This paper is a study of the theory of judgement and truth found in the works of F. H. Bradley. Although Bradley's thought underwent some changes during the forty years he wrote on these topics there seems to be only one change, viz. his abandonment of the so-called 'floating ideas' which is of any significance.

A theory is developed explaining how beliefs, and derivatively intentions and perhaps the other propositional attitudes, find their objects. Beliefs about particular objects are divided into two kinds. Attributive beliefs find their objects purely through the mediation of contained descriptive content, while referential beliefs connect directly with their objects via a causal connection. This distinction is explicated in terms of complementing semantic and epistemic differences, and details of the causal connection are explored.

Intuitionism is most commonly defined in terms of various strong epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions, e.g., that true moral principles are synthetic a priori propositions, known by some special faculty of moral reflection, and the like. I shall not here be concerned with such views. Rather my focus will be upon the program for normative investigation which I have elsewhere argued is implicit in the intuitionists’ writings and which I take to be intuitionism's salient characteristic.

Some philosophers believe that appeals to promoting or maximizing good consequences are a suspect way of attempting to justify coercive interference with another person's actions. Suppose that is true. If there is a presumption that individuals have a right not to be coercively interfered with, then, foregoing utilitarian type appeals, it would seem that the only way to justify coercive interference of a paternalistic sort would be to show that under certain conditions the presumption fails.

A central tenet of modern Legal Positivism is the claim that “the existence of the law is one thing, its merit or demerit another.” I shall call this “the Positivist dictum.” Jeremy Bentham, the first and perhaps the greatest of the English Positivists, announced this doctrine in his early Fragment on Government, when he distinguished the “Expositor” of the law—who “explains what the law is” and “shows what the Legislator and Judge have done” — from the “Censor” — who instructs us in “what the law ought to be.”

The way individual actions enter into larger courses of action often has an effect on the utility of those individual actions. This simple fact has motivated recent discussions about the intelligibility of act-utilitarianism. (See [1], [2], [4], [5], [6], [7], [10] and [11].) It has become clear that act-utilitarianism is incomplete, if not intelligible, without an account of the utility-making properties of courses of action taken as a whole. In this paper I offer a brief discussion of the difficulties of a simple act-utilitarianism and then offer three complementary principles in which the utility of an action is made to depend upon the courses of action of which it may be a constituent. I hope that the discussion will be of interest not only to committed act-utilitarians but to its sympathetic critics as well.

“What kind of psychological theory could relate our use of words to sets of possible worlds?” So queries a recent author, but the question is rhetorical, the insinuation being that any analysis or explanation of semantical notions in terms of possible worlds will involve an account that won't square with a naturalistic view of language acquisition or use. Such feelings are widespread; my purpose here is to argue that they are unjustified.

Writing in 1912, Bertrand Russell declared talk of causes and of causality to be obsolete, noting its elimination from scientific theory as he saw it: “in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word 'cause' never occurs .... The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” Causal laws, he claimed, “tend to be replaced by quite different laws as soon as a science is successful.”