ABSTRACT: In a recent paper (2008), I presented two arguments against the thesis that intentional states are essentially normative. In this paper, I defend those arguments from two recent responses, one from Nick Zangwill in his (2010) and one from Daniel Laurier in the present volume, and offer improvements of my arguments in light of Laurier’s criticism.

ABSTRACT: Ever since Hume raised the problem of induction, many philosophers have tried to solve this problem; however, there still is no solution that has won wide acceptance among philosophers. According to Wilfrid Sellars, the reason is mainly that these philosophers have tried to justify induction by theoretical reasoning rather than by practical reasoning. In this paper I offer a sort of Sellarsian proposal. On the basis of the instrumental principle and the constructivist view of the concept of epistemic justification, I argue that it is reasonable to accept induction.

Rainer Forst’s constructivism argues that a right to justification provides a reasonably non-rejectable foundation of justice. With an exemplary focus on his attempt to ground human rights, I argue that this right cannot provide such a foundation. To accord to others such a right is to include them in the scope of discursive respect. But it is reasonably contested whether we should accord to others equal discursive respect. It follows that Forst’s constructivism cannot ground human rights, or justice, categorically. At best, it can ground them hypothetically. This opens the door wide for ethical foundations of human rights.

One of the most effective ways of winning an argument is to show that your opponent has begged the question. If you are sufficiently skilful in asking him leading questions and have a good sense of timing you can usually succeed in stripping him to his bare principles, with no ascertainable means for their support. That such a tactic of debate should be so effective suggests that it is more than just a ploy. Indeed some philosophers would say that it takes advantage of a characteristic which is inherent in the nature of argument itself, for all arguments must be question-begging. However, few would voice this conviction publicly—for fear of being accused of begging the question.

In the first chapter of Karl Marx's Theory of History, G. A. Cohen contrasts Marx's image of history with Hegel's, contrasts, that is, a powerful form of historical idealism with historical materialism. Historical idealism stresses the “dominion of thought” (Gedankenherrschaft); social change, on such an account, is to be explained principally in terms of changes in consciousness, the course of history being determined by fundamental ruling ideas and conceptions. This view is to be contrasted with historical materialism. The central vision of history in Hegel is formulated as follows by Cohen, “History is the history of the world spirit (and, derivatively of human consciousness) which undergoes growth in self-knowledge, the stimulus and vehicle of which is a culture, which perishes when it has stimulated more growth than it can contain” (26). Marx's vision, a historical materialist vision, is identical in structure with Hegel's, but endows the structure with a new content. This can be seen from the parallel formulation of it, given by Cohen: “History is the history of human industry, which undergoes growth in productive power, the stimulus and vehicle of which is an economic structure which perishes when it has stimulated more growth than it can contain (26).

David Lewis has shocked the philosophical community with his original version of extreme modal realism according to which “every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is”. Logical Space is a plenitude of isolated physical worlds, each being the actualization of some way in which a world could be, that bear neither spatiotemporal nor causal relations to each other. Lewis has given independent, converging arguments for this. One is the argument from the indexicality of actuality, the other an elaborate cost-benefit argument of the inference-to-the-best explanation sort to the effect that a systematic analysis of a number of concepts, including modality, causality, propositions and properties, fares better under his theory than under any rival one that takes a possible world to be either a linguistic entity or an ersatz abstract entity such as a maximal compossible set of properties, propositions or states of affairs. Lewis' legion of critics have confined themselves mostly to attempts at a reductio ad absurdum of his theory or to objections to his various analyses. The indexical argument, on the other hand, has not been subject to careful critical scrutiny. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this argument cannot withstand such scrutiny. Its demise, however, leaves untouched his argument from the explanatory superiority for his extreme modal realism.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger asserted that “it wasnot German idealism that collapsed; rather, the age was no longer strong enough to sustain the greatness, breadth, and originality of that spiritual world, i.e., truly to realize it” (1961, p. 37). He was at this point launchinginto one of the major themes of his later work: the “darkening of the world” in the form of the materialism and “demonism” typified by the antitheses of the USSR and the USA, a polarity of seeming opposites obscuring an underlying fundamental similarity. This was the modernist faith of both cultures in the power of science to solve all of the problems that have plagued humanity for untold centuries, a faith in the power of science to tell us the absolute truth about the nature of reality. In 1955 Heidegger also characterized science and technology in “The Question Concerning Technology” as an “enframing” (Gestell), a particular dominant interpretation of reality dependent on the interest of control and which conceals far more than it reveals. For one thing, “the essence of technology isin a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth” (1977a, p. 33). Although enframing “lets man endure,” only art (poiesis) as the successor of philosophy transcends techne by allowing us to see that “the essence of technologyis nothing technological” (1977a, p. 35). Much earlier, in Being and Time, he gave his first sustained account of science as the interpretationof reality driven by technological interests, and spoke of Being as the “transcendens” lying beyond “every possible character which an entity can possess” [p. 38]. It remains debatable whether this characterization of Being survived into Heidegger's later period, but despite his nostalgia for the spirituality of the early nineteenth century, the role of Beingin these earlier works might best be explained as some kind of realism.

This paper is devoted to the Parmenides’ methodological preamble, in which Parmenides teaches how one is to lead a dialectical inquiry. The method presented there recalls the goddess’s advice, as presented by the historical Parmenides in his Poem, to think “the way of being and the way of non-being.” In Plato’s Parmenides, these two ways are seen as manners of examining a hypothesis. I explain that the method is exhaustive insofar as it requires repeatedly asking what the consequences are if a thing does exist, or does not. Lastly, I suggest that the method should be distinguished from other dialectical practices found in Plato’s work.

ABSTRACT: It is not W.V. Quine’s aim in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” to prove against all-comers that the analytic/synthetic distinction is untenable or to provide a novel conception of our knowledge. He aims to undermine the empiricist’s appeal to the distinction and show what empiricism unencumbered by dogma comes to. Focusing on §§1-3 and §6, I argue that his treatment of analyticity is framed by important philosophical assumptions and the conception of knowledge he defends is one to which he had long been committed. “Two Dogmas” is less easily dismissed when read in the context of Quine’s early lectures on Carnap.

ABSTRACT: There is an intuitive distinction between knowing someone in a detached manner — impersonally — and knowing someone in a more intimate fashion — personally. The latter seems to involve the specially active participation of the person known in a way that the former does not. In this paper I present a novel, communication account of knowing someone personally that successfully explains this participation. The account also illuminates the propositional and testimonial character of the personal knowledge of persons, the conditions of limited transferability to which such knowledge is subject, and its distinctly meaningful role in everyday life. I conclude by considering a worry about self-knowledge that arises on the communication account.

RÉSUMÉ : Il existe une distinction entre connaître quelqu’un de manière détachée, de façon impersonnelle, et connaître quelqu’un de façon plus intime, de façon personnelle. Cette dernière relation, au contraire de la première, semble impliquer la participation particulièrement active de la personne connue. Dans ce texte, je présente une nouvelle analyse de la connaissance intime de quelqu’un qui est fondée sur la communication et explique de manière satisfaisante une telle participation. Cette analyse éclaire aussi la nature propositionnelle et testimoniale de la connaissance intime des personnes, les limites de la transférabilité d’une telle connaissance et son rôle significatif unique dans la vie quotidienne. Je conclus en examinant un problème touchant la connaissance de soi qui surgit dans l’approche communicationnelle.

The correspondence between Descartes and More covers a diversity of each author’s fundamental philosophical views. Their polemics range over not only general aspects of physics, but also extend to cosmology and theology. On the one hand, we have God as infinite and His creation as indefinite for Descartes; on the other hand, God as extant, ubiquitous and omnipresent, and His creation as limited for Henry More. It is this last problem that constitutes the focus of my essay, strictly speaking – the problem of the universe as infinite.

In recent years, Aristotle's treatment of the imagination has become the subject of renewed interest. A pioneering paper by Malcolm Schofield argued that, far from being the rag-bag of widely separate and more or less unrelated concerns that it had previously been generally taken to be, phantasia was, for Aristotle, a ‘loose-knit family concept’ covering all aspects of what Schofield labelled ‘non-paradigmatic sensory experience’. With that conclusion I am more or less in agreement, although only on the condition that ‘sensory’ be given a suitably broad interpretation. My purpose in this paper is to tease out, in a necessarily limited and circumscribed manner, the implications of a proper understanding of Aristotle's developed concept of deliberative imagination, phantasia bouleutikê, for his moral theory and his account of rational action, and to indicate ways in which this is related to his accounts of mental imaging in the rest of the Parva Naturalia.

Qualia are phenomenal properties of sensations and perceptual states: they are whatever it is that gives such states their “felt,” qualitative character. (In speaking of sensations, I speak of course not of mental objects or mental contents, but of mental events—of sensings, not sensa.)

The problem of induced pro-attitudes is simply this: why is action which ultimately issues from pro-attitudes such as desires, volitions, and goals, induced by techniques such as direct manipulation of the brain, hypnosis, or “value engineering,” frequently regarded as action for which its agent cannot be held morally responsible? The problem is of interest for several reasons. Ferdinand Schoeman, for instance, believes that the problem poses a resolvable but challenging predicament for compatibilists: if agents can be held morally responsible for actions that are causally determined, then why should actions that result from induced pro-attitudes be regarded as paradigmatically unfree actions for which agents cannot be held morally accountable? Robert Kane exploits the problem to launch a libertarian attack on compatibilists. He says that a covert non-constraining controller controls the will of another agent by arranging “circumstances beforehand so that the agent wants and desires, and hence chooses and tries, only what the controller intends.” Kane claims that compatibilist accounts of freedom cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent behaves freely and those in which an agent falls prey to the covert non-constraining control of some other party.

In the last few years a broad debate has taken place in books and journals about the time of action. Many different views have been propounded, and many an ingenious argument has been devised. I submit that those views are insightful but that the arguments have been misplaced. The views are at bottom compatible, for they differ in what they call ‘action’. I propose that our conception of action is so enveloped in conventions that there is no factual issue, per se, about the time and place of human action. There are actually several layers of conventionality involved in our timing and placing of actions. The crucial philosophical issues pertain to the clarification of those conventional layers. Among these issues are: (i) What are the conventions involved in timing and locating actions? (ii) What is the rationale for those conventions? (iii) Is that rationale sufficient to show the usefulness of those conventions? (iv) Can and should those conventions be improved upon?

The strong intuition that the facts concerning the subjectivity of consciousness are simply beyond the grasp of objective science is the highest barrier to an intuitively convincing materialism in the philosophy of mind. We are steeped in a tradition which has it that there is, to state it from the first-person point of view, an epistemic difference in principle between my introspectible experience, which only I can apprehend and know, and the things which everyone can apprehend and which form the domain of the natural sciences. This contrast is sometimes cast as that between the subjective stuff of first-person introspectible consciousness and the objective stuff of the natural sciences. In this essay, I will try to budge the view of the subjective-objective distinction which underlies this tradition from its position as tacit dogma.

The principle that epistemic justification is necessarily transmitted to all the known logical consequences of a justified belief continues to attract critical attention. That attention is not misplaced. If the Transmission Principle is valid, anyone who thinks that a given belief is justified must defend the view that every known consequence of the belief is also justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection principle is modified, the possibility of deductive justification is threatened. If some known consequence fails to be justified, the failure may extend to every known consequence. To reject Transmission is to insert a logical gap between the justification of a premise and the justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection on the Transmission Principle therefore usefully brings us face to face with the following dilemma: accept the principle and hand Cartesian scepticism a powerful weapon, or modify the principle and risk undermining deductive justification.

In a series of experiments done in wartime Nazi Germany, inmates of the Dachau concentration camp were exposed to cold by being immersed in ice water, or kept outside in freezing temperatures; their responses were measured, and various techniques were used in an attempt to revive them. The immediate application of these hypothermia studies was to the war effort, to try to protect or save soldiers exposed to cold water or air. An account of the procedures and results of these experiments was written by an American officer, Major Leo Alexander, on the basis of his post-war discovery of documents and interviews in Germany. These reports reveal the ghastly and abominable details of the experiments.

Recent scientific work in British Columbia has caused some ethical debate when it consulted the Alexander report and used some of the Nazi experimental data. The scientists in the Hypothermia Unit of the University of Victoria, unsurprisingly but reassuringly, have no intention of repeating the Nazi atrocities, and condemn them. The current controversy concerns the morality of their using the Alexander data in their study. This out-of-the-way case has some small intrinsic interest; but its consideration leads to broader concerns.

This article aims to shed light on both the foundations and the consistency of the position regarding akrasia Xenophon attributes to Socrates in the Memorabilia. As does Plato's Socrates, Xenophon's Socrates maintains that akrasia is impossible in the presence of knowledge. On the other hand, he differs from the platonic Socrates by granting to enkrateia, instead of knowledge, the role of foundation for virtue. If enkrateia is the very condition for acquiring knowledge and virtue, consequently the responsibility for countering akrasia falls to enkrateia.