There are two general approaches to characterising biological functions. One originates with Cummins. According to this approach, the function of a part of a system is just its causal contribution to some specified activity of the system. Call this the ‘C-function’ (or ‘Cummins function’) concept. The other approach ties the function of a trait to some aspect of its evolutionary significance. Call this the ‘E-function’ (or ‘evolutionary function’) concept. According to the latter view, a trait's function is determined by the forces of natural selection. The C-function and E-function concepts are clearly quite different, but there is an important relation between them which heretofore has gone unnoticed. The purpose of this paper is to outline that relation.

This is not the first paper to discuss the relation of C-function and E-function. Previous attempts all follow either one of two strategies. The first proposes that the two concepts are ‘unified.’ The other proposes that they are radically distinct and apply to wholly different fields within biology.

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.

Whatever the original intent, the introduction of the term ‘thought experiment’ has proved to be one of the great public relations coups of science writing. For generations of readers of scientific literature, the term has planted the seed of hope that the fragment of text they have just read is more than mundane. Because it was a thought experiment, does it not tap into that infallible font of all wisdom in empiricist science, the experiment? And because it was conducted in thought, does it not miraculously escape the need for the elaborate laboratories and bloated budgets of experimental science?

These questions in effect pose the epistemological problem of thought experiments in the sciences:

One enticing response to the problem is to imagine that thought experiments draw from some special source of knowledge of the world that transcends our ordinary epistemic resources.

René Descartes, one of the dominant figures in the history of philosophy, has been accused of one of the most obvious mistakes in the history of philosophy — the so-called cartesian circle. It is my goal in this paper to arrive at an understanding of Descartes's work that attributes to him a theory that

• (a) should be of philosophical interest to contemporary epistemologists,

• (b) is consistent with, and suggested by, the actual text, and

• (c) avoids the circle.

I begin with a brief explanation of the supposed circle. In his search for absolute certainty Descartes requires that in order for a proposition to be an instance of knowledge it must be indubitable for the knower, and in order for it to be indubitable for the knower she must be able to eliminate any possibility of the belief's being false. It is to provide a means to satisfy this requirement that Descartes proposes the principle

And it seems that Descartes's defense of CD traps him in the circle.

What does it mean to say that the Universe had a beginning? There are different ways of spelling this out. I shall develop them, consider the logical relations between them, and support one as best capturing our intuitive understanding of this notion. I shall then draw a conclusion about whether Time could (it is logically possible) have a beginning. Finally I shall consider, on my preferred understanding of what it is for the Universe to have a beginning, what physical cosmology can show about whether it did in fact have a beginning.

I understand by a Universe, a system of substances temporally connected to each other. I understand by a substance a thing with causal powers or liabilities, that is able to act or be acted upon. Substances will thus include both material objects and any other physical objects there may be such as chunks of energy or the fluctuating ‘vacuum’ of quantum field theory, and immaterial objects, if there are any, such as souls and ghosts. I understand by two substances being temporally connected that they exist for periods of time which are either earlier than, overlap with, or are later than each other.

What is the relation between the intention to A and doing A intentionally? It is natural to suppose that the latter entails the former. That is, it is natural to accept what Michael Bratman has called the ‘Simple View’ of the relation between acting intentionally and having an intention. Bratman is one noteworthy writer who has denied that the Simple View is true. In the present paper I do not defend this view. I contend that one well-known argument that Bratman offers for thinking that the Simple View is false fails, in fact, to disprove it. If there are reasons for thinking that the Simple View is false, as I believe there are, they are not the ones that Bratman has offered. My discussion of Bratman also raises some more general questions about the principles governing the rational formation of intentions. I suggest that a special sort of example casts doubt on the tenability of a commonly accepted principle that Bratman, among others, utilizes.

Hume's moral philosophy is often interpreted as an example of a naturalistic approach to ethics. J.L. Mackie, for instance, writes that in Hume the questions of moral philosophy are answered ‘in sociological and psychological terms, by constructing and defending a causal hypothesis.’ Similarly, Páll S. Árdal claims that Hume ‘is concerned with an attempt to discover those psychological laws that explain human emotions (including moral emotions) and the behaviour of people in society.’ I argue in this essay that if Hume is read in this way as developing a general explanatory theory of moral sentiments, he faces an inescapable dilemma. Section I presents the dilemma. In sections II and ill, I argue why for Hume — interpreted as a proponent of general psychological laws — there is no way out of this dilemma.

There has recently been a revival of interest in ‘naturalizing’ ethics. A naturalization seeks to vindicate ethical realism — the idea that ethical judgments can be true reflections of a moral reality — without violating the naturalist constraint that science sets the limits of ontology. The recent revival has been prompted by examples of successful scientific reduction (e.g. temperature, water), and by the emergence of new, nonreductive naturalist strategies (e.g. for biological and mental properties). In this paper, I argue against such naturalist approaches to ethics. My argument builds on the traditional one offered by G.E. Moore, namely that a naturalization would fail to respect an existing difference between the meanings of moral and naturalistic terms. I defend this line of argument against the common claim that it cannot block ‘synthetic’ property identities, ones grounded not in meaning equivalences but in empirical discoveries (as in the cases of temperature and water). I then go on to show that the Moorean argument can make trouble even for recent revisionist and nonreductive naturalist approaches.

My intention in this essay will be to explore the role that consent-based arguments perform in Kant's political and legal philosophy. I want to uncover the extent to which Kant considered that the legitimacy of the State and of its laws depends upon the outcome of intersubjective deliberation. Commentators have divided over the following question: Is Kant best viewed as a member of the social contract tradition, according to which the legitimacy of the state and of the laws it promulgates derives from the consent of those people over whom it claims authority, or should he be read as having put forward a secularized version of natural law theory, according to which the state and its laws are legitimate to the extent that they are attained by standards of sound reason and supported by an objective account of the human good?

George Williams could not have anticipated the special relevance his principle has for contemporary analyses of representational content. In particular, his principle provides both a concise statement of where a currently popular strategy for naturalizing representational content has gone wrong and a positive suggestion for how we should right this wrong. I characterize the kind of naturalistic analysis of representation I have in mind as bottom-up because it seeks to build representation up from a non-intentional, and hence naturalistically unimpeachable, correlation relation. Many authors have suggested such an approach to naturalizing intentionality, but for clarity and completeness perhaps Fred Dretske's Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes ought to be construed as the exemplary source.

There seems to be nearly universal agreement that society cannot do without some form of criminal punishment. At the same time, it is generally acknowledged that punishment, involving as it does the imposition of hardship and suffering, stands in need of justification. What form such a justification should take, however, is a matter of considerable contention, in part because of basic theoretical disagreements on the nature of moral obligation, and in part because of disagreements concerning the nature and purpose of criminal punishment itself.

These disagreements have given rise to a number of rival ‘theories’ of punishment - rival accounts of the purposes of punishment and the conditions which justify it. The traditional theories can be broadly categorized as deterrence theories, incapacitation theories, retributive theories, and rehabilitative theories (broadly conceived to include moral education theories). My purpose here is to contribute to this discussion on punishment by introducing a largely overlooked theory of punishment, one whose outlines can be found in the writings of Simone Wei!, but which has yet to be fully developed and discussed. This theory, which I call the ‘reintegrative theory,’ has, I believe, a number of advantages over more traditional theories of punishment.

Personal and demonstrative pronouns ('I,’ ‘you,’ ‘s/he,’ ‘we,’ the plural 'you,’ ‘they,’ ‘this’ and ‘these’) are notorious for challenging any theory of natural language. Singular pronouns have received much attention from linguists and philosophers alike during the last three decades. Plural pronouns, on the other hand, have been neglected, especially by philosophers. I want to fill this gap and suggest accounts of ‘we,’ the plural ‘you,’ and ‘they.'

Intuitively, singular and plural personal pronouns are ‘counterparts.' Any account of personal pronouns should make sense of this intuition. However, the latter is not very sophisticated and, as we move along, it will be reexamined and relativized. As we shall see, plural pronouns are much more than mere counterparts of the familiar singular ones. It is well known that third person singular pronouns have puzzling behaviors, acting as co-referential terms, bound variables, or unbound anaphora. But co-reference, binding, and unbound anaphora are not confined to the usual examples and extend, in a way, to plural pronouns. My discussion of the latter is partly motivated by this particular behavior.

The idea of nonconceptual contents proposes that there are mental contents at the level of the experiencing person that are individuated independently of ‘anything to do with the mind.’ Such contents are posited to meet a variety of theoretical and explanatory needs concerning concepts and conceptual mental contents which are individuated in terms having to do with the mind. So to examine the idea of nonconceptual content we need to examine whether we really need to posit such content and whether there is a coherent, viable way of doing so. I will examine the idea of nonconceptual contents by considering Christopher Peacocke's attempt, in his Study of Concepts, to posit such contents.

Three principal kinds of considerations motivate positing non-conceptual content: epistemological, phenomenological, and explanatory-psychological. A theory of knowledge might posit nonconceptual content in order to show that our experience contains the justificatory base for empirical thought as its own proper part. Non-conceptual content might also be posited in order to account for the finely detailed or determinate phenomenological character of perceptual experience.

Sentimentality is usually thought of as a mild vice. Unlike such vices as cruelty, dishonesty, or contemptuousness, sentimentality appears to affect only the individuals who have it, and then, not very adversely. So what if we indulge our taste for prematurely dying heroines or stoic, sweet-natured children? Shedding a tear or feeling a diffuse affection does not seem to hurt anyone, not even ourselves. But because of its impact on the self, sentimentality is a more serious vice than might be suspected.

Regardless of the immediate object of our sentimental gaze, the self is also sentimentalized. The self is not only the subject engaged in sentimentalizing activity, but also its mediated object. A sentimentalized sense of self discourages activity and keeps us from dealing with the world directly. The distortion of and absorption in the self is dangerous for sentimental individuals and those with whom they interact. To see why, we must examine the structuring of perception, thought, and emotion which makes up sentimentality. Our inquiry will be sharpened by reference to literary depictions which reflect or encourage sentimental response. Versing us in the ways of sentimentality, some literature may generate our everyday patterns of sentimentalized thought and feeling.

It is often supposed that there is a relationship between desert and responsibility: that to be deserving we must be responsible for that which makes us deserving. Indeed, there seems little doubt that a supposed relationship between desert and responsibility, combined with a growing tendency to view less and less as the responsibility of the individual, contributed to the reluctance to appeal to desert which has been a feature of much recent moral and political philosophy. Certainly, if to be deserving we need to be responsible for that which makes us deserving ‘all the way down,’ it is not easy to see how anyone could ever be deserving of anything.

I will argue that the claim that we can deserve only on the basis of that for which we are responsible — the desert-responsibility thesis — is false. There is no conceptual connection between desert and responsibility. Nevertheless, it is true that many claims to deserve are undermined if there is a lack of responsibility.

Do we rightly expect a perfectly loving God to bring it about that, right now, we reasonably believe that He exists? It seems so. For love at its best desires the well-being of the beloved, not from a distance, but up close, explicitly participating in her life in a personal fashion, allowing her to draw from that relationship what she may need to flourish. But why suppose that we would be significantly better off were God to engage in an explicit, personal relationship with us? Well, first, there would be broadly moral benefits. We would be able to draw on the resources of that relationship to overcome seemingly ever present flaws in our character. And we would be more likely to emulate the self-giving love with which we were loved. So loved, we would be more likely to flourish as human beings. Second, there would be experiential benefits. We would be, for example, more likely to experience peace and joy stemming from the strong conviction that we were properly related to our Maker, security in suffering knowing that, ultimately, all shall be well, and there would be the sheer pleasure of God's loving presence.

In his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (hereafter RM), John Searle attacks computational psychology with a number of new and boldly provocative claims. Specifically, in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘The Critique of Cognitive Reason,’ Searle targets what he calls ‘cognitivism,’ according to which our brains are digital computers that process a mental syntax. And Searle denies this view on grounds that the attribution of syntax is observer relative. A syntactic property is arbitrarily assigned to a physical system, he thinks, with the result that syntactic states ‘do not even exist except in the eyes of the beholder’ (RM, 215). This unabashed anti-realism differs significantly from Searle's earlier work. The Chinese room argument, for example, was intended to show that syntactic properties will not suffice for semantics, where the syntax was realistically construed. But now Searle claims that physical properties will not suffice to determine a system's syntactic properties.

In ‘The Status of Content,’ Paul Boghossian points out an embarrassment in which A.J. Ayer finds himself in his extensive irrealism. Ayer embraces both an emotivist theory of ethics and a deflationary theory of truth. According to an emotivist theory, sentences that look like perfectly good declarative sentences, such as ‘One ought not to kill,’ should be interpreted as non-declarative sentences. According to a deflationary theory of truth, ‘truth’ is not a predicate of sentences, and sentences of the form ‘“p” is true’ are equivalent to sentences of the form ‘p.’ Boghossian argues that emotivism and deflationism turn out to be incompatible.

Boghossian's criticism should not be presented before we ask this question: What motivates Ayer's subversion of surface grammar? A typical motivation to provide an analysis of a certain region of discourse is to find a way in which patterns of inference and compositionality could be more perspicuously presented.

When a man of business enters into life and action, he is more apt to consider the characters of men, as they have relation to his interest, than as they stand in themselves; and has his judgement warped on every occasion by the violence of his passion. When a philosopher contemplates characters and manners in his closet, the general abstract view of the objects leaves the mind so cold and unmoved, that the sentiments of nature have no room to play, and he scarce feels the difference between vice and virtue. History keeps in a just medium betwixt these extremes, and places the objects in their true point of view. The writers of history, as well as the readers, are sufficiently interested in the characters and events, to have a lively sentiment of blame or praise; and, at the same time, have no particular interest or concern to pervert their judgment.