The influence of St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises on Descartes’ work, including the Meditations, has been recognized and discussed by many historians. I just mention a few fairly recent and easily accessible instances. In The Metaphysics of Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon 1965), J. L. Beck suggests that the literary form of the Meditations is most likely due to the Ignatian meditations to which Descartes had been exposed during his training at the Jesuit college of LaFlèche (31). Arthur Thomson in ‘Ignace de Loyola et Descartes’ traces some elements in Descartes’ method and psychology to Ignatian sources, mainly focusing on the Discourse.

Philosophical interest in thought experiments has grown over the last couple of decades. Several positions have emerged, defined largely by their differing responses to a perceived epistemological challenge: how do thought experiments yield justified belief revision, even in science, when they provide no new empirical data? Attitudes towards this supposed explanandum differ. Many philosophers accept that it poses a genuine puzzle and hence seek to provide a substantive explanation. Others reject or deflate the epistemic claims made for thought experiments.

In this paper I present a model for many thought experiments in philosophy and science. The model doesn't assume that thought experiments in fact manage to achieve epistemic justifi cation, but it allows us to see how they aspire to do so. It also emphasises both the parallels and the discrepancies between thought experiments and ordinary scientific experiments.

Over the last twenty years, John Rawls has developed an approach to political philosophy which appeals to the notion of reflective equilibrium. This notion has proven suggestive to those attracted to coherence approaches to justification, in ethics and in other domains as well. In this paper, I explore the question whether Rawls’s approach provides a model for a coherentist account of justification, concluding that although the discussion of reflective equilibrium has provided helpful insights it has not produced a coherentist model of justification.

While openmindedness is often cited as a paradigmatic example of an intellectual virtue, the connection between openmindedness and truth is tenuous. Several strategies for reconciling this tension are considered, and each is shown to fail; it is thus claimed that openmindedness, when intellectually virtuous, bears no interesting essential connection to truth. In the final section, the implication of this result is assessed in the wider context of debates about epistemic value.

For many centuries, philosophers have debated this question: ‘Does God exist?’ Surprisingly, they have paid rather less attention to this distinct – but also very important – question: ‘Would God's existence be a good thing?’ The latter is an axiological question about the difference in value that God's existence would make (or does make) in the actual world. Perhaps the most natural position to take, whether or not one believes in God, is to hold that it would be a very good thing if such a being were to exist. After all, God is traditionally thought to be perfectly powerful and good, and it might seem obvious that such a being's existence would make things better than they would otherwise be. But this judgment has been contested: some philosophers have held that God's existence would make things worse, and that, on this basis, one can reasonably prefer God's non-existence. We first distinguish a wide array of axiological positions concerning the value of God's existence which might be held by theists, atheists, and agnostics alike. We next construe these positions as comparative judgments about the axiological status of various possible worlds. We then criticize an important recent attempt to show that God's existence would make things worse, in various ways, than they would otherwise be.

Roughly a half-century ago, R.M. Hare gave us a potent argument against attempts to account for the meaning of moral language in non-normative or ‘descriptive’ terms. The argument relies on the idea that in order to have genuine moral disagreement, we have to be talking about the same thing. Real disagreement requires agreement in meaning: if the words we use in our disputes mean different things, then we're just talking past, and not to, one another. Using this simple observation, Hare argues that if the meaning of an evaluative word such as ‘good’ were primarily descriptive, then groups with sufficiently different standards for applying ‘good’ wouldn't be able to enter into a real evaluative disagreement. But these disagreements are possible. Hence, he concluded, it's the evaluative meaning of ‘good’ that's primary — and any descriptive account is bound to fail because it doesn't capture the crucial element of endorsement that's central to normative language.

Here is a traditional way of thinking about human knowledge.

• (1) Knowledge is a species of true belief. The crucial difference between knowledge and other kinds of true belief is that propositions that are known have a special property (they are justified, or warranted).

• (2a) Justified (warranted) propositions either have intrinsic justification (they are self-warranting for the knower) or else they are obtainable by means of a justification-conferring argument from other justified propositions that the knower believes.

• (3a) The only propositions with intrinsic justification are those that fall into one of two classes: the set of a priori truths (logic, mathematics, etc.) and the set of propositions recording the sensory experiences of the knower.

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.

Frederic Fitch's celebrated reasoning to the conclusion that all truths are known can be interpreted as a reductioof the claim that all truths are knowable. Given this, nearly all of the proof's reception has involved canvassing the prospects for some form of verificationism. Unfortunately, debates of this sort discount much of the philosophical import of the proof. In addition to its relevance for verificationism, Fitch's proof is also an argument for the existence of God, one at least as strong as the traditional demonstrations. Perhaps unlike other such proofs, Fitch's also operates as a key lemma in a proof that (if sound) establishes that God can't exist.

While the implications of Fitch's proof are thus very important for our understanding of key concepts in the philosophy of religion, they are also relevant to the proof's traditional reception. With these results, I am able to provide a principled motivation for Neil Tennant's recent defense of a restricted form of verificationism.

Envy involves the wish to have something that someone else has; jealousy involves the wish not to lose something that the subject has and someone else does not. Envy and jealousy would seem to involve a similar emotional attitude. Both are concerned with a change in what one has: either a wish to obtain or a fear of losing. This is not a negligible distinction, however. The wish not to lose something is notably different from the wish to obtain something and this difference has significant implications.

Luck varies from person to person, for two reasons. First, for something to occur as a matter of luck is for it to occur beyond the control of someone, and what is beyond one person's control may not be beyond another's. Second, luck may be either good or bad (or neutral — but in that case it is not very interesting), and what is good luck for one person may be bad luck for another.

Moral philosophers have paid a good deal of attention to luck in an effort to determine its relevance to moral judgments of various sorts. We may distinguish three broad classes of such judgments: aretaic judgments, having to do with moral virtue and vice; deontic judgments, having to do with moral Obligation; and what I will call hypological judgments, having to do with moral responsibility. In the wake of Harry Frankfurt's ground-breaking discussion of the claim that moral responsibility requires control, most of the attention that has been devoted in recent years to moral luck has concerned hypological judgments in particular; deontic judgments and aretaic judgments have been given relatively short shrift.

Some Nietzsche scholars, like Wilcox and Kaufmann, think that for Nietzsche there are truths and that knowledge of them is possible. I do not think that this reading is correct. Other scholars, like Danto and Cameron, think that Nietzsche rejects the possibility of truth. In my opinion they are correct, but they also think that this rejection gives rise to serious difficulties in Nietzsche's thought. I think that Nietzsche was aware of these difficulties, consciously sought to get around them, and that his most bizarre doctrines, if understood correctly, succeed in doing so.

What moral reasons, if any, do we have to ensure the long-term survival of humanity? This article contrastively explores two answers to this question: according to the first, we should ensure the survival of humanity because we have reason to maximize the number of happy lives that are ever lived, all else equal. According to the second, seeking to sustain humanity into the future is the appropriate response to the final value of humanity itself. Along the way, the article discusses various issues in population axiology, particularly the so-called Intuition of Neutrality and John Broome’s ‘greediness objection’ to this intuition.

‘When a child learns this ....’ ‘What is “learning a rule”?— This.’ Anyone familiar with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy recognizes these phrases as wholly typical of that philosophy. The appeals to the way in which a child learns, to learning in general, and to the italicized use of the indexical – all are familiar themes. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein develops his position on three crucial philosophical issues by beginning with the way in which a child learns. First, his critique of referential theories of meaning: ‘An important part of the training will consist in the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word’ (PI §6). Second, his attack on essentialist theories of understanding: ‘How does [the pupil] get to understand this notation? – First of all the series of numbers will be written down for him and he will be required to copy them .... And here there is a normal and an abnormal learner’s reaction’ (PI §143). And finally, his attack on the Cartesian model of consciousness: ‘A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences’ (PI §244). These three critiques are the cornerstones for his later philosophy, and at the beginning of each he appeals to how children learn. Moreover, Wittgen-stein’s subsequent writings show an increase in the explicit appeal to learning and to a child’s learning. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s final work, virtually every page involves appeal to learning. In spite of this, most commentators treat the appeal as incidental.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant refers often and with no apparent hesitation or sense of ambiguity to the mind (das Gemüt). He does so not only in his justly famous destruction of rationalist proofs of immaterialism, but throughout his own, positive, ‘transcendental’ account in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. In the first edition of the Critique, he even proposed what he adventurously called a ‘transcendental psychology’ and, although this strange discipline seemed to disappear in the second edition, he left in that edition all his frequent references to forms ‘lying in the mind,’ and to the mind, or the self, or the subject of experience, or the ego, doing this or that. Curiously, though, despite an extensive secondary literature, there is in that literature relatively little discussion of what these expressions, in a proper, strictly Kantian sense, are supposed to refer to. There are two imaginative, extremely suggestive articles by Sellars, some hints at connections with eighteenth century psychology offered by Weldon, a tenebrous book by Heidemann, and some recent attention to the general issue of ‘Kant's theory of mind’ by Ameriks and Kitcher.

It no longer is true in a metaphorical sense only that a person can have a change of heart. We might grant this much — allow that a person may have one heart at one time and have another (numerically different) heart at still another time — and also resist the idea that a person can have a change of mind in anything other than a qualitative sense. In the discussion that follows, this standard view of the matter is called into question. If the argument presented here is sound, it can happen both that one person has numerically different minds at different times and that different people have the same (one) mind at different times. These possibilities, as I take them to be, call for reassessment of some well entrenched assumptions concerning personal identity and responsibility. In particular, they suggest that it may not be true that person A bears responsibility for making decisions person B previously made only on the condition that A is the same person as B.

‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ is, as we all recognize, the inscription over the gate of Dante's hell; but we perhaps forget what precedes that memorable line. Hell, the inscription says, was built by divine power, by the highest wisdom, and by primordial love. Those of us who remember Dante's vivid picture of Farinata in the perpetually burning tombs or Ulysses in the unending and yet unconsuming flames may be able to credit Dante's idea that Hell was constructed by divine power; and if we understand ‘wisdom’ in this context as denoting an intellectual virtue only (and not as connoting a mixed moral and intellectual one), then we might agree that only divine wisdom is capable of making something like Dante's hell.

This paper defends the view that propositions – that is, what are picked about by complement clauses and the range of quantifiers like that in ‘Sanna believes all that Matti said’ – are states of affairs. States of affairs – and thus propositions – are not, in the primary sense, representational; what is representational and what is true or false in the first instance are mental states and sentence tokens that represent propositions. There is, it is argued, a derivative sense in which propositions are bearers of truth, but truth in that sense is a derivative, non-explanatory notion. This view is contrasted with views like the one Scott Soames develops in What is Meaning?. It’s argued that this view is superior to Soames’ in various ways.

On Kant's view, the feeling of respect is the mark of moral agency, and is peculiar to us, animals endowed with reason. Unlike any other feeling, respect originates in the contemplation of the moral law, that is, the idea of lawful activity. This idea works as a constraint on our deliberation by discounting the pretenses of our natural desires and demoting our selfish maxims. We experience its workings in the guise of respect. Respect shows that from the agent's subjective perspective, morality is the experience of being bound and necessitated, but also of being free and emancipated from inclinations.

Respect is a feeling that is generated by the agent's reflection on the nature of her own agency. It is not directed to anybody in particular, but to the very idea of rational agency, which is characterized by self-mastery and self-legislation. Contrary to animals, we do not derive our ends from nature, but we are capable of setting ends of our own, by exercising practical reason, that is, by engaging in the activity of law making.