I have two aims in this paper. My wide one is to discuss what it is for philosophy to enlighten. I am using the same concept of enlightenment that Kant wrote about: It is what brings a rational outlook to social and political life, in opposition to superstition, self-deception and other forms of immaturity. If philosophy is to do this, it is not sufficient for it to have a rational theory about society, nor is having such a theory even necessary, since philosophers can try to make a community more reasonable without formulating a social philosophy. The Vienna Circle is an example. The point of enlightenment is to change society rather than to develop research programs. The difference is between involvement with real life on the one hand and an idle theory on the other.

My narrow aim is to display the self-image of the Vienna Circle as philosophers of enlightenment. They agreed that the important task of any philosophical school was to enlighten and that positivism did so because it expressed the scientific spirit. This is the second concept I discuss. I will show that what they meant by ‘the scientific spirit’ was a moral outlook present in socialism and hostile to fascism. This is not what people usually understand by it. I am also not giving the received historical view of the Circle. Rather the English and American idea is that positivism was entirely an academic movement. The social concerns of its advocates were incidental to its philosophical significance. The Frankfurt School's view is that it had a hidden alliance with technology. My purpose is to counter both these misinterpretations.

Most of us, were we faced with a life threatening situation, would try to avoid it; we do not want to die. Yet Lucretius has argued that death can be ‘nothing to us,’ for when death has occurred we don't exist: we can't suffer something if we don't exist.

If death can be a misfortune, what is the misfortune suffered, and who suffers it? The misfortune must be suffered by the person who dies, before death has occurred, otherwise – as Lucretius points out – there is no subject to suffer the misfortune. But what kind of misfortune can the misfortune of death be, that a person can suffer it before he or she dies? This question provides the focus of the paper.

Our attitudes towards death and life are determined in part by beliefs we have about a variety of things, for example, whether or not there is a life after death. As I shall assume that life ceases at death the attitudes towards death for which I seek explanations will not be universally endorsed; nor are the attitudes towards life, in terms of which the explanations will be given, universally endorsed. My project is not to defend a set of attitudes but to show that the set of attitudes towards life that I consider provide an explanation of a set of attitudes that some people have towards death.

Criticism and sarcasm are interspersed with description and analysis throughout Marx's work. Most of the criticism is aimed at one or another side of a single target: what Marx sees as capitalism's pretensions of freedom, equality, and prosperity in the face of exploitation and recurrent crises. But the remarks on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital seem to be directed at a different target. Here Marx tells us that a commodity is ‘a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ But instead of going on to reveal the nature of commodites-the task that occupies him for the preceding 30 and subsequent 700 pages-Marx takes the opportunity to explore their ‘mystical’ character. The passage repays careful consideration. It is one of the few places in his mature writings in which Marx returns to the tone of his youthful works. It is also the passage in which commentators have claimed to find grounds for attributing a doctrine of ‘false consciousness’ to Marx.

Nations possessing nuclear weapons have seen them as useful for many purposes. These include classic nuclear deterrence (preventing a nuclear attack), extended nuclear deterrence (preventing a conventional attack on the nuclear nation or allied countries), the fighting of a nuclear war ‘if deterrence fails,’ and a ‘diplomatic’ use in which the weapons are seen as implements of coercive political power. Concerning all these uses profound ethical questions arise. It is the last use which will be the focus of attention in this paper.

I have chosen this subject partly because I believe that it has received insufficient attention from those reflecting on nuclear policies from an ethical point of view. Discussions tend to focus on the use, threat to use, or intention to use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack or threat of nuclear attack. The retention of nuclear weapons for such a purpose is far easier to rationalize than is the development of such weapons for extended deterrence, nuclear ‘diplomacy,’ or the actual waging of a nuclear war. Historically, nuclear weapons have been held by nuclear states for all these purposes. In fact, there are natural relations between the functions. When a power possesses nuclear weapons, the ultimate token of military power in the modern world, it is natural that it will seek to use them for purposes less restricted than the sole one of deterring nuclear war. Hence there is a natural development from classic deterrence to extended deterrence and the coercive use of nuclear weapons in the pursuit of national interest. There is also a natural connection between classic deterrence and the development and deployment of nuclear weapons for the purpose of fighting and ‘prevailing’ in a nuclear war. An opposing state is to be prevented from attacking by the belief that an attack would be followed by retaliation. That requires that a nuclear state indicate the will and capacity to retaliate-that is, to use these weapons in a real war if necessary.

Epistemologists have profited from studies of the ways in which ‘know’ is ambiguous. We can also profit by studying the ways in which ‘know’ is vague. After classifying sources of vagueness for ‘know,’ I spend the second section examining theories of vagueness. With the exception of the theory that vague predicates are incoherent, which I try to refute, we need not take a stand on a particular theory to show that the vagueness of knowledge has substantive epistemological implications. The third section supports the thesis through a survey of ways in which appeals to vagueness can be applied to the field's issues. First, I show how higher order vagueness is evidence against the KK thesis, the incorrigibility of sense data, and the completability of epistemology. An interesting resemblance between infinity and vagueness provides the point of departure for the next type of application. For this resemblance suggests a new way of handling apparently infinite belief structures. The approach is illustrated with an analysis of common knowledge. The third type of application concerns the ways in which disguised sorites creep into our thinking about knowledge. In addition to brief illustrations concerning naive holism, question begging, and an objection to incorrigibilism, I provide more detailed illustrations involving Jonathan Adler's sceptical appeal to epistemic universalizability, the prediction paradox, and William Lycan's objection to Gilbert Harman's social knowledge cases. I conclude with some general remarks on the lessons to be learned from the vagueness of knowledge.

The point of the traditional distinction between the contexts of discovery and justification is to insist on the normative character of epistemology. The point is not to dismiss from epistemology merely the genesis of ideas; into the context of discovery go also descriptions of evaluative practices and decisions. However ideas are created, scrutinized, and judged, it is only the approbation to which they are entitled, accorded or not, that allegedly matters to epistemology. The criticism, familiar since N.R. Hanson's Patterns of Discovery, that philosophy ought not to ignore the genesis of ideas is ironically conservative. If what is not normative epistemology is to be ignored, then the distinction would have us ignore even the reception and appraisal of scientific ideas.

Do fetuses have a right to life in virtue of the fact that they are potential adult human beings? I take the claim that the fetus is a potential adult human being to come to this: if the fetus grows normally there will be an adult human animal that was once the fetus. Does this fact ground a claim to our care and protection? A great deal hangs on the answer to this question. The actual mental and physical capacities of a human fetus are inferior to those of adult creatures generally thought to lack a serious right to life (e.g., adult chickens), and the mere fact that a fetus belongs to our species in particular seems morally irrelevant. Consequently, a strong fetal claim to protection rises or falls with the appeal to the fetus's potentiality, for nothing else can justify it.

Causal theories of action are attempts to develop an account of actions in terms of events (typically bodily movements and their effects) which have the right kind of causal ancestry. The causal ancestry must be traced back to some kind of intentional state (or combination of intentional states) in the agent, such intentional state (or states) must have the right kind of content, and it must cause the bodily movement (or other effect) in the ‘right’ way. Causal accounts differ on the nature of the intentional state, the nature of the content it must have, and the specification of the ‘right’ kind of causal connection to bodily movements or other effects. Causal accounts also differ on the identification of the action itself. Some acounts say that the action is the bodily movement, provided that it was caused in the right way and had the right kind of effects. Others identify the action with the triggering intentional state (called a volition or trying), provided that it has the right kind of effects. Yet others identify the action with the composite event of the intentional state's causing the appropriate effects. Finally there are those which fail to identify the action with any of these events or combinations of them.

Richard Cumberland, the Anglican divine, concludes his anti-Hobbesian work, Treatise of the Laws of Nature, with the following remarkable observation: ‘Hobbes, whilst he pretends with one hand to bestow gifts upon princes, does with the other treacherously strike a dagger to their hearts.’ This remark sums up a dominant theme of seventeenth-century reactions to Hobbes's political theory; a host of similar complaints could be marshalled from among the ranks of secondary figures such as Clarendon, Filmer and Pufendorf. Today, however, Cumberland's criticism has a relatively unfamiliar ring. Following the lead famously given by John Locke, we are much more likely to be impressed by the totalitarian features of Hobbes's political philosophy than by its subversive character. To preclude initial objections, there is of course a relatively uncontroversial sense in which Hobbes's thought is subversive; in metaphysics, ethics and theology Hobbes's daggers are deliberately aimed at the hearts of the Schoolmen and the Puritans. But Cumberland's concern in the quotation is with Hobbes's theory of sovereignty: the thrust of his criticism is that the theory is top-heavy, and this issue has not received much attention in recent years. One notable exception is David Gauthier who writes that ‘from unlimited individualism only anarchy follows. The theory is a failure.’ Gauthier, however, argues tht Hobbes's presentation of his theory in Leviathan marks a major advance over the earlier De Cive, and if our criterion of success is the strength of the sovereign's position, then this claim seems highly suspect. In the first part of this paper I shall argue that the sovereign of Leviathan is a more vulnerable figure than the sovereign of the earlier De Cive. In the second part of the paper I take up the problem posed by military service for a Hobbesian theory of political obligation. Employing a distinction between act- and rule-prudentialism, I shall argue that here again the position of Leviathan is in some ways less satisfactory than that of the earlier works.

The French philosopher Jean Buridan's work on the logical paradoxes is currently attracting more attention than it has for several centuries. In part this is due to a general resurgence of interest in the paradoxes, but the immediate occasion is the recent publication of G. E. Hughes's edition, translation, and commentary on the chapter of Buridan's Sophismata most immediately concerned with the paradoxes. (This despite the fact that an English version of the whole of the Sophismata cheaper than even the paper back edition of Hughes's has been available for some years, as has an excellent account of Buridan's theory by A. N. Prior.) It is worth noting, therefore, that Buridan's theory fails, and in a way that makes it seem unlikely that it can be developed into a serious rival of more modern theories.