Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably (in typical cases at least) no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was argued in a somewhat different way by Wittgenstein. The intended point was not merely a grammatical one: we say of an expression that it means such and such, but not that it says such and such. Be that as it may, the main point was quite substantive: typically, an (e.g.) English expression is such that, with its meaning (unambiguously) fixed, there are a variety of distinct (perhaps better: distinguishable) things to be said in using it on some production of it or other.

It is becoming popular among contemporary philosophers to view liberalism as a political morality which rests on a fundamental moral requirement that persons are to be treated equally according to a certain conception of equal respect and concern. On this view, the liberal conception of equal respect and concern requires that conflicts of interests must be decided by appeal to principles which are rationally justifiable on grounds that are neutral or impartial between persons and their competing conceptions of the good life. Ronald Dworkin has expressed this view by contrasting liberalism with political moralities that are founded on conceptions of what constitutes treating persons equally which are ‘at least partly determined by some conception of the good life.‘

A good historian often can assess the relative likelihood of competing historical claims more reliably on implicit grounds - intuitively, if you like - than in any other available way. This idea has been a persistent theme of Verstehen-theorists. It is, in essence, the old saw that there is no substitute for the brewmaster's nose, adapted to the art of producing historical brew. If true, it augments the importance of the historian relative to that of his arguments, and thereby gives him a dignity that he might otherwise lack. And some have thought that it marks an important methodological difference between historical studies and the natural sciences. It is, in its way, a humane idea. But is it true?

I

There are various ways of being a sceptic. Most obviously, perhaps, versions of scepticism can differ with respect to scope. Scepticism can be universal; it can be directed against beliefs belonging to certain broad kinds, say beliefs having to do with the external world; or it can be quite focussed, as in the case of religious scepticism. But there is also the question of force. Some philosophers treat scepticism as a purely theoretical affair, defining it as the thesis that knowledge is impossible. This kind of scepticism, theoretical scepticism, has no essential connection with any particular sceptical practice. A theoretical sceptic does not necessarily entertain doubts or suspend judgment about any particular matter of fact or theory. He may think that the problem of induction is insoluble yet not be seriously concerned that the sun will not rise tomorrow. But in other versions, the force of scepticism is taken to be practical, in which case to be a sceptic is to entertain doubts or suspend judgment, and not just to take a certain theoretical position in epistemology.

Recently Robert Almeder has invoked Aristotle's celebrated regress argument to argue for the existence of basic knowledge that does not require the satisfaction of any justification condition. After outlining Almeder's argument, I shall show why it ultimately fails.

Aristotle's regress argument in Book I of the Posterior Analytics is basically that because we have inferential knowledge, we must also have non-inferential knowledge. Aristotle plausibly assumes that to know the conclusion of an argument on the basis of its premises, one must know its premises. But he notes that if knowledge of any premise requires knowledge of some other proposition, then knowing any proposition would require knowledge of each member of an infinite regress of propositions. According to Aristotle, we cannot know each member of such a regress, but we do have some inferential knowledge; consequently there must be some basic, non-inferential knowledge, i.e., knowledge that does not depend for its justification on inferential relations to other known propositions.

Plato's Euthyphro is a dialogue about the virtue of piety. It is also one of the aporetic dialogues, ending in apparent failure to discover what piety is. It is common to understand the dialogue as teaching lessons about other things, about definition, for instance, or about the logic of refutation. About piety, however, it is thought to teach us only negatively, showing a few of the many things which piety is not.

My thesis, on the contrary, is that there is a positive account of the nature of piety in the dialogue; it is, moreover, an account which cannot be separated from the other lessons which the dialogue teaches. I shall find it necessary to expose the structure of the logical lessons in order to develop my account of the holy.

Quantified modal logic and propositional attitudes have long been regarded as sites susceptible to referential opacity — that curious affliction first diagnosed by Quine. In this paper I suggest a way of alleviating the symptoms of referential opacity as they manifest themselves in fictional contexts, contexts in which we are confronted by discourse about fiction(s). Indeed, a case might be made against Quine that it is fictional, rather than quotational, contexts which are the referentially opaque contexts par excellence. For whether we take a Fregean line on the matter and consider the obliquity of fictional terms as due to shift of reference, or a Quinean line and consider their opacity as due to failure of reference, their non-standard (or as Kaplan might put it, non-vulgar) occurrence is clear and avowed. Moreover, as the non-standardness or non-vulgarity of terms in fictional contexts is by design and not due to some mere accident of orthography, they seem in many ways to be both more interesting and potentially more revealing.