If skepticism is once again fashionable, then much of the credit must go to Peter Unger who gives a sustained defense of an ultra-pyrrhonian position in his book, Ignorance: A case for Skepticism. Starting with a version of the traditional argument that we know nothing about the external world, Unger plunges deeper into skeptical waters by next arguing that there is at most hardly anything which we know to be so; and he scarcely pauses before proceeding to defend the stronger conclusion of ‘universal ignorance,’ the thesis that nobody ever knows anything to be the case. I view Unger's thesis and the arguments that led him to it as a challenge to be overcome, not by an appeal to dogmatism - which Unger sees as the only alternative to skepticism - but by recourse to hard-biting arguments of the sort in which Unger himself puts his faith. In what follows I shall attempt to restate Unger's three main skeptical arguments with a view to showing that their bite is not nearly so hard as he imagines.

A central difficulty in the way of understanding Spinoza's metaphysical system is that of reconciling two apparently contradictory theories of the causation of finite modes (i.e., individual entities) found in his Ethics. The easiest way to present the problem is to place these two accounts side by side.

Together, these propositions entail (at least) that (a) God is a necessary and sufficient condition for the occurrence of any action, and (b) that anything so determined is eternal and infinite. Compare these implications with the following.

Is acrasia possible? Can you do wrong knowingly? Opinion divides. Each, to the other side, is a paradox monger.

At issue is the most felicitous set of concepts and principles to bring to descriptions and evaluations of human action. So to speak, such a set is an outline of a script for reality to play: it provides identities and relations in which individuals and events or whatever may be cast. Deniers typically begin with a set that rules acrasia out of court, recasting alleged examples in a different explanatory mold. Affirmers typically begin with plausible examples and look for a theoretical framework to place them in, taking those that disallow it to be absurd. But any denier, on legitimate dialectical grounds, can point out that such a reductio is a petitio. So it is a resilient issue, still with us after being bounced around so much in history.

I

There are various ways of being a sceptic. Most obviously, perhaps, versions of scepticism can differ with respect to scope. Scepticism can be universal; it can be directed against beliefs belonging to certain broad kinds, say beliefs having to do with the external world; or it can be quite focussed, as in the case of religious scepticism. But there is also the question of force. Some philosophers treat scepticism as a purely theoretical affair, defining it as the thesis that knowledge is impossible. This kind of scepticism, theoretical scepticism, has no essential connection with any particular sceptical practice. A theoretical sceptic does not necessarily entertain doubts or suspend judgment about any particular matter of fact or theory. He may think that the problem of induction is insoluble yet not be seriously concerned that the sun will not rise tomorrow. But in other versions, the force of scepticism is taken to be practical, in which case to be a sceptic is to entertain doubts or suspend judgment, and not just to take a certain theoretical position in epistemology.

Is it possible to characterize the sortal essence of Fs for a sortal concept F solely in terms of a criterion of identity C for F? That is, can the question ‘What sort of thing are Fs?’ be answered by saying that Fs are essentially those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of C? This paper presents a case study supporting a negative answer to these questions by critically examining the neo-Fregean suggestion that cardinal numbers can be fully characterized as those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of one-one correspondence between concepts.

Hume's moral theory, I shall here argue, is explicitly and in fundamental ways a common sense theory. It is widely accepted, of course, that Hume found moral distinctions to rest on sentiment, and that he found in the principle of sympathy the means by which individual sentiments come to be experienced by others. What has not received adequate attention is Hume's concern to refute moral skepticism and his explicit reliance on appeals to “common sense,” nor,so far as I know, has anyone suggested how these several features coalesce in an outlook which is appropriately designated a common sense theory. To support my claim I shall first show that Hume is not, as is widely supposed, what we would term a “subjectivist” in morals, and that in fact he means to establish, in at least two important senses of the term, the “objectivity”of morals.

This paper is devoted to a solution to Moore's problem. After explaining what Moore's problem is and after considering the main approaches toward solving the problem, I provide a definition of Moorean sentences in terms of pure Moorean propositions. My solution to Moore's problem essentially involves a description of how one can contradict oneself without uttering a contradiction, and a set of definitions that exactly determines which sentences are Moorean and which are close relatives of Moorean sentences.

The causal theory of human action that maintains that a person's wants cause his actions has recently gained considerable support in the philosophical community. The so-called logical connection argument, once a seemingly powerful obstacle to this theory, has fallen into disrepute. Roughly stated, this argument claims that since the relation between a want and the supposedly resultant action is logical in nature, whereas the relation between any cause and its effect must be contingent in nature, a want therefore cannot be the cause of an action.

In this paper I shall first of all consider four classical formulations of the logical connection argument (hereinafter the LCA), expounding them step-wise and reviewing various objections, some telling, that have been brought against them. Next I shall present my own formulation of the LCA, which is immune to such objections. Finally I shall propose a natural modification of the causal theory which would enable it to escape the brunt of the LCA. I shall then argue, however, that when the causal theory is modified in this way there are insuperable difficulties to the task of gathering evidence in support of it.

The puzzle of the self-torturer raises intriguing questions concerning rationality, cyclic preferences, and resoluteness. Interestingly, what makes the case puzzling has not been clearly pinpointed. The puzzle, it seems, is that a series of rational choices foreseeably leads the self-torturer to an option that serves his preferences worse than the one with which he started. But this is a very misleading way of casting the puzzle. I pinpoint the real puzzle of the self-torturer and, in the process, reveal a neglected but crucial dimension of instrumental rationality.

The Platonic view that every just person is, in virtue of being such, happier than any unjust person, since all among the latter are unhappy, strikes a most responsive chord in the hearts of a great many persons. But it would seem that this idea has less of a foothold in reality than it does in our hearts. It is far too difficult to deny that there are unjust persons who are happy. Indeed, some even seem to be happier than many a just person.

So I shall lower my sights. Rather than attempting to defend as sound the Platonic view, I shall argue that the just person is favored to be happier than a certain kind of unjust person whom I shall simply call a masquerader - this is, an individual who is frequently concerned to masquerade as a deeply caring person.

David Chalmers claims that the logical possibility of ‘zombie worlds’ — worlds physically indiscernible from the actual world, but that lack consciousness — reveal that consciousness is a distinct fact, or property, in addition to the physical facts or properties.

The ‘existence’ or possibility of Zombie worlds violates the physicalist demand that consciousness logically supervene upon the physical. On the assumption that the logical supervenience of consciousness upon the physical is, indeed, a necessary entailment of physicalism, the existence of zombie worlds implies the falsity of physicalism. How do we determine the logical possibility of zombie worlds? By conceptual analysis of the concepts involved, keeping empirical facts in mind.

My aim in this paper is to show how confusion and unclarity about reasons for action (reasons for doing) has led to serious error in ethics and the philosophy of action, and to try to set matters right. In Part I I set out what reasons for doing are, and try to make clear the distinction between reasons as justifying actions and reasons as motivating them. In Part II I try to show how, even in the ideal situation of successful and correct deliberation, a justifying reason is never identical with a motivating one, since they are two quite different sorts of thing. However a motivating reason and what one takes to be a justifying reason may be the same. In Part Ill I show how failing to make these distinctions leads to paradoxes and absurdities in the philosophy of action. It emerges that a related distinction must be made between wanting, valuing, and being valuable.

Alan Hazen has claimed that Buridan’s theory of truth does not escape semantic paradox.

David Hume’s critique of religion reveals what seems to be a vacillation in his commitment to an argument-based paradigm of legitimate believing. On the one hand, Hume assumes such a traditional (argumentbased) model of rational justification of beliefs in order to point to the weakness of some classical arguments for religious belief (e.g., the design argument), to chastise the believer for extrapolating to a conclusion which outstrips its evidential warrant. On the other hand, Hume, ‘mitigated’ or naturalist skeptic that he is, at other times rejects an argumentbased paradigm of certainty and truth, and so sees as irrelevant the traditional or ‘regular’ model of rational justification; he places a premium on instinctive belief, as both unavoidable and (usually) more reliable than reasoning. On this view, a forceful critique of religion would have to fault it, not for failing to meet criteria of rational argument (failing to proportion belief to the evidence), but (as Hume sometimes seems to) for failing to be the right sort of instinct.

The basic idea motivating this paper is that something can be done intentionally even when it is not done with the intention of doing it. An implication of this idea is that the distinction between doing what one intends and doing something as a foreseen avoidable consequence of doing what one intends cannot be used to exonerate agents for misdeeds.

My immediate purpose here is to illustrate these points and show how they pertain to the morally relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia, and to the exoneration of God for the production of evil. In particular, I shall try to show, first, that the American Medical Association's recent attempt to distinguish between active and passive euthanasia is seriously defective. Second, I shall try to show that a popular version of the so-called Free Will Defense of God for Evil is also seriously defective.

King develops a syntax-based account of propositions based on the idea that propositional unity is grounded in the syntactic structure of the sentence. This account faces two objections: a Benacerraf objection and a grain-size objection. I argue that the syntax-based account survives both objections, as they have been put forward in the existing literature. I go on to show, however, that King equivocates between two distinct notions of ‘propositional structure’ when explaining his account. Once the confusion is resolved, it is clear that the syntax-based account suffers from both Benacerraf and grain-size problems after all. I conclude by showing that King's account can be revised to avoid these problems, but only if it abandons its motivating idea that it is syntax that unifies the proposition.

Debates concerning the analysis of the concept of law of nature must address the following problem. On the one hand, our grasp of laws of nature is via our knowledge of their instances. And this seems not only an epistemological truth but also a semantic one. The concept of a law of nature must be explicated in terms of the things that instantiate the law. It is not simply that a piece of metal that conducts electricity is evidence for a law that metals conduct electricity.