There is more to akrasia than meets the eye: it can occur in speech and perception, cognitively and emotionally as well as between decision and action. But because it is over-determined and because it occurs in opaque intentional contexts, its attribution remains highly fallible. The lures of akrasia are the same as those that are exercised in ordinary psychological and cognitive inferential contexts.

In this essay an attempt is made to transcend the divide between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of history by proposing an alternative account of understanding the past, one based on the nature of testimonies, specifically their scope and depth. This is done through a critical engagement with the works of prominent realist and anti-realist philosophers of history (Bevir/Lorenz and Ankersmit/White, respectively); other philosophers working on relevant topics such as epistemology, and historians who have written on historical method. The alternative account thus developed is then tested by applying it to the case of the Historikerstreit, the bitterly waged historian's struggle concerning the history and legacy of Nazism. On the surface it appears to affirm the anti-realist position that posits historical narratives as being inherently normative/aesthetic given the inadequacies of the ‘thick’ realist position, but upon closer scrutiny it demonstrates the merit of my alternative, testimony-based ‘thin’ realist account.

The aim of this paper is to generalize a pair of concepts that are widely used in the history of science, in art history and in historical linguistics – the concept of internal and external history – and to replace the often very vague talk of ‘historical narratives’ with this conceptual framework of internal versus external history. I argue that this way of framing the problem allows us to see the possible alternatives more clearly – as a limited number of possible relations between internal and external history. Finally, I argue that while external history is metaphysically prior to internal history, when it comes to historical explanations, we need both.

In a recent essay Duncan Pritchard argues that there is no fundamental epistemological distinction between religious belief and ordinary or non-religious belief. Both of them – so he maintains in the footsteps of Wittgenstein's On certainty – are ultimately grounded on a-rational commitments, namely, commitments unresponsive to rational criteria. I argue that, while this view can be justified theologically, it cannot be advanced philosophically as Pritchard assumes.

I offer an account of Aquinas's reflection on faith and reason to show that the theologian – not the philosopher – is entitled to deal with a-rational commitments, because the truths of faith can be seen as simply intellectual – like the rational statements considered by the philosopher – but also as decisions made by way of divine grace. I also suggest that Pritchard's thesis may be re-proposed on a new basis, if Aquinas's theological stance were reinterpreted so as to point out unexpected connections between theology and philosophy.

I argue against Greco's account of the value of knowledge, according to which knowledge is distinctively valuable vis-à-vis that which falls short of knowledge in virtue of its status as an achievement and achievements being finally valuable. Instead, I make the case that virtuous belief is also an achievement. I argue that the nature of knowledge is such that knowledge is finally valuable in a way that virtuous belief is not, precisely because knowledge is not simply a success from ability. The value of knowledge lies in the positive responsiveness of the world to an agent's epistemic virtuousness.

This dialogue on thought and language is a sequel to my dialogue ‘Thought and Thinking’, but can be read independently of it. The five disputants are the same as in the previous dialogue, namely Socrates; an imaginary neuroscientist from California (whose opinions reflect those of contemporary cognitive neuroscientists); an Oxford don from the 1950s (who employs the linguistic analytic techniques of his times); a Scottish post-doctoral student; and John Locke (who speaks for himself). The discussion takes place in Elysium in the early evening after dinner. They discuss the relationship between what one thinks and what one says, examine the reasons for supposing that there must be a language of thought and show why there cannot be one, investigate the supposition that thought must have a medium – that one must think in something (words, ideas, pre-linguistic concepts) – and demonstrate that it cannot have one. They investigate whether there can be non-linguistic thinking and whether non language-using animals can be said to think, and determine the limits of thought and thinking.

This paper is a response to a paper by Marcus Giaquinto in which he argues that lexical meaning is moderately indeterminate and that this poses a problem for the linguistic view of a priori knowledge. I argue that accepting the moderate indeterminacy thesis as he presents it is perfectly compatible with both the linguistic view in general and the specific suggestion that some a priori knowledge can be explained by appealing to synonymy. I also argue that, in fact, Giaquinto's considerations speak in favour of the linguistic view rather than against it. The general lesson is that, contrary to what might be suspected, the linguistic view does not presuppose an implausibly simple and tidy conception of lexical meaning.