In this paper I wish to propose and defend a form of the Representative Theory of Perception (RTP). According to this version of the theory, when a subject perceives some object x to be in a state P1 he does so by being aware of some modfication M1 (from a range M1,M2, … Mn) of some object E. The subject's way of perceiving any one of a range of objects x,y,z, … is that of being aware of some modification of E (leaving it open whether E is the subject himself, a person, an ego or a sense-field, e.g., a visual field). It will be a necessary condition of someone's perceiving x to have property P1 that E be modified in some way. And in order for the modifications of E to be representations, a given property P1 will need to be causally related, characteristically, to one or more specific modifications, M1,M2, … Mn, of E. (For simplicity, instead of taking the physical states or modifications P1,P2, … Pn to be states of individual physical objects, I shall assume them to be modifications of the physical world (in toto) symbolized by ‘X'.)

The publication of Political Liberalismhas allowed John Rawls to bring to the fore issues that remained in the background of A Theory of Justice. His explicit attention to the concept of ‘the reasonable’ is a welcome development. In a more recent publication, he affirms the importance of this concept, ‘while [granting] that the idea of the reasonable needs a more thorough examination than Political Liberalism offers.’ In this paper, I will present a critical exposition of the senses of the reasonable on which justice as fairness relies. Rawls employs the term in four main contexts. I will outline these various senses and argue that in each case, a controversy in the secondary literature can be resolved by close attention to the concept of the reasonable. In three of these contexts, Rawls relies on what I will call a ‘strong’ sense of the reasonable, while in one he sometimes seems to rely on a ‘weak’ sense. I argue that justice as fairness is best served by relying on a strong sense throughout.

In 1693 William Molyneux put a question to John Locke:

The question became celebrated, attracting some of the foremost minds of the eighteenth Century and beyond. However, it is far from obvious what Molyneux's question is really about. What issue, or issues, of a more general and theoretical nature, does it raise? Since this is unclear, it is also unclear whether Molyneux's question still matters today. I defend a particular conception of what the question is about. If I am right, the question does indeed still matter.

Scanlon’s Being Realistic about Reasons is a beautiful book – sleek, sophisticated, and programmatic. One of its key aims is to demystify knowledge of normative and mathematical truths, realistically construed – i.e. construed, roughly, as being true relevantly independent of minds and languages, when interpreted at face-value. In this article, I develop an epistemological problem that Scanlon fails to explicitly address. I argue that his ‘metaphysical pluralism’ can be understood as a response to that problem. However, it resolves the problem only if it undercuts the objectivity of normative and mathematical inquiry.

Individuals have various kinds of obligations: keep promises, don’t cause harm, return benefits received from injustices, be partial to loved ones, help the needy and so on. How does this work for group agents? There are two questions here. The first is whether groups can bear the same kinds of obligations as individuals. The second is whether groups’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do to the same degree that individuals’ pro tanto obligations plug into what they all-things-considered ought to do. We argue for parity on both counts.

Many moral theories are committed to the idea that some kinds of moral considerations should be respected, whatever the cost to ‘lesser’ types of considerations. A person's life, for instance, should not be sacrificed for the trivial pleasures of others, no matter how many would benefit. However, according to the decision-theoretic critique of lexical priority theories, accepting lexical priorities inevitably leads us to make unacceptable decisions in risky situations. It seems that to operate in a risky world, we must reject lexical priorities altogether. This paper argues that lexical priority theories can, in fact, offer satisfactory guidance in risky situations. It does so by equipping lexical priority theories with overlooked resources from decision theory.

It is by now widely agreed that a theory of territorial rights must be able to explain attachment or particularity: what can link a particular group to a particular place with the kind of normative force necessary to forbid encroachment or colonization? Attachment is one of the pillars on which any successful theory of territory will have to stand. But the notion of attachment is not yet well understood, and such agreement as does exist relies on unexamined assumptions. One such assumption is that attachment is an achievement of some sort, as opposed to some kind of brute ascriptive status that a claimant has irrespective of anything it might do.

But achievements do not come for free. ‘Achievement’ is a success term, and any theory predicated on success, no matter how minimal, requires a theory of failure. Yet theorists of territory have not grappled with the problem of failure.

Despite all the attention given to Kant's universalizability tests, one crucial aspect of Kant's thought is often overlooked. Attention to this issue, I will argue, helps us resolve two serious problems for Kant's ethics. Put briefly, the first problem is this: Kant, despite his stated intent to the contrary, doesn't seem to use universalization in arguing for duties to oneself, and, anyway, it is not at all clear why duties to oneself, should be grounded on a procedure that envisions a world in which everyone wills the contrary of those duties.

If all politics is local, then any sensible political theory must be sensitive to the fine-grained features of the political landscape. No one thinks that one form of government is best for every situation, and a theory that fails to accommodate ‘local knowledge’ runs the risk of irrelevance. Yet we also think that political philosophy must rise above the particularities of context and transcend the muck-a-muck of daily politics.

Most theories, however, leave only a secondary role for context. They see it either as the basis for an excuse or merely as the data that must be plugged into a predetermined agenda. On the first view, contexts are only relevant when they prevent a society from achieving whatever the view regards as the best government for humans. If a society lacks the conceptual, technological, or economic resources to attain the best form of government, then its context absolves it from charges of illegitimacy. We find this view reflected in the attitudes of, say, those Americans who think every country should be a liberal democracy, but admit that some places are not yet developed enough to realize such a society.

Frege's definition of the natural number n in terms of the set of n-membered sets has been treated rudely by history. It has suffered not one but two crippling blows. The discovery of Russell's Paradox revealed a fatal flaw in the ‘naive’ conception of set. In spite of its intuitive appeal, Frege's Basic Law V (in the context of the rest of his theory) turned out to be impermissible, leaving us only with the etiolated concept of set that survives in the axiomatic treatments initiated by Zermelo. The independence results, however, of Godel and Cohen, concerning Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis, have left us adrift in choosing between Cantorian and non-Cantorian set theories, which has induced in some logicians a skepticism in regard to the very idea of set-theoretic platonism.

This paper argues that if epistemological contextualism is correct, then not only have knowledge-ascribing sentences context-sensitive truth conditions, certain comparative and superlative constructions involving ‘know’ have context-sensitive truth conditions as well. But not only is there no evidence for the truth of the latter consequence, the evidence seems to indicate that it is false.

The position I aim to criticize has been defended by, most notably, Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose, and David Lewis. While the contextualist theories offered by these authors differ in their details, the problem to be presented seems to arise irrespective of these details. And though in most of the illustrations below I rely on Lewis's account, I could have made essentially the same points in terms of any of the other accounts.

According to an accepted view of the nature of evaluation, which many trace to Hume, knowledge does not provide us with the criteria for judging whether something is good. For this, it is said, we need something like a pro-attitude such as C. L. Stevenson argues for, or a decision such as R. M. Hare argues for. Some act of the will is required to create the criteria for evaluation. I shall argue against this view. I shall argue that the criteria for evaluating something are identical with the criteria for classifying it and that, therefore, the knowledge which provides us with the criteria for classification provides us with the criteria for evaluation.

In Section I, I give a brief account of the way in which knowledge provides the criteria for a classification and the significance of borderline cases and degree differences in classification. In Section II, I develop the idea of degree differences in classification and tie it to the idea of evaluation. In Section III, I defend my account of evaluative criteria by contrasting it with R. M. Hare's account, and I argue that the criteria for the class concept of man are at the basis of moral evaluation. I end with a brief illustration of my thesis from Kant's Metaphysics of Morals.

A philosopher once wrote the following words:

I will attempt to do two things in this paper.In Part I) I will show that H.A. Prichard failed to appreciate the limitations of the application of the ‘“ought” implies “can”’ principle. Where the ‘can’ is not the ‘can’ of physical impossibility the principle is false; the principle can be shown to be false when it is read this way by an examination of the role of excuses, which is not that of removing obligations. Part II) demonstrates how the misapplication of the ‘“ought” implies “can”’ principle is utilized in a chain of confusion: a confusion of excuses and justifications with respect to obligations and a confusion of the relation between obligations and blameworthiness.

This paper argues that the Cambridge Platonists had stronger philosophical links to Scottish moral philosophy than the received history allows. Building on the work of Michael Gill who has demonstrated links between ethical thought of More, Cudworth and Smith and moral sentimentalism, I outline some links between the Cambridge Platonists and Scottish thinkers in both the seventeenth century (e.g., James Nairn, Henry Scougal) and the eighteenth century (e.g., Smith, Blair, Stewart). I then discuss Hume's knowledge of Cudworth, in Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

In recent years, philosophers trained in the techniques and constrained by the style of what is known in the Anglo-American world as ‘analytic philosophy’ have in growing numbers undertaken to include within their methodological ambit the theories and insights of Karl Marx.

In his paper ‘Knowledge and Reasons’ B. A. O. Williams remarks: “That there should be radically impersonal knowledge seems, on the face of it, impossible: if p is known, then somebody must surely know it”. Williams points out, however, that this “apparent platitude” has strongly counter-intuitive consequences. let ‘Kp’ stand for ‘it is known that p', and’ Kap’ for’ a knows that p'.

Dictionaries distinguish the following senses of ‘punishment’:

1. (1a) the act of punishing, or the fact of being punished - where ‘punish’ is defined as: an act of public authority causing an offender to suffer for an offense. As In: ‘the respectable not only obey the law, but punish those who refuse to do so’.

2. (1b) that which is inflicted as a penalty for an offense. As in: ‘all punishments are to be carried out in the Barrack Yard’, ‘fit the punishment to the crime’.

3. (2) severe handling or treatment causing heavy damage, injury or loss. As in: ‘the fighter had been subjected to heavy punishment in his losing bout’, ‘the ships received considerable punishment from the batteries’.

Unlike old soldiers, the rhetoric of the great neither dies nor fades away. And so Hume's celebrated ‘is-ought’ passage still provokes debate.

Hume was worried about the relation between ought statements and those supporting them: between ‘tolerence brings peace’ or ‘is God's will’, and ‘so one ought to be tolerant’. He denies the deducibility of the latter from the former, as the ‘ought’ expresses ‘a new relation or affirmation’, ‘entirely different from the others’. And this is commonly taken as saying that the ought statement is ‘different’ and non-deducible, because it is no longer a ‘purely factual statement’, to wit one that makes another ordinarily testable truth claim.

However, recent criticism, by W. D. Hudson and others, points out that Hume says other things seemingly inconsistent with this. In the passage, he mentions ‘ought’ and ‘virtue’ interchangeably, and ‘tolerance is virtuous’ as in the same boat as ‘one ought to be tolerant’. But, also, he treats the virtue of an action as sensibly discernible by the approbation which it evokes, and takes us to mean by a virtuous action that we will approve of it on contemplation.