The contemporary view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious intentionality consists in two claims: (i) unconscious propositional attitudes represent the world the same way conscious ones do, and (ii) both sets of attitudes represent by having determinate propositional content. Crane (2017) has challenged both claims, proposing instead that unconscious propositional attitudes differ from conscious ones in being less determinate in nature. This paper aims to evaluate Crane's proposal. In particular, I make explicit and critique certain assumptions Crane makes in support of his asymmetry, and argue for a conditional claim: if Crane is right that unconscious intentional states are (relatively) indeterminate, this suggests that conscious intentional states are indeterminate in a similar fashion as well.

Mikel Burley says that he thinks that the Makropoulos debate can make no sense unless talk about eternal life makes sense. Here is his most striking argument that it doesn't – that immortality is inconceivable:

This essay deals with the problem of the status of colours, traditionally considered as the paradigmatic case of secondary qualities: do colours exist only as aspects of experience or are they real properties of objects, existing independently of human and animal perception? Recently, John Campbell has argued in favour of the simple view of colours, according to which colours are real properties of objects. I discuss the place of Campbell's position in a debated which was started by John Mackie and continued by John McDowell, and defend it from a criticism due to Michael Smith. I conclude that the simple view is a philosophically credible position. Subsequently, I consider an alleged contradiction between the simple view and semantic externalism pointed out by Jim Edwards. I suggest that a supporter of the simple view may consistently maintain semantic externalism, if she also accepts epistemological externalism about the canonical warrant of perceptual judgements.

‘Reply to Horton’ gives four reasons why Horton's attack on Kekes' earlier article fails. In particular Horton fails to make the case that we have a moral obligation to do more than we already do towards relieving poverty through the taxes we already pay.

It is notorious that great philosophers are apt to be misunderstood. Controversy rages about their work, and sometimes they are credited with completely contradictory views. Consider the sharply contrasted opinions of Plato's political thought by Sir Karl Popper, on the one hand, and G. C. Field and H. B. Acton on the other.

This paper is concerned with the senses in which paintings do and do not depict various temporal phenomena, such as motion, stasis and duration. I begin by explaining the popular – though not uncontroversial – assumption that depiction, as a pictorial form of representation, is a matter of an experiential resemblance between the pictorial representation and that which it is a depiction of. Given this assumption, I illustrate a tension between two plausible claims: that paintings do not depict motion in the sense that video recordings do, and that paintings do not merely depict objects but may depict those objects as engaged in various activities, such as moving. To resolve the tension, I demonstrate that we need to recognise an ambiguity in talk of the appearance of motion, and distinguish between the depiction of motion and the depiction of an object as an object that is moving. Armed with this distinction, I argue that there is an important sense in which paintings depict neither motion, duration, nor – perhaps more controversially – stasis.

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion1 closes with an endorsement of the very position which it has consistently attacked, namely belief in an orderer. Hume's willingness to oppose arguments supporting a position in which he believes means that, despite mounting severe criticisms, he can consistently support a designer as the optimum hypothesis for order in the world. He produced numerous statements of order in the world and then, in Part 12 of the DNR, alleged that persons of understanding would find that belief in a designer follows.

Within the field of virtue and vice epistemology open-mindedness is usually considered an archetypal virtue. Nevertheless, there is ongoing disagreement over how exactly it should be defined. In this paper I propose a novel definition of open-mindedness as a process of impartial belief revision and use it to argue that we should shift our normative assessments away from the trait itself to the context in which it is exercised. My definition works by three sequential stages: not screening new claims, impartially weighing the evidential strength of claims, and updating beliefs accordingly. Using this definition I argue for a focus on agents’ particular circumstances to determine what degrees of credulity, open-, or closed-mindedness are appropriate in any given situation. As well as providing conceptual clarity regarding the concept of open-mindedness this paper indicates the benefits of this contextual approach for our everyday epistemic attitudes. In particular it enables us to recognise, without stigma, when ourselves or others deviate from open-mindedness for appropriate reasons.

A young Greek student who arrived in Cambridge thirty years ago to readfor the Classical Tripos went to Bowes and Bowes to equip himself with the necessary works of reference. Besides his Liddell and Scott and his Lewis and Short he came away with a copy of A Guide to the Classics by Michael Oakeshott and G. T. Griffith, Fellows of Gonville and Caius College, not noticing that it was subtitled ‘How to Pick the Derby Winner’. Even when an author or editor is trying to avoid ambiguity there may still be questions of interpretation. The April 1926 issue of the Journal of Philosophical Studies printed three articles under the collective title ‘The Problem of Colour in Relation to the Idea of Equality’. They were the texts of papers read at a meeting of the newly founded British Institute of Philosophical Studies at the Royal Society of Arts on 16 February 1926. The title might suggest a symposium on problems discussed earlier by Goethe or later by Wittgenstein, or perhaps some investigation into the distinction between a priori and empirical concepts. The uncertainties of readers cannot have been long-lived. The symposiasts were Sir Frederick Lugard, KCMG, CB, DSO, Morris Ginsberg, MA, D.Litt. and the Hon. H. A. Wyndham. The same volume contained ‘The Primitive and the Civilized Mind’ by N. Lossky and the 1927 volume added Professor R. F. A. Hoernlé's ‘Prolegomena to the Study of the Black Man's Mind’.

In his discussion note ‘J. J. C. Smart, Materialism and Occam's Razor’ Peter Glassen argues that it was inconsistent of me both to assert that realism is true and that Occam's razor (or any other principle for that matter) is a reason for the materialist thesis. Glassen says that Occam's razor ‘is not a physical thing, state or process at all’. A little further down on the same page he uses the phrase ‘material or physical thing, state, or process’. It is possible, therefore, that Glassen regards the distinction between ‘material’ and ‘physical’ as unimportant in the present context. I think however that one way of replying to Glassen turns on this distinction.

A newcomer to the writing of this survey quickly learns (though not quite quickly enough for his first venture) that they do not serve who only sit and wait. The expectation, in other words, that the year's major books of French philosophy will arrive unsolicited, is not fulfilled. Instead one is faced with a miscellaneous set of publications covering such varied topics as Jewish mysticism, cybernetics and a translation from Spanish of a primer of political economy. I must therefore beg readers to be indulgent enough to pay for my first lesson, promising them that henceforth I shall bestir myself and forage.

I begin with some elementary observations about assertion. In spite of recent criticisms of philosophers who have been too ready to take the subject-predicate indicative sentence as the standard form of assertion, there is no doubt that this form of sentence does represent something very fundamental about assertion. To put the matter in a rough-and-ready way: if we are to assert anything at all, it seems obvious that we must first draw our listener's attention to something that we propose to talk about, and then, when we have secured his attention, go on to say something about that to which we have drawn attention.