It is unusual for an academic philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to discuss the subject of spirituality. Not so long ago this fact might have been attributed to a general view of philosophy as the practice of conceptual analysis and the theory of logic. However in a period when the discipline has developed to a point where almost every aspect of human life has been made the subject of some department of ‘applied philosophy’ it could hardly be said that the subject of spirituality, in so far as discussion of it may have normative implications, lies outside the sphere of reasonable philosohical enquiry. Yet it is almost entirely neglected.

One of the ways of dividing all philosophers into two kinds is by saying of each whether he is an ordinary man's philosopher or a philosophers' philosopher. Thus Plato is a philosophers' philosopher and Aristotle an ordinary man's philosopher. This does not depend on being easy to understand: a lot of Aristotle's Metaphysics is immensely difficult. Nor does being a philosophers' philosopher imply that an ordinary man cannot enjoy the writings, or many of them. Plato invented and exhausted a form: no one else has written such dialogues. So someone with no philosophical bent, or who has left his philosophical curiosity far behind may still enjoy reading some of them.

The usual way for new cells to come into being is by division of old cells. So the zygote, which is a—new—single cell formed from two, the sperm and ovum, is an exception. Textbooks of human genetics usually say that this new cell is beginning of a new human individual. What this indicates is that they suddenly forget about identical twins.

In a discussion of rule-following inspired by Wittgenstein, Kripke asks us to consider the relation which holds between meaning plus by ‘+’ and answering questions like, ‘What is the sum of 68 and 57?’. A dispositional theory has it that if you mean plus by ‘+’ then you will probably answer, ‘125’. That is because, according to such a theory, to mean plus by ‘+’ is, roughly speaking, to be disposed, by and large, and among other things, to answer such questions with the correct sum. Kripke wants to emphasize, by contrast, that if you mean plus by ‘+’ then, faced with the question, ‘What is 68 + 57?’ you ought to answer, ‘125’. One could sum up the assumption about meaning which appears to underpin this criticism of dispositional theories in terms of the slogan that meaning is normative. Allan Gibbard gives us a way of reading that slogan which is suggested by Kripke's brief remarks:

The crux of the slogan that meaning is normative … might be another slogan: that means implies ought. To use roughly Kripke's example, from statements saying what I mean by the plus sign and other arithmetic terms and constructions, it will follow that I ought to answer ‘7’ when asked ‘What's 5 + 2?’.

Early last century an article appeared which transformed the philosophy of time. The article was James Ellis McTaggart's ‘The unreality of time’, published in 1908. As his title implies, McTaggart argued in this article that there is in reality no such thing as time. But that claim, although startling enough, is not what makes the article so remarkable. The same claim had after all been made long before McTaggart, for example by Kant in 1781, and in McTaggart's sense it is still made by those who think that time is merely one of the four dimensions of an unchanging ‘block universe’. However, most of those who think this are more influenced by Minkowski's comment, also made in 1908, that relativity has doomed space and time to ‘fade away into mere shadows’ of a unified spacetime than they are by McTaggart's more substantial arguments.

By entitling her recent collection of essays on philosophy and literature Love's Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum signals her commitment to giving a positive answer to the question posed by the title of this paper. If love can deliver or lay claim to knowledge, then moods (the variety of affective states to which human nature is subject) must be thought of as having a cognitive significance, and so must not only permit but require the attentions of the epistemologist. As Nussbaum points out, such a conclusion runs counter to a central strand of thinking in both ancient and modern philosophy. The rational or cognitive side of human nature is often defined in contrast to its affective or emotional side, the latter being understood as having no role to play in the revelation of reality. On the contrary, where reason and the senses can combine to disclose the way things are, moods typically cloud that cognitive access by projecting a purely subjective colouration onto the world and leading us to attribute properties or qualities to it which have at best a purely personal and internal reality.

There is a frequently asked philosophical question about our ability to grasp and to predict the thoughts and feelings of other people, an ability that is these days sometimes given the unfortunate name of ‘mentalising’ or ‘mind-reading’–I say ‘unfortunate’ because it makes appear mysterious what is not mysterious. Some philosophers and psychologists argue that this ability is grounded in possession of some kind of theory or body of knowledge about how minds work. Others argue that it is grounded in our capacity to take on in imagination the perspective of others; sometimes called simulating or centrally imagining another person, we entertain in our minds what the other person is thinking about and feeling: if he is thinking ‘p’ and ‘if p then q’, then we think ‘p’ and ‘if p then q’, and if he is feeling angry with someone, then we imagine feeling angry with that person. We thus recreate as well as we can in our imagination his mental life as it is ‘from the inside’. We can do this in two different ways: I can put myself in the other's shoes, simply imagining what I would do were I in his situation, or I can empathise with him, imagining being him, taking on in imagination his relevant traits and other mental dispositions; I will from now on use the term perspective-shifting to cover both of these imaginative activities.

It's natural to think of scientists as truth seekers, people driven by an intense curiosity to understand the natural world. Yet this picture of scientists and scientific inquiry sits uncomfortably with the reality and prevalence of scientific fraud. If one wants to get at the truth about nature, why lie? Won't that just set inquiry back, as people pursue false leads? To understand why this occurs – and what can be done about it – we need to understand the social structures scientists work within, and how some of the institutions which enable science to be such a successful endeavour all things considered, also abet and encourage fraud.

During the last fifty years three major ways of defining a science of psychology have been proposed and tried out.

There are two concepts of consciousness that are easy to confuse with one another, access-consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. However, just as the concepts of water and H2O are different concepts of the same thing, so the two concepts of consciousness may come to the same thing in the brain. The focus of this paper is on the problems that arise when these two concepts of consciousness are conflated. I will argue that John Searle's reasoning about the function of consciousness goes wrong because he conflates the two senses. And Francis Crick and Christof Koch fall afoul of the ambiguity in arguing that visual area V1 is not part of the neural correlate of consciousness. Crick and Koch's work raises issues that suggest that these two concepts of consciousness may have different (though overlapping) neural correlates – despite Crick and Koch's implicit rejection of this idea.

Let me start with the enigmatic dictum of Blaise Pascal: ‘l'homme passe l'homme’ – ‘man goes beyond himself’; ‘humanity transcends itself’. What does this mean? On one plausible interpretation, Pascal is adverting to that strange restlessness of the human spirit which so many philosophers have pondered on, from Augustine before him, to Kierkegaard and many subsequent writers since. To be human is to recognize that we are, in a certain sense, incomplete beings. We are on a journey to a horizon that always seems to recede from view. Unlike all the other animals, who need nothing further for their thriving and flourishing once the appropriate environmental conditions are provided, human beings, even when all their needs are catered for – physical, biological, social, cultural – and even when they enjoy a maximally secure and enriching environment, still have a certain resistance to resting content with existence defined within a given set of parameters. They still have the restless drive to reach forward to something more.

Are explanations in the social sciences fundamentally (logically or structurally) different from explanations in the natural sciences? Many philosophers think that they are, and I call such philosophers ‘difference theorists’. Many difference theorists locate that difference in the alleged fact that only in the natural sciences does explanation essentially include laws.

In a recent article, ‘Tensed Time and Our Differential Experience of the Past and Future,’ William Lane Craig (1999a) attempts to resuscitate A. N. Prior's (1959) ‘Thank Goodness’ argument against the B-theory by combining it with Plantinga's (1983) views about basic beliefs. In essence Craig's view is that since there is a universal experience and belief in the objectivity of tense and the reality of becoming, (that he identifies with ‘the presentist metaphysic’) ‘this belief constitutes an intrinsic defeater-defeater which overwhelms the objections brought against it.’ (1999a, 519) An intrinsic defeater-defeater is a belief that enjoys such warrant for us that it simply overwhelms the defeaters brought against it without specifically rebutting or undercutting them. Thus, Craig claims that an effete philosophical argument like McTaggart's paradox is nothing more than ‘an engaging and recalcitrant brain teaser whose conclusion nobody really takes seriously.’ (1999a, 532) It is difficult to reconcile this statement with Craig's own writings elsewhere. For Craig has vigorously argued in at least two other articles that 'hybrid A-B theorists like McCall, Schlesinger, and Smith [who give ontological status to both A-properties and B-relations] are in deep trouble’ (1998, 127) since they are all effectively refuted by McTaggart's Paradox (cf. Craig 1997). It is not Craig's inconsistency regarding the significance of McTaggart conundrum that I want to draw attention to, however. Rather I wish to raise a different issue.

There seem to be two kinds of emotion the rists in the world. Some work very hard to show that emotions are essentially cognitive states. Others resist this suggestion and insist that emotions are noncognitive. The debate has appeared in many forms in philosophy and psychology. It never seems to go away. The reason for this is simple. Emotions have properties that push in both directions, properties that make them seem quite smart and properties that make them seem quite dumb. They exemplify the base impulses of our animal nature while simultaneously branching out into the most human and humane reaches of our mental repertoires. Depending on where one looks, emotions can emerge as our simplest instincts or our subtlest achievements. This double nature makes emotions captivating, but also confounding. Researchers find themselves picking one side at the expense of the other, or packaging seemingly disparate components into unstable unions. I will defend a more integrative approach. For a more thorough treatment, see Prinz (forthcoming).

The interest in supererogation and supererogatory actions derives from the perception that there is something problematic about them. I shall argue that there is nothing problematic about them. The perception to the contrary arises from preconceptions common in ethical theory. When these are relaxed or dismissed, supererogatory actions are easily assimilated as well-motivated responses to moral situations. Assimilating, rather than denying, them is important for a sound moral philosophy.

The theme of this paper can be introduced in this way: does a pluralist approach to religion entail a pluralist approach to religion? My theme is not that odd, because I have two notions of pluralism in mind. There is what I will call ‘tolerant pluralism’ and what I will call ‘religious pluralism’. And thus my question is ‘Does tolerant pluralism re religion entail religious pluralism?’

This paper offers a synoptic view of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement and its reception by the German Idealists. I begin by sketching Kant's conception of how its several parts fit together, and emphasize the way in which the specifically moral motivation of Kant's project of unification of Freedom and Nature distances it from our contemporary philosophical concerns. For the German Idealists, by contrast, the CPJ's conception of the opposition of Freedom and Nature as defining the overarching task of philosophy provides a warrant and basis for bold speculative programmes. The German Idealist development therefore presupposes Kant's failure in the CPJ to resolve the problem of the relation of Freedom and Nature. What is fundamentally at issue in the argument between Kant and his successors is the question of the correct conception of philosophical systematicity and in this context I reconstruct Kant's defence of his claim to philosophical finality.

In light of the magnitude of interpersonal harm and the risk of greater harm in the future, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued for pharmacological enhancement of moral behaviour. I discuss moral bioenhancement as a set of collective action problems. Psychotropic drugs or other forms of neuromodulation designed to enhance moral sensitivity would have to produce the same or similar effects in the brains of a majority of people. Also, a significant number of healthy subjects would have to participate in clinical trials testing the safety and efficacy of these drugs, which may expose them to unreasonable risk. Even if the drugs were safe and effective, a majority of people would have to co-operate in a moral enhancement programme for such a project to succeed. This goal would be thwarted if enough people opted out and decided not to enhance. To avoid this scenario, Persson and Savulescu argue that moral enhancement should be compulsory rather than voluntary. But the collective interest in harm reduction through compulsory enhancement would come at the cost of a loss of individual freedom. In general, there are many theoretical and practical reasons for scepticism about the concept and goal of moral enhancement.