In an earlier age there was much discussion of a so-called ‘paradox of democracy’. The point seemed to be about what would happen if a democratic society voted democratically to abolish its democratic procedures and to move to a dictatorship. Would that be democratic or not?

This paper introduces a conjecture that laws of nature may be of different kinds, in particular that there may, in addition to laws which constrain outcomes (C-laws), be laws which empower systems to direct or select outcomes (E-laws) and laws which guide systems in such selections (G-laws). The paper defends this conjecture by suggesting that it is not excluded by anything we know, is plausible, and is potentially of great explanatory power.

This paper examines some recent trends in feminist epistemology. It argues that theories that make a priori claims to the effect that the structure of our body of knowledge must encode a masculine bias are both philosophically problematic and politically counterproductive, and it recommends a feminist methodology free from such general theoretical claims as best suited for the promotion of productive feminist thought and action.

I criticize the ‘Humean’ view of reasons for actions, the view that the reasons for an action can be stated in terms of desires and beliefs. I point out that this view must ignore concepts which are central to our understanding of human actions, namely, intention, motivation and associated concepts such as decision. One can then see just how inadequate the Humean view is.

This paper challenges what I call ‘Frankfurt's Care-Importance Principle’ (or ‘the CIP’), according to which, ‘If there is something that a person does care about, then it follows that it is important to him.’ Indeed, caring may generate genuine importance. I claim, however, that the agent's caring may have blinding effects too, it may blind him to what is really important to him. In this kind of case, caring does not generate genuine importance; rather, it reinforces the agent's false belief that what he cares about is really important to him. In the second part of the paper, I try to explain the philosophical urgency in correcting the CIP. I claim that Frankfurt's adherence to the CIP casts doubt upon the adequacy of his conceptual framework to deal with a special kind of conflict, namely, the conflict between the moral and the personal.

Imagine that your body has become attached, without your permission, to that of a sick violinist. The violinist is a human being. He will die if you detach him. Such detachment seems, nonetheless, to be morally permissible. Thomson argues that an unwantedly pregnant woman is in an analogous situation. Her argument is considered by many to have established the moral permissibility of abortion even under the assumption that the foetus is a human being. Another popular argument is that presented by Singer and Unger to the effect that even those who are moderately prosperous are morally obliged to help the poor if they can do so at relatively small cost to themselves. The paper considers the question whether these two arguments can be simultaneously valid.

In a recent article, John Leslie has defended the intriguing Carter-Leslie ‘Doomsday Argument’ (Philosophy, January 2000). I argue that an essential presupposition of the argument—that ‘the case of one's name coming out of [an] urn is sufficiently similar to the case of being born into the world’—engenders, in turn, a parallel ‘Ussherian Corollary’. The dubiousness of this Corollary, coupled with independent considerations, casts doubt upon the Carter-Leslie presupposition, and hence, dooms the Doomsday argument.

Laurence Goldstein has ‘re-created’ Wittgenstein's doctoral viva, arguing that had Wittgenstein's dissertation, his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘been judged by normal standards of originality and philosophical argumentation, it would have failed’. Goldstein claims that Wittgenstein ‘lifted’ central doctrines from Russell and from Bernard Bolzano. I point out that passages allegedly plagiarized from Russell are actually criticisms of his doctrines, and that there is no evidence that Wittgenstein even knew Bolzano's work, directly or indirectly. I argue that alleged similarities, substantial and stylistic, between his work and Bolzano's give no support even to a weaker claim of influence.