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.

One natural way of explaining the phenomenon of akrasia, or weakness of will, would be this: to describe a conflict between a desire that is more or less rational (that represents, or corresponds to, a considered judgment on what is to be done), and a desire that is rather less rational, where the less rational desire wins out ‘against one’s better judgment.’ To explain what makes two such desires conflicting desires (as opposed to being just two different desires), it is then natural to suggest that they originate in distinct ‘parts of the soul’ (or in distinct ‘partitions of the mind’).

The announced project of the Meditations, it is usually supposed, is to get rid of all error by rejecting everything that might be false, thus retaining only what is certainly true; the next step is to acquire further certainly true beliefs by valid inference from that foundation.

The notion of representation figures centrally both in Descartes’ scientific theorizing about sense in humans and in his conceptual speculations about the nature of human cognition.

Descartes’ philosophical innovation in the Dioptrics is the claim that sensing in humans is a kind of representing rather than a kind of resembling. This provides the cornerstone for his attack on traditional theories of sense, and it underwrites his own position that sensing (in humans) is a kind of thinking, ascribable to the rational soul rather than to any Aristotelean sensitive soul.

Substance dualism, once a main preoccupation of Western metaphysics, has fallen strangely out of view; today’s mental/physical dualisms are dualisms of fact, property, or event. So if someone claims to find a difference between minds and bodies per se, it is not initially clear what he is maintaining. Maybe this is because one no longer recognizes ‘minds’ as entities in their own right, or ‘substances.’ However, selves - the things we refer to by use of ‘I’ - are surely substances, and it does little violence to the intention behind mind/body dualism to interpret it as a dualism of bodies and selves. If the substance dualist’s meaning remains obscure, that is because it can mean several different things to say that selves are not bodies.

Philosophy is not history, not even intellectual history. The history of philosophy is history, a branch of intellectual history. Yet it is widely believed, by philosophers and historians of philosophy alike, that the study of the history of philosophy is an important part of the study of philosophy.

It is a compelling idea that the calculus of individuals proposed by Leonard and Goodman articulates the concept of parthood.1 However, the persistence of material objects through some changes of parts, and their failure to persist through other changes in the organization of their parts present a serious challenge to this idea.

This is an enquiry into flawed explanations. Most of the effort in studies of the concept of explanation, scientific or otherwise, has gone into the contrast between clear cases of explanation and clear non-explanations.

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.

Many questions concerning the nature of the mind have remained intractable since their first systematic discussion by the ancient Greeks. What is the nature of knowledge, and how is it possible to represent the world? What are consciousness and free will? What is the self and how is it that some organisms are more intelligent than others? Since it is now overwhelmingly evident that these are phenomena of the physical brain, it is not surprising that an established empirical and theoretical foundation in this domain has eluded us for so long. For in order to understand what we are and how we work, we must understand the brain and how it works. Yet the brain is exceedingly difficult to study, and research on any significant scale is critically dependent on advanced technology.

When I hear someone speaking and understand what is said, do I translate the words I hear into words of my own? I think the answer in general is ‘No.’ Of course, I might sometimes have to translate what I hear if I am not very good in the language the other person is speaking. But if I speak that language well, and the other person is speaking clearly and intelligbly enough, I simply understand. There is no question of translating what I hear into words of my own. If I speak the language, the words I hear are words of my own. I don’t need any others.

Now, we stand outcast and starving,

Mid the wonders we have made… .

(From ‘Solidarity Forever,’ by Ralph Chaplin)

I belong to a school of thought which has been called analytical Marxism. Some of the partisans of this position, and that includes me, are deeply engaged by questions in moral and political philosophy which have not, in the past, attracted the attention of Marxists. We are concerned with exactly what a commitment to equality requires, and with exactly what sort of obligations productive and talented people have to people who are relatively unproductive, or handicapped, or in special need. We seek a precise definition of what exploitation is, and we want to know exactly why it is wrong.

To cut a convincing figure again in jurisprudence — which is my present field of concern— natural law theory, by which I mean and shall mean throughout, traditional natural law theory, basically the theory of St.Thomas, must be made convincing again in ethics.