We argue that friendship is constituted in the practice of narration, not merely identified through psychological or sociological criteria. We show that whether two people have, as Aristotle argues, ‘lived together’ in ‘mutually acknowledged goodwill’ can be determined only through a narrative reconstruction of a shared past. We demonstrate this with a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship (1982). We argue that this book provides not only an illustration but also an enactment of the practice of friendship as the urge to redeem—and thus to instantiate—Aristotelian suzên (‘living together’) by means of its telling.

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic (what is semantically important may not be important), and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis (advanced in [2] and [3] and in Chisholm [15]) – which implies the inadequacy of classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data.

One of the main problems is of course the mind-body problem. It'snot really a question as to how there can be such disparate things as protons and electrons on the one hand, and such things as desires on the other, cohabiting the same universe and apparently having quite a lot to do with each other. For, provided that we are not squeamish about committing the pathetic fallacy, we can attribute desires to any kind of servomechanism, we can claim that the ordinary water closet, for example, wants to remain full at all times and when necessary acts so as to fulfil that desire. The question, as I see it, is rather, how there can be such a thing as consciousness of desire existing in universelargely unconscious.

Willard thinks we should be puzzled and perplexed about the relevance of morality in deciding what to do. His puzzlement stems from not being able to see any connection between facts and values. In particular, he holds that moral rights (if there are any) cannot be based on needs because needs are not really facts and, even if they were, there seems no way to bridge the fact/value gap between needs (construed as facts) and moral rights.

No aspect of Locke's Essay has received more attention than his theory of personal identity. Yet surprisingly little attention has been given to the intellectual context in which it was written. This is particularly noteworthy in that the chapter in which the theory is developed, “Of Identity and Diversity” (II,xxvii), has a history quite independent of the bulk of the Essay. Added only in the second edition (1694), the theory constitutes a rather late chapter in Locke's intellectual biography. In contrast to other major themes of the Essay, such as the origin of our ideas, substance, power, essence, etc., which received their early development in the various drafts of the Essay (the first being dated 1670), Locke's views on personal identity were apparently first formulated in a note in his 1683 journal.

The appraisal model of love is object-centred and reasons-based: love is based on reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. The bestowal model of love is subject-centred and non-reasons-based: love is not based on reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but rather originates in the lover. In this paper, I blend these disparate models, with the aim of preserving their virtues and overcoming their difficulties. I propose a subject-centred, reasons-based account: love arises within the lover, but, within the lover, love is based on the lover’s motivating reasons.

La sémiologie est une discipline en gestation: ni ses concepts de base, ni sa méthode, ni son champ d'application ne sont encore parfaitement délimités. En cette nébuleuse nous voudrions toutefois montrer que s'esquisse un système stellaire polarisé par la notion de signe. Qu'un tel système ne soit pas encore visible à l'œil nu, cela dépend surtout, croyons-nous, d'une part du vocabulaire utilisé par les sémiologues, qui tantôt manipulent les mêmes termes en des acceptions différentes, tantôt conférent à des termes différents le même sens, d'autre part du fait que les distinctions sous-jacentes à certains choix ne sont pas considérées comme les éléments d'une combinatoire susceptible d'articuler les diverses positions possibles. Notre démonstration portera sur le champ d'application de la sémiologie: nous nous livrerons en premier lieu à un inventaire des principales tendances qui le parcourent, pour ensuite comparer ces tendances entre elles et reconstruire le système à l'intérieur duquel elles s'insèrent.

ABSTRACT: In the first part of the paper, I’ll rehearse an argument that perceiving that we see and hear isn’t a special case of perception in Aristotle but is rather a necessary condition for any perception whatsoever: the turning of one’s attention to the affection of the sense organs. In the second part of the paper, I’ll consider the thesis that the activity of the active intellect is analogous to perceiving that we see and hear.

If there is one aspect of David Gauthier's program for a contractualist morality that has been most sceptically received, it is his view that instrumentally rational agents would choose to adopt a disposition that would in turn constrain their future choices. Instead of remaining “straightforward maximizers” caught in a suboptimal state of nature, they would become “constrained maximizers” who could avoid prisoner's dilemmas (PDs) by engaging in conditional co-operation. Apart from the fact that Gauthier's entirely prescriptive orientation leads him to omit any specification of the mechanism through which this might be accomplished, serious doubts have been raised about the adequacy of the argument that he offers in support of adopting constrained maximization.

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member.

In a recent article, D. H. Finkelstein offers a new proposal about the distinction between conscious and unconscious belief. On his proposal, someone's belief is conscious if he has an ability to express it simply by self-ascribing it; and someone's belief is unconscious if he lacks such an ability. In this article, I argue that his proposal is inadequate, and then offer a somewhat different proposal. On my proposal, someone's belief is conscious if he has self-ascribed this belief without recourse to any evidence about his behaviour, and someone's belief is unconscious; if it is not conscious.