The Humean tradition claims to show that the direct perception of causal power is in principle impossible. One argument for this conclusion is very simple: One cannot perceive what is not there; ‘causal power’ entails ‘necessary connection’; there are no necessary connections between matters of fact; therefore one cannot perceive causal power. The heart of this argument, of course, and the backbone of the Humean tradition, is that there are no necessary connections between matters of fact. This contention is supported by the familiar Humean dialectic. If there were a necessary connection of any kind between C and E, then the conjunction of C · ˜ E would be self-contradictory. However, all events are complete in themselves and never alone require that any other event will or must result from them. It is very strange to think of water freezing when heated or air pressure decreasing with depth, but no matter how foreign these conceptions may seem there is nothing self-contradictory about them. Since the assertion of C · ˜ E is never self-contradictory, it follows that there can be no necessary connection, logical or “causal”, between them, and hence there is no causal power that we could directly perceive.

Is self-deception always immoral? That it is always immoral to deceive oneself seems to have been the ‘received’ view amongst philosophers. Such a view was vigorously supported by Bishop Butler in the eighteenth century. Recently, Herbert Fingarette has argued for a similar position. In this paper I wish to examine Butler's and Fingarette's arguments and contend that no morally sensitive and reasonable person can possibly accept them without thereby ceasing to be morally sensitive and reasonable.

Recently Wesley Salmon has argued that a certain class of confirmation functions (C-functions) must be rejected for yielding contradictions. The C-functions involved happen to be the kind ingeniously constructed and employed most notably by Professor Carnap. More recently Keith Lehrer has argued that these C-functions may be salvaged by the adoption of a rule that eliminates certain languages. In the paragraphs that follow, it will be shown that Salmon's reply to the sort of program suggested by Lehrer is not at all convincing and that Lehrer's defence of his suggested rule of greater completeness is unacceptable.

Dans un célèbre ouvrage sur Contemplation et Vie contemplative selon Platon, A.J. Festugière donnait de la dialectique platonicienne une interprétation selon laquelle celle-ci constituait une véritable expérience mystique possédant presque tous les traits de la contemplation chrétienne. La dialectique platonicienne y était présentée, surtout dans son acte final, comme une sorte d'extase, une union d'ordre mystique, un contact de l'âme perdue dans son objet, contact qui suscite en elle un sentiment qui dépasse tout l'ordre normal de la connaissance. Le Bien ou l'Un en tant qu'objet dernier de l'ascension dialectique y était conçu comme quelque chose d'ineffable et d'indéfinissable.

Is there such a thing as a ‘Logic of Discovery’? Do we even have a consistent idea of such a thing? The approved answer to this seems to be “No.” Thus Popper argues (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) “The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it.” (p. 31.) Again, “… there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process.” (p. 32.) Reichenbach writes that philosophy of science “… cannot be concerned with [reasons for suggesting hypotheses], but only with [reasons for accepting hypotheses].” (Experience and Prediction, p. 382.) Braithwaite elaborates: “The solution of these historical problems involves the individual psychology of thinking and the sociology of thought. None of these questions are our business here.” (Scientific Explanation, pp. 20, 21.)

People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene in them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street.

In this paper, Plato’s notion of the sudden moment is fully explored. In the Parmenides, the “now” (nun) and the “sudden” (exaiphnês), it is argued, refer to one and the same entity from the distinct perspectives of timeless Being and temporal Becoming, respectively. This interpretation tallies well with, and enriches, the Platonic views on time and eternity found in the Timaeus. Finally, the paper highlights the pivotal role of the third deduction, where the sudden moment appears, for an understanding of the entire dialectical exercise of the Parmenides.

This book is the second volume of a critical edition of the writings of Thomas Reid, an edition that will include many of his manuscript remains as well as his previously published works. These volumes are intended to displace the heretofore standard 8th edition of Reid's works edited by Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856). Hamilton's edition is marred by his numerous, often intrusive, and obtuse footnotes. Reid's spelling and punctuation were also sometimes “corrected” by Hamilton, so his edition does not present a fully accurate version of the original editions whose publication was superintended by Reid. The type in the Hamilton edition is also archaic and very small, making reading the text excessively difficult. The present and subsequent volumes are intended to present canonical texts free of the flaws in the Hamilton text. This volume succeeds admirably in that project.

Fred Adams and collaborators advocate a view on which empty-name sentences semantically encode incomplete propositions, but which can be used to conversationally implicate descriptive propositions. This account has come under criticism recently from Marga Reimer and Anthony Everett. Reimer correctly observes that their account does not pass a natural test for conversational implicatures, namely, that an explanation of our intuitions in terms of implicature should be such that we upon hearing it recognize it to be roughly correct. Everett argues that the implicature view provides an explanation of only some of our intuitions, and is in fact incompatible with others, especially those concerning the modal profile of sentences containing empty names. I offer a pragmatist treatment of empty names based upon the recognition that the Gricean distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive, and argue that such a solution avoids both Everett's and Reimer's criticisms.

In Color for Philosophers, C. L. Hardin argues that chromatic objectivism—a view that identifies colour with some or other property of objects—must be false. The upshot of Hardin's argument is this: there is, in fact, no principled correlation between physical properties and perceived colours. Since that correlation is a minimal condition for objectivism, objectivism is false. Mohan Matthen, who accepts Hardin's conclusion for what can be called “simple objectivism,” takes it that an adaptationist theory of biological function applied to colour is able to surmount the problems Hardin describes. It is Matthen's view that I am primarily concerned with in this paper. I will argue that it entails an overly simple view of adaptive value—as, perhaps, do all objectivist views.

In this article I am going to propose a modification in the theory of pure restitution, in the hope that such modification will eliminate at least some sources of resistance to the theory, while preserving the theory's distinct place among the philosophical approaches to the institution of legal punishment.

Discussions of the morality of capital punishment, and indeed discussions of the morality of punishment in general, usually assume that there are two possible justifications of punishment, a deterrence justification associated with utilitarianism and other consequentialist moral theories, and a retributive justification associated with deontological moral theories. But now that rights-based theories are attracting the increasing attention of moral philosophers it is worth asking whether these theories may not employ a different justification of punishment, with different consequences for the morality of particular forms of punishment. I will argue that rights theories do employ a different justification of punishment, and that this justification combines many of the attractive features of the deterrence and retributive justifications while avoiding their unattractive features. In particular, I will argue that the rights-based justification has more attractive consequences for the morality of capital punishment than either the deterrence or retributive justifications.

R. G. Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine has been widely discussed in recent years by his commentators. However, most philosophers who discuss the re-enactment doctrine touch only briefly on his view of the identity of thoughts. This is surprising because Collingwood claims that the historian's successful re-enactment of the thought behind the historical agent's action involves re-thinking the same thought as the agent and not merely a copy of his thought.

(i) God is omniscient; therefore, for any change, C, among particulars, God knows the occurrence of C. (ii) If God knows the occurrence of C, then X. (iii) not-X. It is clear that the set of propositions (i)—(iii) is inconsistent. This is the general form of two problems—which I call the ‘problem of change in knowledge’ (PCK) and the ‘problem of change in essence’ (PCE)—for Avicenna concerning God’s knowledge of particulars. No work in the secondary literature has discussed exactly what PCK and PCE are. In this paper, I will clarify exactly what they are.

The Protestant Reformation is said to have had a number of ramifications within philosophy. Popkin has traced the sceptical crisis in 17th century philosophical thought back to the criterion problem, the search for a rule of religious truth, which was precipitated by the Reformation. Rex has shown how the elaboration of what might be called the epistemology of religious certitude devised by Calvinist theologians provided fertile intellectual ground for the acceptance of Cartesianism. I shall claim that one product of the Reformation was a set of closely related doctrines, doctrines which were to become associated with Cartesianism, and which were essential to the formulation ofthe Reformers' case.

Philosophers no longer argue whether Hume ever read Berkeley, yet some remain puzzled as to why so little of Berkeley appears in Hume's works. Professor Popkin has remarked that even “where Hume and Berkeley come closest to discussing the same subject or holding the same view, Hume neither uses Berkeley's terms nor refers to him.” An apparent exception to this generalization is Berkeley's doctrine of minima sensibilia, for both philosophers use this term to denote indivisible sensible points, and both invoke such points in order to show that sensible extension is not infinitely divisible. Yet it has been suggested that, although Berkeley and Hume employ the same terms, they nevertheless maintain different doctrines: Hume's minima are unextended, whereas Berkeley's are extended.