The general framework of this paper relies on the observation that the practice of science as an experimental research program involves a social network of subjects working together (Latour 1988; Stengers 1994), both as co-researchers and as co-subjects of experiments. We want to take this basic observation seriously in order to explore how the objectivity of scientific results obtained thereby is highly affected and dependent on multifarious ‘intersubjective regulations.’ By intersubjective regulations we mean the different ways in which each subject/ researcher is able to account for his or her experience and share it with other subjects/researchers (comparing it, differentiating between each of them, seeing similarities and even identities, but also producing conflictive accounts) to the point of giving way to a re-styled objectivity founded on such ruled inter-individual practices (Husserl1954, 1973; Depraz 1995; Varela 1999):

Evolutionary ethics, the idea that the evolutionary process contains the basis for a full and adequate understanding of human moral nature, is an old and disreputable notion. It was popularized in the 19th century by the English general man of science, Herbert Spencer, who began advocating an evolutionary approach to ethical understanding, even before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 (Spencer 1857, 1892). Although it was never regarded with much enthusiasm by professional philosophers, thanks to Spencer’s advocacy the evolutionary approach to ethics soon gained wide popularity, both in Britain and towards the end of the century, even more in the United States of America (Ruse 1986; Russett 1976). It became transformed into a whole sociopolitical doctrine, known somewhat inaccurately as ‘Social Darwinism.’ (Scholars have long debated as to whether Darwin himself was truly a Social Darwinian, and the answer seems to depend on which of his works you read. If you look at the Origin of Species, he certainly is not. On the other hand, if you look at the Descent of Man, there are good reasons for thinking that he was not unsympathetic to the idea.

The facts of global poverty are staggering. Consider, for instance, how 1.5 billion people subsist below the international poverty line, which means about a quarter of the world's current population lives in poverty. There is much talk about how freer markets will help the situation of these people, in particular how it will help the worst off. So far the evidence for this claim is fairly unclear. ‘

At any rate, on several accounts, alleviating the worst aspects of poverty would impose fairly small costs on us in more affluent countries, yet we continue to do very little about alleviating this situation. For instance, a 1 per cent tax on world product would make enormous inroads in lifting people out of poverty. Alternatively, simply a shift in priorities could do this without any added taxes: a 1 per cent decrease in military spending in the developed world and a 10 per cent decrease in military spending in the developing world could have the same effect.

As is well enough known, the term physis in Empedocles Fr. 8 (DK) is cited by Aristotle in the Metaphysics (Δ 4,1014b36-1015a3) as meaning the ousia of natural things, in the sense of the stable substance or form that is the terminus of generation (a10-11). This interpretation is rejected almost unanimously by commentators. The three or four attempts to defend it have not proved convincing. The case now seems officially closed. Yet there remain some loose ends. These are of the kind that would keep bothering television detectives and would cause enough loss of sleep to prompt a fresh investigation of a whole case. Is that procedure called for here?

The error theory of moral judgment says that moral judgments, though often believed to be objectively true, never are. The tendency to believe in the objectivity of our moral beliefs, like the beliefs themselves, is rooted in objective features of human psychology, and not in objective features of the natural world that might exist apart from human psychology. In naturalized epistemology, it is tempting to take this view as the default hypothesis. It appears to make the fewest assumptions in accounting for the fact that humans not only make moral judgments, but believe them to be, at least some of the time, objectively true. In this paper I argue that from an evolutionary perspective, the error theory is not the most parsimonious alternative. It is simpler to suppose that mental representations with moral content arose as direct cognitive and motivational responses to independent moral facts.

Jerry Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work That Way (2000; hereafter Mind) purports to do a number of things. To name three: First, it aims to show what is problematic about recent evolutionary psychology, especially as popularized in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997). Fodor's particular target here is the rose-coloured view of evolutionary psychology as offering a “new synthesis” in integrating computational psychology with evolutionary theory. Second, Fodor's book poses a series of related, in-principle problems for any cognitive theory that revolve around the putative tension between the local nature of computational processing and the global nature of at least some cognitive processing. And third, it reiterates Fodor's earlier argument, in The Modularity of Mind, for the hopelessness of trying to extend the notion of modularity from “input systems” to “central systems.“

Is a singularist conception of causation coherent? That is to say, is it possible for two events to be causally related, without that relationship being an instance of some causal law, either basic or derived, and either probabilistic or non-probabilistic? Since the time of Hume, the overwhelmingly dominant philosophical view has been that such a conception of causation is not coherent.

The main claim of this paper is that Plato's views on social and individual good as well as his criticism of democracy can be best understood as a conscious attempt to contrast with Periclean conceptions of freedom and democracy a new point of view. It will be argued that it is a mistake to see Plato's view as either democratic or authoritarian. An adequate understanding of Plato will focus on some difficult questions concerning the relationship between freedom and knowledge; questions that are rarely if ever faced clearly today. The Platonic conception and its clash with Pericles raises also some important and still unresolved questions about human motivation.

I was brought up to believe that, in the “great debate” with the Rationalists, the Empiricists had largely won, particularly in view of Quine's holistic conception of justification, whereby even the claims of logic, though remote from experience, are indirectly tested by it. But some years ago I awoke to the possibility that there was something fishy in all this, and that the fallibilistic banalities that have played such a large role in driving the Quinean conception couldn't plausibly have such dramatic consequences. “Everything can be revised in the light of experience” is good advice for someone who hasn't noticed just how rich, complex and indirect our reasonings about any issue, including logic and mathematics, can be; but does it really tell against what Kant and the others had in mind when they believed that there were some claims whose justification needn't appeal to experience (which, it's crucial to remember, is how he and others thought of it, until the Positivists and Quine revised it to “unrevisability“)?

A great deal has been written about Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. But in those writings little attention has been devoted to analyzing the structure and argument of Chapter I of that work. The discussions of Chapter I that one finds in most of the commentaries on the Grundlegung do little to uncover and set forth any overall structure or argument in the chapter.

But in fact Chapter I contains a sustained argument beginning with the first sentence and continuing through to the point where the principle of morality is stated toward the end of the chapter. When this argument is made apparent, it is also apparent that Chapter I has a definite role to play in the economy of the whole work. Chapter I establishes what the “supreme principle of morality” is by an analysis of the concept of moral goodness. Chapter II continues with an exposition, using technical philosophical terminology, of that same principle; and Chapter III, of course, aims to justify that principle.

How many truth-values are there? Although this appears to be a very simple question, in my opinion it defies any very simple answer. Some of us have trouble making up our minds. Frege, who invented the term “truth-value”, declared that apart from Truth and Falsity “there are no further truth-values”; and yet Frege, who introduced many of us to semantic presuppositions, acknowledged truth-value gaps. Now how many values would that be? On one way of counting, True, False and Gap make three. To be sure it's not Frege's way of counting; but it's defensible. And we are left with the historical puzzle that Frege, who founded his semantics on the insistence that functions be everywhere defined—without any gaps—has come to be known as the author of the doctrine of semantic presuppositions and truth-value gaps.

This paper will examine Rawls’ Theory of Justice as the most coherent twentieth century restatement of the liberal egalitarian paradigm. It will examine Rawls’ assertion that his theory is in the tradition of the state of nature/contractarian formulation of that paradigm, with particular reference to the parallels between Locke's formulation and his own. The paper will note that in both formulations:

a) The principles of justice formulated are sub specie aeternitatis but it will be argued that in fact they are, in their more developed form under “more favourable” historical conditions, the principles acknowledged by liberal man.

b) The principles developed by men in “reasonably favourable conditions” (R., 5.82,542) are principles both of equality and inequality. However, it will be argued that the inequality principle takes precedence over the equality principle and, in fact, in its theoretical and practical manifestations, makes void the fair value of the equality principle itself.

Since its appearance in 1971, John Rawls’ A Theory of justice has attracted much critical attention. Most of this attention has inevitably centred on the two principles of justice for institutions and on their derivation from the original position. This paper will examine a part of the system which has not yet received such close scrutiny — Rawls’ theory of political obligation in general and civil disobedience in particular. My main aim is to understand this theory, since there are crucial respects in which it is undeveloped. But I shall also along the way comment on its possibilities; these comments will for the most part take the form of comparisons with its utilitarian rival.

In what follows I shall not confine myself to the material in Rawls’ book, but rather use the appearance of the book as an opportunity to review the development of the theory of political obligation since “Justice as Fairness”. When one surveys the period bounded by that initial paper and by the book, certain patterns form.

Common Sense Morality condemns us for being indifferent to the suffering of others. Even so, it sharply distinguishes between this and our knowingly and needlessly contributing to the suffering of others. (That we are talking about voluntary behavior throughout is to be understood.) And it holds that the latter constitutes the greater moral wrong. It would seem that common sense morality is not without a point. From the premise that a person knowingly and needlessly takes steps to cause others to suffer, it would certainly be correct for us to conclude that he desires to see others suffer and is sufficiently motivated by this desire that he brings about the suffering of others.

Near the beginning of this century an episode of note occurred in Vienna. In 1894 the University had commissioned Gustav Klimt to paint a series of panels depicting the triumph of light over darkness. The first panel that Klimt finished, in 1900, represented Philosophy. The Faculty, evidently, had hoped for something like Raphael's depiction of the School of Athens: Plato, Aristotle, perhaps Galileo and Hume and Kant and Mach, would discourse gravely whilst a suitably impressed crowd of bystanders looked on and learned.

If α and α’ are distinct variables and ϕ and ϕ’ are open sentences of some language, where ϕ’ is the result of replacing one or more free occurrences of a in α with free occurrences of α’ in ϕ’, then a universal closure of ⌜(α=α’ → (ϕ → ϕ’))⌝, is an indiscernibility principle of that language. For instance, (1) is an indiscernibility principle.

The existence of opaque constructions falsifies the familiar unrestricted principle of substitution which affirms that co-referential expressions are intersubstitutable in all contexts without change of truth-value. But indiscernibility principles are another matter. Not every counter-example to the unrestricted principle of substitution is a counter-example to some indiscernibility principle. Indeed, it is likely to be thought that there is no counter-example to any indiscernibility principle, and that the semantics of variables and objectual quantification ensures that all indiscernibility principles are true.

The overriding concern of the Republic is the relation between morally (or socially or politically) right (or just) action and happiness (or prudence). To settle the matter Plato says he must first discover the formula for politically just action for individuals, and that it will be easier to do this if we first take justice to be a virtue of a city as a whole. He develops a model of an ideal city, hardly mentioning justice and the other cardinal virtues, and then looks to that model to individuate them.

Here I shall first discuss the defense of his portrait of an ideal city. Second, the logic of virtue (arete) is considered, in two steps. It is argued that judgments of virtue are to be split into those of function (ergon) and power (dynamis). Then there is a brief consideration of each half. Third, the implications of this for understanding and threefold classification of goods are drawn. Finally, there is a discussion of the formula for each of the cardinal virtues of a city.

Intuitionism has for many years been a poor relation among the various metaethical theories, commonly thought both parochial and irrational. Most recent writers who attempt a survey of ethical theory mention it briefly in an embarrassed sort of way, and then dismiss it in a paragraph or two. John Rawls, however, does not share this common attitude. In his recent book he represents his own theory as being an alternative both to intuitionism and to utilitarianism, and it is apparent from his discussion that he takes both of these latter theories seriously, as having substantial attraction to reasonable men. Those sympathetic to intuitionism have no doubt been cheered by Rawls’ respectful treatment; but they are likely also to have been dismayed by the fact that, because he focuses upon a somewhat unusual understanding of it, he does not make clear how his theory stands in relation to intuitionism in its most general form, nor whether there are varieties of intuitionism consistent with the whole of his theory or at least with important parts of it. I shall try to answer these questions here.

The revival of interest in contractarian theories of morals and politics may encourage us to enquire into the prospects for a contractarian theory of law. Such a theory would be normative, aiming, not at the best explanation or justification of our actual legal practices and institutions, but rather at a rational reconstruction of those practices and institutions from the perspective of agreement among maximizing individuals. It would offer a secular and instrumental rationale for law that requires no dubious assumptions about the objectivity of values or the existence of moral order in the universe. Of course, such a reconstruction might fail, leading to a skeptical conclusion. Rational individuals, in a position to decide on their terms of interaction, might reject any structure that we should recognize as a legal framework. But this must seem unlikely. We may compare law with morality, recognizing that both have arisen in a framework of teleological and theological understandings that are themselves no longer plausible to us, without supposing that either must therefore be wanting from the perspective of rational agreement.