The idea that all people are moral equals enjoys broad support. Practically speaking, there is no doubt that this is a great moral victory. Inegalitarian views are often morally arbitrary, and many have been used to support self-serving and deeply harmful actions and policies. Coming, as it does, on the heels of ideas of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender-based superiority, there is no question that the world is a far better place for our commitment to the idea that all (normal adult) humans deserve to be shown equal moral respect or concern.

Since the time of Hume, many philosophers have thought it impossible to deduce an ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is,’ or in general to deduce ‘ethical sentences’ from purely ‘factual sentences.’ Some of these philosophers claim that this is due, not to any Special feature of ethics, but to a general feature of logic, namely, its conservativeness:

Mental causation, our mind's ability to causally affect the course of the world, is part and parcel of our ‘manifest image’ of the world. That there is mental causation is denied by virtually no one. How there can be such a thing as mental causation, however, is far from obvious. In recent years, discussions about the problem of mental causation have focused on Jaegwon Kim's so-called Causal Exclusion Argument, according to which mental events are ‘screened off’ or ‘preempted’ by physical events unless mental causation is a genuine case of overdetermination or mental properties are straightforwardly reducible to physical properties.

In an influential article, Gerd Grasshoff has argued for the identification of the objects in Wittgenstein's Tractatus with the ultimate constituents of reality in Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics. Grasshoff's interpretation is based on two interrelated claims: (1) The specific determination of the objects in the world and the relation among them is the primary theme in Wittgenstein's early philosophy, because it is the primary theme for Hertz. (2) Wittgenstein did not assume the existence of simple objects on purely logical grounds without having specific examples of simple objects in mind, because Hertz did not do this.

Classical Electrodynamics is a classical theory treating Systems comprising an electromagnetic field and electrically charged matter. In a recent book Mathias Frisch argues that this theory is inconsistent within its intended domain of application and that a number of interesting methodological morals follow from this conclusion (2005,33-5; all citations of Frisch refer to this work).

In 1968, Nelson Goodman made an observation about artistic forgery that has never been fully appreciated, though his discussion of forgery has received plenty of philosophical attention. Goodman describes the case in which you, the viewer, are confronted with an original work and a forgery that is, for you, perceptually indistinguishable from it. On the basis of lab tests, you know which of the works is forged, but you can see no difference between them. Nonetheless, Goodman says, the knowledge that one of them is forged makes for an aesthetic difference between the works, for you, now. One reason is that this knowledge changes the way you look at the works, and the way you should look at them; it alters the sorts of scrutiny it is appropriate to apply. In fact, knowledge that one of the works is forged ‘assigns the present looking a role as training toward … perceptual discrimination’ (Goodman, 1976,105).