For all his insistence that the mind has no parts, Descartes often describes inner mental conflicts, sometimes his own: ambivalence, fixation to childhood prejudice, are for him fixtures of human life. “Sigmund Descartes?” examines this aspect of his thought.

Mainstream metaphysicians today take little ontological interest in the world as we interact with it. They interpret the variety of things in the world as variety only of concepts applied to things that are basically of the same sort—e.g., sums of particles or temporal parts of particles. I challenge this approach by formulating and defending for a contrasting line of thought. Using what I call ‘the Constitution View,’ I argue that ordinary things (like screwdrivers and walnuts) are as ontologically significant as particles. I further argue for why we need recourse to such ordinary things in our basic ontology.

Traditionally Hume is seen as offering an ‘empiricist’ critique of ‘rationalism’. This view is often illustrated – or rejected – by comparing Hume's views with those of Descartes'. However the textual evidence shows that Hume's most sustained engagement with a canonical ‘rationalist’ is with Nicolas Malebranche. The author shows that the fundamental differences (among the many similarities) between the two on the self and causal power do indeed rest on a principled distinction between ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’, and that there is some truth in the traditional story. This, however, is very far from saying that Hume's general orientation is an attack on something called ‘rationalism’.

How is the possibility of promising to be explained without circularity? Appeal is made to the role of natural inclinations in linguistic behaviour, which presupposes truth telling and promise keeping, and also to the social functions of human language which go beyond signalling and transmitting information and which are prior to any explicit conventions. Although promises are broken and lies told, we all have the right to feel resentment when these things happen.

I develop an account of moral perception which is able to deal well with familiar naturalistic non-realist complaints about ontological extravagance and ‘queerness’. I show how this account can also ground a cogent response to familiar objections presented by Simon Blackburn (about supervenience) and J.L. Mackie (about motivation). The familiar realist's problem about relativism, however, remains.

I consider reasons for questioning ‘the laws of logic’ (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, and negation), and suggest that these laws do not accord with everyday reality. Either they are rhetorical tools rather than absolute truths, or else Plato and his successors were right to think that they identify a reality distinct from the ordinary world of experience, and also from the ultimate source of reality.

From the Lockean point of view, the mind-body problem is conceived as a problem created by us. It is an error to think there is a problem with mind and body, an error of confusing nominality with reality. I argue that Locke's agnosticism should be understood as a warning not to confuse our human point of view with what really is. From this perspective, the mind-body problem is a nominal problem, not a real one. It appears to us as a problem, but is not really so. But what makes it appear to us as a problem? This is Locke's starting point for solving the mind-body problem.

Kant is clear that the concept of the ‘highest good’ involves both a demand, that we follow the moral law, as well as a promise, that happiness will be the outcome of being moral. The latter element of the highest good has troubled commentators, who tend to find it metaphysically extravagant, involving, as it does, belief in God and an afterlife. Furthermore, it seems to threaten the moral purity that Kant demands: that we obey the moral law for its own sake, not out of interest in the consequences. Those commentators brave enough to tackle the issue look to the concept of the highest good either to add content to the moral law (Silber), or to provide rational motivation, in a way that does not violate moral purity (Beiser and Wood). I argue that such interpretations, although they may be plausible reconstructions, are unable to account for certain conceptual and textual problems. By placing Kant's thought against the background of medieval theology, I argue that the hope for the summum bonum is irreducibly important for Kant, even where its function is not that of providing the content or motivational force of the moral law. Kant is not only concerned with the shape of our duties and motivations, but the shape of the universe within which these emerge.

By the lights of a central logical positivist thesis in modal epistemology, for every necessary truth that we know, we know it a priori and for every contingent truth that we know, we know it a posteriori. Kripke attacks on both flanks, arguing that we know necessary a posteriori truths and that we probably know contingent a priori truths. In a reflection of Kripke's confidence in his own arguments, the first of these Kripkean claims is far more widely accepted than the second. Contrary to received opinion, the paper argues, the considerations Kripke adduces concerning truths purported to be necessary a posteriori do not disprove the logical positivist thesis that necessary truth and a priori truth are co-extensive.

Dispositions depend on “categorical” facts definitionally and pedagogically. Must they always depend on them also ontologically for “grounding”? Does there really have to be an ultimate “bottom level” of matter, and must it be “categorical”? The concepts microphysics supplies, however, are dispositional in meaning. What predicates aren't? Besides “shaping” and “locating” predicates, predicates expressing degrees of similarity and dissimilarity are nondispositional enough in meaning: but the predication of all these features of things depends upon other features for these to bound and to relate to one another comparatively. Faced with the uncomfortable alternative of “dispositions all the way down” Simon Blackburn proposes antirealism. Possibly, though, predicates' dispositionality or categoricality can be relative to a given level of the organization of matter.

Empirical studies of perception must use the logic of everyday non-technical conceptions of perception as their unquestioned background. This is because the phenomena to be studied are defined and individuated on the basis of such basic understanding. Thus the methods of neurobiology exclude reductionist accounts from the outset, implicitly if not explicitly. It is further argued that the concepts of neural and mental representation, while not confused per se, presuppose a general picture where perception as a whole is viewed in the light of teleology. References are made to discussions by Bennett and Hacker, Paul Churchland, and Peter Winch.

Philosophers talk routinely of ‘Hume's problem of induction’. But the usual accompanying exegesis is mistaken in a way that has led epistemologists to conceive of ‘Hume's problem’ in needlessly narrow terms. They have overlooked a way of articulating the conceptual problem, along with a potential way of solving it. Indeed, they have overlooked Hume's own way. In explaining this, I will supplement Hume's insights by adapting Ryle's thinking on knowledge-how and knowledge-that. We will also see why Hume's ‘sceptical solution’ was a perfectly appropriate response to his ‘sceptical argument’ — rather than (as is often thought by analytic epistemologists) a merely descriptive response patently missing the normative sceptical point so strikingly formulated by Hume.

Aristotle says that no human achievement has the stability of activities that express virtue. Ethical situationists consider this claim to be refutable by empirical evidence. If that is true, not only Aristotelianism, but folk psychology, contemporary virtue ethics and character education have all been seriously infirmed. The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) to offer a systematic classification of the existing objections against situationism under four main headings: ‘the methodological objection’, ‘the moral dilemma objection’, ‘the bullet-biting objection’ and ‘the anti-behaviouristic objection’; (2) to resuscitate a more powerful Aristotelian version of the ‘anti-behaviouristic objection’ than advanced by previous critics; and (3) to explore some of the implications of such resuscitation for our understanding of the salience of character and for future studies of its nature.