My paper concerns advice-sense reasons, where advice-sense reasons are reasons that are conceptually connected with genuine advice, which purports to track correct conclusions of practical deliberation. It is a common assumption-accepted without question by, for example, T. M. Scanlon (1998), Christine Korsgaard (1997), and Stephen Darwall (1983)—that there is only one advice—sense of "There is reason for A to X." My paper casts doubt on this assumption by making a case for the view that there are two advice-senses of the statement: the instrumental intention-based sense and the potentially non-intention-serving sense. My distinction grounds my contention that a common objection to the Humean view that practical reasoning is essentially instrumental reasoning is because there are no rationally required ends is mistaken.

Jaegwon Kim has articulated and defended what is now known as the "principle of explanatory exclusion" (PEX). Its importance cannot be understated. For among other things, Kim has employed PEX in his critiques of non-reductive accounts of mental causation. Nevertheless, in a recent critique, Ausonio Marras correctly observes that PEX, "has seemed highly counterintuitive to philosophers who regard individual events as identifiable by diverse descriptions…" For if events can be variously type-identified, what is there to prevent multiple explanations of a single event relative to the various type-identifications? In this paper, I explore the extent to which Marras’s criticisms of PEX can be sustained. I will argue that while Marras’s critique is instructive, his principal claim that a revised version of PEX yields no problematic consequences for non-reductive accounts of mental causation is false. Thus, if it ever was, Kim’s so-called "problem of explanatory exclusion" remains problematic.

There are two questions concerning spatial or temporal intervals that Hume does not carefully distinguish: (1) whether there is an infinity of indivisible parts and (2) whether every part has parts. Hume has two arguments answering no to (2). They have not been well understood, nor have they been refuted. The main attacks on these arguments come in Flew’s highly influential paper, so I will show that his attacks are misconceived, as are considerations raised by Fogelin and Laird. Ironically, the criticisms show neglect of Cantor’s conception of a line as an actual infinity. Along the way I will show that, just as time is an abstraction, so a moment is too, and I will answer the traditional criticism of Hume’s account of arriving at an idea of time—that one needs already to have the idea of time in order to get it in the way Hume describes.

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus claims or implies that a symbolism including no symbols for truth-operations other than "N" is (N1) expressively complete for propositions expressible in the predicate calculus (without identity) and (N2) univocal, but in such a way that (N3) it requires only a finite number of applications of the operation N (N4) on an ultimate basis of nothing but elementary propositions. Fogelin has challenged these four claims, and revoked only his challenge of N1. Geach and Soames have independently developed an interpretation of Wittgenstein’ s N-symbolism that they claim avoids all of these difficulties. I argue that their interpretation is indeed compatible with NI-N3, but not with N4. I then introduce a modification of the Geach/Soames interpretation, and argue that it is compatible with all four claims. This modified version employs just one operation besides the N-operator: substitution, which I argue is an expansion of Russell’s 1905-1907 theory of substitution.

Moral motivation is roughly divided into two competing models, conativism and cognitivism. Conativism accounts for moral motivation in terms of emotion or desire. Cognitivism claims motivation is reason-based, in that a certain belief or kind of belief is necessary for motivation. Cognitivism generally implies a hierarchical model of moral motivation: we have two independent sets of motivation, emotions and reasons, but moral action results from reason ruling over "lower level" emotions. The hierarchical model can claim superiority over conativism because reason accounts for autonomous action, while emotions, due to their subjective and uncontrollable nature, do not. My response to the hierarchical model is that it is not an adequate rejection of conativism in the case of Hume. I aim to show this by giving an account of the corrective role of sympathy in Hume’s moral theory.

Having set out one of Seyla Benhabib’s critiques of Jürgen Habermas, I continue with Iris Marion Young’s constructive critique of Benhabib. My goal is to develop their discussion of the moral point of view as demanding reciprocal but asymmetrical recognition; and to achieve this I introduce insights based on the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. I argue that despite initial appearances, Gadamer’s theory offers four significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamics of moral discourse.

In Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason Kant gives normative weight to a distinction between the intelligible and empirical characters of virtue: only the former kind of virtue has moral worth. Since the distinction between these two characters of virtue coincides with a distinction between unobservable and observable features of virtue, we must ask how Kant can grant this distinction practical moment. Kant states that the difference between the two characters of virtue is that the former involves a transformation of the disposition. An appeal to a transformation of what amounts to our intelligible character is no help, since this character is precisely inaccessible to us. I establish the practical relevance of the transformation of our disposition by identifying the resolution in which it consists. The normative sense of the distinction between two characters of virtue is further clarified with reference to Kant’s depiction of conscience in Religion.

According to Descartes, a materially false idea (i.e., a sensory idea such as RED) is an idea that mis-represents its object. Margaret Wilson argues that this feature of materially false ideas is best explained by attributing to Descartes a "two-factor" theory of content according to which the referential content of an idea is causally determined. After explaining Wilson’s arguments and their impact on the literature, I tender a different explanation of the referentiality of Descartes’ sensory ideas. I argue that the de re component of these ideas is best explained by Descartes’ view on how we "acquire" ideas and that once we understand their de re component in this light, it also becomes apparent that Descartes’ view on the content of (at least) sensory ideas is neither purely internalist (as the common interpretation wants it to be) nor purely externalist (as Wilson suggests).

Although the scope of the claim for value neutrality in science has narrowed in the past forty years, the ideal of science as value-free is still widely held by both philosophers and scientists. This paper directly challenges value-free science not as a practical possibility but as a normative ideal. Using a decision theoretic approach, I argue that values, most notably non-epistemic values, are a required part of good reasoning within science. With the ideal rejected, I then consider a challenge to that rejection in the form of placing limitations on scientists’ role in public life or on their moral responsibilities. Finally, I consider the implications of rejecting value-neutrality for objectivity.

In a recent challenge to higher-order theories of consciousness, Fred Dretske argues that conscious states can differ, there can be a conscious difference between conscious states, without consciousness of a difference. Therefore state consciousness should not be described as a state one is conscious of being in. An ambiguity in Dretske’s use of ‘conscious of’ leads to two different possible interpretations of this claim. Neither interpretation, unfortunately, is decisive against higher-order theories. Nonetheless, the examination of Dretske’s ‘Spot’ does result in the identification of a puzzle case that neither higher-order theories nor Dretske’s theory of consciousness adequately resolves.

Anti-pornography feminists are often criticized for their claim that pornography causes harm to women. Pornography does not, the critics insist, determine how its consumers think, feel, or act in fixed ways. This assertion seems true, but it only counts as an objection to anti-porn feminism if their argument depends upon a deterministic conception of causation. Does anti-porn feminism rely on such a conception of causation? I argue that it need not, and provide a philosophically defensible conception of causation to which anti-porn feminists can help themselves. This casts their argument in a more plausible light and renders their position stronger than usually supposed.

Many philosophers, including Foley, Burge, and Coady, have recently argued that we are justified in forming a belief on the basis of an utterance simply because the utterance is intelligible. On this line of reasoning, an agent can form a justified testimonial belief without possessing any reasons for believing that the testifier is reliable. By appealing to considerations about consistency, rationality, content, or meaning, their arguments purport to show that these beliefs are not only justified, but that they are justified a priori. In this paper, I argue that all of their arguments fail I conclude that testimonial beliefs formed on the basis of blind trust are neither justified nor justified a priori.

Recent work in the Continental tradition, by Jacques Derrida but more thoroughly by John Sallis, has offered a reinterpretation of the "errant cause" in Plato’s Timaeus, also called "receptacle" and finally chora. In this paper, I consider the following matters concerning this reinterpretation:

I argue that the radical otherness of the chora that is recognized and emphasized by the Continental thinkers, an otherness that precludes any classical translation and any assimilation into a rational account of the cosmos, builds upon and represents an advance over their predecessors in both textual and substantive fidelity. I conclude by suggesting that this otherness must be regarded as implicit in Timaeus’ "first," earlier account of causes.

In this paper, I will examine some contemporary attempts to do transcendental philosophy with a view toward a possible response to the historicity or contextuality of transcendental arguments, arguments which nonetheless avoid a naïve historicism or empiricism. I begin with a discussion of the transcendental or formal pragmatics of Apel and Habermas, a discussion which will reveal two problems: that of the relation between history and transcendental conditions, and that of closure, will then construe a deconstructive account of the "quasi-transcendental" role of difference and historicity as a response to these two problems. In the last section, I will sketch the relation between transcendental conditions and what they condition on a deconstructive account. I will show that this account seeks to avoid the problem of the immanence or closure of the field constituted by conditions of possibility.

From its inception in Kant’s strivings to imagine a "religion within the limits of reason alone," the "Continental" tradition has maintained a strict division of labor between theological and philosophical reflection on religion. In what follows, I examine this "Continental" legacy in the context of Derrida’s recent work on the concept of responsibility. First, I discuss three guiding themes (viz., the limits of systematic analysis, the idea of "non-dogmatic" religion, and the importance of "the other") that characterize the "Continental" tradition’s orientation towards philosophy of religion, as well as Derrida’s approach to the concept of responsibility. Second. I elucidate Derrida’s account of this concept as developed in two recent texts, "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority," and The Gift of Death. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the uses and limits of this account for religious (and theological) reflection.

Non-being is a fundamentally paradoxical concept. It seems we must either reduce it to something positive, a strategy rooted in Plato’s association of non-being with difference, or remain silent on the subject, as recommended by Wittgenstein. I argue that both strategies fail to account for certain experiences of absence and loss. Using Horst Hoheisel’s submission for "Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" as an example, and drawing on responses to the question of non-being found in the work of Bergson, Bion, and Levinas, I suggest the possibility of an alternative treatment: re-formulating absence as that which resists Being.

The traditional philosophical problem about other selves is the problem of other minds—the question of how we can know other beings exist who think and perceive. Merleau-Ponty is well-known for his solution to the problem in terms of the syncretic reciprocity of behavior. But Levinas’ efforts to express the radical alterity and ethical call of the other poses new problems: what precisely is this transcendence relationship with others? Is it beyond the embodied, reciprocal intersubjectivity that Merleau-Ponty lays out? In this paper I sort through and adjudicate some of the complexities between these two thinkers, showing some advantages in Levinas’ account of alterity, but also some problematic aspects that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh can ameliorate. The result is an attempt to do justice to the best of each thinker, to begin rendering an account of alterity that remains firmly elemental.

Habermas and Brandom remain divided on a key point in their theories of language concerning the priority of a participant vs. a third-person, observational perspective onto language. I examine this dispute as it has been played out in a recent exchange between them, attempting to salvage the defensible content of Habermas’s arguments for the priority of the participant’s perspective onto language. Many of Habermas’s points in this exchange are not well made, blurring crucial distinctions that are important for his argument. But he still has a point that highlights an important way in which Brandom fails to follow through in the development of his understanding of language as a distinctively social practice. The value of Habermas’s criticism of Brandom’s work lies not in exposing an unbridgeable gulf between their two positions, but in helping us to work out more consistently the social perspective onto language which informs both their work.

The goal of this paper is to re-examine Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of love that we find in Totality and Infinity, while being mindful of Luce Irigaray’s worries about this conception. Irigaray’s analysis of Levinas’s work points to what might be considered the most damning elements of Levinas’s thought, and her view needs to be taken seriously. But I also think there are other possibilities for reading Levinas with regard to the "feminine" in general, and his conception of love in particular. This task is completed in part by taking seriously Levinas’s claim in the preface to Totality and Infinity that Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption is "a work too often present in this book [Totality and Infinity] to be cited." I use Rosenzweig’s reading of love as a path into Levinas’s work.

Legal positivism sees law as fundamentally separate, exogenous, autonomous, acting upon society rather than acting within. I compare it with the common law model of law as endogenous or embedded. Both models are in some degree reflected in the methodology of American law; yet the two imply a deep inconsistency in our corporate belief in what law is. Common law theory gives a very different location to legal indeterminacy. Positivism places it within the fabric or "body" of law, while common law theory puts it outside, envisioning it as a condition of adjudicating human interaction and conflict according to a system of rules.

The development of a theory of a conceptually separate and autonomous law has not displaced the endogenous or embedded view inherited from the common law, and the two theories dictate fundamentally distinct and operationally different approaches to legal interpretation.

In this paper I claim that strictly speaking a Husserlian phenomenologist cannot describe essences. I demonstrate this claim by investigating the interrelationships between fact and essence, and intuition and expression. These investigations reveal that facts are relatively apparent and manifest, and as such they more readily lend themselves to straightforward description. Essences, however, are not apparent in the same way facts are. Essences are there in experience, but they are secreted among the facts. Given the quasi-hidden quality of essences, I argue that the only way phenomenology can fulfill its aim of making these essences manifest is to evoke them, and I show where Husserl himself intimates that this must be the case.

Attempting to reconcile a robust sense of human freedom with entrenched Church doctrines, Luis de Molina espoused for the first time a complete formulation of the doctrine of divine middle knowledge. However, it immediately sparked vigorous theological and philosophical debate. The debate has been revived, with Robert Adams as a leading opponent. Adams’ objection, roughly, is that the doctrine cannot be true since its (alleged) propositional objects lack the requisite metaphysical grounds for their being true. Breaking with many contemporary Molinists, I offer reasons for rejecting popular counterfactual semantics as a means to assess "conditionals of freedom." I then discuss an alternative way to assess "conditionals of freedom" revived by Richard Gaskin, offer an objection to it and argue that it is not as damaging as it first seems. I conclude, therefore, that a Molinist can respond to Adams’ type objections without relying upon popular semantics.

Feminists and their opponents typically view the ethic of justice as relevant to the public sphere, consigning the ethic of care to our private lives. An integrative approach views each theory informing the other—in both private and public arenas. I take this integrative approach in the public sphere, informing the principle of restitution with a care ethic as a mode of criminal justice. On the integrative approach to restitution, the concrete particulars of the offense give substantive content to the guiding principles of justice. Focus is on the particular individuals involved in the crime, their needs and future relationship, and their relationship to the wider community. Infusing abstract principles of justice with a care ethic yields a richer conception of restitution. It promises greater restoration of victim, offender, and community than traditional views of punishment or restitution interpreted simply as an abstract principle of justice devoid of considerations of care.

Aristotle’s references to empeiria, though few, demonstrate both its importance to Aristotle’s epistemology and theory of human cognition and the difficulties for the interpreter of Aristotle in explaining just what kind of cognition empeiria is. The importance of empeiria is undeniable; it is one of the crucial stages that we pass through as we develop from our cognitive beginnings in perception to our eventual achievement of nous, the intellectual grasping of first principles. But it is also puzzling; sometimes Aristotle suggests that the possession of empeiria is the grasp of a universal, but at other times he seems to think that it grasps only particulars. Likewise, the relationship between empeiria and logos, the human capacity for reason and language, is very mysterious. I argue that the connection between empeiria on the one hand and universals and logos on the other is much closer than interpreters have acknowledged.

I lay out a brief analysis of Heidegger’s notions of situatedness, attunement, and fundamental attunement—Befindlichkeit, Stimmung, Grundstimmung. I indicate the manner in which Heidegger’s thinking of the disclosive function of attunement develops into a notion of disclosure of socio-historical situation or "epoch," rather than simply of the "there" of individual Dasein. I use Heidegger’s sketch of this disclosive function of attunement to analyze the notions of apatheia and ataraxia associated with Hellenistic scepticism. I read these as attunements, or "tones" that disclose various positive and negative aspects of the thinking of Hellenistic culture, as that culture experiences the transition from insular parochialism to cosmopolitanism.

Leibniz seems to hold a version of divine concurrence in which God shares causal power with finite substances, but he doesn’t give an explicit account. Instead he gives a somewhat vague reference to perfection and limitation. He says that God produces what is perfect in substances while the substances themselves are responsible for imperfections in them. In this paper I discuss Leibniz’s doctrine of the complete concept of an individual substance, and his account of Divine Will and creation, and I show how these play roles in the perfection-limitation doctrine. The divine will contributes the perfection, the complete concept contributes the limitation, and together, God and the substance concur in the production of effects. This interpretation explicates Leibniz’s discussion of perfection and limitation, thus yielding a plausible account of divine concurrence.

William Hanson has recently criticized informal expositions given by Quine and Jeffrey of the concept of logical consequence in first-order logic with identity. Hanson maintains that by appealing to truth or falsity in the actual world rather than in possible worlds in fixing the extension of validity, these analyses turn intuitively invalid arguments into valid ones. In this paper, I argue against this by showing how Hanson misrepresents the two analyses; appropriately understood, both invalidate the relevant arguments. This is evidence for thinking that truth and falsity simpliciter suffice to fix the extension of logical consequence in first-order logic with identity.

Moral concepts seem to be different in important ways from other sorts of concepts. Speakers don’t bring their conceptual competence into question by taking deviant moral views, and moral disputes don’t seem to be governed by the kinds of authority and deference relations characteristic of other kinds of disagreements. These features suggest that moral concepts are essentially contestable: the concepts themselves don’t decide between competing substantive accounts of how to use them. I argue that the essential contestability thesis is false, though considering its appeal forces us to respect important features of our moral discourse. Instead, the hopes for a substantive view of moral concepts lie with a quasi-empirical bet about the resolvability of actual moral disagreement. Shared meaning, in the moral case as elsewhere, rests on shared commitments to certain canons of reasoning. I suggest how this view can preserve the essential practical role of moral concepts.

A number of philosophers think that while we cannot explain how the mind is physical we can know that it is physical, nonetheless. That is, they accept both the explanatory gap between the mental and the physical and ontological physicalism. I argue that once one accepts the explanatory gap, the main argument for ontological physicalism, the argument from causation, looses its force. For if one takes physical/nonphysical causation and ontological physicalism to be equally mysterious, as physicalists who accept the explanatory gap are inclined to do, there is little justification for accepting ontological physicalism rather than rejecting causal interaction between the physical and the nonphysical.

There has been a great deal of debate in recent years about the proper analysis of the concept of desert. Philosophers disagree about what kinds of things can be deserving, what kinds of things can be deserved, and what kinds of facts can serve as reasons for desert, or desert-bases. I argue that this debate is unimportant. What is important about desert is its use, what it does for us. I argue that the moral force of desert-claims can be preserved in the absence of knowledge of the correct analysis of the concept of desert itself. After identifying the source of the moral force of desert-claims, I discuss the implications of my thesis for the view that justice requires giving people what they deserve.

In Chapter Eight of What We Owe to Each Other, T.M. Scanlon attempts to use his theory, which includes the principle of reasonable rejectability, a conception of reasons, and the contractarian framework and its accompanying motivation, to show that it is able to provide some of the same attractive features as relativistic theories, while maintaining universal moral status.

After describing Scanlon’s tripartite classification of morality and values, I critically examine the way in which he tries to accommodate convention and social customs. I argue that the Principle of Established Practices does not in any sense "explain" the moral weight of social meanings as Scanlon claims. I further argue that it is unclear what if any connection the contractarian framework has with the substantive moral conclusions Scanlon states in Chapter Five of the work.

A well-known argument against the Putnam/Burge-style thesis of semantic externalism about mental content is that only internalism is compatible with the causal efficacy of the mental.

In the initial sections of this paper I assess and reject two partial-analyses of the notion of causal efficacy, both of which undermine the internalist’s argument and so have been endorsed by externalists. In the final section I propose a novel analysis of that notion which avoids the objections I have raised—and it turns out to support the internalist’s argument.

In the end I hope to have shown two things: first, a substantial bit about the notion of causal efficacy, which has never been well-understood; and second, that semantic externalism does, after all, entail epiphenomenalism about the mental.

In his Principles of Human Knowledge, Berkeley claims that materialism, the doctrine that some things exist or can exist unperceived, "will be found at bottom to depend on the doctrine of abstract ideas." But it has proven exceedingly difficult to understand what this dependence consists in. I argue that when located in their Cartesian context, these arguments and their relation to materialism become intelligible. For among Berkeley’s targets is the Cartesian conception of material substance as a determinable quality capable of existing independently of its modes; this conception is one cause of the "extravagancies" of the materialists. Against this position, Berkeley deploys the conceivability principle (if x is conceivable, x is possible), although he does not offer the ‘impossibility argument’ (which requires the premises that if x is conceivable, x is consistent and that if x is consistent, x is possible) attributed to him by Kenneth Winkler and others.

In Chapter 6 of The Nature of True Minds John Heil argues that semantic opacity in a representational system arises from the representer’s having second-order representations of its own first-order representational states (which can be construed as a form of self-consciousness). I offer an account of opacity which (unlike the substitution test) can be applied to all forms of representation, including those which are not perspicuously expressible in a natural language. Using this account of opacity and Heil’s notion of weak representation, I argue on the basis of hypothetical examples that second-order representation is neither necessary nor sufficient for opacity.

I offer a two-pronged rejoinder to Jaegwon Kim’s claim that nonreductive physicalists are committed to epiphenomenalism. First, I argue that while physicalists should affirm the causal closure of the physical world, the requisite principle of closure is not so strong as to rule out the very possibility of non-physical overdetermining causes of human behaviour. Secondly, I argue that Kim’s exclusion argument loses its force if we endorse a metaphysical framework in which events are coarse particulars, for, in such a metaphysical framework, the notion that a mental cause is a physical event several of whose properties are causally relevant to its behavioural effects involves no problematic overdetermination.

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) offers a new integrative framework for analyzing interactions between development and evolution. Biologists and philosophers are keen on evo-devo in part because it appears to offer a comfort zone between, on the one hand, what some take to be the relative sterility of mainstream population genetics to integrate a developmental perspective; and, on the other hand, what some take to be developmental systems theorists’ intractable synthesis of development and evolution. In this essay, I outline core concerns of evo-devo, distinguish theoretical variants, and counter Sterelny’s recent argument that evo-devo‘s attention to development, while important, offers no significant challenge to evolutionary theory as we know it.

What Reid misses is the role Descartes gives to representation in sense-perception. I argue that the version of "representationalism" Reid attributes to the Cartesian system of ideas ill-suits Descartes’s actual views, and that Descartes embraces neither of the "prejudices" Reid takes to be the grounds of the ideal system. Instead, I suggest we try an entirely different approach to understanding why Descartes admits representation into sense-perception—one that understands his main concern to be how we achieve intelligible experience through a welter of sensations.

Christine Korsgaard claims that an agent is less than fully rational if she treats some desire as reason-giving even though she cannot justify doing so. I argue that there is a middle way, which Korsgaard misses, between the Humean claim that our desires neither need nor admit of rational assessment, and the Kantian claim that our desires always require justification: an agent needs reasons to opt out of her concerns, and so out of those desires which reflect her concerns — not reasons to opt into them or stay in. As long as an agent has no good reason to abandon some concern, she is reasonable to treat the desires associated with it as reason-giving. A rational agent must therefore have the capacity to form higher-order attitudes toward her desires; but rationality only requires that she exercize that capacity when she has some good reason to do so.

Samuel Clarke was one of the most influential rationalist moralists of the eighteenth century and Francis Hutcheson is generally seen as one of the most important critics of rationalism. Much of the secondary literature that deals with Hutcheson’s moral sense theory tends to characterize it in terms not only of its opposition to moral rationalism generally but more particularly to Samuel Clarke’s "moral fitness" theory. Without in any way diminishing the epistemological contrast between Hutcheson and Clarke, I will argue in what follows that Hutcheson’ s theory of morality shares far more common ground with Clarke’s morality than is generally acknowledged. I hope to bring to light an otherwise unexpected continuity between moral sense theory and the earlier versions of moral rationalism to which it is usually opposed.

Allan Gibbard has developed a theory of normative judgement based on an expressivist theory of norms and the communities of judgement we form as normative agents. Gibbard argues that pressures of conversation and cooperation "nudge us toward consensus." In this paper I am most concerned with the normative status of these communities of judgement, into which we have been nudged. I argue that certain norms have normative force only in virtue of community membership. However, as Gibbard presents his theory, it is difficult to see how communities of judgement can be the sorts of things that have the requisite normative authority. In the paper I examine Gibbard’s norm-expressivist account of judgement and show that these communities of judgement require a more robust notion of social groups than that which Gibbard presents. I sketch a more robust treatment of social groups by building on such views as those of Margaret Gilbert.

Contextualism holds that the standards for a belief to count as knowledge vary by context. But contextualism ignores the role the concept of knowledge plays in allowing a community to divide epistemic labor among members. Dividing epistemic labor requires a great degree of uniformity in the standards for a belief to qualify as knowledge, and so contextualism impedes the social practices of transmitting and applying knowledge. An avenue for the further development of contextualism is suggested that would balance the benefits of contextualism with the need to divide epistemic labor. This suggestion consists of limiting the number of different standards that can be evoked by a context and linking each to a non-contextual epistemic operator.

Opponents of the infamous principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) have leaned heavily on a counterexample strategy. In response to this style of argument, defenders of PAP have employed a two-pronged reply. First, they argue that many of the counterexamples breach a kind of dialectical propriety by assuming surreptitiously that causal determinism obtains. Second, the defenders of PAP attempt to show that, provided the case does not beg the question, one can always find an alternative possibility to build responsibility upon. Together, these two prongs create a dilemma that seems to threaten the counterexample strategy. Recently, John Fischer and Derk Pereboom have mounted separate attacks against both horns of this dilemma. My argument is that an intuitively plausible principle of exculpation will allow the defender of the relevance of alternatives to resist both of their arguments.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body suggests that it is through the renewed creative abilities of embodied existence that we are able to acquire a heightened sense of self and world. Central to his description of the body is the concept of the ‘virtual body’ that enables us to turn our actual situation into a world of symbolic meaning. Most scholars have overlooked this aspect of his philosophy of the body and suggest that it is only in his later works that we find an original theory of the imagination. A closer reading of the earlier texts, however, reveals that the later theory of imagination is already implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body, in which presence is made possible by means of the virtual body and the real is saturated by the imaginary. Thus even in his earlier works, Merleau-Ponty is attempting to disclose the imaginative traces of the perceptual, the invisible lining of the visible, a project that forms the groundwork for his later studies of flesh, intercorporeity, and reversibility.

In this paper I discuss a major objection to Intention-Based Semantics (IBS). Stephen Schiffer has argued that in order to make the IBS analysis of meaning sufficient, one must add restrictions that are psychologically impossible to fulfill, thereby making IBS untenable. In what follows, I explain the elements of IBS that require it to invoke these psychologically unrealizable restrictions. I then accept Schiffer’s criticism, but modify its significance to IBS. I argue that the problem that Schiffer notes is not a reason to reject IBS. Instead, IBS uncovers the following deeply fascinating fact about the nature of meaning and communication: meaning is best understood as an absolute concept—an unrealizable ideal limit. I conclude by exploring some implications of explaining meaning and communication as absolute concepts.

In recent years, a revisionist strand has appeared within both incompatibilist and compatibilist theories of free will and responsibility. Perhaps the best recognized place is a wing of compatibilism (championed by Dennett) that invokes considerations about "the varieties of free will worth wanting." However, incompatibilists of various stripes have long signaled an openness to revisionism of a particular sort. Incompatibilists typically admit that the truth of determinism would require substantial revision in our responsibility-characteristic practices. In this paper I attempt to provide a framework for systematic discussion of the disparate revisionist threads in the literature and their relationship to one another. In particular, I (1) aim to identify the various kinds of revisionisms, (2) highlight their natural connections to existing theories of responsibility, and (3) illustrate the ways in which sophisticated revisionism might represent an advance over standard theories of responsibility.

That self-respecting people must not tacitly approve of wrongs done to them creates a presumption against forgiveness. Some argue that this presumption can be overcome when one "separates" the wrongdoer from the wrongdoing, but what does this mean?

I argue that 1) is subject to counterexample, 2) under1ines the sense in which one can forgive a wrongdoer, and although 3) may be a necessary condition for forgiveness as such, it is not so because of any connection to tacit approval.

Alvin Plantinga has famously argued that naturalism is self-defeating. Plantinga’s argument is, at its heart, an argument from analogy. Plantinga presents various epistemic situations and claims of each that (i) a person in such a situation has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs, and (ii) a reflective naturalist is in a relevantly similar situation. I present various epistemic situations and claim of each that a person in such a situation does not have an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs. I further claim that at least some of these situations are more relevantly like the situation faced by the reflective naturalist than any of the situations Plantinga describes. Therefore, Plantinga’s argument fails to establish that the reflective naturalist has an undefeated defeater for each of his beliefs and hence fails to establish that naturalism is self-defeating.

Recently, philosophers have employed the notion of advice to tackle a variety of philosophical problems. Michael Smith, for one, argues you have a reason to N if your ideally rational self would advise you to N (the advice model), and that if you believe your ideally rational self would advise you to N, then either you will desire to N, or you are irrational (the practicality requirement). Here I argue that the advice model and the practicality requirement are both false, because advice is more complicated that Smith presumes. While one who accepts advice usually acts on it, this is not always the case. As a result, advisers must often tailor the content of their advice to take advantage of situations where advisees have these idiosyncratic motivational structures. And this means that advisers don’t always advise their advisees to do that which they really want them to do.

"Pure reflection" is an important concept that bridges Sartre’s early ontology and ethics. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre spent a section discussing the ontological characteristics of pure reflection. In Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre explored the ethical implications of the ontological characteristics of pure reflection that he presented in Being and Nothingness, and used pure reflection as an essential stage leading to "authenticity."

While many commentators have recognized the importance of pure reflection in Sartre’s ethics, few have studied the ontological characteristics of pure reflection closely. But without a thorough understanding of the ontological characteristics of pure reflection, we lack the ground to understand the ethical implications of pure reflection and subsequently Sartre’s early ethics as a whole. To obtain the ground, I pursue a detailed study of the ontological characteristics of pure reflection and offer a phenomenological model of pure reflection.

In this paper, I investigate Nancy Fraser’s thesis that groups which suffer from both misrecognition and maldistribution face an inevitable dilemma: either adopt remedies for the economic injustice that tend to put the group out of business as such, or adopt remedies for the misrecognition that tend to reinforce the group’s differentiating characteristics. I argue that, although she introduces useful ways of distinguishing between the causes of harm to groups, her typology of groups based on these harms and her conclusion of an inevitable dilemma between available remedies both suffer from an overly objectivistic account of group identities. In particular, by using Axel Honneth’s distinctions between the inner logics of different types of social collectivities and their recognition struggles, and by examining different types of political struggles concerned with gender and sexual identity, I argue that groups facing both kinds of injustice do not necessarily face the dilemma Fraser claims.