The great Scottish Enlightenment man of letters David Hume (1711–76) offered an account of causation in terms of regularities: repeated pairings of certain kinds of events. Anything more than this, a supposed ‘secret connexion’ binding individual causes and effects, is not something we could ever experience. This, at least, is the view traditionally ascribed to him. Here the account, and its empiricist motivation, is outlined, and a fundamental problem identified: his account of causation is in tension with his account of the way in which we acquire the concept of a distinctive connection between causes and effects. To explain both our experience of causation, and causation's intimate connection with time, we need to appeal to singular causation: the connection between individual events which Hume found so elusive.

What is time? Just like everything else in the world, our understanding of time has changed continually over time. This article tracks this question through the history of Western philosophy and looks at major answers from the likes of Aristotle, Kant, and McTaggart.

Introductions to epistemology routinely define knowledge as a kind of belief which meets certain criteria. In the first two sections of this article, I discuss this account and its application to religious epistemology by the influential movement known as Reformed Epistemology. In the last section, I argue that the controversial consequences drawn from this account by Reformed Epistemology offer one of the best illustrations of the untenability of a conception of knowledge as a kind of belief. I conclude by sketching an alternative account of cognition which also provides a different framework for religious epistemology.

Many of the decisions mothers face are morally intense. They're experienced as highly morally significant, and they are also often very morally complex, meaning that there aren't black-and-white, obvious answers to questions about what one morally may or must do. For example, I suggest that breastfeeding is complex in this way, despite a good deal of cultural pressure in favour of trying to do it. Acknowledging many of the decisions of motherhood as complex or as ‘grey areas’ is accurate, and also good for mums. But it also burdens mums with the responsibility of researching, discussing, thinking through, and ultimately making significant, complex moral decisions for themselves. I call this the moral load, taking inspiration from Emma's ‘mental load’. In the last section I consider what we could or should do to try to lessen the moral load as a burden on mums.

In this short piece, I argue in favour of the practice of imagining ‘others’ in a global way and taking universal moral thinking seriously. We are in need of a sense of global identity which can then create global moral thinking. In this way, we can start to see and treat global challenges, such as the environment, social justice, poverty, racism and Covid-19, more effectively.

If you grade enough papers, you will find some consistent pitfalls, especially in the writing of students who are coming to philosophy for the first time. I wrote up the following tips a couple of years ago when I was a teaching assistant for an introductory philosophy class at Yale led by Daniel Greco called ‘Problems in Philosophy’. The tips were intended, then, for college students, many of them right out of high school, and most of whom had never written a philosophy paper before. So the focus is on clarity and mastering the basics. With that in mind, I hope you will find these tips helpful for teaching or writing in philosophy (or any other relevant field or discipline).

I criticize Brian Earp's ‘Some Writing Tips for Philosophy’. Earp's article is useful for someone who wishes to do well in analytic philosophy as currently practised but it also casts doubt on why such analytic philosophy would be of interest to someone who wants to learn something new. In addition to its good tips, Earp's article contains two bad tips which, if followed, will tend to produce a paper that says next to nothing. I list the two faulty tips, show how the practices of great philosophers and scientists contradict them, then set out some contrary good tips for philosophers who aim to write a paper that makes a contribution to our knowledge.

Frederick (2021, see the preceding article) offers a critique of my writing tips aimed at undergraduate students coming to philosophy – and in many cases, essay writing – for the first time (Earp, 2021, in this volume) Frederick claims that most of my tips are good tips but characterizes two of them as bad tips, as follows:

In this article I consider the impact of euthanasia/physician-assisted suicide on the way we live and the relationships we have. I argue that embracing the practice of assisted dying is a deficient form of care that will erode the respectful and responsible human bonds that hold us all well in community.

We often hear that certain mental disorders are disorders of the brain, but it is not clear what this claim amounts to. Does it mean that they are like classic brain diseases such as brain cancer? I argue that this is not the case for most mental disorders. Neither does the claim that all mental disorders are brain disorders follow from a materialist world-view. The only plausible way of understanding mental disorders as brain disorders is a fairly modest one, where we label brain differences we find in mental illness as pathological based on their link to mental dysfunction. How many mental disorders will turn out to be brain disorders on this understanding is an empirical question.