Replying to Theaetetus’ suggestion that knowledge is true opinion at Tht. 200e, Socrates remarks that ‘a whole profession’ testifies against this definition. The orator practises the art of persuasion, not to teach people, but make them believe whatever he wants. If a robbery has taken place, for example, he cannot in a short time teach adequately the truth about what happened to people who were not on the scene.

It seems generally agreed that a theory of sensory episodes that mentions sensory objects and a sensing relation — the ‘act-object’ theory — is unacceptable and should be replaced by some other account. A chief competitor is the Adverbial Theory, and one of its chief advocates is Wilfrid Sellars. While it is clear that there are serious difficulties for the act-object theory not facing the adverbial theory, I will argue that the latter has difficulties of its own.

'Some beliefs about the world are justified, others are not.’ This seems to be a plausible, even if not completely uncontroversial, claim. The controversy most likely would center on the meaning given to the term ‘justified'. If one gives extremely strong criteria for justification, one might argue that the claim is false. None of our beliefs about the world are justified. It is possible, perhaps, to interpret Hume as taking such a position.

Whether or not Hume held this, I think that there is a sense of ‘justified’ in which Hume could have argued that some of our beliefs about the world are justified. I will try to show this by developing an analysis of justified belief that is compatible with Hume's theory of the nature of beliefs and belief formation. As a minimum criterion for success such an analysis must be able to provide a plausible basis for distinguishing between justified and unjustified beliefs.

Many utilitarians accept Bentham's view that to argue for the principle of utility is as ‘impossible as it is needless'. They take utilitarianism as a first principle which one either accepts or does not. They do, of course, defend utilitarianism against objections, and make objections to other ethical positions; but the principle of utility itself, they hold, must stand on its own merits. In this article we use a different approach. We introduce a principle, which we call ‘Weak Majority Preference', which we believe likely to be accepted by many who do not consider themselves utilitarians. We then show that from this principle it is possible to derive the general principle of utility.

C.A. Macdonald's incisive note, ‘On the Unifier-Multiplier Controversy', gave me fresh thoughts regarding the method of actindividuation which he defends against Jonathan Bennett's and my own misgivings. I believe a second look at the Reductive Unifying account, in light of Macdonald's apology for it, will help us size up the issues, notably those involving causation and time.

I shall follow previous debaters and dwell upon examples of mayhem, where one individual kills another by carrying out a more rudimentary action. Here is Donald Davidson's case. A queen murders her royal husband by emptying a vial of poison into his ear as he sleeps. To be exact: she rotates her wrist, and the lethal drug cascades toward his ear.

We cannot know something unless it is true. The things that we know, therefore, must be logically consistent. Moreover, we cannot know something unless we are justified in believing it. But it does not obviously follow that the things that we are justified in believing must be consistent with each other. For we can be justified in believing something that turns out to be false. Knowledge entails truth and hence consistency. Rationally justified belief does not entail truth and it may not entail consistency.

Knowledge, however, requires especially good justification. We can have reason to believe something that happens to be true, even good reason (say, strong circumstantial evidence linking a suspect to a crime), without our belief being so well-grounded that we know it to be true.

In this century, much of the discussion of the free will problem has centered around the conditional analysis of ‘can’. Following G.E. Moore, most compatibilists have based their position on the supposition that to say a person could have acted otherwise is simply to say that he would have acted otherwise, if he had chosen (or willed) to. Most incompatibilists have rejected this supposition, arguing that it must not only be true that a person would have acted otherwise if he had chosen (or willed) to, but that it must also be true that the person could have chosen (or could have willed) otherwise than he did. I think that incompatibilists are right here. The question whether determinism entails lack of free will comes down to the question whether determinism entails that no one could have chosen (or could have willed) otherwise than he did.

During the past ten years moral philosophers in the English-speaking world have executed an astonishing volte face on the question of whether philosophers qua philosophers have a role as advocates in public policy debates. The standard answer to this question a decade ago was that philosophers were peculiarly qualified to analyze the logic and meaning of moral discourse but were in no way privileged in their ability to make correct moral judgments. This doctrine was a straightforward application of the then equally standard (but of course not universal) trichotomous fact/ value/ analysis distinction. Moral discourse was divided from scientific discourse and philosophy from both. Today philosophers are more than willing to take a stand on public issues — abortion, euthanasia, violence as instrument of social change, any element of foreign policy, preferential treatment of previously discriminated against social groups, and so on. This reversal is easy enough to account for historically.

Prima facie there is confusion in that part of Marx's theory which deals with religion and revolution. On the basis of Marx's scattered statements on religion one can construct two views of the relationship between revolutionary action and the abolition of the religious mentality. One view is that the exploited class can come to atheism prior to the creation of communist society, and, indeed, must attain a secular consciousness if it is to be the agency of revolution. The other view is that the power of religion cannot be broken until after the communist revolution because only a new economic order can remove the material conditions which sustain religion as a mass phenomenon.

In the face of these conflicting views we are left with two alternatives. Either we can take one of the constructions as the authentic one, or, we can conclude that Marx's position is incoherent. Seeking the best in both worlds, my approach involves showing why the charge of incoherence appears plausible while arguing for a resolution in the direction of the first construction.