Husser believed that Kant's great attempt to achieve and to understand the viewpoint of transcendental subjectivity failed. For “Kant, … so many presuppositions are ‘obviously’ valid, presuppositions which in the Humean sense are included in the world enigma (of how objectivity based on subjectivity is possible), (that he) never penetrated to the enigma itself.” The attempt failed in its origins, because Kant did not fully appreciate the character and extent of Hume's problem of the nature of the self and the possible extent of knowledge. Kant's attempt failed also in its results because Kant created mythical constructions; the noumenal object ‘behind’ sensible appearances, and the noumenal self ‘behind’ conscious describable acts and experiences. “Because he understands inner perception in this empiricist, psychological sense and because, warned by Hume's scepticism, he fears every recourse to the psychological as an absurd perversion of the genuine problem of the understanding, Kant gets involved in his mythical concept formation.”

A highly controversial issue in criminal law theory has been the use of strict liability offenses, i.e., offenses which create liability ‘without fault.’ The collection of strict liability offenses is varied according to the element of the particular offense with respect to which liability is strict. For example, a statute prohibiting the filing of a false financial statement with the Secretary of State might impose liability despite a reasonable error as to the truth of the statement, or as to the financial nature of the statement, or as to the identity of the official in question. What all strict liability offenses have in common is the imposition of liability despite the possibility of reasonable mistake or due care regarding some important element of the offense. Generally, then, a strict liability offense is one to which a claim of no-negligence is not a defense. Indeed, such a claim will not even be heard. All that the prosecution need prove is the voluntary commission of the proscribed acts by the defendant; no other question concerning the defendant's efforts or opportunity to obey the law is relevant to liability or conviction.

Albert Casullo has argued that the propositions of arithmetic could be experientially disconfirmed, with the help of an invented scenario wherein experiences involving our standard counting procedures, as applied to collections of objects, seem to indicate that 2+2≠4. Our best response to this scenario would be, Casullo suggests, to accept the results of our standard counting procedures as correct, and give up our standard arithmetical theory. This suggestion, interestingly enough, is not as bizarre as it initially appears. But indeed a problem lies in the assumption, common to Casullo’s scenario and to his suggested resolution, that our arithmetical theory might possibly be independent of our standard counting procedures. Here I show that this assumption is incoherent, whether the independence at issue is supposed to make room for the genuine possibility that 2+2≠4, or the merely epistemic possibility that we could rationally believe that 2+2≠4: given our standard counting procedures, then (on pain of irrationality) our arithmetical theory follows.

Against the standard interpretation of Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ as the prioritization of epistemology over ontology, I argue in this paper that his critique of traditional metaphysics must be seen as a farewell to the perfectionism on which early modern rationalist ontology and epistemology are built. However, Kant does not simply replace ‘perfection’ with another fundamental concept of normativity. More radically, Kant realizes that it is not simply ideas but only the relation of ideas that can be subject to norms, and thus he shifts the focus from the reality of ideas to the validity of judgments. Section 1 of this paper clarifies the pre-Kantian role of the concept of perfection and examines Kant’s critical response to that concept. Section 2 identifies Kant’s point of departure from the Cartesian ‘way of ideas.’ Section 3 explains the key problem of his novel account of epistemic normativity. I conclude that Kant’s anti-perfectionism must be seen as the driving force behind his ‘Copernican revolution’ in order to fully appreciate his mature account of epistemic normativity.

Suppose that in the Meditations Descartes thinks he needs to prove that his clear and distinct perceptions are true. There can be little doubt that if he does think he needs to do this, he thinks that the way to do it is to prove that ‘a non-deceiving God exists’ is true. Now suppose that Descartes does come up with such a proof. Presumably he clearly and distinctly perceives both the premisses and that ‘a non-deceiving God exists’ follows from them. But that will not suffice to prove that ‘a non-deceiving God exists’ is true. For, if there is a problem about whether clear and distinct perceptions are true, then in advance of settling it, there is a problem about whether what is proved merely on the basis of clear and distinct perceptions is true.

In ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,’ Harry Frankfurt introduces a scenario aimed at showing that the having of alternative possibilities is not required for moral responsibility. According to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), an agent is morally responsible for her action only if she could have done otherwise; Frankfurt thinks his scenario shows that PAP is, in fact, false. Frankfurt also thinks that the denial of PAP gives credence to compatibilism, the thesis that an agent could both be causally determined in all her actions and yet be morally responsible. Since its introduction, Frankfurt's original example has generated a voluminous literature, including a plethora of other, more complicated, Frankfurt-style examples (FSEs).

Edmund Gettier objects to analysing knowledge as justified true belief (JTB) on the ground that someone can justifiably infer a true conclusion from a justified false premise and hence not know the conclusion's truth, although the conclusion is justified. For instance, someone can justifiably deduce a true p v r from a justified but false p, where he has no justification for the true r. Gettier's objection draws on two assumptions: first, that a justified belief can be false; second, that a premise can justify a conclusion even though the premise is false.

Some JTB advocates grant the first assumption but deny the second. They usually concede the first assumption to protect the respectability of non-deductive inference. The argument is that if evidence e can nondeductively justify the conclusion c, then it must be possible for c to be justified and yet false, since e does not entail c. Although the assumption is sound, the argument as it stands fails to show it. But let us set this point aside for the moment.

When Booth moved his finger, thereby firing a gun, thereby killing Lincoln, did he perform three discrete actions, or were there relations of identity or inclusion among them? Most treatments of this problem have tended to assume there is but one sort of entity properly to be called an action, and hence that one answer to this question must be established to the exclusion of all others. And the favored answer has been that Booth's actions are not discrete, or indeed even overlapping, but identical. It is possible, however, to adopt a more conciliatory spirit, in which a place is sought for talk of discrete or fine-grained actions in cases like this, as well as for entities of the coarser sort most have favored.

A theory of human action should provide an account of the connection between reason and action when an agent acts for a reason, and it should provide an account of the explanatory force of explanations of actions. On the causal theory of action, the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and explanations of actions are modeled on ordinary causal explanations, where events are explained by citing other events as their causes. A once common objection to the causal theory had it that reasons cannot be causes, since explanations of actions do not fit reason and action into a nomic nexus expressed by laws or law-like generalizations. Against this train of thought, Donald Davidson defends a version of the causal theory by arguing that the view that the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and the view that explanations of actions do not fit reasons and actions into a nomic nexus are compatible. Davidson's theory generated a small industry of criticism focusing on the implications of his version of the causal theory for the nature of the causal connection between reasons and actions.

Utilitarianism claims to be a rational moral theory in at least three ways. First, it claims to give us an objective standard of morality, a way of deciding moral issues, not in the light of what each of us happens to like or dislike, but on publicly verifiable grounds. Secondly, by offering only one criterion of morality it assures consistency. If we accept a system which invokes two or more independent principles, there is always the possibility of insoluble conflict. For example, if we take our stand on the Ten Commandments, we cannot, without divine revelation, be sure that we shall not one day find ourselves in a situation in which we must break one or other of them; and our system gives us no guide as to which we ought to break.

In the by now well known talks he gave at Princeton, Saul Kripke claimed that “[t]heoretical identities … are generally identities involving two rigid designators and therefore are examples of the necessary a posteriori.” (Published as “Naming and Necessity,” in G. Harmon and D. Davidson, eds., Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht, 1972) 253-355; (hereafter referred to as “NN”; this quote p. 331.) A rigid designator is an expression that designates the same object in all possible worlds when it is used. So Kripke is claiming that ‘Water is H20’ and ‘Heat is the motion of molecules’ are generally identities involving expressions like ‘water’ and ‘the motion of molecules’ which designate the same objects in all possible worlds. If the identity statement is true, both sides designate the same object rigidly, i.e., in all possible worlds, and therefore the statement is necessarily true. On the other hand, whether it is true is determined ultimately by appeal to experience. It follows that if true, the identity is necessary a posteriori.

In his Arthur Holly Compton Memorial Lecture Sir Karl Popper tackles a problem raised by Compton himself in an earlier lecture. The problem is to understand how such abstract things as aims, purposes, rules, or agreements can influence or control the movements of men, and perhaps also of animals (p. 15). To illustrate the problem Compton had remarked on the amazing faith and confidence shown by his audience and the lecture's organizer that he should arrive on the agreed date to give the lecture, considering ‘the great physical improbability that their confidence was justified’. For

This is a reply to Donald Ainslie's discussion of Terence Penelhum's work on Hume, Locke and the nature of consciousness; although agree on many points about the differences between Locke and Hume, I take issue with Ainslie's views about the epistemic status Hume accords to introspective acts.