Since the international community has offered their nearly unanimous condemnation of the system of apartheid in the Republic of South Africa, the topic of this essay might seem moot. However, the involvement and cooperation with the South African government of numerous governments, businesses, and other institutions suggest that those condemnations do not constitute the final word - certainly not politically, nor, perhaps, morally.

Frege's definition of the natural number n in terms of the set of n-membered sets has been treated rudely by history. It has suffered not one but two crippling blows. The discovery of Russell's Paradox revealed a fatal flaw in the ‘naive’ conception of set. In spite of its intuitive appeal, Frege's Basic Law V (in the context of the rest of his theory) turned out to be impermissible, leaving us only with the etiolated concept of set that survives in the axiomatic treatments initiated by Zermelo. The independence results, however, of Godel and Cohen, concerning Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis, have left us adrift in choosing between Cantorian and non-Cantorian set theories, which has induced in some logicians a skepticism in regard to the very idea of set-theoretic platonism.

Kant was very proud of his Copernican revolution. So it is a bit ironical that the exact nature of this revolution should have turned out to be as obscure and controversial as it has. In the present paper I will try to provide a new way of looking at the issue. It is my hope that this new perspective will prove not only historically but also theoretically valuable; in particular, that it will present Kant's revolution as one that we might want to take seriously, and maybe even think we still need.

In Book II of Plato's Republic, Glaucon, after putting on the mantle of Thrasymachus, concludes that in order for Socrates to show that justice is to be valued for its own sake, he must show that the just man who appears to be unjust is happier than the unjust man who appears to be just. In other words, according to Glaucon, Socrates must show that the just man who as a result of appearing to be unjust is thrown in prison, scoured and racked, has his eyes burned out and is finally impaled, presumably on a spear, is happier than the unjust man who through appearing to be just is rewarded with high office, wealth and is permitted to marry into the best of families. Adiemantus it will be noticed reaches a similar conclusion.

Robert F. Almeder believes he has discovered a ‘pressing problem': ‘stating the conditions under which we determine whether a person's basic belief is true without introducing an evidence condition for knowledge’. He believes further that this is ‘a problem needing resolution before any ultimately satisfying explication of basic knowledge can be offered’.

My aim is to show that Almeder has failed to discover any problem at all, but I begin by asking: how could the question how we determine the (mere) truth of another's basic belief (regardless of how we do so) have any bearing on the correct explication of the concept of basic knowledge?

In her influential paper, ‘The First Person,’ Elizabeth Anscombe brings together a number of considerations which, she believes, lead to the startling conclusion that the first person pronoun is not a referring expression — that ‘I’ is never used to refer. This is startling, because if we consider even superficially the logical properties of first person statements, nothing could, prima facie, seem more obvious than that in any such statement, the first person pronoun functions logically as a singular referring expression. Moreover, Anscombe herself offers the following informal gloss on the truth conditions of first person assertions: ‘If X asserts something with ‘I’ as subject, his assertion will be true if and only if what he asserts is true of X.’

Regarding the identity of artifacts in time, four positions may be discerned: first, the view reducing the continuing identity of an object to the continuing identity of its parts; second, the more generally accepted position that spatiotemporal continuity under a kind is necessary; third, the claim that while continuity is not a necessary condition, the sameness of parts and the sameness of form are sufficient together; and fourth, the suggestion that continuity of form is a sufficient and non-defeasible condition for reidentifying artifacts. Others such as Scaltsas believe that the different conditions claimed to be sufficient by the views mentioned are, in fact, only criteria of identity applicable in different circumstances, and that no sharply defined hierarchy can be said to hold between them.