Berkeley's Principles is a curious work. The nominal topic is epistemic. The actual topic is ontological. And it is not uncommon to suggest that ‘Berkeley's System presents us with unique puzzles, particularly at its foundation.’

If, as many commentators suggest, Berkeley's principal arguments for idealism are weak, this might suggest that we are approaching his works from a set of assumptions Berkeley did not share. In this paper I explore such a possibility.

According to conventional wisdom, the causes of economic inequality under capitalism are different in kind from those operating in a socialist system. In socialist societies today the distribution of wealth and income is determined by political authority, whereas in capitalism it is thought to arise mainly from the choices of individuals freely transferring goods and services in the competitive market. Robert Nozick's account of the workings of a ‘free society’ expresses this view clearly:

On many accounts, the criterion of our diachronic identity or persistence consists in or comprises some psychological conditions. As on Locke's account, these conditions often include one's appealing to the relation of remembering having an experience of. Contemporary theorists are unlikely to claim simply that a necessary condition for Pm at tm being the same person as Pn at a later time, tn, is that Pn remembers having experiences had by Pm at tm. They are more likely to appeal, as does Derek Parfit, to a ‘continuity of memory’ or ‘overlapping chains’ of memories, that is, to assert that Pn must at least remember having experiences had by somebody, Pn-1, existing at some time in-between tm and tn, that Pn-1 in turn must remember having experiences had by somebody Pn-2 … and so on back to Pm.

In his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (hereafter RM), John Searle attacks computational psychology with a number of new and boldly provocative claims. Specifically, in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘The Critique of Cognitive Reason,’ Searle targets what he calls ‘cognitivism,’ according to which our brains are digital computers that process a mental syntax. And Searle denies this view on grounds that the attribution of syntax is observer relative. A syntactic property is arbitrarily assigned to a physical system, he thinks, with the result that syntactic states ‘do not even exist except in the eyes of the beholder’ (RM, 215). This unabashed anti-realism differs significantly from Searle's earlier work. The Chinese room argument, for example, was intended to show that syntactic properties will not suffice for semantics, where the syntax was realistically construed. But now Searle claims that physical properties will not suffice to determine a system's syntactic properties.

It was common enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find philosophers holding the position that for something to be ‘in the mind’ and for that mind to be conscious of it are one and the same thing. The thought is that consciousness is a relation between a mind and a mental entity playing the same role as the relation of inherence found between a substance and qualities belonging to it. What it is, on this view, for something to ‘inhere’ in the mind is for that mind to be conscious of it. Locke was explicit in his acceptance of such a claim, writing, for instance,

Philosophical work on testimony has flourished in recent years. Testimony roughly involves a source affirming or stating something in an attempt to transfer information to one or more persons. It is often said that the topic of testimony has been neglected throughout most of the history of philosophy, aside from contributions by David Hume (1711-1776) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). True as this may be, Hume and Reid aren't the only ones who deserve a tip of the hat for recognizing the importance of testimony: Augustine of Hippo (354-430) affirms the place of testimony in human cognition, at least in his later writings.

In what follows, we consider three questions raised by Augustine's thinking about testimony: the analytical question of what sources count as testimony (Section I); the epistemological question about the status of testimony-based belief (Section II); and the doxastic question about the circumstances in which it is appropriate to believe on the basis of testimony (Section III).

If by the term ‘matter’ is meant the extended, movable, and corporeal stuff out of which perceptible objects are made, then, according to one interpretative tradition, there is nothing in Aristotle's account of the world that corresponds to matter in the above sense of physical stuff. Aristotle does indeed describe certain things as extended, movable, and corporeal: for example, the five elements, earth, water, air, fire, and ether, as well as everything made out of them. He also has the concept of a material cause, that is, the raw materials out of which something can be made or generated, and he makes frequent use of this concept in his analysis of perceptible substances. Still, the fact that Aristotle thought about what perceptible substances are made of is insufficient evidence for attributing to him the concept of matter as physical stuff. In addition, we would want to know whether he thought that all perceptible substances are extended, movable, and corporeal precisely because they are made out of matter, and whether any aspect of their behavior is to be explained simply by virtue of their nature as material objects.

This paper is designed to reinterpret and clarify John Stuart Mill's ideas on science. Past discussions of these ideas strike me as unsatisfactory in two crucial respects. In the first place they have encouraged us to regard Mill's principal work on epistemology, A System of Logic, as fundamentally inductivist This is the received interpretation of Mill's Logic and one finds it summarized and affirmed in the remark of Laurens Laudan that 'by and large' Mill was 'a rather orthodox inductivist who saw science as the generalisation of observation and who argued that all scientific ideas (including those of mathematics) come directly from experience.

According to philosophical orthodoxy, the parties to moral or legal disputes genuinely disagree only if their uses of key normative terms in the dispute express the same meaning. Recently, however, this orthodoxy has been challenged. According to an influential alternative view, genuine moral and legal disagreements should be understood as metalinguistic negotiations over which meaning a given term should have. In this paper, we argue that the shared meaning view is motivated by much deeper considerations than its recent critics recognize, and that much would be lost in opting for the explanation of normative disputes as metalinguistic negotiations.

Recent moral philosophy has been characterized by some serious attempts to show that both Kantian and utilitarian moralities leave us with insufficient room to pursue our personal projects and relationships. These moralities have been charged with demanding a kind of impartiality that leaves us with too little space for developing ourselves and our friendships, family relations, communities, and nations in the ways best suited for us. Critics claim these theories implausibly maintain that if our personal relationships and affinities do not further the ends of moral duty or maximum utility, they are of no value and hence we lack reason to devote ourselves to them. In what follows, I will assume that a conception of morality would indeed be implausible if it were to demand impartiality in the strong sense that it would be impermissible to favor our own projects and ambitions, to care especially about the welfare of certain persons rather than others, and sometimes to give preference to those we care most about, even when we could benefit strangers more.

I argue that propositions are contingent existents. Some propositions that in fact exist might not have existed and there might have been propositions that are distinct from every actually existing proposition. This is because some propositions are singular propositions, which are propositions containing ordinary objects as constituents, and so are ontologically dependent on the existence of those objects; had those objects not existed, then the singular propositions would not have existed. I provide both a philosophical and technical understanding of the contingent status of propositions.

Contractarians view justice (or, more ambitiously, all of morality) as being defined by a contract made by rational individuals. No one supposes that this contract is actual, and the fact that it is merely hypothetical raises a number of questions both about the assumptions under which it would be actual and about the force of hypothetical agreement that is contingent on these assumptions.

Particular contractarian theories must specify the circumstances of the agreement and the endowments, beliefs, desires, and degree and type of rationality of the agents. How these issues are settled determines the force of the hypothetical agreement. The fact that ignorant people who desired only universal suffering would, under duress, agree to a certain principle gives us no reason to believe the principle is a correct moral principle or to think it rational to accept or act on it: some counterfactual assumptions undermine entirely the moral force of hypothetical agreement. On the other hand, to take people just as they are, with their current beliefs, desires, endowments, and all, is to endorse their ignorance and mistakes as well as any previous injustice that affects their bargaining power.

It is technically possible to clone a human being. The result of the procedure would be a human being in its own right. Given the current level of cloning technology concerning other animals there is every reason to believe that early human clones will have shorter-than-average life-spans, and will be unusually prone to disease. In addition, they would be unusually at risk of genetic defects, though they would still, probably, have lives worth living. But with experimentation and experience, seriously unequal prospects between cloned and noncloned people should erode. We shall ignore arguments about cloning that focus on the potential for harm to the fetus or resultant human being, where harm is understood solely in terms of physical and mental health. Unless the resultant people would generally have lives worth living there is no positive case for cloning, or any other form of reproduction, for that matter. If the resultant beings will generally have lives worth living there is a prima facie case for allowing cloning. We imagine the case in which the resultant beings will have lives well worth living.

Two conditions guiding permissible use of force in self-defence are proportionality and success. According to the proportionality condition the means used to prevent an attack can be permissible only if they are proportional to the interest at stake. According to the success condition, otherwise impermissible acts can be justified under the right to self-defence only if they are likely to succeed in preventing the perceived threat. These requirements should not always be interpreted narrowly. Sometimes people are permitted to kill culpable aggressors in order to avoid a non-lethal harm. Sometimes people are permitted to take up arms to defend themselves against culpable aggressors they have little or no hope of defeating.

In answering the question, “How is the concept of a person possible?”, Strawson (Individuals. London: Methuen, 1959) lays great stress upon a particular class of predicate.

He says, “They are predicates, roughly, which involve doing something, which clearly imply intention or a state of mind or at least consciousness in general, and which indicate a characteristic pattern, or range of patterns, of bodily movement, while not indicating at all precisely any very definite sensation or experience … . Such predicates have the interesting characteristic of many P-predicates, that one does not, in general, ascribe them to oneself on the strength of observation, whereas one does ascribe them to others on the strength of observations. But, in the case of these predicates, one feels minimal reluctance to concede that what is ascribed in these two different ways is the same. This is because of the marked dominance of a fairly definite pattern of bodily movement in what they describe, and the marked absence of any distinctive experience.

Externalism with respect to content is the thesis that the contents of an individual's mental states are fixed, not just by the intrinsic physical characteristics of the individual, but also in part by the external circumstances of the individual. This idea can be illustrated by means of thought experiments involving pairs of ‘twins’ who are identical with respect to their intrinsic features yet who differ mentally because of differences in their environments. The thoughts of a thirsty earthling may turn to water. Suppose that an earthling has a molecule-for-molecule twin on a very distant planet, a planet identical to Earth except that wherever Earth has H2O, Twin Earth has XYZ, which is superficially indistinguishable from water. When the twin is thirsty, her thoughts will turn instead to twater, as we may call it. Externalism about content is a metaphysical thesis, but it has epistemological implications. Many have argued that externalism is incompatible with a suitably rigorous thesis about the authoritative, introspective self-knowledge we seem to have with respect to our own thought contents.

Husserl and others have spent a great deal of time writing introductions to phenomenology, and in trying to explain its nature. One thing that becomes clear from these efforts is that phenomenology claims to have a method for analyzing the essential structures of “mental events” (erlebnisse). This raises the possibility of phenomenology turning back on itself, for surely the analysis itself must consist of “mental events”. Hence, at some point in its investigations, phenomenology itself could become what phenomenologists seek to analyze. Husserl foresaw this when he suggested the possibility that:

What becomes apparent here is that phenomenology's self-reflection is necessary, not merely possible: without self-reflection phenomenology would lack final “genuineness” or the “ability to justify itself down to its roots”. Unfortunately while Husserl, here and in other places, signals the necessity of this sort of reflection, he nowhere seems actually to carry it out at length.