Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion1 closes with an endorsement of the very position which it has consistently attacked, namely belief in an orderer. Hume's willingness to oppose arguments supporting a position in which he believes means that, despite mounting severe criticisms, he can consistently support a designer as the optimum hypothesis for order in the world. He produced numerous statements of order in the world and then, in Part 12 of the DNR, alleged that persons of understanding would find that belief in a designer follows.

Moral questions surrounding suffering tend to focus on obligations to relieve others’ suffering. In this paper, I focus on the overlooked question of what sufferers morally owe to themselves, arguing that they have the duty to self-care. I discuss agents who have been shaped by moral luck to contribute to their own suffering and canvass the ways in which this damages their moral agency. I contend that these agents have a duty to care for themselves by protecting and expanding their agency, which involves precluding further destruction of agency and ensuring the continued ability to self-care.

I suggest a reconstruction of Kant's theory of perception – in particular his notions of intuition, concept, sensible impression, sensation, synthesis and combination – informed by the progress of philosophy and human and animal psychology since his time. I take from Burge the distinction between unconceptualized perception of objects (found in animals, infants, and to some extent in adult humans) and our conceptualized, judgmental perceptual experience. Kant concentrated on the latter, but he can be seen to leave room for the former, especially if we make clearer distinctions than he did between sensible impression and sensation, and between synthesis and combination.

I argue that the widely-held view that belief aims at the truth is false. I acknowledge that there is an important connection between truth and belief but propose a new way of interpreting that connection. On the account I put forth, evidence of truth constrains belief without furnishing an aim for belief.

This paper is a critical notice of Andrea Kern's book Sources of Knowledge. In the first part, I outline some criteria of adequacy I believe any credible philosophical account of knowledge should meet. In the second, I consider how Kern's book measures up to those criteria. Finally, I offer a sympathetic and constructive discussion of a number of key elements of Kern's approach, including the relation of her position to the philosophy of John McDowell, from which Kern draws inspiration; her defence of disjunctivism; her concept of a rational capacity for knowledge and its acquisition; and her understanding of scepticism.

In this paper I demonstrate how certain contemporary atheists have problematically conflated atheism with agnosticism (knowingly or unknowingly). The first type of conflation is semantic fusion, where the lack of belief in God is combined with the outright denial of God, under the single label of ‘atheism’. The second is morphological fission which involves the separation of atheism into two subcategories where lack of belief in God is labelled as negative atheism and outright denial of God as positive atheism – and while here they are more explicitly demarcated, they are still positioned under the broad notion of atheism. I argue in this paper that atheism should be better used as the propositional denial of God and that uncertainty and unknowability about God should be reserved to characterise agnosticism. Conflating these positions under the single term ‘atheism’ mischaracterises agnostics and inflates the territory of atheists. In clarifying these terms, I review how the nuances in the prefix a- in atheism have potentially contributed towards these misnomers. I also suggest the use of the categories ‘local atheism’ and ‘global atheism’ to clarify on whom the burden of proof lies within the discourse.

This paper starts by recalling a conversation of the author, then a young student, with Karl Popper in 1988. Popper argued that there is a ‘British mystery’ among the English-speaking peoples: their deep love of liberty, combined with a deep sense of duty, which was epitomised in the 20th Century by Winston Churchill. This paper argues that Churchill was a representative of an old tradition that goes back to Magna Carta of 1215. At its core is the protection of liberty to enjoy decentralised and peaceful ways of life and the corresponding allergy to revolutions and to schemes of perfection centrally designed.

In this paper I aim to state the nature of the humanities, contrasting them with the natural sciences. I argue that, compared with the natural sciences, the humanities have their own objects, their own aims, and their own methods.