In common-sense morality, certain special obligations loom large. These are duties which are laid upon agents, be they individuals or groups, in virtue of their distinctive identities, relationships or histories: because of who they are, how they are linked to others or what they have done in the past. The particularistic basis of these obligations means that no one but the agent in question is engaged by such a duty. It is that agent's alone.

These special obligations include duties towards oneself, towards one's dependants and towards those to whom one has made certain commitments. In each case they prescribe partisan treatment. The beneficiary is to enjoy a benefit which may not be especially important in the global scheme of things, and which may even be obtained at the cost of others’ being deprived of benefits that are equally or more important in some cosmic sense.

A philosopher once wrote the following words:

Half-truths lie notoriously at the heart of publicly indulged instances of rationalization and excuse-making. Politicians and administrators, for example, explain away failed policies or even overt malfeasance by snatching at some particle of truth, some ostensibly saving grace. A halftruth articulated – the nominal truth – covers what I shall henceforth refer to as a sleeping truth – a truth that can lie in both senses of the word. We let a sleeping truth lie undisturbed, without proper examination or scrutiny, and sometimes we let it lie (prevaricate) in the matter of helping underwrite a deception: the policy or malfeasance was not, after all, that bad. Even when we discern the sleeping truth, we let the halftruth stand, because the one proffering it is like us – fallibly human, pressed for time perhaps or an unfortunate victim of circumstance. Sometimes the effort of calling a spade a spade may be forgone simply because there is not enough morally at stake.

Intentionality, as Brentano originally introduced the term in modern philosophy, was meant to provide a distinctive characteristic definitively separating the mental from the physical. Mental states have an intrinsic relationship to an object, to that which they are ‘about.’ Physical entities just are what they are, they cannot, by their very essence, refer to anything, they have no ‘outreach,’ as one might put it. Mental states have, as it were, an incomplete essence, they cannot exist at all unless they are completed by something other than themselves, their object. Brentano's position is opposed to all theories which represent the mental as only extrinsically related to the world, that is, to all theories in which mental states are themselves self-sufficient for their own existence and only secondarily relate to the world by means of something external to their nature, e.g., neurological causation, divine intervention, or preestablished harmony.

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that Hegel's political philosophy is difficult to interpret. But his political thought clearly poses problems which the rest of his work does not (especially), and these problems arise from apparent political ambivalence on his part towards the French Revolution, towards monarchy, towards the doctrine of popular sovereignty, towards public opinion and press freedom - well, there is scarcely a reader of Hegel who could not add some additional topic to this already lengthy list. For instance, Hegel sometimes noted how crucial it is for a state to be decisive; every state needs a reservoir of decisiveness, supplied preferably by a monarch, who ‘has become the personality of the state,’ who ‘cuts short the weighing of the pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying “I will” make its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.’

Both the distinction between de re and de dicto beliefs, and the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions have seemed, to some philosophers, to be of somewhat dubious status. While admitting that there is, in each case, some sort of distinction to be drawn, they have been inclined to think that these distinctions are not relevant to the philosophical questions being asked about beliefs and descriptions. Philosophers have, for example, been concerned with the structure of beliefs, where this can be understood to mean the structure of believed propositions; and they have been concerned with the analysis of sentences containing definite descriptions. But, it is thought, these two distinctions have no bearing on propositional structure or on sentence meaning. They have, in short, no semantic significance.

A person who sincerely denies that the sun will rise tomorrow or that some trees are green is either a lunatic or a fool. And yet, skeptical arguments seem to show that such statements are doubtful. In this sense skeptical arguments seem to imply that we are not more rational than a lunatic or a fool. This is - in a nutshell - ‘the problem of skepticism.‘

Much of the history of philosophy may be interpreted as a series of attempts to get rid of this problem by discovering ways of justifying statements that most people take to be true as a matter of course.

‘Either God is or he is not.’ But to which view shall we be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance, a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.

In several recent writings and in the 1980 Freemantle Lectures at Oxford, Alvin Plantinga has defended the idea that belief in God is ‘properly basic,’ by which he means that it is perfectly rational to hold such a belief without basing it on any other beliefs. The defense falls naturally into two broad parts: a positive argument for the rationality of such beliefs, and a rebuttal of the charge that if such a positive argument ‘succeeds,’ then a parallel argument will ‘succeed’ equally well in showing that belief in the Great Pumpkin is properly basic. (It is taken as obvious that ‘the Great Pumpkin objection,’ unrebutted, would constitute a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that the positive argument had succeeded in proving anything at all.) In this essay I shall argue both that Plantinga has partially misconceived the objection, and that he has not succeeded, indeed cannot succeed, in rebutting it, for the objection does in fact constitute a reductio ad absurdum of his position. For the sake of ease of exposition, I shall first provide a bare sketch of the positive argument, though I shall discuss it directly only as it bears on the attempted reductio.

Of these two books by Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (MSM) is the more substantial. In it the most substantial parts of Explaining Technical Change (ETC) reappear; and in it - in its impoverished conception of contradiction - the most striking omission of ETC takes the heaviest toll. ETC is to a very considerable extent taken up with reviews of other people's work on the economics of technical change. Its Part One survey of the philosophy of social science is very rapid, with little novelty in- tended or offered. The survey is not systematically, or even incessantly, drawn upon in the Part Two discussion of technical change. MSM, by contrast, is a library of penetrating and provocative discussion, which ranks in quality with books by G.A. Cohen and John Roemer or (very different in conception and working assumptions) Richard Miller among the number of recent exactingly analytical studies of Marx's theories, and is more comprehensive than any of these.

One commonly stated reason for thinking that there are abstract entities such as propositions is that they are needed to account for undeniable facts about propositional attitudes and the sentences reporting such attitudes. According to the propositional theory, belief, doubt, assertion and other attitudes are relations between individuals and propositions. In sentences reporting these relations the words in the content-sentence (e.g., ‘p’ in sentences of the form ‘S said that p’) refer to concepts or other abstract things and the entire ‘that-clause’ refers to a proposition. According to a common rival account, propositional attitudes are complex relations between individuals and sentences and each that-clause refers to the content-sentence it contains. The words in the content-sentence either fail to refer or refer to themselves. A striking implication of both the propositional theory and the sentential theory is that the words and phrases in the content-sentence of a sentence expressing a propositional attitude fail to refer to the familiar things to which they ordinarily refer.

The problem of why something exists rather than nothing is doubtless as old as human philosophising. Of comparable antiquity is the observation that one cannot hope to explain why something exists rather than nothing by appealing to the existence of something else, on pain of vicious circularity.

In this paper, I distinguish between the question of why anything exists, and the question of why particulars exist. These two questions are equivalent only if the only things that exist are particulars. Certainly many have held that universals as well as particulars exist. I take it here that there is a prima facie distinction between universals and particulars. It follows that the former question is prima facie more general than the latter. I will initially concentrate on the latter, taking a hint from some recent theorising about the physics of the Big Bang.

There is a venerable and thoroughly entrenched tradition of regarding epistemic justification as playing an essential cognitive role in the acquisition, maintenance, or even loss of knowledge. Hold fixed that p is true and that S believes that p. Given this, whether S comes to know that p, still knows that p, or no longer knows that p essentially depends upon whether S has acquired, sustained, or lost justification for believing that p. I shall call any theory which regards epistemic justification as playing this essential epistemological function in cognition a Jn-theory. To simplify, we will say that a Jn-theorist is one who holds that - when the truth of p is held constant and S's belief that p is held constant - S's knowledge that p varies directly with the victory of S's justification and indirectly with its defeat.

Whether John Locke's Two Treatises is a justification of revolution or a demand for revolution, it is a book about political revolution. Yet it is also a book about property. This is so not only because of the obviously central place that Locke's discussion of property holds in the Second Treatise but also because his account of when revolution is justified hinges, in three crucial respects, on his account of how private, or, exclusive, rights to property arise.

Certain examples involving negatively relevant evidence (hereafter, nre) are trouble for reliabilists, since they show that reliability is not sufficient for justification. Two approaches for dealing with these examples within the reliabilist framework have been taken. Neither approach, however, can account for all cases involving nre. This I will argue. I will explain the two approaches briefly, then describe a counter example which calls for a difference approach. To handle the case I describe, one needs torequire that the agent's belief be ‘internally acceptable’ as well as reliable.

Many examples show that reliability is insufficient. Consider a modification of an example by Goldman, which he used to make a different point. Driving through the country, Andy looks to the right, sees a barn, and comes to believe that the object he sees is a barn. His belief, however, is not justified because he possesses nre, viz., his false, but justified, belief that the majority of bam-like objects in the area are barn facsimiles which, under the present visual circumstances, are almost indistinguishable from real barns.