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.

In 1966 Michel Foucault pointed out that the generation of thinkers who had taken as their model Sartre or Merleau-Ponty had suddenly become part of the intellectual museum. A new generation of thinkers had appeared whose passion was not for “meaning”, “man” and “commitment”, but for the “concept and the system”.

“Our task, Foucault went on, is to free ourselves from humanism and in that sense our work is political.” For some time Foucault and those who thought like him were classed as ‘academics”, that is as people whose thinking had little or no implications for the ongoing state of the society. Then came the May movement of 1968 and in February of 1969 a major gathering was held and the main speakers were Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault.

The problem of ascertaining whether there is a justification for the imposition of suffering and premature death on nonhuman animals is important in itself. Examination of the problem also promises to force philosophers to rethink widespread assumptions about what is proper treatment of less than normal human beings, the basis for attributing rights to humans, the value of life, the “intrinsic worth of all human beings,” and certain egalitarian principles. In what follows my primary concern will concern the justification of imposing suffering on animals. In particular I shall try to sort out and examine some arguments set forward by Tom Regan in a recent essay.

The goal of standard semantics is to provide truth conditions for the sentences of a given language. Probabilistic Semantics does not share this aim; it might be said instead, if rather cryptically, that Probabilistic Semantics aims to provide belief conditions.

The central and guiding idea of Probabilistic Semantics is that each rational individual has ‘within’ him or her a personal subjective probability function. The output of the function when given a certain sentence as input represents the degree of likelihood which the individual would assign to that sentence. One can characterize these functions via a set of axioms, and in the terms of this defined structure develop probabilistic analogues of all important semantical notions (e.g. validity, entailment). Then, dealing with ‘being given probability 1’ instead of ‘truth,’ one can proceed to give a completely adequate semantics for the particular language under consideration. The axioms delimiting the class of probability functions are, in fact, chosen with this goal and language in mind.

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.”

I want to present some evidence that facts about de re attitudes or causal facts are important in the explanation of actions. In particular, I will argue that an attempt by Ernest Sosa and Mark Pastin [4] to give a scheme for explaining intentional actions fails. By adding either de re or causal locutions we can devise a more adequate schema for explaining action, but their analysis had been designed to eliminate de re locutions from explanations of intentional action. Showing the failure of their analysis does not, of course, show that de re or causal elements are required in these explanations, since it does not rule out the possibility of alternative explanatory schemes. But the centrality of de re or causal elements is supported by the inadequacy of their attempts to dispense with them.

In this article I want to investigate what sort of explanation is being given when someone says “He did x out of such and such emotion” or “Such and such emotion was his motive tor doing x”. In order to do this I will try and argue for the following:

1. (1) The term ‘motive’ should not be limited to contexts where we expect that the motivation does not fall within the standard range.

2. (2) The motive which is said to be behind an actual action is to be construed as a cause.

3. (3) The motive which is said to be behind an actual action is to be construed as entailing a want which is a cause.

4. (4) However not all actions which can be said to be done out of some motive can be said to be actions which the agent wanted to do.

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.

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?

This is yet another study of Mill's ‘proof’ of utilitarianism, and since the topic is by now rather shop-worn I should state right off what new form I hope to give to it. Mill argues from the premise that each person desires his own happiness to the conclusion that the general happiness is desirable. To be more precise, he argues that one's own happiness is the only thing that any person desires as an end, and from this he moves to the conclusion that the general happiness is that state of things which should be promoted. It is not necessary at the outset to accept this as the correct rendering of Mill's argument; it is part of my object to show that it is.

As an introduction to explicating the concept of basic knowledge, I shall examine Aristotle's argument for the existence of basic knowledge and urge two basic points. The first point is that Aristotle's argument, properly viewed, establishes the existence of a kind of knowledge, basic or non-demonstrative knowledge, the definition of which does not require the specification of, and hence the satisfaction of, any evidence condition. This point has been urged by philosophers like Peirce and Austin but it needs further argumentation because most analytic epistemologists still insist (for reasons that we shall see) that all knowledge, whether basic or non-basic, requires the satisfaction of some evidence condition. Secondly, to urge (as Wittgenstein and Dewey have done) that the basic propositions whose existence is established by Aristotle's argument could be privileged but not known, for the reason that there is no evidence condition for them, would be to adopt a position that either entails wholesale skepticism or undermines the basic distinction between knowledge and belief.

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.

Replying to Theaetetus’ suggestion that knowledge is true opinion at Tht. 200e, Socrates remarks that ‘a whole profession’ testifies against this definition. The orator practises the art of persuasion, not to teach people, but make them believe whatever he wants. If a robbery has taken place, for example, he cannot in a short time teach adequately the truth about what happened to people who were not on the scene.

Recent developments in game theory have shown that the mathematical models of action so widely admired in the study of economics are in fact only particular instantiations of a more general theoretical framework. In the same way that Aristotelian logic was ‘translated’ into the more general and expressive language of predicate logic, the basic action theoretic underpinnings of modern economics have now been articulated within the more comprehensive language of game theory. But precisely because of its greater generality and expressive power, game theory has again revived the temptation to apply formal models of action to every domain of social life. This movement has been fuelled by some notable successes. Game theory has provided useful insights into the logic of collective action in the theory of public goods, and strategic models of voting have illustrated important aspects of institutional decision-making. But this extension of formal models into every area of social interaction has also encountered significant difficulties, despite the fact that contemporary decision theory has weakened its basic assumptions to the point where it teeters constantly on the brink of vacuity.

Aristotle is often credited with views about practical reasoning, desire, and action collectively referred to as the theory of the practical syllogism.Some commentators are skeptical about the existence of any such general theory, but most would agree that a theory of some sort is outlined in the De Motu Animalium and that it influences Aristotle’s account of akrasia in the icomachean Ethics.

This paper will begin by describing the most important ideas in the De Motu Animalium discussion of the practical syllogism. The ideas are simple but I think that their implications and philosophical importance have not been appreciated. I will suggest that the practical syllogism is Aristotle’s model for the rational explanation of action. Other commentators have made this claim, but I think that it can be given a very precise sense. Aristotle thinks that an action can be rationally explained if the agent acts in response to the strength of the reasons that he sees for acting. The practical syllogism is an argument that expresses the reasons in favor of the action, so if the agent acts for those reasons the action is explained by the practical syllogism. The second part of the paper considers the work that the practical syllogism does in Aristotle’s account of akrasia. I will argue that in akrasia—at least in the most extreme kind of akrasia—the agent acts intentionally to satisfy a desire but the action cannot be explained by a practical syllogism. Aristotle distinguishes between explanation by the motivational strength of desires and explanation by a practical syllogism. The last part of this paper comments on David Charles’s interpretation of Aristotle’s views about desire, practical reason, and akrasia. Charles discusses the traditionally disputed questions in a provocative way, and more importantly his suggestions fit together into a complex and philosophically sophisticated reading of Aristotle. I disagree with his most important claims, but I can best explain and defend my own interpretation by contrasting it with his.

It is commonly said that ethical disputes either involve disagreements of fact or disagreements of principle and that while disagreements of fact can be overcome by rational means, disagreements of principle cannot. The difficulty is supposed to be this: for an argument to be rationally persuasive it must appeal to premises already accepted by the person to be persuaded, and if the premises include the principle in question then they will not be acceptable to that person; however, if the premises do not include the principle in question the argument cannot succeed because the conclusion can only validly be inferred from premises which do include the principle in question. While this doctrine is appealing to philosophers who find the idea of ultimate disagreement in ethics comforting, it is a visciously skeptical view which can be generalized to cover all systematic areas of human knowledge. As ‘disagreements of principle’ can appear in almost any domain of human inquiry, the hidden cost of this doctrine is terribly high.