It was common enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find philosophers holding the position that for something to be ‘in the mind’ and for that mind to be conscious of it are one and the same thing. The thought is that consciousness is a relation between a mind and a mental entity playing the same role as the relation of inherence found between a substance and qualities belonging to it. What it is, on this view, for something to ‘inhere’ in the mind is for that mind to be conscious of it. Locke was explicit in his acceptance of such a claim, writing, for instance,

Philosophical work on testimony has flourished in recent years. Testimony roughly involves a source affirming or stating something in an attempt to transfer information to one or more persons. It is often said that the topic of testimony has been neglected throughout most of the history of philosophy, aside from contributions by David Hume (1711-1776) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). True as this may be, Hume and Reid aren't the only ones who deserve a tip of the hat for recognizing the importance of testimony: Augustine of Hippo (354-430) affirms the place of testimony in human cognition, at least in his later writings.

In what follows, we consider three questions raised by Augustine's thinking about testimony: the analytical question of what sources count as testimony (Section I); the epistemological question about the status of testimony-based belief (Section II); and the doxastic question about the circumstances in which it is appropriate to believe on the basis of testimony (Section III).

Brentano (1874) famously claimed that two features demarcate the mental: consciousness and intentionality. Although he claimed that these features are intimately related, subsequent generations of philosophers rarely treated them together. Recently, however, the tide has turned. Many philosophers now accept that consciousness is intentional, where to be intentional is to have representational content, is to represent ‘things as being thus and so — where, for all that, things need not be that way’ (Travis, 2004, 58). In fact, weak representationalism, which holds that perceptual experiences have representational content, is ‘now fairly uncontroversial’ (Lycan, 2004).

The thesis that mental properties are dependent, or supervenient, on physical properties, but this dependence is not lawlike, has been influential in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is put forward explicitly in Donald Davidson's seminal ‘Mental Events.’ On the one hand, Davidson claims that the mental is anomalous, that ‘there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained’ (1970, 208), and, in particular, that there are no strict psychophysical laws. On the other hand, he insists that the mental supervenes on the physical; that ‘mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics’ (1970, 214).

According to one understanding of them, Tarskian principles about truth (and falsity) aim to explicate the core of the classical conception of truth (and falsity), as endorsed by Aristotle and others:

Timothy Williamson famously offered an argument from these Tarskian principles in favour of bivalence — the contention that whatever says something is either true or false — to the effect that denying bivalence in particular cases classically entails a contradiction. This has played a crucial role in the reception of Williamson's case against the main alternative classical view of the nature of vagueness, supervaluationism, and thus in favor of his own epistemic view.

In chapter nine of The Practice of Moral Judgment (1996b) and her later article ‘Making Room for Character’ (1996a), Barbara Herman offers a distinctive and interesting response to a set of concerns involving the idea that Kantian ethics objectionably alienates us from personal relationships and commitments. Broadly speaking, these concerns take one of two general forms: some accounts emphasize the practical marginalization of personal interests and relationships, arguing that the Kantian's open-ended commitment to impartial overriding moral requirements threatens to leave the agent little or no practical room for the sorts of relationships and commitments that we think of as important in (or essential to) a recognizably human life. A related but more formal variant emphasizes the internal perspective of the agent and the structure rather than the scope of moral commitment. On this account, the problem is said to lie in the requirement that we are only to act on reasons justifiable from an impersonal universalizing point of view and the way in which this requirement precludes the kind of partial and personal reasons for action said to be essential to individual agency and a sense of self.

Pornography deserves special protections, it is often said, because it qualifies as speech. Therefore, no matter what we think of its content, we must afford it the protections that we extend to most speech, but don't extend to other actions. In response, Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton have argued that the case is not so simple: one of the harms of pornography, they claim, is that it silences women's speech, thereby preventing women from deriving from speech the very benefits that warranted the special protections in the first place. At first glance, it is hard to see how to make sense of this response. If the claim is that pornography prevents women from actually uttering words, then it just seems false; on the other hand, if that isn't the claim, then it isn't clear how anyone can be said to be silenced. Faced with such worries, many have been inclined to dismiss these claims about silencing as confused.