I shall argue in this paper that extant definitions of causality are incorrect since they do not cohere in the proper way with the concept of a cause of the universe. This lack of coherence is twofold. (i) For some extant definitions of a cause, there are possible instances of the concept of a cause of the universe that do not satisfy the definitions. (ii) For these or other extant definitions, there are entities or occurrences (in some possible world) that are not instances of the concept of a cause of the universe but that count as causes of the universe according to the definitions. This failure of coherence between extant definitions of causality and the concept of a cause of the universe entails either that there is some other (as yet unformulated) definition of a cause that is correct or that causality is indefinable. I shall suggest in the conclusion of this paper that it is more plausible to believe that causality is indefinable.

David Gauthier stages a competition between two arguments, each of which purports to decide once for all transparent agents which is best, being a straight or being a constrained maximizer. The first argument, which he criticizes and rejects, is for the greater utility, on a certain weak assumption, of straight maximization for all transparent agents. The second, which he endorses, is for the greater utility on the same weak assumption of constrained maximization for all transparent agents.

In Section I, Gauthier’s account of constrained maximization is presented, and his use in the two arguments of the idea of choosing a disposition to choose actions is noted. Section II is about the unfortunate argument that Gauthier criticizes. This argument is flawed in ways additional to those he notices, but a less ambitious form of reasoning can, for individuals whose probabilities and values are right, be good for the greater expected utility of straight maximization. Section III takes up the argument that Gauthier endorses and maintains that it is wrong in a way specific to it as well as in ways closely related to all of the first argument’s noted flaws. An Appendix features a three-person prisoners’ dilemma and includes demonstrations of principal conclusions reached in the body of this paper.

In a ‘Letter from Washington’ in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Drew reported some speculation regarding the mental processes of Ronald Reagan. In Drew’s words:

The curious process Drew describes is clearly important in many ways -historically, politically, and perhaps legally. We contend that there is even some epistemological significance to Reagan’s method for the fixation of belief. We shall argue, in particular, that some of those curiously insulated beliefs which (if we are to believe Drew) Reagan possesses qualify as knowledge under at least one leading causal reliabilist theory of knowledge- that presented by F. Dretske in Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1981). But, as we detail the structure of such beliefs, what is probably evident already will emerge quite clearly, viz., that these beliefs do not amount to knowledge.

Most discussions of Rawls’s philosophy tend to neglect the strong communitarian strand of his theory: so much so that in the debate between liberals and communitarians Rawls’s account of community has been for the most part intriguingly absent. This article is an attempt to fill in the gap by offering a discussion of the Rawlsian understanding of community as it was presented in A Theory of Justice and its possible implications for a pluralist society. At the same time, I want to take issue with one of the most influential critiques leveled against Rawls’s conception of the self: namely, Sandel’s critique of the ‘individuated subject’ that, in his view, underlies justice as fairness. Rawls’s constructions, so Sandel argues, rest on an unencumbered self that is individuated in advance and whose identity is fixed once and for all.

What exactly are we conscious beings? Do we have immaterial souls, souls that are substances and can survive the destruction of our physical bodies? Richard Swinburne has recently given an affirmative answer to the latter question on the basis of a strikingly simple Cartesian argument. This paper shows why Swinburne’s argument ultimately fails, owing to an instructive dilemma concerning the logical possibility of conscious beings’ surviving bodily destruction. Perhaps we do have substantial immaterial souls, but Swinburne’s Cartesian argument, we shall see, does not cogently deliver the conclusion that we do.