Newcomb's paradox was first presented by Robert Nozick and has been discussed by a considerable number of writers. You are playing a game with a Being who seems to have extraordinary predictive powers. Before you are two boxes, in one of which you can see $1,000. The other is closed and you cannot see what it contains, but you know that the Being has put a million dollars into it if he has predicted that you will take it only, but nothing if he has predicted that you will take both boxes; you may take either both boxes or the closed one only. The Being has correctly predicted the choices of all who have so far played with him. What should you do?

Let us call the Being the seer, and his opponent the player. I should also like to reduce the amount that may, or may not, be in the closed box to $10,000. Nearly everyone could make good use of $1,000 and better use of $10,000 or $11,000, but it is hard to say whether a million dollars would be a blessing or a curse.

In his influential “Naming and Necessity,” Saul Kripke has deployed a new sort of analytical apparatus in support of the classical Cartesian argument that minds and bodies must be distinct because they can be imagined separately. In the initial section of this paper, I shall first paraphrase Kripke's version of that argument, and then suggest a way in which even one who accepts all of its philosophical presuppositions may avoid its conclusion. In the second section, I shall defend this suggestion against some of the possible objections to it.

Recent materialists have not been overly impressed by the Cartesian claim that minds and bodies (mental states and physical states, etc.) can be imagined or conceived separately from each other. Their usual reply is that this is only to be expected, given the contingent nature of the identify involved. Kripke, however, has argued persuasively that such a reply is unacceptable because it overlooks a crucial fact about the terms in which the identity theory is couched.

Husserl and others have spent a great deal of time writing introductions to phenomenology, and in trying to explain its nature. One thing that becomes clear from these efforts is that phenomenology claims to have a method for analyzing the essential structures of “mental events” (erlebnisse). This raises the possibility of phenomenology turning back on itself, for surely the analysis itself must consist of “mental events”. Hence, at some point in its investigations, phenomenology itself could become what phenomenologists seek to analyze. Husserl foresaw this when he suggested the possibility that:

What becomes apparent here is that phenomenology's self-reflection is necessary, not merely possible: without self-reflection phenomenology would lack final “genuineness” or the “ability to justify itself down to its roots”. Unfortunately while Husserl, here and in other places, signals the necessity of this sort of reflection, he nowhere seems actually to carry it out at length.

I wish to defend a functionalist approach to the mind-body problem. I use the word ‘functionalist’ with some reluctance, however; for although it has become the conventional label for the sort of approach taken by such philosophers as H. Putnam and D. C. Dennett, I believe it is somewhat misleading. The functionalist, as I understand him, tries to show how there can be machine analogues of mental states and then argues that just as we are not inclined to postulate an ontological dualism between simulated mental states and the machine's physical states, we need not postulate a dualism between mind and body. The functionalist also argues, however, that it is wrong to identify the mental states or simulated mental states with the physical states.

Recently functionalism has come under attack, first for not being a coherent alternative, and secondly for not being able to provide an adequate account of sensations. I believe that the first objection is misguided and shall deal with it in section I. However, I agree that functionalists have not provided an adequate account of sensations, but I shall try to help remedy this in section II.

By a potential person I shall mean an entity which is not now a person but which is capable of developing into a person, given certain biologically and/or technologically possible conditions. This is admittedly a narrower sense than some would attach to the term ‘potential'. After all, people of the twenty-fifth century, if such there will be, are in some sense potential people now, even though the specific biological entities from which they will develop, i.e. the particular gametes or concepti, do not yet exist. For there do exist, in the reproductive capacities of people now living and in the earth's resources, conditions adequate to produce these future people eventually, provided of course that various possible catastrophes are avoided. Indeed, in some sense of ‘potential’ there have been countless billions of potential people from the beginning of time. But I am concerned not with such remote potentialities but with currently existing entities that are capable of developing into people.

In this paper I wish to argue for a view that, despite its traditional standing, has not yet in any detail been defended. The view is briefly that in the Republic, at the point where Plato is engaged in contrasting the true philosopher with the “lover of sights and sounds”, he characterises sensible particulars — referred to as “the many” — as being bearers of opposite properties in so radical a manner that they can be said neither to be nor not to be: they lie somewhere between being and utter non-being.

There are two related reasons why this traditional view should now be closely scrutinised. The first is that, whatever the outcome, the passage of the Republic in question — 475a-480a — is quite crucial to our understanding of the development of Plato's thought about sensible particulars. The second’ is that it has been suggested recently, and ably argued, that Plato is not in fact talking about particulars at all; rather about types or sorts of particulars.

It would be misleading to make any reference to Marx's “theory” of truth-for nowhere in the corpus of Marx's writings will one find an essay dealing with truth in a thematic way. Marx's scattered remarks on truth occur within the context of discussions of social questions. What one can pull together on the topic of truth amounts at most to the sketch of a concept which applies to social knowledge and not knowledge in general. My aim will be to reconstruct Marx's concept of social truth on the basis of his writings on society and social theory.

Those who want a systematic essay developing a general Marxist theory of knowledge have, of course, Lenin's classical formulation of Marxist epistemology in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. We also have Leszek Kolakowski's bold and heretical attack on Lenin's interpretation in “Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth” where we find the astounding claim that Marx's view of truth is closer to that of William James than to that of Lenin.

Kolakowski's essay has been the subject of numerous attacks both by predictably indignant true believers and by independent, creative Marxists.

If a catalogue were made of terms commonly used to affirm the adequacy of critical interpretations of works of art, one word certain to be included would be “plausible.” Yet this term is one which has received precious little attention in the literature of aesthetics. This is odd, inasmuch as I find the notion of plausibility central to an understanding of the nature of criticism. “Plausible” is a perplexing term because it can have radically different meanings depending on the circumstances of its employment. ln the following discussion, I will make some observations about the logic of this concept in connection with its uses in two rather different contexts: the context of scientific inquiry on the one hand, and that of aesthetic interpretation on the other. In distinguishing separate senses of “plausible,” I shall provide reason to resist the temptation to imagine that because logical aspects of two different types of inquiry—science and criticism—happen to be designated by the same term, they may to that extent be considered to have similar logical structures.

In this paper I propose to give close attention to two recent discussions of the relation between theism and morality. It will be helpful first to sketch some of the considerations that have emerged from the many discussions of the relation between theism and morality and which form the background to the two recent contributions I shall discuss.

According to Marx one of the primary evils of capitalism (and any other class society) is that it is exploitative-and necessarily so. Socialist and communist societies will (necessarily) not be exploitative and this is one of the reasons why they will in some sense be better. To understand such claims we have to determine exactly what Marx means by “exploitation” and what it is about exploitation that Marx finds to be bad. Neither of these questions is as simple as it might seem.

A common misunderstanding of Marx is this: exploitation consists simply in an unequal distribution of social wealth. Workers are exploited because they get so much less of the pie than do capitalists. Another interpretation of Marx's concept is that exploitation consists in the fact that workers to not get the whole pie. They produce all value and, therefore, deserve to get it all back. I will show that both of these interpretations are inadequate or simply mistaken. An error common to both is an overemphasis on distribution.