Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness entails self-consciousness, or, even more strongly, that consciousness is self-consciousness. As Kathleen Wider puts it in her terrific book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, ‘all consciousness is, by its very nature, self-consciousness.’ I share this view with Sartre and have elsewhere argued for it at length. My overall aim in this paper is to examine Sartre's theory of consciousness against the background of the so-called ‘higher-order thought theory of consciousness’ (the HOT theory) which, in turn, will shed light on the structure of conscious mental states as well as on Sartre's theory of (self-) consciousness and reflection. Another goal of this paper is, following Wider, to show how Sartre's views can be understood from a contemporary analytic perspective. Sartre's theory of consciousness is often confusing to the so-called ‘analytic Anglo-American’ tradition, but I attempt to show how this obstacle can be overcome against the backdrop of a specific contemporary theory of consciousness.

A belief must have justification if it is to count as knowledge. And it is a commonplace thought that in certain circumstances experiences can serve as justifications for beliefs. Moreover, many have thought that there is something distinctive about the wayin which experiences justify beliefs, and that there is something distinctive about experiences which accounts for the distinctive way in which they justify beliefs. In this paper, I seek to elucidate views about experience and justification that can make sense of these thoughts and that can show us why so many have been attracted to them.

I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justify beliefs.

Over the past two decades, moral philosophers have been engaged in a seemingly interminable debate about the role of internal and external reasons in practical reasoning. The rough distinction between these two sorts of reasons is this: internal reasons apply to particular agents in virtue of their relation to that agent's desires, preferences, or other motivational states, while external reasons are normative for particular agents quite independently of their relation to the subjective motivational states of these agents.

Forgery is one of those topics that philosophers find fascinating but, with a few notable exceptions, don't pursue with anything like vigor, or at least anything like the vigor with which they pursue other topics. That's one reason why I suspect that their interest in forgery isn't due so much to their being philosophers as it is to their being human beings. In other words, I suspect that they, like everybody else, enjoy a virtuoso flim-flam job — provided they aren't the victims. Countless short stories, novels, movies, and situations in real life in which normally decent people cheer for the bad guy to get away with it, to pull the wool over everyone's eyes and make off with the cash, the girl, status, or whatever, are all evidence that the con artist warms the cockles of our hearts at least a few degrees.

Rational agents, it seems, are capable of adopting intentions which make actions rational and which they would otherwise have no reason to do, or even have reason not to do. Howard Sobel imagines the following, uncontroversial but somewhat contrived, example: ‘I'll give you a nickel if you now intend to hand me the red [pencil] in five minutes. I'll give you the nickel now. I don't care if you do hand me the red one when the five minutes are up. The nickel will be yours whether or not you do that then, if you manage now to intend to do it then’ (Sobel, 242-3, emphasis in original).

Should we stop spending money on things we do not really need and send the money instead to groups that aid victims of absolute poverty? Garrett Cullity and Peter Unger have given renewed vigor to the well known argument by Peter Singer that we should do this. Like Singer, Cullity and Unger compare our duties to the poor to our duties when we encounter a victim of calamity, such as a child in danger of drowning. (Unger argues that our duties to the poor are even more pressing.) Singer and Unger tell us what to do and why we must do it; most starkly, Unger gives us the names, addresses, and toll-free phone numbers of four organizations to which we can donate, and the book cover tells us that the author's royalties are going equally to Oxfam America and the U.S. Committee for UNICEF. Unger dissolves the divide between theory and practice.

A person's welfare or well-being concerns what is good for him, what makes his life worth living. It therefore depends crucially on facts about the person and his life. As William James once remarked, whether a life is worth living depends on the liver. How this dependency should be spelled out is a controversial question. Desire theorists, or as I shall call them well-being preferentialists, claim that a person's well-being depends on his desires and preferences.

Natural selection explains why humans have eyes: eyes are useful for getting around in an illuminated world; without them we would get around a lot less effectively, at much greater risk, and with a great deal less appreciation of potential mates. One might think, therefore, that natural selection explains why you or I—humans as we are—have eyes. But the inference has been contested by a number of able philosophers, starting with Elliott Sober and going to Joel Pust. The disputants divide as follows. Sober, Denis Walsh, and Pust hold that though natural selection explains why humans as a species have eyes, it doesn't explain why particular humans have them.

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.

Consider our attitude toward painful and pleasant experiences depending on when they occur. A striking but rarely discussed feature of our attitude which Derek Parfit has emphasized is that we strongly wish painful experiences to lie in our past and pleasant experiences to lie in our future. Our asymmetrical attitudes toward future and past pains and pleasures can be forcefully illustrated by means of a thought-experiment described by Derek Parfit which I will paraphrase as follows:

There has been much recent debate about Presentism among those who believe the doctrine to be nontrivial and true, those who believe it to be nontrivial and false, and those who believe it to be trivial — either trivially true or trivially false. Formulating Presentism precisely is problematic, which accounts for some of the controversy.

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.

Descartes challenged himself to know that he was not dreaming, with the supposed price to be paid if he lacked that knowledge being his failure to have any knowledge at all of the contingent existence and features of an external world. And subsequent epistemologist after subsequent epistemologist has kept that Cartesian skeptical challenge alive. Recent non-skeptical responses to it — most notably, Robert Nozick's — have focussed on whether one's not knowing that one is not dreaming really does entail one's lacking all external world knowledge. Seemingly, Nozick is unworried by the prospect of one's never knowing that one is not dreaming. He does argue that no one ever has that knowledge, but he reassures us that this does not entail that people do not have a steady and satisfying supply of the more ‘Standard’ sorts of external world knowledge. As I will argue in this paper, though, I see no good reason to concede in the first place that one cannot know that one is not dreaming.

When Sandra Harding called for an epistemology of science whose systematic attention to the gendered Status of epistemic agents renders it ‘less partial and distorted’ than ‘traditional’ epistemologies, some commentators recoiled in horror. Propelled by ‘a mad form of the genetic fallacy’ they said, she descends ‘the slide to an arational account of science.’ On a less melodramatic reading, feminist epistemologies such as Harding's advocate not irrationalism, but senses of rationality more expanded than those which they associate with ‘traditional’ epistemology.

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.

Roughly a half-century ago, R.M. Hare gave us a potent argument against attempts to account for the meaning of moral language in non-normative or ‘descriptive’ terms. The argument relies on the idea that in order to have genuine moral disagreement, we have to be talking about the same thing. Real disagreement requires agreement in meaning: if the words we use in our disputes mean different things, then we're just talking past, and not to, one another. Using this simple observation, Hare argues that if the meaning of an evaluative word such as ‘good’ were primarily descriptive, then groups with sufficiently different standards for applying ‘good’ wouldn't be able to enter into a real evaluative disagreement. But these disagreements are possible. Hence, he concluded, it's the evaluative meaning of ‘good’ that's primary — and any descriptive account is bound to fail because it doesn't capture the crucial element of endorsement that's central to normative language.

If one is to believe that p justifiably, then one must believe p for, or because of, one's evidence or reasons in support of p. The basing relation is exactly this relation that obtains between one's belief and one's reasons for believing. Keith Allen Korcz, in a recent article published in this Journal, has argued that two conditions are each sufficient and are jointly necessary to establish basing relations between beliefs and reasons. One condition is formulated to account for basing relations that can obtain in virtue of causal relations between one's belief and reasons, and the other condition is supposed to account for basing relations which can be established independently of the instantiation of any such causal relation.

Proving the immortality of the soul was a common challenge for the religious metaphysical writers of the seventeenth century. One attractive line of argument was premised on the ‘unity,’ ‘simplicity,’ or ‘indivisibility’ of consciousness (‘mind,’ or ‘soul’). While the religious issue of the soul's immortality dropped to a lower place on the philosophical agenda in the eighteenth century, the question of the unity of consciousness continued to run high as philosophers attempted to apply material atomism to mind and to vital phenomena in general.

In this paper I wish to consider one aspect of the role that divine commands seem to play in religious ethics, their role when considered in relation to the foundations of morality. If, as seems to be taken for granted in traditional religious ethics, divine commands have moral force in and of themselves, then at least some obligations are derived from commands. This being so, might not all be? If they were, then divine commands would be what the rest of morality derived from and was founded upon.

In Inequality, Larry Temkin attacks ‘The Slogan’: ‘One Situation cannot be [morally] worse (or better) than another in any respect if there is no one for whom it is worse (or better) in any respect.’ Temkin notes that the Slogan has great intuitive appeal. It underlies, for example, the conviction that it is irrational to prefer a Pareto-inferior outcome; the transition from egalitarianism to the difference principle; Robert Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example; defense of appropriation under the Lockean proviso; and Derek Parfit's Mere Addition Paradox. As an egalitarian, Temkin's main concern with the Slogan is the support it gives to the ‘leveling down objection’ to egalitarianism: the egalitarian finds it to be in some respect an improvement that the better-off are leveled down to the position of the worse-off, without any gain to the worse-off. The Slogan condemns this: leveling down cannot be better in any respect, since there is no one for whom it is better in any respect.