It no longer is true in a metaphorical sense only that a person can have a change of heart. We might grant this much — allow that a person may have one heart at one time and have another (numerically different) heart at still another time — and also resist the idea that a person can have a change of mind in anything other than a qualitative sense. In the discussion that follows, this standard view of the matter is called into question. If the argument presented here is sound, it can happen both that one person has numerically different minds at different times and that different people have the same (one) mind at different times. These possibilities, as I take them to be, call for reassessment of some well entrenched assumptions concerning personal identity and responsibility. In particular, they suggest that it may not be true that person A bears responsibility for making decisions person B previously made only on the condition that A is the same person as B.

In his recently published paper, ‘The Nature of Possibility,’ David Armstrong presents an account of possibility which, he correctly claims, is partly an elaboration of the early Wittgenstein's. Both are combinatorialists. That is to say, both hold that there is a fixed ontology of individuals, properties and relations whose combinations determine the range of all possible states of affairs, and therewith the range of all those totalities of states of affairs which they call possible worlds.

But Armstrong's account, I believe, is fatally flawed in ways that Wittgenstein's isn't. And this, I shall argue, is mainly because Armstrong is both an actualist, whose fixed ontology is one of actual individuals, properties and relations, and a reductionist, who tries to reduce the notion of possibility to that of ߢallߣ their combinations. Armstrong seems to think that Wittgenstein at least shares his actualism, and perhaps even his reductionism.

In a well-known series of articles, Norman Daniels has drawn a contrast between wide reflective equilibrium and a more traditional method of theory acceptance in ethics that would be employed by a sophisticated moral intuitionist. The more traditional method is geared towards achieving a narrow equilibrium, or ‘an ordered pair of (a) a set of considered moral judgments acceptable to a given person P at a given time, and (b) a set of moral principles that economically systematizes (a).’ Although we might achieve narrow reflective equilibrium by deducing particular moral judgments from self-evident moral principles, the more plausible approach is to start from our particular moral judgments. Here we begin by screening our intial moral judgments to eliminate those in which we have little confidence and those made under circumstances conducive to error. We then search for general moral principles that best account for the remaining ‘considered’ moral judgments.

Descartes’ version of the Cosmological Argument in the Third Meditation is usually considered a failure, not because its conclusion doesn't follow from its premises, but because the truth of two of its premises is doubtful. One of these premises is that the objective reality of an idea is derived from a cause in which there is at least as much formal reality; the other, that only a being that possesses the qualities normally attributed to God could be responsible for the idea of God. Typically there are two objections made in response to the first of these premises. First, we don't understand the concepts of formal and objective reality well enough to know whether or not the premise commands our assent.

In a recent article in this journal, Barbara Lariviere offers a very useful distinction between two ways of understanding the claims that Leibniz, or relational theorists in general, might wish to make about the nature of motion and the structure of space and time; viz.,

and

Citing the authority of Weyl, the author argues that L1 is untenable; indeed, the argument purports to show that if L1 were true, then there would be no coherent basis for a theory of motion, not even a relational theory. My main goal in this note is to point out why this argument is mistaken while at the same time sketching the real reason why the relational conception of motion is untenable. In addition I will offer a few remarks about the relevance of L2 to the absolute-relational controvery.

There are no intimate connections between Locke's political thought and his general philosophical position — that, at least, is the longestablished view, the accepted orthodoxy. Locke's Second Treatise of Government, so it is held, presents doctrines which are unrelated to, or perhaps even in conflict with, those of the Essay concerning Human Understanding.For contemporary students and scholars this view is firmly established through Peter Laslett's influential ‘Introduction’ to his edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government.At the moment it receives powerful support from a magisterial work by an author well known both as political theorist and as commentator on Locke: Richard Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics & Locke's Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986). Ashcraft's reductive contextualism and his concomitant intentional neglect of certain philosophical (particularly methodological and epistemological) dimensions of Locke's position would lead us to read the 2T more as a piece of parochial political propaganda than as a treatise of political theory.