Is a singularist conception of causation coherent? That is to say, is it possible for two events to be causally related, without that relationship being an instance of some causal law, either basic or derived, and either probabilistic or non-probabilistic? Since the time of Hume, the overwhelmingly dominant philosophical view has been that such a conception of causation is not coherent.

The decline of biodiversity is without a doubt one of the most important symptoms of what could be called a “global environmental crisis.” Our ability to stop this decline depends on the capacity to implement an effective, collective system of preservation on a global scale. In this paper, I will analyze the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the international agreement that aims at creating this type of global cooperation.

While I consider that cosmopolitan governance is desirable, given the legitimacy of the preservation of global biological diversity, I will not attempt to directly argue for it here. Still, it is worth mentioning some of the reasons that might lead us to adopt this position. First, certain past conservation measures have been harshly criticized as imperialistic. For example, Project Tiger in India, which Western environmentalists often cited as a success, have had a deleterious effect on local populations.

The power of skepticism depends on the apparent possibility of rationally asking, for virtually any kind of proposition commonly thought to be known, how it is known or what justifies believing it. Moral claims are among those commonly subjected to skeptical challenges and doubts, even on the part of some people who are not skeptical about ordinary claims regarding the external world. There may be even more skepticism about the possibility of justifying moral actions, particularly if they are against the agent's self-interest. Both problems-how to justify moral claims and how to justify moral action - come within the scope of the troubling question “Why be moral?” Even a brief response to moral skepticism should consider both kinds of targets of justification, cognitive and behavioural, and should indicate some important relations between the two types of skeptical challenge. I will begin with the cognitive case- with skepticism about the scope of theoretical reason in ethics - proceed to practical skepticism, which concerns the scope of practical reason, and then show how an adequate account of rationality may enable us to respond to moral skepticism.

Few questions about utilitarianism have been more vexed than that of its relation to rights (and its associated notion, Justice). It is commonplace to hold that there are nonutilitarian rights, rights not founded on considerations of utility. And it is even thought that the very notion of rights is inherently incapable of being significantly employed within the utilitarian framework. In the present paper, I wish to consider both of these matters. I propose to give reasons—mostly not really new—for rejecting the stronger, conceptual claim; and on the former, substantial question, I want to argue that the utilitarian at least has a respectable way of handling the vocabulary of rights, even a useful one. Further, I shall argue that what the utilitarian—in particular, J. S. Mill—has to say about rights is quite plausible, though I shall conclude with a question about how illuminating it is.

In this discussion I take it for granted that proper names are words of a language, are not mere interjections or burps. I also take it for granted that for any proper name “N. N.” there is some general term “A” that gives the relevant criterion of identity; repeated use of “N. N.” involves an intention to keep on saying things about one and the same A, or as I shall put it for short “N. N.” is a name for an A. An intention to keep on referring barely to the same thing is, as lawyers say, void for uncertainty. (A name for an A may or may not be a name of an A; it will not be a name of an A if through some mistake or fraud or again confusion of two A's together, the name “N. N.” gets used without assignable reference.)

These theses have been denied, but I think not reasonably. Some very silly arguments have been used recently: e.g. an argument from the logical possibility of Protean change is put up to show that a proper name may attach to a thing no matter what sort it comes to belong to.

The implications of evolutionary theory for a theory of knowledge have been explored by numerous writers in the period since Darwin. (See, for example: Spencer [1857]; Toulmin [1967, 1972]; Popper [1965, 1972, 1974]; Campbell [1974].) In general, these writers have developed theories of knowledge development by analogy with evolutionary theory. That is, they have developed theories which apply the mechanism of differential selection on variation to the growth of knowledge. In this sense knowledge is seen to be a function of success (often understood in pragmatic terms) in a field of alternative ideas. Knowledge evolves in much the same way as organisms with more robust ideas or ideas with greater verisimilitude or greater explanatory power or greater problem solving ability, etc. surviving from one generation to the next in the struggle for acceptance. Hence, the title ‘evolutionary epistemology.’

Hans Herzberger's 1973 essay ‘Ordinal Preference and Rational Choice’ is a classic milestone in the erosion of the idea that rational agents are maximizers of utility. By the time Herzberger wrote, many authors had replaced this claim with the thesis that rational agents are maximizers of preference. That is to say, it was assumed that at the moment of choice a rational agent has a weak ordering representing his or her preferences among the options available to the agent for choice and that the rational agent restricts choice to one of the optimal options. Such an option is an available option judged at least as good as imy other.

As W. V. Quine sees it we must, in the interests of science, resist “the old tendency to associate observation sentences with a subjective sensory subject matter,” because such sentences are “meant to be the intersubjective tribunal of scientific hypotheses“; observation sentences are meant to be the independent and objective control of scientific theory. Accordingly, Quine has developed a behaviouristic operational definition of an observation sentence for the purpose of dispelling the air of subjectivity which surrounds the notion of observation (WB 19).

In this paper I argue that his observation-sentence definition, or criterion, fails to fulfil this purpose. In the first half of the paper (sections 1 and 2), I describe in particular the kind of subjectivism which most worries Quine-what he calls the epistemological nihilism of Hanson, Kuhn and Polanyi-and I then turn to Quine's remedy, his observation criterion.

This is the judgement passed by Professor Bhikhu Parekh in his 1994 essay “Decolonizing Liberalism.” His deference to John Stuart Mill is shown in his making Mill not one of the exceptions, but rather the central object of attack. It would seem indeed that if the charges can be made good against Mill they will hold against nineteenth-century liberalism in general, and perhaps in some degree against twenty-first-century liberalism.

Simple piety moves me to offer some defence of Mill's own good judgement, particularly in relation to India. But, in dealing with a phenomenon like liberalism, we need always to maintain a distinction which tends to blur. Doctrines and assertions are one thing. Historical movements and trends in a society are another.

When I hear someone speaking and understand what is said, do I translate the words I hear into words of my own? I think the answer in general is ‘No.’ Of course, I might sometimes have to translate what I hear if I am not very good in the language the other person is speaking. But if I speak that language well, and the other person is speaking clearly and intelligbly enough, I simply understand. There is no question of translating what I hear into words of my own. If I speak the language, the words I hear are words of my own. I don’t need any others.

A paradox in Marx's thought (and for Marxism in general) is that while Marx's writings abound in moral Judgments (i.e., in commendations, condemnations, prescriptions, etc., made on the basis of a concern for human ill and well-being), they contain, at the same time, explicit repudiations of morality. A major charge leveled against morality in the writings of Marx and other Marxists, a charge to which, perhaps, all of the other charges against morality can be reduced, is that morality is ideology or, to say the same thing slightly differently, that morality is ideological.

A difference of opinion exists among some philosophers who have recently inquired whether Marx thinks that capitalism is distributively unjust. What has to be determined is whether in Marx's view the wage worker suffers an injustice in not receiving most or all of the surplus value he creates. Allen Wood argues that this is not Marx's view, and George Brenkert agrees, for quite similar reasons; but Ziyad Husami and Gary Young, on the other hand, argue in reply to Wood, and on overlapping grounds, for the opposite interpretation; Wood, in turn, has defended himself against Husami.

The aim of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that mental concepts are natural kind concepts. By ‘mental concepts’ I mean the ordinary words belonging to our everyday languages (English, Spanish, and so on) that we use in order to describe our mental life. The plan of the paper is as follows. In the first part, I shall present the hypothesis: firstly, I shall present a theory about the meaning of natural kind concepts following Putnam's 1975 proposal, with some modifications; secondly, I shall present a taxonomy of mental concepts and, thirdly, I shall explain what the meaning of each kind of mental concept would be on the hypothesis defended in this paper. In the second part of the paper, I shall present two interesting consequences of the hypothesis proposed: first, that it is preferable to avoid a certain way of conceiving phenomenal concepts which does not fit with the hypothesis proposed; second, that folk psychology could fruitfully be considered a theory, and why, ultimately, it will not be eliminated.

I‘m a materialist, and not too embarassed about it. It would be nice to have a knock down argument to defend materialism, but not having one, I instinctively fight off idealists, dualists, skeptics, or whatever, with the same punches and feints used by materialists from time immemorial. Like, say, the snide observation that a material like liquor gets even my idealist friends drunk, or that the senile dualists I have known don't seem at all to consist of ageless minds trapped in aging bodies. I will not resort to ad baculum, because all non-materialists I‘ve known, of whatever stripe, act as though tampering with their bodies is the same as tampering with their very selves.

Two decades ago, problems of alienation and fetishism were the focus of most English speaking studies of Marx’s philosophy. More recent work on Marx and Marxist themes has tended to avoid these questions in favor of discussions of explanation, exploitation, distributive justice and problems of class formation and co-ordination. The latter set of problems seem more readily addressable, if not always more tractable, using contemporary tools drawn from the philosophy of science, as well as methods of decision theory, game theory, and welfare economics. But the change in emphasis has not been without costs; gains in clarity and rigor have come at the price of abandoning Marx's most fundamental criticism of capitalism as a way of life. I shall argue that it is no coincidence that the shift to ‘rational choice’ Marxism has had precisely that cost.

The main difficulty utilitarians have faced is the problem of reconciling the dictates of utility with what seem clearly to be moral duties, but based on considerations of Justice. John Stuart Mill addressed this problem in his essay, Utilitarianism, and the result has not served to silence the critics of utilitarianism on this score. In part, this is due to the fact that Mill's position in the chapter on Justice is not entirely clear, nor is it entirely convincing where it is clear. Still, I do not think Mill's views on Justice have been given their due. In this essay, I shall try to show that Mill anticipated recently defended principles that rely on appeal to a notion of fairness or fair play, and that these can be given a utilitarian foundation.

By a ‘semantic determinant’ I will mean“…a structural feature of the world necessary for the determination of truth and falsity …,” or briefly, “Semantic determinants are things that determine valuations.” (Thomason (1972), pp. 301, 302), where such determination is functional and where valuations are themselves functions from sentences into truth values. A familar example is the ‘domain of individuals’ relative to which truth conditions are given for sentences containing “all,” “some,” and related expressions, where these can be construed as ‘quantifiers.’ Thus, e.g., “Some men are albinos” is true just in case at least one individual in the domain which is a man is also an albino. For this truth condition to be making a definite claim we must suppose that the domain is a definite (though not necessarily finite) set of individuals fixed in advance.

The numerous difficulties facing the traditional Humean regularity approach to the problem of causation have been discussed in the literature at great length. In view of the current interest in possible worlds semantics, it is not surprising that the only serious alternative treatment of causation presently available, the counterfactual approach, has been explored recently as a means of circumventing the apparently unresolvable difficulties facing regularity causal theories. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that such a strategy holds little promise. Specifically, I will argue that, in addition to giving rise to problems directly analogous to those facing regularity accounts, the counterfactual approach fails in principle to reflect important properties of causal relations as we understand them intuitively. David Lewis's possible worlds account, the most comprehensive counterfactual theory to date, is further criticized for implicit problems with natural lawhood even more serious than those typically raised for regularity accounts, for additional inadequacies in its analysis of causal relations, and for its failure to satisfy basic empiricist epistemological standards.

Here is Frege in Foundations of Arithmetic, §64: