In this paper, I consider Isaac Newton’s fevered accusation that John Locke is a ‘Hobbist.’ I suggest a number of ways in which Locke’s account of the mind–body relation could plausibly be construed as Hobbesian. Whereas Newton conceives of the human mind as an immaterial substance and venerates it as a finite image of the Divine Mind, I argue that Locke utterly deflates the religious, ethical, and metaphysical significance of an immaterial soul. Even stronger, I contend that there is good reason to suspect that Locke is a crypto-materialist, at least with respect to human beings, and in this respect, could reasonably be labeled a ‘Hobbist.’

Are obligations of collective agents—such as states, businesses, and non-profits—ever overdemanding? I argue they are not. I consider two seemingly attractive routes to collective overdemandingness: that an obligation is overdemanding on a collective just if the performance would be overdemanding for members; and that an obligation is overdemanding on a collective just if the performance would frustrate the collective’s permissible deep preferences. I reject these. Instead, collective overdemandingness complaints should be reinterpreted as complaints about inability or third-party costs. These are not the same as overdemandingness. Accordingly, we can ask an awful lot of collective agents.

Functionalist identity theorists (functionalists, for short) argue that if physical states of the central nervous system (CNS) have the same function (the same input and output) as pain, pains should be identified with those physical states. Many objections have been raised against this position. My aim in this paper is to defend it against opponents who argue that it leads to an absurd result: the ascription of pains to things which cannot reasonably be thought to be capable of suffering, or of having any conscious states. In doing this, I will outline a version of the functionalist position which I think is plausible. It departs in several respects from versions commonly found in the literature.

It has been widely held, and still is held to some extent, that emotion and reason tend to be incompatible, that if a person is influenced by emotion to hold the beliefs he does, or perform the actions he does, then they tend to that extent to be unreasonable. This opinion manifests itself in a variety of ways. For example, it is no coincidence that Sherlock Holmes, the archetypal person of reason, is emotionally cold and detached. In a recent philosophical work, Robert Trigg has written of the emotions

Selon Charles Perelman, la logique, étude des moyens de preuve, a été, dans le prolongement du rationalisme cartésien, progressivement réduite à la logique formelle, étude des techniques démonstratives des mathématiciens. Corrélativement, le champ du rationnel a été considérablement rétréci, et les moyens de preuve utilisés dans les sciences humaines ont été mis au rencart. La raison est devenue incompétente dans tousles domaines qui échappent au calcul, les abandonnant aux forces irrationnelles, aux instincts, à la suggestion, à la violence. Refusant cette dichotomie entre la raison calculatrice et l'irrationnel, Perelman, à la recherche d'une voie intermédiaire, découvrit non pas ce qu'il escomptait, c'est à dire une logique des Jugements de valeur, mais la rhétorique. Celle-ci de nos Jours, est tombée en désuétude. Si l'on veut la rani mer, c'est des Anciens qu'il faut s'inspirer: d'Aristote surtout, mais aussi de Platon. C'est à ce dernier que nous voulons consacrer les pages qui suivent.

According to Utilitarian Generalization (hereafter ‘UG’) an act is right or wrong depending on what would happen if everyone were to do acts of that kind. One chief difficulty in applying UG is to determine which acts share the same relevant properties and are therefore acts of the same kind. In focusing on this problem I first examine the criteria of relevance proposed by Jonathan Harrison and by David Lyons. I show that each of their proposals is inadequate because each allows us to designate as relevant some properties we noncontroversially take to be irrelevant. I next propose a criterion which not only allows us to designate as irrelevant every property that we noncontroversially take to be irrelevant, but which also expresses the underlying causal and generalization features of UG. Since the acid test of any such proposal will be its response to the highly controversial issue of whether the behavior of others is relevant for applications of UG, I turn to this important issue.

Although there has been considerable interest recently in statements that have been described as pragmatically inconsistent or self-defeating (for example, the statement ‘I do not exist’), the notion of pragmatic inconsistency has not been clearly defined and little attention has been paid to the relation between the assertion of these statements and the statements themselves. Hintikka [1] and Nakhnikian [2], for example mention that ‘I do not exist’ cannot be asserted without pragmatic inconsistency, but they are concerned mainly with belief statements that are pragmatically inconsistent rather than with the assertion of them. In doing so they have missed an important point—that it is the characteristics of statements that cannot be asserted without pragmatic inconsistency that render other statements pragmatically inconsistent.

Hume begins ‘Of scepticism with regard to the senses,’ Section 2 of the Treatise, Book I, Part iv with the claim that it is otiose to ask whether or not there are bodies since belief in their existence is unavoidable. The appropriate question is rather ‘What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body?’ (§2, 187-8; his emphasis). For Hume, belief is lively conception. Hence, he is also undertaking to answer the logically prior question: What causes induce us to form the concept of body? Hume wants to explain the ordinary notion of, and belief in, external objects as part of his science of human nature.

Nelson Goodman's new riddle of induction wears many faces. In one of its guises the new riddle of induction appears as the problem of providing a general account of the distinction between projectible and non-projectible predicates. This is the form of the riddle which is supposed to point up a lacuna in the foundations of confirmation theories such as Carnap's which, Goodman charges, work only to the extent that one builds into them just the right (projectible) predicates. As a new riddle of induction, the problem of distinguishing projectible from non-projectible predicates has the virtue that it is in fact new—a virtue not shared by some other forms of the riddle.

Philosophers had recognized previously that some predicates are more projectible than others in the sense that, for instance, the prediction that a certain toss of a die will turn up an even face is safer and more likely to be true than the prediction that the same toss will turn up six.

The prevailing theoretical framework for theorising about representation construes all representation as involving objective representational contents. This classic framework has tended to drive philosophers either to claim that evaluative judgements are representations and therefore objective, or else to claim that evaluative judgements are not really representations, because they are not objective. However, a more general, already well-explored framework is available, which will allow theorists to treat evaluative judgements as full-fledged representations (thus doing justice to their representational aspects) while leaving open whether they are objective. Such a more general conception of representational content is exemplified, e.g. by Lewis's ‘centred contents’ and Gibbard's framework of ‘contents of judgement’, thus it is not new. I shall start in §1 by introducing the more general framework of perspectival contents and then illustrate in §2 how awareness of it can help expose the fallaciousness of certain widely used forms of argumentation in metaethics.

Some self-knowledge must be arrived at by the subject herself, rather than being transmitted by another’s testimony. Yet in many cases the subject interacts with an expert in part because she is likely to have the relevant knowledge of their mind. This raises a question: what is the expert’s knowledge like that there are barriers to simply transmitting it by testimony? I argue that the expert’s knowledge is, in some circumstances, proleptic, referring to attitudes the subject would hold were she to reflect in certain ways. The expert’s knowledge cannot be transmitted by testimony because self-knowledge cannot be proleptic.

What role do the first principles of morals play in Reid's moral theory? Reid has an official line regarding their role, which identifies these principles as foundational propositions that evidentially ground other moral propositions. I claim that, by Reid's own lights, this line of thought is mistaken. There is, however, another line of thought in Reid, one which identifies the first principles of morals as constitutive of moral thought. I explore this interpretation, arguing that it is a fruitful way of understanding much of what Reid wants to say about the role of moral first principles and drawing some connections between it and recent work on moral nonnaturalism.

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.

Much discussed but still unresolved is whether a subject's internal physical structure is a sufficient condition for his beliefs and desires. The question has sometimes been expressed as a question about microstructurally identical Doppelgänger. Imagine two subjects who are identical right down to the ions traversing the synapses. Their senses are stimulated in all the same ways, their bodies execute the same motions, and identical physical events mediate between the sensory inputs and the behavioral outputs. Must they have the very same beliefs and desires? Let us call the thesis that they must, internalism. The internalist may hold that a physical similarity less complete than this will also guarantee identity in beliefs and desires, but certainly, he holds, perfect identity of internal physical histories will suffice.

Internalism will be opposed by those who sense that the nature of mentality is closely tied to the nature of explanation in terms of mental states and that in explaining a subject's behavior we cannot abstract, even in principle, from the character of the environment in which the subject is embedded. This essay offers a partial articulation of this point of view and shows how it conflicts with internalism. A consequence of the view to be described is that our attributions of belief must reflect the probabilistic regularities in the subject's environment. As we shall see, this consequence conflicts with internalism in two ways. The first conflict turns on the fact that there is no limit on the possible variety of such regularities. The second conflict turns on the fact that two subjects might by chance have the same micro-structural history though different probabilistic regularities obtain in their respective environments.