Philosophical accounts of humour standardly account for humour in terms of what happens within a person. On these internalist accounts, humour is to be understood in terms of cognition, perception, and sensation. These accounts, while valuable, are poorly situated to engage the social functions of humour. They have difficulty engaging why we value humour, why we use it define ourselves and our friendships, and why it may be essential to our self-esteem. In opposition to these internal accounts, I offer a social account of humour. This account approaches humour as a social practice. It foregrounds laughter and participation, and thereby gives an account of humour that helps to understand why we value humour, why we use it as we do, and why we use it to define our relationship to the world.

What is the relationship between human rights and the rights of states? Roughly, while cosmopolitans insist that international morality must regard as basic the interests of individuals, statists maintain that the state is of fundamental moral significance. This article defends a relational version of statism. Human rights are ultimately grounded in a relational norm of reciprocal independence and set limits to the exercise of public authority, but, contra the cosmopolitan, the state is of fundamental moral significance. A relational account promises to justify a limited conception of state sovereignty while avoiding the familiar cosmopolitan criticisms of statist accounts.

This paper examines Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy, focusing on her accounts of virtuous conduct, conscience, obligation, and moral character. I argue that Cockburn’s account of virtue has two interlocking parts: a view of what virtue requires of us, and a view of how we come to see this requirement as authoritative. I then argue that while the two parts are ultimately in tension with one another, the tension is instructive. I use Cockburn’s encounter with Shaftesbury’s writings to help bring out this tension in her thought. I conclude that Cockburn’s work marks a bridge in modern moral philosophy from seventeenth-century natural law theory to the naturalism of the eighteenth century— that of Gay, Hume, and Bentham.

Plato's Euthyphro is a dialogue about the virtue of piety. It is also one of the aporetic dialogues, ending in apparent failure to discover what piety is. It is common to understand the dialogue as teaching lessons about other things, about definition, for instance, or about the logic of refutation. About piety, however, it is thought to teach us only negatively, showing a few of the many things which piety is not.

My thesis, on the contrary, is that there is a positive account of the nature of piety in the dialogue; it is, moreover, an account which cannot be separated from the other lessons which the dialogue teaches. I shall find it necessary to expose the structure of the logical lessons in order to develop my account of the holy.

Platonic universals received sympathetic attention at the turn of the century in the early writings of Moore and Russell. But this interest quickly waned with the empiricist and nominalist movements of the twenties and thirties. In this process of declining interest Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblance seemed to serve both as coup de grâce and post-mortem.

I propose, however, that family resemblance far from being an adequate refutation of Platonic universals can actually be accommodated within a Platonic theory properly conceived. But first for some caveats and qualifications.

What family resemblance actually succeeds in refuting is not Platonic universals but Aristotelian or empiricist, or, generally, abstractive or commutative, universals. An abstractive universal is a universal arrived at by induction from identical characteristics in numerically distinct individuals (thus, for instance, see Aristotle's Metaphysics 5.26, 1023b30-31). An abstractive universal is a common property and nothing else. This conception of a universal has several consequences. First, abstractive universals are ontologically dependent on particulars.

In a ‘Letter from Washington’ in The New Yorker, Elizabeth Drew reported some speculation regarding the mental processes of Ronald Reagan. In Drew’s words:

The curious process Drew describes is clearly important in many ways -historically, politically, and perhaps legally. We contend that there is even some epistemological significance to Reagan’s method for the fixation of belief. We shall argue, in particular, that some of those curiously insulated beliefs which (if we are to believe Drew) Reagan possesses qualify as knowledge under at least one leading causal reliabilist theory of knowledge- that presented by F. Dretske in Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1981). But, as we detail the structure of such beliefs, what is probably evident already will emerge quite clearly, viz., that these beliefs do not amount to knowledge.

rests in part on the twin claims that the best reason we have for belief in other minds is the analogical argument, and the best reason we have for belief in God is the teleological argument. The conclusion also rests on Plantinga's analyses of these two arguments, which show that both fail for very similar reasons. Thus the beliefs based on these arguments are “in the same epistemological boat,“ and Plantinga draws his conclusion. This is, as James Tomberlin says, “an ingenious argument for the conclusion that belief in God is justified in the absence of any good reason whatever.“

In this paper I wish to consider the two claims mentioned above, that the best reasons we have for belief in other minds and belief in God are the analogical and teleological arguments, respectively.

In this paper I propose to give close attention to two recent discussions of the relation between theism and morality. It will be helpful first to sketch some of the considerations that have emerged from the many discussions of the relation between theism and morality and which form the background to the two recent contributions I shall discuss.

Functional words are of substantial interest in moral philosophy because they appear to lie at the juncture of description and evaluation. This is no doubt the reason that they have played a significant part in much recent discussion of the relation between facts and values. Yet, in spite of the many discussions in which functional words have made an appearance, their significance for an understanding of the relation between facts and values remains unclear. A thorough-going examination of the nature of functional words would appear to be in order. And while such a study is beyond the scope of a single article it should nevertheless be possible to make a beginning. That, at any rate, is my objective in what follows.

It is obvious that identical events must occur at the same time. This follows simply from the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals and from the fact that events have temporal features among which are those which attribute to events times of occurrence. Thus,

• (1) (x) (y) (x is an event & y is an event ﬤ (x=y ﬤ (t) (x occurs at t ≡ y occurs at t))).

But from the fact that (1) is true, and is, indeed, true necessarily, it does not follow that events necessarily occur at the times at which they in fact occur. This latter claim about events is expressed as follows:

• (2) (x) (t) (x is an event & t is a time & x occurs at t ﬤ ◻ (y) (y=x ﬤ y occurs at t)),

Hume maintained that “since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear.” Descartes maintained a very similar doctrine, and Locke and Berkeley held at least part of the doctrine. I shall not try to set out precisely what any of these philosophers thought about self-knowledge; I cite them simply as proponents of the general view which I shall be examining in this paper: namely, that each of us has a special epistemic authority about his own mental life. This view is still widely held, particularly in the form of the thesis that one's sincere avowals of current mental states are incorrigible, i.e., such that, necessarily, no one ever has overriding reason to think them false.

Proper recognition came belatedly to the work of Karl Popper. The novelty and power of his comprehensive philosophy went largely unnoticed for decades, his views being misapprehended, to the extent they were apprehended at all, as an uncompelling variation on the dominant Positivist theme. In the past two decades, however, recognition has become widespread. He can lay claim to being the initial figure in a vital and flourishing tradition in the contemporary literature; his views find expression even in undergraduate curricula; and he finds himself the welcome subject of a two-volume issue in the Schilpp series, The Library of Living Philosophers. The appearance of this collection is the occasion of this notice.

Unfortunately, the spectre of misapprehension surrounds Popper still, and haunts what should have been some of the most interesting pages in this collection. At issue here is Popper's conception of rational scientific methodology, a conception which has received substantial criticism from inductivist and anti-inductivist quarters alike. Partly from conviction, and partly for the sake of argument (Popper is an anti-inductivist), I shall adopt the latter viewpoint in this essay. My sympathies, however, will be with his critics.

This is a reply to Willem Lemmens’ discussion of my interpretation of the Dialogues on Natural Religion in my 2000 collection Themes from Hume: Self, Will, Religion. I use Lemmens’ careful textual analysis to clarify my considered position and to further the reading of Part 12 of the Dialogues.

I want to discuss a certain class of paradoxes, which I will call ‘pragmatic paradoxes.’ The term reflects the role of indexical elements in some familiar instances of the class, such as the statements ‘I am not here,’ or ‘I am not now speaking,’ and serves to distinguish the paradoxes in which I’m interested, from the semantic paradoxes, like the Liar.

An analysis of the Surprise Exam paradox affords a natural approach. Here is one version of the paradox. On Friday the teacher informs the class that one day next week (Monday- Friday) an exam will take place, and that it will be unexpected until announced, on the day it is to take place. The students reason that it can’t take place on Friday, since, were it not to occur by Thursday, they would be expecting it Friday, contrary to the teacher’s specification. If it can’t take place Friday, then it can’t take place Thursday either, for similar reasons. And so forth. The students conclude that no such exam can take place. But of course it can. So, what went wrong?

The moral problem of abortion seemed simple to describe, if not resolve. There was consensus that at least some methods of birth control—avoiding or preventing the development of a conceptus—were not wrong. There was consensus that it was wrong to kill another person like ourselves. The problem seemed to be this: when in the development toward adult life does it become wrong to prevent or terminate that development? The conservatives said, ‘from conception.’ Liberals said that it became wrong after viability, or after birth, or after early infancy. Some moderate liberals have argued that there is an intermediate stage where stopping the development of a fetus is wrong—but not the same as killing a person—because of the fetus’s similarity to or potential to become a person. While all agree on the moral principle that it is wrong to kill another person, there has been little progress toward agreement on how this principle applies to the fetus.

The neo-Lockean justification of the highly unequal distribution of income in capitalist societies is based upon two key premises: that people are the rightful owners of their labor and talents, and that the external world was, in the state of nature, unowned, and therefore up for grabs by people, who could rightfully appropriate parts of it subject to a ‘Lockean proviso.’ The argument is presented by Nozick. Counter-proposals to Nozick’s, for the most part, have either denied the premise that people should morally be viewed as the owners of their talents, or have challenged Nozick’s Lockean proviso.

Rawls, and to a more limited extent Ronald Dworkin, deny self-ownership. As Rawls writes: ‘…the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset … The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society.’ Behind the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, those who deliberate about justice are deprived of knowledge about characteristics whose distribution is morally arbitrary. In Dworkin’s proposal for resource egalitarianism, agents calculate the insurance policy they would hypothetically ask for, were they denied knowledge of what talents they will draw in the birth lottery. Compensation for unequal talents is, according to Dworkin, properly made by taxing and transferring income according to the way it would have been distributed as a consequence of such insurance. Dworkin’s veil of ignorance is thin, because agents in the appropriate posture for deliberating about income distribution know their preferences and attitudes toward risk, but not their talents. For both Rawls and Dworkin, the self-ownership premise is challenged by constructing a veil of ignorance in which people are deprived of knowledge of certain personal characteristics, knowledge of which would bias their opinions, from a moral viewpoint.

Although the literature on Wittgenstein's notion of criteria is extensive, it seems unsatisfactory. Most interpretations of criteria not only misrepresent Wittgenstein; more importantly, they misconstrue the relation between a mental state and the behavior characteristic of that state. If by “criteria” Wittgenstein meant what he has been taken to mean, it is unlikely that any mental states have criteria. In this paper I shall argue that a proper interpretation of Wittgenstein's notion provides an account of the relation between some mental states and the behavior characteristic of them which is at least approximately correct.

According to current interpretations of criteria the relation between a form of behavior C and the mental state of which it is a criterion, S, is such that the proposition “A person displaying C is (or: very likely is) in S” is either a necessary truth, known a priori to be true, or “true in virtue of a definition, convention, or rule of language.”