Donald Davidson notoriously rejected ‘metaphorical meaning’ and denied the existence of linguistic mechanisms by which metaphorical significance is conveyed. He contended that the meanings metaphorical sentences have are just their literal meanings, though metaphorical utterances may brute-causally have important cognitive effects. Contrastingly, John Searle offers a Gricean account of metaphor as an elaborated kind of implicature, and defends metaphorical meaning as speaker-meaning. Each of those positions is subject to very telling objections from the other's point of view. This paper proposes a synthesis that combines the respective virtues of Davidson's and Searle's accounts and avoids all the objections to each.

This paper seeks to differentiate negative properties from positive properties, with the aim of providing the groundwork for further discussion about whether there is anything that corresponds to either of these notions. We differentiate negative and positive properties in terms of their functional role, before drawing out the metaphysical implications of proceeding in this fashion. We show that if the difference between negative and positive properties tabled here is correct, then negative properties are metaphysically contentious entities, entities that many philosophers will be unwilling to countenance.

I defend a new interpretation of Wittgenstein's notion of religious (or ethical) attitude in the Tractatus, one that rejects three key views from the secondary literature: firstly, the view that, for Wittgenstein, the willing subject is a transcendental condition for the religious attitude; secondly, the view that the religious attitude is an emotive response to the world or something closely modelled on this notion of emotive response; and thirdly, the view that, although the religious and ethical pseudo-propositions of the Tractatus are nonsensical, they nevertheless succeed in expressing the religious attitude endorsed by Wittgenstein. In connection to the first, I argue that the notion of willing subject as transcendental condition is abandoned by Wittgenstein in the Notebooks and is no longer a feature of his position in the Tractatus. In connection to the second, I argue that the religious attitude is dispositional rather than emotive for Wittgenstein: it is a disposition to use signs in a way that demonstrates one's conceptual clarity. Finally, in connection to the third, I argue that the religious or ethical attitude is strongly ineffable in that it cannot be described, expressed or conveyed by language at all.

A reductive theory of collective intentionality would imply that the ‘official’ intentions of an oppressive political authority cannot be constructed from the intentions of individuals when they follow the authority's rules. This makes it difficult to explain the unraveling of official group plans through time in a seemingly consistent fashion, and the corresponding source of coercion. A non-reductive theory, on the other hand, cannot capture whether the actions of individuals in an oppressive society are free or coerced, so long as a manifest institutional structure and rules are in place. I put forward a hybrid account of group intentionality that is capable of articulating why oppressive political power is illegitimate, which comes down to the official and individual intentions in joint group actions diverging in such a way that individuals are not governed on the basis of dependent reasons.

It is clear that natural entities can be preserved – they can be preserved because they can be harmed or destroyed, or in various other ways adversely affected. I argue that in light of the rise of scientism and other forms of philistinism, the political, religious, mythic, personal and historical meanings that people find in those entities can also be preserved. Against those who impugn disciplines such as fine arts, philosophy and sociology, I contend that this sort of preservation requires the efforts of those whose work exemplifies the core values of the arts, the humanities and the qualitative social sciences.

A bias against the past is a feature of our Zeitgeist, and has a number of manifestations. One of these is the dominant model of rational agency as geared towards producing effects or outcomes, a model which cannot make sense of the cogency of backward-looking reasons for action. I discuss the nature of such reasons, and the way of perceiving and understanding the past which goes with them. This mode of understanding the past is one of the things that gives substance to the idea that the past has a reality lacked by the future, a reality which among other things makes the past a possible object of contemplation (as in the study of history). Such contemplation is a crucial component of eudaimonia.