According to Jeff Speaks, one sort of perfect being theology takes its rise from a description of God as the greatest conceivable being. Speaks offers two problems for this project. One is finding a suitable sense of ‘conceivable’. The other concerns what he calls ‘troublemakers’, attributes that seem to show that God cannot be the greatest conceivable being. Speaks brings these together in a dilemma.

The paper articulates a novel strategy against external world skepticism. It shows that a modal assumption of the skeptical argument cannot be justified.

We have some justified beliefs about modal matters. A modal epistemology should explain what’s involved in our having that justification. Given that we’re realists about modality, how should we expect that explanation to go? In the first part of this essay, I suggest an answer to this question based on an analogy with games. Then, I outline a modal epistemology that fits with that answer. According to a theory-based epistemology of modality, you justifiably believe that p if (a) you justifiably believe a theory that says that p and (b) you believe p on the basis of that theory.

One of the main problems that Paul Horwich’s Minimalist theory of truth must face is the generalization problem, which shows that Minimalism is too weak to have the fundamental explanatory role Horwich claims it has. In this paper, I defend Horwich’s response to the generalization problem from an objection raised by Bradley Armour-Garb. I also argue that, given my response to Armour-Garb, Horwich’s proposal to cope with the generalization problem can be simplified.

Some time ago I wrote a paper about conceivability and knowledge. An anonymous referee rejected it on the grounds that the result had already been established in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Intrigued, I looked for the story but found no mention of it in Louis and Ziche's extensive bibliography. I spent months consulting archives and electronic records to no avail. I had begun to doubt whether the story even existed when I had the curious good luck to encounter Sir Thomas Browne of Pembroke College, Oxford, who assured me of the piece's authenticity and introduced me to Brother Christian Rosenkreuz of Invisible College who in turn generously put me into correspondence with Borges himself. The literary defects in what follows reflect not a diminution of Borges's undoubted power as a storyteller, but merely my limited ability as an amateur translator. Whatever the translation's literary faults may be, I hope the story's philosophical interest—i.e., an argument that ideal conceivers have higher-order knowledge of necessary truths—remains. [Trans.]