Scientists are often bemused by the efforts of philosophers essaying a theory of colour: colour science sports a huge array of facts and theories, and it is unclear to its practitioners what philosophy can or is trying to contribute. Equally, philosophers tend to be puzzled about how they can fit colour science into their investigations without compromising their own disciplinary identity: philosophy is supposed to be an a priori investigation; philosophers do not work in psychophysics labs – not in their professional capacity, anyway.

These inter-disciplinary barriers arise out of misunderstanding. Philosophers should not so much attempt to contribute to empirical theories of colour, as to formulate philosophical theories of colour. Philosophy is concerned with appearance and reality, object and property, function and representation, and other such fundamental categories of ontology and epistemology. Philosophical theories attempt to fit colour into these categories; such theories do not compete with colour science. However, fitting colour into philosophical theories means dealing with colour as it really is – and one cannot know what it is without consulting the psychologists. That is why philosophers need an up-to-date understanding of psychological theories of colour.

In this paper I examine a much discussed passage of the Timaeus. This passage contains one of the most important descriptions of Plato's ontology to be found in all the dialogues. The ontological scheme there described differs from that presented in the middle Platonic dialogues in that a third sort of entity, the Receptacle or space, is added to the two classes of things familiar to readers of the Phaedo and Republic: Being (i.e. the Forms) and Becoming (the phenomenal world). The introduction of the Receptacle into Plato's ontology enables Plato to clarify the relation between the orders of Being and Becoming in a way not otherwise possible. When the relation between the Forms and their phenomenal counterparts has been clarified, I shall argue, it becomes clear that the Theory of Forms as presented in the Timaeus is in fact a coherent metaphysical theory, one which is not susceptible to the Third Man Argument. This fact in turn bears (although somewhat indirectly) on the vexed question of the place of the Timaeus in the chronology of Plato's works.

Philebus 5Sc-62a has traditionally been viewed as one of the more likely passages in the late Platonic dialogues where the theory of Ideas may be construed to be present in the same manner as in the Republic with its sharply dualistic epistemology and ontology. There is certainly a similarity of language between the passage and the Republic: in the Philebus the pure, clear, certain/stable, true, unalloyed, eternally existing, always changlessly the same, really real objects of the philosopher's reason and knowledge sound like Platonic Ideas. Roger A. Shiner, following in the steps of G.E.L. Owen, has offered four new arguments which attempt to show that in this passage Plato in fact is not committed to the theory of Ideas in the form in which it appears in the Republic, that in this passage there is no Republic-style gulf between knowledge and opinion, reality and becoming. I wish to argue that none of these arguments succeed.

In a volume entitled Analytical Marxism, John Roemer portrays analytical Marxists as ‘largely inspired by Marxian questions, which they pursue with contemporary tools of logic, mathematics, and model building.’ Eschewing dogmatism, analytical Marxists raise foundational questions that conventional Marxism often overlooks and are committed to the necessity for abstraction in seeking answers to them. One such foundational question is raised by Jon Elster in a companion volume, Making Sense of Marx. His question is the subject of this essay.

I have never been shy about admitting to fellow philosophers that I am a Bayesian, but I confess that I have rarely made the admission without discomfort. It is because I know what people usually think. They think I am an orthodox Bayesian. They think I am convinced that everyone (unbeknownst to herself) harbors a real-valued degree of confidence assignment that satisfies the axioms of the probability calculus.

Much recent discussion in moral philosophy has focused on the contrast between those moral theories which are consequentialist in structure and those moral theories which admit independent side constraints on the means which can be used to achieve various ends. In this essay I shall attempt to show that this contrast provides an illuminating framework against which to understand two conflicting strategies for justifying paternalistic interference. The first, consequentialist strategy takes paternalistic interference to be justified when it will protect or perhaps enhance some valued goal or end state, such as an agent's welfare or future ability to choose. Gerald Dworkin's essay “Paternalism” contains what is perhaps the most compelling recent development of this sort of rationale for paternalistic interference and accordingly much of my subsequent discussion will focus on this essay.

In this paper I shall examine Aristotle's treatment of a certain puzzle concerning change. In section I, I shall show that within a certain standard framework for the semantics of subject-predicate sentences a number of things that Aristotle wants to maintain do not make sense. Then, I shall outline a somewhat non-standard account of the semantics for such sentences — arguably Aristotle's — and show how the proposals concerning change fit quite naturally into this framework. The results of this exercise will enable us to say something quite precise about applications of some obscure but characteristically Aristotelian doctrines: that ‘is’ is ‘said in many ways,’ that his predecessors got the Law of Opposites wrong. They also shed some light upon Aristotle's ontology of predicables.

There is widespread agreement among critical theorists that reason has to be understood as culturally mediated and interwoven with social practice. The embeddedness and variability of basic categories, principles, standards, and procedures mean that the critique of reason has henceforth to be carried out in conjunction with social, cultural, and historical analysis. We can no longer hope to fathom its 'nature, scope, and limits' through an introspective survey of the contents of consciousness, but have to study the acts and products, utterances and texts, practices and institutions in which it is embodied. That is to say, 'self-reflection' has now to proceed through the interpretation and critique of the socio-historical world.

Feminist theory, whether specifically philosophical or not, has been integrative in a number of ways. In epistemology and metaphysics it has attacked dualisms and dichotomies and tried to show that mind and body, reason and emotion, civilization and nature are neither separate nor separable; in ethics, we have agreed that rules, principles and justice must be tempered with a sense of caring and community; and, more generally, we have been at pains not to draw too sharp lines between philosophy and psychology, history and anthropology, literary theory and sociology.

Marx wrote in The German Ideology that the communist movement ‘shatters the basis of all morality’ and that ‘the communists preach no morality at all’; in The Communist Manifesto that morality and religion are correctly seen by the class-conscious proletarian as ‘so many bourgeois prejudices behind which there lurk in ambush Just as many bourgeois interests.’ In an article ‘Marxism and Morality’ and in a book Ruling Illusions; Philosophy and the Social Order, I urged that Marx's well advertised but untheorised scorn for ‘morality’ not be interpreted in terms of rejection of the prevailing (bourgeois) content of moral norms, which would be consistent with espousing an alternative set of ‘precepts’ or ‘principles.’ Rather, Marx's position should be seen as a theoretical and practical opposition to the very form of ‘morality’ as he understood it: the form of universal, absolute laws binding on individuals as beings with a capacity to rise above and conquer their selfish, capricious ‘inclinations.’

—Clarence Jenson Network, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1976

—J. M. Keynes

In this article I attempt to untangle the purported connection between moral virtue and flourishing in the context of examining what looks like an unexpected effect of oppression: If moral virtue is necessary for flourishing—as Aristotle assumes that it is when he describes eudaimonia as an “activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” — then members of structurally privileged groups can only flourish if they are morally good. However, it is hard to conceive of the privileged as morally good, since their privileges result from unjust social positionings. Thus it appears that they are prevented from leading good lives. This is an odd claim to add to a theory of oppression, which one would expect to explain how the victims of oppression — rather than its beneficiaries — are denied a shot at the good life.

While the privileged may enjoy especially ample opportunities to develop certain virtues, I will be thinking here about vices associated with practices of domination, including active or passive acceptance of the benefits that come from occupying positionings that depend upon systems of male dominance, white supremacy, class divisions under capitalism, norms of heterosexuality, and so on.

Many questions concerning the nature of the mind have remained intractable since their first systematic discussion by the ancient Greeks. What is the nature of knowledge, and how is it possible to represent the world? What are consciousness and free will? What is the self and how is it that some organisms are more intelligent than others? Since it is now overwhelmingly evident that these are phenomena of the physical brain, it is not surprising that an established empirical and theoretical foundation in this domain has eluded us for so long. For in order to understand what we are and how we work, we must understand the brain and how it works. Yet the brain is exceedingly difficult to study, and research on any significant scale is critically dependent on advanced technology.

Introduction

The various special concerns and commitments that individuals ordinarily have, for example towards family members, friends, and possibly compatriots, present an interesting challenge for justice. Justice, after all, is said to be blind and imposes demands on persons that ought to be impartial, at least in some respects, to personal ties and relationships. Yet individual special concerns are obviously of moral importance and are deeply valued by participants in these relationships. Thus any conception of justice to be plausible has to be able to accommodate to some extent the various types of valuable and valued special concern characteristic of ordinary social life. In particular, it is important to see how the impartial demands of justice can be maintained while accommodating special concern.

In this paper I am interested in Aristotelian essentialism only as it relates to Aristotle's notion of an ordinary object. In particular, I shall concentrate on two main kinds of interpretation that are to be distinguished here. First, there is what I call the standard version. So named because it formulates the preferred view among commentators, the standard version holds that essences are necessary (at least) for the existence of objects. Against this is a recently proposed line of interpretation which I shall call the non-standard version of Aristotelian essentialism. It holds that possessing a given essential property is only sufficient, not necessary, for the existence of a given object and so denies the standard version. While I focus mainly on arguments and evidence that bear on decision between the two versions, I also reflect some on whether Aristotle is best construed a de re or a de dicto essentialist. Part I of the paper spells out the versions in question. Part II contains considerations which show Aristotle's openness to de re essentialism.