Explanation of cognition as a special way of being appears in Aristotle without traceable ancestry. Earlier, in Parmenides (Fr. 16; DK, 288) and in Empedocles (Fr. 108; DK, 318), the notion that cognition is somehow equated with the physical constitution of the knower at any given moment had been put forward. But the now rather enigmatic fragments of those thinkers fail to show how this notion foreshadowed any new kind of being over and above the physical. In fact, would it not seem incongruous to use the term “being” for something proposed by them in terms of change? ·

What is the source of the hardness of the logical must? What does the necessity of mathematical and logical inference consist in? If I am plotting the curve y = x2 and assume that x = 2 I must conclude that y = 4; no other consequence can be drawn. What is the nature of this ‘must'?

Understanding Wittgenstein's answer to this question is essential to understanding his later philosophy. The question of the nature of logical or mathematical necessity is as fundamental for the Investigations as it obviously was for the Tractatus. Barry Stroud's article “Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity” certainly is still one of the most illuminating and important of the papers dealing with this question.

A version of the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) claims that one is only blameworthy for actions which one was able to avoid. Much of the discussion about PAP concerns Frankfurt’s counterexamples to it. After fifty years of refined debates, progress might seem hopeless. Yet, we can make headway by asking: “what’s our reason for believing PAP?” The best answer is this: lacking eligible alternatives—alternatives whose cost is not too high to reasonably opt for—is a good excuse. Yet, this principle is subject to straightforward counterexamples, unless it is given an epistemicised reading. And in this latter case, it does not support PAP. So, PAP is unsupported, at least for now.

As it is presently employed, grounding permits grounding many things from one ground. In this paper, I show why this is a mistake by pushing for a uniqueness principle on grounding. After arguing in favor of this principle, I say something about it and kinds of grounding, discuss a similar principle, and consider its import on a formal feature of grounding, ontology, and ontological simplicity.

After he had rejected much of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein, upon at least one occasion, still “thought that in the Tractatus he had provided a perfected account of a view that is the only alternative to the viewpoint of his later work”—a perfected account: that is to say (at least) a well-knit, coherent one. It seems to me that this merit must be denied the whole account presented in the Tractatus and I would like to explain why.

The Tractatus holds that every true or false proposition is analyzable as a truth-functional compound of elementary propositions. It further holds that elementary propositions are completely independent of one another. “The simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts the existence of a state of affairs” (4.21).

The validity of argument by disjunctive syllogism (henceforth, DS) has been denied by proponents of relevant and paraconsistent logic (who are sometimes one and the same). DS is stigmatised for its role in inferences — most notably C.I. Lewis's derivation of that fallacy of irrelevance ex falso quodlibet (EFQ) — that involve both it and other rules of inference governing disjunction, or, to speak more precisely, other rules of inference taken to apply to the very same disjunction that obeys DS. In avoiding these inferences the road less travelled is to deny the identity rather than to deny DS: what follows is, then, an exercise in disjoining disjunctions.

Comme chacun sait, nous vivons à une époque où le changement est une donnée fondamentale de I’ action et aussi de Ia pensée. De ce point de vue, il est bizarre de penser que des hommes, disons des philosophes, aient non seulement posé l'immutabilité comme critère constitutif de Ia vérité mais en outre qu'ils aient défendu ce critère selon les règles de l'éloquence, avec un succès public notoire. En effet, dire d'un concept qu'il se définit au sein d'une rhétorique c'est dire, entre autres choses, qu'il présente, aux yeux du locuteur qui le propose avec succès, une valeur et une importance qui peuvent être montrées. Encore une fois, dans un monde où le changement est devenu banal, Ia défense efficace de l'immutabilité est non seulement un anachronisme: elle est bizarre.

By an incomplete sentence we shall understand a declarative sentence that can be used, without variation in its meaning, to make different statements in different contexts. Although the point deserves supporting argument, which we will not provide, sentences whose grammatical subjects are indexical expressions or demonstratives are obvious, plausible examples of incomplete sentences. Uttered in one context the sentence ‘He is ill’ may be used to make one statement, for example, that George is ill, while in another context the very same sentence may be used to make a quite different statement, for example, that Paul is ill.

It is customary to dismiss such queries as ‘Can God create a being he cannot control?’ and ‘Can God create a knot he cannot untie?’ with the comment that such questions in fact fail to specify a task for God to perform. The reason given is that omnipotence is included in the idea of God, with the alleged result that such expressions as ‘a being God cannot control’ and ‘a knot God cannot untie’ contain contradictions. J .L. Cowan has argued that this conventional response is mistaken, and subsequently expanded upon this contention in reply to some of its critics. I shall try to show that Cowan's defense of the coherence of expressions like these is mistaken, and with it his conclusion that since an omnipotent God clearly cannot perform such tasks the concept of omnipotence is self-contradictory.

Cowan has no quarrel with one assumption of the customary reply. If the specification of a task is self-contradictory, he agrees that the inability of God to perform it is no blemish on his omnipotence.

Professor John Wisdom holds that the reference to be found in many religious beliefs to what lies beyond the world and transcends the senses is misleading. Religious beliefs speak and, indeed, can only speak about this world, the world we know by means of the senses. The religious believer is himself misled when he describes the God he believes in as transcendent. What gives content to his beliefs is how certain things stand in this world. To appreciate these and so to embrace the beliefs in question is for a person to change in himself, to come into contact with something that lies within him. Here lies the spiritual aspect of the content of religious beliefs.

Is it true that utilitarianism can accommodate the modern belief that human beings have certain moral rights against everybody ‘just in virtue of their human nature?’ I should have thought the most a utilitarian could grant was that we had rights just in virtue of the utility of respecting such rights, not just in virtue of our human nature. In fact, that is more like the view Professor Brandt actually supports. What he argues is that there is not the a priori difficulty with the idea of utilitarian moral rights that some philosophers have thought there was. However, I think the possibility of utilitarian moral rights is not the same as the view that we all have human rights against everybody just in virtue of our human nature. As I hear it, ‘just in virtue of our human nature’ is an alternative to a utilitarian basis for rights. I'll return to that.

In De Interpretatione 9 Aristotle considers the proposition that everything that is or comes to be, is or comes to be of necessity. From the supposition that this is so, he draws the following consequence: ‘[In that case] there would be no need (ού δέοο) to deliberate or take trouble, [saying] that if we do this there will be so and so, and if we do not do this there will not be so and so’ (18b31-3). Finding this result absurd, he rejects the supposition and concludes that some events or states of affairs are contingent.

In a recent article Robert Paul Wolff has argued that Marx's theory of capitalist exploitation is incorrect, in that its ground is the premiss that labor is the source of all value.1 This, of course, is a well-rehearsed objection to Marx, but Wolff gives it a novel twist. He notes that the defense of this premise in the opening pages of Capital is inadequate, but he is not troubled by this ‘bad argument,’ for he sees Marx's real argument as something else: the (implicit) claim that unless labor is the source of all value, an adequate account of profit is impossible. In other words Marx is seen to be making a transcendental argument: an inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of profit. Wolff proceeds to argue that Marx goes astray here, but not so far astray that a valid transcendental argument, faithful to Marx's essential insight, cannot be charted.

Along with the rest of his Critique de Ia Raison Dialectique, which it introduces, the “Question de Méthode” (widely read by English-speaking students of Marx as Search for a Method) takes an important place in the development of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical and political thought. However, the Search is also a challenge to Marxists either to defend or abandon certain of their views, and as such I think it raises some crucial issues. It is the purpose of this essay not to produce a systematic critique of Sartre's influential work, but rather to explore and sharpen some principles of the methodology of historical materialism by critically examining a selection of interrelated misconceptions about Marxism exhibited in the Search and shared by many friends as well as foes of the historical materialist approach to the study of human society.

A view of truth that gained prominence among early logical positivists, what A.J. Ayer called the ‘redundancy theory of truth,’ has had a renaissance over the last few decades. The fundamental thought behind this theory is that the truth predicate is a device of disquotation. Redundancy, or disquotationalism, is seen by its advocates as providing a definitive answer to the perennial question ‘what is the nature of truth?’ The answer, says the disquotationalist, is to reject the idea that truth has some underlying nature. The terms true and false, as Ayer put it, connote nothing (Ayer, 1936/1946,88). They do not correspond or refer to some elusive ingredient of reality. Truth, he argued, must be deflated from its exalted metaphysical Status — but the notion should not be dispensed with altogether. Disquotationalists like Ayer think that the truth predicate has an essential role to play in logic. Indeed, disquotationalism, in its purest form, sees the sole function of the truth predicate as fulfilling this logical need, that is, as a device that aids generalization by permitting infinite conjunction and disjunction.

Is there a sense in which we exercise direct volitional control over our beliefs? Most agree that there is not, but discussions tend to focus on control in forming a belief. The focus here is on sustaining a belief over time in the face of ‘epistemic temptation’ to abandon it. It is argued that we do have a capacity for ‘doxastic self-control’ over time that is partly volitional in nature, and that its exercise is rationally permissible.

This paper develops a moderate pessimist account of moral deference. I argue that while some pessimist explanations of the puzzle of moral deference have been misguided in matters of detail, they nevertheless share an important insight, namely that there is a justified moral agency ideal grounded in pro tanto reasons against moral deference. This thought is unpacked in terms of a set of values associated with the practice of morality. I conclude by suggesting that the solution to the puzzle of moral deference developed here gives us a plausible recipe for generalizing to certain cases of nonmoral deference as well.