In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ‘transcendental’) philosophy.

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented with this thing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa.

If we want to assess whether or not a naturalized phenomenology is a desideratum or a category mistake, we need to be clear on precisely what notion of phenomenology and what notion of naturalization we have in mind. In the article I distinguish various notions, and after criticizing one type of naturalized phenomenology, I sketch two alternative takes on what a naturalized phenomenology might amount to and propose that our appraisal of the desirability of such naturalization should be more positive, if we opt for one or both of the latter alternatives.

My immediate aim in this lecture is to contribute something to the apt characterization of our representation and knowledge of the specifically human life form, as I will put it—and, to some extent, of things ‘human’ more generally. In particular I want to argue against an exaggerated empiricism about such cognition. Meditation on these themes might be pursued as having a kind of interest of its own, an epistemological and in the end metaphysical interest, but my own purpose in the matter is practical-philosophical. I want to employ my theses to make room for a certain range of doctrines in ethical theory and the theory of practical rationality—doctrines, namely, of natural normativity or natural goodness, as we may call them. I am not proposing to attempt a positive argument for any such ‘neo-Aristotelian’ position, but merely to defend such views against certain familiar lines of objection; and even here my aims will be limited, as will be seen.

Much of the literature concerning epistemic injustice has focused on the variety of harms done to socially marginalized persons in their capacities as potential contributors to knowledge projects. However, in order to understand the full implications of the social nature of knowing, we must confront the circulation of knowledge and the capacity of epistemic agents to take up knowledge produced by others and make use of it. I argue that members of socially marginalized lay communities can suffer epistemic trust injustices when potentially powerful forms of knowing such as scientific understandings are generated in isolation from them, and when the social conditions required for a responsibly-placed trust to be formed relative to the relevant epistemic institutions fail to transpire.

‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist.’ Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserl's phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentano's: that intentionality, the mind's ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentano's originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or in inventing the terminology, which derives from scholastic discussions of concepts or intentiones. Rather, his originality consists in his claim that the concept of intentionality marks out the subject matter of psychology: the mental. His view was that intentionality ‘is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything like it.’ This is Brentano's thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental.

‘No matter what the grievance, and I'm sure that the Palestinians have some legitimate grievances, nothing can justify the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians. If they were attacking our soldiers it would be a different matter.’ (Dr. Zvi Shtauber, Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom, BBC Radio 4, May 1, 2003).

After the first wave of writings in environmental philosophy in the early 1970s, which were mostly critical of anthropocentrism, a new trend emerged which sought to humanise this subject, and to revive or vindicate anthropocentric stances. Only in this way, it was held, could environmental values become human values, and ecological movements manage to become social ecology. Later writers have detected tacit anthropocentrism lurking even in Deep Ecology, or have defended ‘perspectival anthropocentrism’, as the inevitable methodology of any system of environmental ethics devised by and for the guidance of human beings. Human good, broadly enough conceptualised, is held to be the basis of ethics. Besides, it is sometimes added, non-anthropocentric considerations in any case add nothing to anthropocentric ones, when broadly construed.

1.1. A major purpose in nationalizing the provision of health care in the UK was to affect its distribution between people, and, in particular, to minimize the impact of willingness and ability to pay upon that distribution. It has never been clear, however, what alternative distribution rule is to apply. There is no shortage of rhetoric about ‘equality’ and ‘need’, but most of it is vacuous, by which I mean it does not lead to any clear operational guidelines about who should get priority and at whose expense. The closest we have got so far to such explicit guidelines has been the formulae which determine the geographical distribution of NHS funds, the driving force behind which is a notion of need based on relative mortality rates and on the demographic structure. The avowed objective is to bring about equal access for equal need irrespective of where in the UK you happen to be.

If the self—as a popular view has it—is a narrative construction, if it arises out of discursive practices, it is reasonable to assume that the best possible avenue to self-understanding will be provided by those very narratives. If I want to know what it means to be a self, I should look closely at the stories that I and others tell about myself, since these stories constitute who I am. In the following I wish to question this train of thought. I will argue that we need to operate with a more primitive and fundamental notion of self; a notion of self that cannot be captured in terms of narrative structures. In a parallel move, I will argue that there is a crucial dimension of what it means to be other that is equally missed by the narrative approach. I will consequently defend the view that there are limits to the kind of understanding of self and others that narratives can provide.

What is the metaphysical relationship between the fetus/embryo and the pregnant organism? In this paper I apply a substance metaphysics view developed by Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard to argue, on the basis of topological connectedness, that fetuses/embryos are Lady-Parts: part of the maternal organism up until birth. This leaves two options. Either mammalian organisms begin at birth, or we revise our conception of organisms such that mammalian organisms can be part of other mammals. The first option has some advantages: it is numerically neat; aligns with an intuitive picture of organisms as physically distinct individuals; and ties ‘coming into existence’ to a suitably recognisable and important event: birth. But it denies that the fetus survives birth, or that human organisms existed prior to their birth. The second option allows us to recognise that human organisms exist prior to and survive their birth, but at a cost: it leaves the question of when an organism comes into existence unanswered, and demands potentially far-reaching conceptual revision across a range of domains.

Marxism is the tradition of thought and practice founded by Marx. To be identifiable as Marxism any phase of this tradition must have important resemblances to Marx's own work, and those resemblances must be conscious and acknowledged. Anti-Marxists tend to interpret this relation according to a derogatory religious model. Marxists, they suppose, treat Marx as an authority and follow their leader wherever he leads, instead of following the argument wherever it leads. On this view Marxism has an essentially scholarly relation to Marx and a polemical relation to everything else: it seeks to identify exactly what Marx said and thought, to preserve the master's teaching in all its original purity, and to appeal to it for correct answers to the substantive questions that we face. In other words, Marxism is that tradition which treats the works of Marx as a bible and imagines that it can clinch substantive arguments with the words ‘Marx has said it’.

Psychologically normal adult humans make sense of intentional actions by trying to decide for which reason they were performed. This is a datum that requires our understanding. Although there have been interesting recent debates about how we should understand ‘reasons’, I will follow a long tradition and assume that, at a bare minimum, to act for a reason involves having appropriately interrelated beliefs and desires.

I want to focus on some of the limits of decision theory that are of interest to the philosophical concern with practical reasoning and rational choice. These limits should also be of interest to the social-scientists' concern with Rational Choice.

Let me start with an analogy. Classical Newtonian physics holds good and valid for middle-sized objects, but not for the phenomena of the very little, micro, sub-atomic level or the very large, macro, outer-space level: different theories, concepts and laws apply there. Similarly, I suggest that we might think of the theory of decisionmaking as relating to middle-sized, ordinary decisions, and to them only. There remain the two extremes, the very ‘small’ decisions on the one hand and the very ‘big’ decisions on the other. These may pose a challenge to the ordinary decision theory and may consequently require a separate treatment.

Exotic ontologies are all the rage. Distant from common sense and often science as well, views like mereological essentialism, nihilism, and four-dimensionalism appeal to our desire to avoid arbitrariness, anthropocentrism, and metaphysical conundrums.

Is philosophy like plumbing? I have made this comparison a number of times when I have wanted to stress that philosophising is not just grand and elegant and difficult, but is also needed. It is not optional. The idea has caused mild surprise, and has sometimes been thought rather undignified. The question of dignity is a very interesting one, and I shall come back to it at the end of this article. But first, I would like to work the comparison out a bit more fully.

During The Second World War somewhere between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand people risked their lives, and often the lives of their families, to help rescue Jews from Nazi persecution. These acts included helping Jews sustain their lives in the face of persecution, escape from incarceration centers, maintain an underground existence and escape the country. Their acts were clearly morally worthy, yet given the actual and potential costs involved, many of these acts seem to go beyond what could be morally demanded of agents in that situation.

I want to argue for the importance of the notion human being in ethics. Part I of the paper presents two different sorts of argument against treating that notion as important in ethics.

A. Here is an example of the first sort of argument.

What makes us human beings is that we have certain properties, but these properties, making us members of a certain biological species, have no moral relevance. If, on the other hand, we define being human in terms which are not tied to biological classification, if (for example) we treat as the properties which make us human the capacities for reasoning or for self-consciousness, then indeed those capacities may be morally relevant, but if they are morally significant at all, they are significant whether they are the properties of a being who is a member of our species or not. And so it would be better to use a word like ‘person’ to mean a being that has these properties, to bring out the fact that not all human beings have them and that non-human beings conceivably might have them.

According to the distinguished philosopher Richard Wollheim, an emotion is an extended mental episode that originates when events in the world frustrate or satisfy a pre-existing desire (Wollheim, 1999). This leads the subject to form an attitude to the world which colours their future experience, leading them to attend to one aspect of things rather than another, and to view the things they attend to in one light rather than another. The idea that emotions arise from the satisfaction or frustration of desires—the ‘match-mismatch’ view of emotion aetiology—has had several earlier incarnations in the psychology of emotion. Early versions of this proposal were associated with the attempt to replace the typology of emotion found in ordinary language with a simpler theory of drives and to define new emotion types in terms of general properties such as the frustration of a drive. The match-mismatch view survived the demise of that revisionist project and is found today in theories that accept a folk-psychological-style taxonomy of emotion types based on the meaning ascribed by the subject to the stimulus situation. For example, the match-mismatch view forms part of the subtle and complex model of emotion episodes developed over many years by Nico Frijda (Frijda, 1986). According to Frijda, information about the ‘situational antecedents’ of an emotion—the stimulus in its context, including the ongoing goals of the organism—is evaluated for its relevance to the multiple concerns of the organism. Evaluation of match-mismatch—the degree of compatibility between the situation and the subject's goals—forms part of this process.

My topic is the relation between the right and the good. I introduce it by relating some aspects of the debate between various British intuitionists in the first half of the present century.

In Principia Ethica (1903) G. E. Moore claimed that to be right is to be productive of the greatest good. He wrote ‘This use of “right”, as denoting what is good as a means, whether or not it be also good as an end, is indeed the use to which I shall confine the word’ (p. 18). By the time he wrote his Ethics (1912, e.g. p. 6) he seems to have weakened his position, and offers conduciveness to the good not as a definition of ‘right’ but as an account of the one and only property that makes acts right. Even if it be the only right-making property, conduciveness to the good will not be identical with the right-ness that it makes.