If we were to look caref ully at recent commentary on Descartes's theories of ideas and Sensation, we would find that a large number of commentators hold that he believes the following:.

1. (1) Ideas are representational,

2. (2) Sensations are ideas,

3. (3) Sensations are not representational.

This is an inconsistent triad: any two of the above claims can be true together, but they cannot all be true together. The inconsistent triad can be avoided if we reject one of the claims. Some have argued that Descartes did not hold (l).1 Some have argued that he did not hold (3). I believe that Descartes held (1) and (3), and will argue that he did not hold (2).

Generally, any account of Cartesian Sensation at the very least must account for sensations in terms of the ontology. The account must say whether they are modes or not, and if modes, modes of what — mind, body, both, the union, and so on. Moreover, how sensations are cast in terms of the ontology must agree with how they are cast in terms of the epistemology.

Robert Nozick addresses the idea of egalitarian redistribution in an argument standardly considered original: the “Wilt Chamberlain Argument”. However, this argument (without reference to Wilt Chamberlain) is found in David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, first published in 1751. Placing this argument within a Humean and Hayekian, rather than a Lockean or Kantian, perspective radically changes its import for issues of economic justice. Rather than vindicating the radical individualism of Nozick and other libertarians, applied to our circumstances using Hume's conventionalist and evolutionary account of justice, Hume's Wilt Chamberlain argument vindicates moderate redistribution constrained by the rule of general laws and the goal of fostering innovation and industriousness.

I want to attempt to analyze a forgotten area in the philosophy of emotions, the relations between physiological changes and the emotions. I want to do this:

• (1) by first of all briefly setting out some distinctions necessary to the understanding of the position I will be arguing for,

• (2) then by trying to elucidate what exactly is to be understood by the term ‘physiological change’ in the context of an emotion,

• (3) by showing that particular physiological changes are not part of the concept of any particular emotion and are only linked causally to the cognitive-appetitive part of an occurrent emotional state (the description of which part, forms the concept of that particular emotion),

• (4) by showing, however, that the notion of a physiological change is part of the concept of an emotional state,

• (5) and, finally, by drawing out some consequences of this analysis.

In this paper, I want to discuss the recent attempts by Professor John R. Searle to cast doubt on the traditional empiricist distinction between fact and value. Searle's first attack on this distinction was made in 1964 in his now classic article, “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’.” In that paper, he presented what he claimed to be a counter-example to the thesis that statements of fact may not entail statements of value. Searle's argument aroused much controversy and inspired many attempted refutations, but Searle apparently found none of these convincing, for a few years later he published a revised version of his paper as the last chapter of his book, Speech Acts. The new version includes his replies to many of the objections which had been made to his thesis up to that time. It also includes, in the main body of the book, a theory of language which is supposed to provide the theoretical underpinning explaining why his original paper presents a genuine counter-example to the position he is attacking. It is the Speech Acts version of Searle's thesis which I want to consider here.

A number of philosophers have resisted impersonal explanations of our obligation to mitigate climate change, and have developed accounts according to which these obligations are explained by human rights or harm-based considerations. In this paper I argue that several of these attempts to explain our mitigation obligations without appealing to impersonal factors fail, since they either cannot account for a plausibly robust obligation to mitigate, or have implausible implications in other cases. I conclude that despite the appeal of the motivations for rejecting the appeal to impersonal factors, such factors must play a prominent role in explaining our mitigation obligations.

Could a Nazi soldier or terrorist be courageous? The Courage Problem asks us to answer this sort of question, and then to explain why people are reluctant to give this answer. The present paper sheds new light on the Courage Problem by examining a controversy sparked by Bill Maher, who claimed that the 9/11 terrorists’ acts were ‘not cowardly.’ It is shown that Maher’s controversy is fundamentally related to the Courage Problem. Then, a unified solution to both problems is provided. This solution entails that gutsy people who lack good ends are not courageous.

A formal result is proved which is used in Juhani Yli-Vakkuri's ‘Epistemicism and Modality’ to argue that certain two-dimensional possible world models are inadequate for a language with operators for ‘necessarily’, ‘actually’, and ‘definitely’.

Kant’s theory of friendship is crucial in defending his ethics against the longstanding charge of emotional detachment. But his theory of friendship is vulnerable to this charge too: the Kantian sage can appear to reject sympathetic suffering when she cannot help a suffering friend. I argue that Kant is committed to the view that both sages and ordinary people must suffer in sympathy with friends even when they cannot help, because sympathy is necessary to fulfill the imperfect duty to adopt others’ merely permissible ends (MPEs), and we ought to take friends’ MPEs as our own. MPEs are individuated in terms of concepts which include marks of the first person, and no marks of law other than permissibility. To adopt ends of others individuated in terms of such concepts rather than merely promote them as means to different ends, those concepts must engage with one’s feelings in a way that requires sympathy.

We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of one's own doxastic states. It is, as we put it, transparent rather than empirical self-knowledge.

Lange (2000) famously argues that although Jeffrey Conditionalization is non-commutative over evidence, it’s not defective in virtue of this feature. Since reversing the order of the evidence in a sequence of updates that don’t commute does not reverse the order of the experiences that underwrite these revisions, the conditions required to generate commutativity failure at the level of experience will fail to hold in cases where we get commutativity failure at the level of evidence. If our interest in commutativity is, fundamentally, an interest in the order-invariance of information, an updating sequence that does not violate such a principle at the more fundamental level of experiential information should not be deemed defective. This paper claims that Lange’s argument fails as a general defense of the Jeffrey framework. Lange’s argument entails that the inputs to the Jeffrey framework differ from those of classical Bayesian Conditionalization in a way that makes them defective. Therefore, either the Jeffrey framework is defective in virtue of not commuting its inputs, or else it is defective in virtue of commuting the wrong kinds of ones.

Agent-relative reasons are an important feature of any nonconsequentialist moral theory. Many authors think that they cannot be accommodated within a value-first theory that understands all value as agent-neutral. In this paper, I offer a novel explanation of agent-relative reasons that accommodates them fully within an agent-neutral value-first view. I argue that agent-relative reasons are to be understood in terms of second-order value responses: when an agent acts on an agent-relative reason, she responds appropriately to the agent-neutral value of her own appropriate response to some agent-neutral value. This view helps reconcile important elements of deontology and consequentialism.

A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the use of that term. This paper explains how neo-pragmatism deals with this issue while avoiding problems that arise with existing expressivist and cognitivist solutions.

For more than two decades, C. B. Macpherson has waged a relentless campaign to expose and critize the ‘possessive individualist’ assumptions of classical and liberal democratictheory. This new book —a collection of essays, including several not previously published —gives a clear focus to this campaign and provides the fullest expression to date of its positive side: the elaboration of a social philosophy incorporating liberal values but free from possessive individualist assumptions. What is defective in the assumptions is less the internal theoretical problems they generate than that they have become historically outmoded. For Macpherson, liberal democracy is historically — even politically — inadequate, before it is theoretically inadequate. It is inadequate for us — now — because it rests on assumptions we no longer need, assumptions that have ceased to be historically progressive. However, liberal democracy is not, as surgeons would say, beyond operation. On Macpherson's view, nearly everything that is attractive in liberal theory can be salvaged. Democratic Theory is appropriately subtitled: Essays in Retrieval.

The thesis that mental properties are dependent, or supervenient, on physical properties, but this dependence is not lawlike, has been influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is put forward explicitly in Donald Davidson's seminal ‘Mental Events.’ On the one hand, Davidson claims that the mental is anomalous, that ‘there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’ (1970, 208), and, in particular, that there are no strict psychophysical laws. On the other hand, he insists that the mental supervenes on the physical; that ‘mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics’ (1970, 214).

It is widely held that the insane are not culpable for their offenses, or at least that they are not culpable for those offenses which are specific manifestations of mental disorder. Indeed, this is generally regarded by philosophers as a platitude. Yet it seems to me that what we have here is not a platitude, or even a truth, but an overly broad swipe with a dull blade. When we have brought the issues into sharper focus I think we will see that the mere fact that an offense was a manifestation of mental disorder never in itself exculpates, though it is sometimes relevant to determining whether the action was excusable in one of several standard ways. Moreover, I think it emerges that the issue is not nearly as significant as one might initially suppose it to be.

Professor Allen acknowledges that Marx's writings underdetermine the nature of his ethical views and that, with due caution, "the attribution of ethical views to Marx will have to be inferential; they will not be supportable merely by direct quotation" (p. 379). I am therefore rather puzzled by Allen's unease with the general nature of my project and by his repeated insistence for more direct texts. I confess that I am also somewhat surprised that Allen's exegetical concern has led him in dealing with the moral theory I have adumbrated to ask for the most part just, Is it Marx? and not also, in any detail, Is it true? I think it is clear though, by inference, that Allen has his doubts on the latter score, but what I must deal with are the various questions or problems Allen has regarding my attributions to Marx and the implications I find in his texts. There are as I see it four such questions, though each is perhaps the heading for a cluster of ones.

While there is agreement among many (but not all) theologians and philosophers that a miraculous event should be conceived in opposition to the natural order, there is disagreement about why this opposition must be present. In this paper I propose to examine Antony Flew's explanation of how and why miracles and nature are opposed, suggesting that his account is, as it stands, problematical and in need of revision. In evaluating Flew's position I shall focus on comments he makes when discussing Hume's account of miracles, and while I shall not attempt to argue the correctness or incorrectness of Flew's interpretation of Hume, I think that what I say, if correct, bears importantly on that issue.