Blowing people up in the shopping centre of Warrington or of a provincial Irish town, or in a Jerusalem restaurant, flying planes full of people into heavily populated skyscrapers or centres of government, massacring defenceless villagers simply because they belong to another tribe. These are certainly hate crimes, that is, crimes fuelled by hate. For most of us the hate and the crime, when we watch such events unfold, are unimaginable. We cannot imagine what it is which can drive people in our time to do such things.

Terrorism must be outlawed once and for all, we think, surely rightly. Yet we are unsure how to do it. But there is a vague feeling that some of this terrorism arises from violent differences of belief, and from people being driven by their beliefs to kill those of other beliefs. But again, as liberals, we do not know how to handle this thought.

Mary Kate McGowan

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works in metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of science. Forthcoming articles include ‘Gruesome Connections’ in Philosophical Quarterly and ‘Privileging Properties’ in Philosophical Studies.

Anthony Skillen

Recently retired as lecturer in the Philosophy Department of the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Charles D. Tarlton

Professor of Political Science at the University of Albany. In recent years he has written on Locke, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. He is currently engaged in an analysis of the structural ambiguities of Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondaments de l'inegalité parmi les hommes.

Stephen J. Boulter

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University. His research areas include the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science and medieval philosophy.

Gabriele De Anna

A tutor in the Philosophy Department at St Andrews and research fellow at the University of Padua, Italy. He has published papers in American, British and Italian journals and is the author of the forthcoming book, Realismo Metafisico e Rappresentazione Mentale (Padua: Il Poligrafo).

Roy Sorensen

Roy Sorensen seeks Fame and Fortune as a Dartmouth College philosophy professor. He is the author of Blindspots, Thought Experiments and Pseudo-Problems, and most recently Vagueness and Contradiction.

David Beisecker

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has published articles in the philosophy of mind and language, with an eye towards writing a book on the metaphysics of mind and meaning.

In what follows, I motivate and clarify the controversy over metaphysical realism (the claim that there is a single objective way that the world is) by defending it against two objections. A clear understanding of why these objections are misguided goes a considerable distance in illuminating the complex and controversial nature of m-realism. Once the complex thesis is defined, some objections to it are considered. Since m-realism is such a complex and controversial thesis, it cannot legitimately be treated as inevitable unless, of course, there are no viable alternatives to it. For this reason, a brief defense of non-realist metaphysics is offered. Since m-realism is both controversial and substantive, a commitment to it requires both explicit recognition and sustained defense.

The article seeks to function as a cluster of reminders of the rich, robust and subtle place of ‘our’ concept of beauty—hence of its contrasts. It illustrates this through everyday life examples as well as through criticism of writings that, in apparent embarrassment about using the idea, seek to supplant it with something less suspect. The article seeks to show the concept of beauty at work not only in art but, as Plato urged, in human action and reaction at all levels, as well of course in nature. I try to sketch an epistemology of sensibility and a logic of beauty as a more-or-less topic neutral concept attaching to whole, hence individual and perhaps unique situations.

Machiavelli's much advertised science of politics turns out, in the long run, to falter. Machiavelli's various stratagems for controlling political outcomes are workable a small percentage of the time at best. Unpredictability works continually against the theory of practical action. A large part of Machiavelli's adaptation to this deficiency is to turn at many crucial moments, to the unambiguous and startling clarity of murder as a political instrument. It is this central position of murder that helps to account for worrying guiltiness that sticks to The Prince despite many years of efforts to soften the book's message. In the final analysis, one might even suggest that a kind of erotic fascination lurks within the book's texture of murder.

In this paper I offer a straight solution to Hume's problem of induction by defusing the assumptions on which it is based. I argue that Hume's problem only arises if we accept (i) that there is no necessity but logical necessity, or (ii) that it is unreasonable to believe that there is any form of necessity in addition to logical necessity. I show that Hume's arguments in favour of (i) and (ii) are unsound. I then offer a suggestion as to how the weakness of his arguments has escaped detection. Finally, having claimed that there remains a surmountable problem with inductive arguments, I end by characterising that problem and a possible approach to its solution.

This essay deals with the problem of the status of colours, traditionally considered as the paradigmatic case of secondary qualities: do colours exist only as aspects of experience or are they real properties of objects, existing independently of human and animal perception? Recently, John Campbell has argued in favour of the simple view of colours, according to which colours are real properties of objects. I discuss the place of Campbell's position in a debated which was started by John Mackie and continued by John McDowell, and defend it from a criticism due to Michael Smith. I conclude that the simple view is a philosophically credible position. Subsequently, I consider an alleged contradiction between the simple view and semantic externalism pointed out by Jim Edwards. I suggest that a supporter of the simple view may consistently maintain semantic externalism, if she also accepts epistemological externalism about the canonical warrant of perceptual judgements.

An ill-informed reading of Adam Ferguson's epitaph has given me an idea for securing posthumous recognition. Consider philosophers in the year 2201 who read my epitaph: ‘Here lies Roy Sorensen who will be long remembered for his paradoxes’. If these future scholars remember me, then well and good. If they do not remember me, my epitaph will appear to be rendered false by their failure to recall me. Suppose the poignancy of this self-defeat leads my epitaph to be widely repeated. I thereby acquire ignominy as the forgotten philosopher. But wait! Eventually someone will notice that no one can remember that Roy Sorensen is forgotten. For if someone did remember that Roy Sorensen is forgotten, then he would be forgotten—not remembered. After all, memory implies truth. Thus the self-defeating aspect of my epitaph is itself self-defeating! The happy ending is that my epitaph becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy by a curious kind of double-negation.

Donald Davidson's argument that non-linguistic creatures lack beliefs rests on two premises: (1) to be a believer, one must have the concept of belief, and (2) to have the concept of belief, one must interpret the utterances of others. However, Davidson's defense of these premises is overly compressed and unconvincing. In a recent issue of Philosophy, Roger Fellows provides new arguments for these premises. In this paper, I explain why I'm not persuaded by Fellows' attempt to bolster Davidson's line of reasoning and cast doubt on Davidson's and Fellows' overall strategy of attaching special significance to the concept of belief.