In recent years work on the topic of personal identity has flourished. Much of it is ingenious and some of it is quite dazzling. Despite the brilliance of the literature, however, the topic itself continues to be wrapped in darkness and its capacity to baffle and perplex is as great as ever. In the present paper, I will attempt to make clear that and why this is so. I shall begin by showing why the most recent virtuoso performance in the area leaves everything as obscure as before. I shall then develop a version of what appears to me to be the most viable alternative to both the bankrupt view just unmasked and its equally bankrupt congeners, and indicate why it too is less than fully satisfactory. The upshot will be that we seem to be faced with three possible conclusions, each moderately compelling, but none obviously correct or altogether happy.

A starting point for this paper is that there is at least one concept of probability, call it epistemic probability, which can be identified with belief or some sort of idealised belief (e.g., rational belief). If this identification is to be of any significance, then it needs to be shown that epistemic probability is a ‘true’ probability concept and is subject to those restrictions and requirements which relate and govern probabilities, which we call the probability calculus.

The most rehearsed argument to establish the probability calculus for epistemic probabilities is the Dutch Book Argument (DBA). There are two intuitions behind the DBA. The first is that if we can find some fine-grained behavioural measure of epistemic probability, then we may be able to show that epistemic probabilities obey the probability calculus by showing that the behaviour is of a kind which is, as a matter of necessity, subject to certain limitations and restrictions.

Muddles can be instructive. The clarifying confusion to be examined in this paper is Isaiah Berlin's intelligent vacillation on the issue of whether or not the extent of a person's freedom depends on his desires. Is the amount of freedom an agent possesses determined solely by his objective circumstances or is it also partly a function of his subjective tastes and preferences? In clarifying this question I shall suggest that Berlin has trouble answering it because he almost perceives that interpersonal cardinal measurement of freedom, if possible at all, is possible only on a subjective basis. Yet as Berlin eloquently reminds us measuring freedom according to a subjective metric generates paradox. Whether commonsense ideas of freedom are consistent and reasonable is not purely an academic issue, for we do often make political judgments to the effect that one or another policy, or a movement to one or another form of society, can be expected to reduce or enlarge human freedom. If freedom is not measurable these judgments are merely hortatory.

‘Ifs’ come washed or unwashed. The washed ifs are embedded in precise theories: the constantly strict implication of deductive inference, the variably strict implication of ‘nearness’ conditionals, and statements of conditional probability. By a nearness conditional I mean the common part of Stalnaker's and D. Lewis's theory of counterfactual conditionals, which depends on a notion that possible worlds are more or less near to each other, as a measure of their over-all similarity to each other.

One argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom runs as follows:

In other words it is argued that if an essentially omniscient being (God) believes prior to the actual performance of a certain action that that action will be performed at a particular time the action in question cannot be a voluntary action. The crucial premise in the argument, it seems to me, is (b) the assumption that an essentially omniscient being can know the outcome of human actions in advance of their performance, or more simply put, that essential omniscience implies knowledge of future free acts. My purpose here is to argue that this assumption is self-contradictory.

This paper is devoted to a solution to Moore's problem. After explaining what Moore's problem is and after considering the main approaches toward solving the problem, I provide a definition of Moorean sentences in terms of pure Moorean propositions. My solution to Moore's problem essentially involves a description of how one can contradict oneself without uttering a contradiction, and a set of definitions that exactly determines which sentences are Moorean and which are close relatives of Moorean sentences.

In ‘Skeptism Oisarmed,’ L.S. Carrier asserts the following:

Premise (1), actually a premise schema attributed to Peter Unger, is the following:

I suggest, contrary to Carrier's assertion, that many reasonable people, including many philosophers, would regard (1) as a necessary truth knowable a priori, and would be quite happy to accept its universal quantification, with no implied restriction to propositions for which we can get any evidence at all.

How is such a dispute about what reasonable people would do to be resolved? I suggest that, at the very least, Carrier owes us an explanation of the grounds on which he would reject particular instances of the schema, e.g.,