This paper focuses on an underappreciated issue that dreams raise for moral evaluation: is immorality possible in dreams? The evaluatiotial internalist is committed to answering ‘yes.’ This is because the internalist account of moral evaluation holds that the moral quality of a person's actions, what a person does, her agency in any given case is completely determined by factors that are internal to that agency, such as the person's motives and/or intentions. Actual production of either good or bad effects is completely irrelevant to the moral evaluation of that agency. Since agency can be expressed in a dream, the internalist is committed to dream immorality. Some may take this as a reductio of evaluational internalism, but whether or not this is the case the issue reveals what such a theory is committed to.

In this paper I explore the significance of dreams to morality, and argue that the absurdity of dream immorality supports an account of moral evaluation with an externalist component, rather than a purely internalist account of moral evaluation.

If the commands of authority are peremptory and content-independent directives, it is a great puzzle why any rational autonomous agent should accept them as morally binding, as Robert Paul Wolff and others have argued. I analyse the peremptory and content-independent quality of authoritative directives and argue that all earthly authorities operate within a specified domain. I investigate three candidates for the role of universally applicable boundary conditions–morality, harm to self, and absurdity. I conclude that commands are authoritative only when intra vires, i.e. issued within the proper domain of the authority. Wolff's challenge is not met, hut it is shown to be less forbidding.

This essay examines the profound affinities between Wittgenstein and the historical Socrates. The first five sections argue that similarities between their personalities and circumstances can explain a comparable pattern of philosophical development. The next nine show that many apparently chance similarities between the two men's lives and receptions can be explained by their shared conceptions ofphilosophical method. The last three sections consider the difficulty of practising this method through writing, and examine the solutions which Plato and Wittgenstein adopted.

Berkeley claims idealism provides a novel argument for the existence of God. But familiar interpretations of his argument fail to support the conclusion that there is a single omnipotent spirit. A satisfying reconstruction should explain the way Berkeley moves between first person singular and plural, as well as providing a powerful argument, once idealism is accepted. The new interpretation offered here represents the argument as an inference to the best explanation of a shared reality. Consequently, his use of the first person must be taken as ‘exemplary’ rather than ‘Cartesian’. This explains the freedom of movement in the text between singular and plural. However, it also reveals Berkeley as side-stepping sceptical doubt.

Bertrand Russell is widely considered to be one of the founders of analytic philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Individuals have usually stressed his early philosophical contributions as seminal in this regards. But Russell also had another side–a naturalistic side–leading him towards a naturalistic epistemology and naturalistic philosophy of science of the type Quine later made famous. My goal is to provide an outline of Russell's naturalistic epistemology and the underlying philosophical motivations for such a move. After briefly presenting Russell's conception of the nature of philosophy, I sketch his theory of philosophical method, which is a version of the method of analysis. This provides the underpinnings for a discussion of his Naturalistic Epistemology, which led him to adopt a version of a behavioristic epistemology. Although Russell vacillated on the question of the adequacy of such an account, it provided a major element in his later philosophical views. I suggest that we must reevaluate our conception of the history of analytic philosophy and, in particular, our understanding of Russell's place in the history of 20th century philosophy.

This paper aims to return Wittgenstein's Tractatus to its original stature by showing that it is not the self-repudiating work commentators take it to be, but the consistent masterpiece its author believed it was at the time he wrote it. The Tractatus has been considered self-repudiating for two reasons: it refers to its own propositions as ‘nonsensical’, and it makes what Peter Hacker calls ‘paradoxical ineffability claims’ – that is, its remarks are themselves instances of what it says cannot be said. I address the first problem by showing that, on Wittgenstein's view, nonsense is primarily a technically descriptive, not a defamatory, qualification, and is not indicative of Wittgenstein rejecting or disavowing his own Tractarian ‘propositions’. I then dissolve the paradoxical ineffability claim by making a technical distinction, based on Wittgenstein's own theory and practice, between saying and speaking.