. The imputation of an inability to pity strikes us as a damning moral criticism; it is one we are likely to make, for example, against those who commit acts of extreme cruelty. Yet pity is hardly ever welcomed by its recipients, and for that reason it differs in a puzzling way from other emotions which are closely associated with virtue, such as gratitude or compassion. The prospect of becoming an object of pity is alarming, and not merely because we fear the misfortune that would evoke pity in others; it is alarming in part because we suspect that being on the receiving end of that emotion could seriously aggravate our plight. We also regard an aversion to being pitied as commendable, perhaps even morally commendable. There is something shameful in wanting to be pitied, just as there is in the indulgence of self-pity. The aged and the physically disabled do not want our pity, as a rule, and we think better of them for not wanting it. Finally, we know that those who give pity are frequently guilty of serious wrongdoing. A pitiless heart may be a terrible thing, but a fondness for dispensing pity is scarcely any better.

Towards the ends of their reviews, Annette Baier and Jean Hampton allow, if only momentarily, the real spectres to surface. Baier writes, ‘Gauthier rightly sees the dangers of exploitation and subjection inherent in a kin-based and affection-dependent morality, so purports to try for something totally different. Even if our moral natures cannot recognize themselves in Gauthier’s version of them, the problem that drives the attempt [for an individualist and unsentimental morality] is a real one, and so far, I think, an unsolved one; unsolved for morality as well as for moral theory.’ Hampton writes, ‘Gauthier will point out that anyone who insists that a human being has objective value must develop a theory that will not only justify that claim but also explain what reason one would ever have for respecting this value. I believe this is a challenge one has no choice but to accept, given what the moral facts are.’

Most philosophers of action have seen little or no connection between the individuation of action and questions of freedom and responsibility. Is this a mistake? According to a recent suggestion by Fred Dretske it may be. Dretske views overt actions not as observable events with a distinctive sort of causal history, but rather as causal sequences, in which a distinctive sort of inner cause produces the appropriate outcome. So when Jimmy voluntarily wiggles his ears, the motion of his ears is not his action; it is only a component of the action, its result. The entire action consists in an event-causal sequence wherein an inner event C causes the result: it is C’s causing the motion of Jimmy’s ears.

This paper explores what happens when artists fail to execute their goals. I argue that taxonomies of failure in general, and of failed-art in particular, should focus on the attempts which generate the failed-entity, and that to do this they must be sensitive to an attempt’s orientation. This account of failed-attempts delivers three important new insights into artistic practice: (1) there can be no accidental art, only deliberate and incidental art; (2) art’s intention-dependence entails the possibility of performative failure, but not of failed-art; and (3) art’s intention-dependence is perfectly compatible with the role that luck plays in artistic creation.

The relation of Marx's writings to ethical theory has been viewed in a variety of different ways. Some deny that Marx has or can have any ethical theory at all. Others claim, on the contrary, that underlying Marx's pronouncements lies an implicit ethical theory which we may discern. Amongst this latter group a debate has quietly been taking place of late as to the nature of the ethical theory to which Marx might be said to subscribe. Some, e.g. E. Kamenka, have maintained that Marx's ethics is non-utilitarian. Others such as A. Schaff, and most recently D. Allen, have argued that in fact, Marx is a utilitarian, though of course Marx did not proclaim himself to be a utilitarian.

We all make decisions, sometimes dozens in the course of a day. This paper is about what is involved in this activity. It's my contention that the ability to deliberate, to weigh different courses of action, and then to decide on one of them, is a distinctively human activity, or at least an activity which sets man and the higher animals apart from other creatures. It is as much decisio as ratio that constitutes the distinguishing mark of human beings. Homo may not always be rationalis, but he is always decidens.

The paper is about practical decision, although there is also another important kind of decision that I won't discuss, namely cognitive decision. The difference is roughly that which distinguishes the function of a jury from that of a judge, at least in jury trials. The jury's job is to arrive at an answer to the question: guilty or not guilty? This is a cognitive decision, a decision that, on the basis of the evidence, such-and-such is the case. The judge, apprized of the jury's cognitive decision, makes the practical decision to sentence the guilty party to 20 years. On some other occasion, I hope to be able to say something about cognitive decision, as well as about a third kind of decision named value decision.

What is the relation between the intention to A and doing A intentionally? It is natural to suppose that the latter entails the former. That is, it is natural to accept what Michael Bratman has called the ‘Simple View’ of the relation between acting intentionally and having an intention. Bratman is one noteworthy writer who has denied that the Simple View is true. In the present paper I do not defend this view. I contend that one well-known argument that Bratman offers for thinking that the Simple View is false fails, in fact, to disprove it. If there are reasons for thinking that the Simple View is false, as I believe there are, they are not the ones that Bratman has offered. My discussion of Bratman also raises some more general questions about the principles governing the rational formation of intentions. I suggest that a special sort of example casts doubt on the tenability of a commonly accepted principle that Bratman, among others, utilizes.

Questions about sincerity play a central role in our lives. But what makes an assertion insincere? In this paper we argue that the answer to this question is not as straightforward as it has sometimes been taken to be. Until recently the dominant answer has been that a speaker makes an insincere assertion if and only if he does not believe the proposition asserted. There are, however, persuasive counterexamples to this simple account. It has been proposed instead that an insincere assertion that p is one made by a speaker who (a) does not express his belief that p; or (b) does not believe that he believes that p; (c) does not assent to p; or (d) does not express any of these cognitive states. We show that these alternative accounts also face counterexamples.

Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately nativist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind (AT 8B 358, AT 3 418; CSM 1 304, CSMK 187). One reason it is surprising to find Descartes endorsing universal innateness is that such a view seems to leave no role for bodies in the production of our ideas of them.

In this review of Hutto and Myin’s Radicalizing Enactivism, I question the adequacy of a non-representational theory of mind. I argue first that such a theory cannot differentiate cognition from other bodily engagements such as wrestling with an opponent. Second, I question whether the simple robots constructed by Rodney Brooks are adequate as models of multimodal organisms. Last, I argue that Hutto and Myin pay very little attention to how semantically interacting representations are needed to give an account of choice and action.

Particularism is in vogue in ethics today. Particularism is sometimes described as the idea that what is a sufficient moral reason in one situation need not be a sufficient moral reason in another situation. Indeed, it has been held, on particularism, what is a reason for an action in one situation might be a reason against the same type of action, or might not be a reason at all, in another situation. However, this description is insufficient. Even a generalist, such as a utilitarian, may admit that, what is in one situation a sufficient reason for the rightness of an action may, in another situation, be a sufficient reason for its wrongness. For example, the fact that if I shoot at a certain person, I kill him, may, in one situation, be a sufficient reason not to shoot at him. It is sufficient for the wrongness of shooting at him if, in the situation, shooting at him suffices to guarantee that welfare does not get maximized. He is killed, say, and deprived of future pleasure, with no positive ‘side-effects’ whatever.

According to truthmaker theory, particular truths are true in virtue of the existence of particular entities. Truthmaker maximalism holds that this is so for all truths. Negative existential and other ‘negative’ truths threaten the position. Despite this, maximalism is an appealing thesis for truthmaker theorists. This motivates interest in parsimonious maximalist theories, which do not posit extra entities for truthmaker duty. Such theories have been offered by David Lewis and Gideon Rosen, Ross Cameron, and Jonathan Schaffer. However, it will be argued here that these theories cannot be sustained, and hence maximalism comes with a serious ontological cost. Neither Armstrong's invocation of totality facts nor the Martin-Kukso line on absences can meet this cost satisfactorily. I'll claim that negative facts are the best (and perhaps only) way out of the problem for the truthmaker maximalist.

What kind of semantics should someone who accepts the epistemicist theory of vagueness defended in Timothy Williamson's Vagueness (1994) give a definiteness operator? To impose some interesting constraints on acceptable answers to this question, I will assume that the object language also contains a metaphysical necessity operator and a metaphysical actuality operator. I will suggest that the answer is to be found by working within a three-dimensional model theory. I will provide sketches of two ways of extracting an epistemicist semantics from that model theory, one of which I will find to be more plausible than the other.

Since the time of Hume, many philosophers have thought it impossible to deduce an ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is,’ or in general to deduce ‘ethical sentences’ from purely ‘factual sentences.’ Some of these philosophers claim that this is due, not to any Special feature of ethics, but to a general feature of logic, namely, its conservativeness:

Democratic theorists stress the importance of free and equal discussion and debate in a well-functioning democratic process. In this process, citizens attempt to persuade each other to support legislation by appealing to considerations of justice, liberty or the common good and are open to changing their minds when hearing the arguments of others. They are concerned to ground policy and legislation on the most defensible considerations of morality and the best empirical evidence. To be sure, majority rule remains important in democratic decision making because of the persistence of disagreement. But many have argued that debates over legislation that appeal to moral considerations ought to be given a much larger place in our understanding of the ideals of democracy than theorists have given them in the past. This emphasis on the importance of moral debate and discussion in democracy is characteristic of what I call the wide view of deliberative democracy.

An important aspect of Sellars' philosophy is his attempt to explicate the concept of thought on the "model" of the concept of speech. More specifically, Sellars has argued that the intentionality of "inner" episodes or thoughts is to be understood in terms of the "semantical" characteristics of intelligent ("nonparroting") linguistic behavior, and not the other way around as the "classical tradition" had supposed.

To avoid misunderstanding, it is important to realize that Sellars' claim, as he explains, in Aristotelian terminology, is a claim "in the order of conceiving" as contrasted with "the order of being." That is, Sellars accepts, as an integral part of his theory, the classical claim that meaningful speech is the manifestation or overt causal expression of ''inner" thoughts, but argues that our concept of such thoughts is a derivative concept, a concept which, in the order of theoretical reconstruction, is "modelled on," is an analogical extension of, the concept of meaningful linguistic behavior.

Some philosophers believe that appeals to promoting or maximizing good consequences are a suspect way of attempting to justify coercive interference with another person's actions. Suppose that is true. If there is a presumption that individuals have a right not to be coercively interfered with, then, foregoing utilitarian type appeals, it would seem that the only way to justify coercive interference of a paternalistic sort would be to show that under certain conditions the presumption fails.

In a dense and fascinating article of some ten years ago, Toomas Karmo adds his voice to the chorus of philosophers who deny the possibility of soundly deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ According to Karmo, no derivation containing an ethical conclusion and only non-ethical premises can possibly be sound, where ‘sound’ describes a deductively valid derivation all of whose premises are true. He also suggests that the only valid derivations of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ will be trivial ones. His argument has, to my knowledge, gone unrebutted; on the contrary, it has won recent endorsements, some philosophers evidently believing that he has finally put to rest the issue of the logical autonomy of ethics. Against that trend, I intend to rebut his argument, both by falsifying the taxonomy on which his argument relies and by offering a nontrivial and potentially sound ‘is’-‘ought’ derivation of my own.

The self-deception debate often appears polarized between those who think that self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves (‘intentionalists’), and those who think that intentional actions are not significantly involved in the production of self-deceptive beliefs at all. In this paper I develop a middle position between these views, according to which self-deceivers do end up self-deceived as a result of their own intentional actions, but where the intention these actions are done with is not an intention to deceive oneself. This account thus keeps agency at the heart of self-deception, while also avoiding the paradox associated with other agency-centered views.