Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness entails self-consciousness, or, even more strongly, that consciousness is self-consciousness. As Kathleen Wider puts it in her terrific book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, ‘all consciousness is, by its very nature, self-consciousness.’ I share this view with Sartre and have elsewhere argued for it at length. My overall aim in this paper is to examine Sartre's theory of consciousness against the background of the so-called ‘higher-order thought theory of consciousness’ (the HOT theory) which, in turn, will shed light on the structure of conscious mental states as well as on Sartre's theory of (self-) consciousness and reflection. Another goal of this paper is, following Wider, to show how Sartre's views can be understood from a contemporary analytic perspective. Sartre's theory of consciousness is often confusing to the so-called ‘analytic Anglo-American’ tradition, but I attempt to show how this obstacle can be overcome against the backdrop of a specific contemporary theory of consciousness.

Rational agents, it seems, are capable of adopting intentions which make actions rational and which they would otherwise have no reason to do, or even have reason not to do. Howard Sobel imagines the following, uncontroversial but somewhat contrived, example: ‘I'll give you a nickel if you now intend to hand me the red [pencil] in five minutes. I'll give you the nickel now. I don't care if you do hand me the red one when the five minutes are up. The nickel will be yours whether or not you do that then, if you manage now to intend to do it then’ (Sobel, 242-3, emphasis in original).

Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately nativist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind (AT 8B 358, AT 3 418; CSM 1 304, CSMK 187). One reason it is surprising to find Descartes endorsing universal innateness is that such a view seems to leave no role for bodies in the production of our ideas of them.

When Sandra Harding called for an epistemology of science whose systematic attention to the gendered Status of epistemic agents renders it ‘less partial and distorted’ than ‘traditional’ epistemologies, some commentators recoiled in horror. Propelled by ‘a mad form of the genetic fallacy’ they said, she descends ‘the slide to an arational account of science.’ On a less melodramatic reading, feminist epistemologies such as Harding's advocate not irrationalism, but senses of rationality more expanded than those which they associate with ‘traditional’ epistemology.

In this paper I wish to consider one aspect of the role that divine commands seem to play in religious ethics, their role when considered in relation to the foundations of morality. If, as seems to be taken for granted in traditional religious ethics, divine commands have moral force in and of themselves, then at least some obligations are derived from commands. This being so, might not all be? If they were, then divine commands would be what the rest of morality derived from and was founded upon.