Protagoras and his pupil Euthalos argued against one another in paradoxical fashion regarding the fulfilment of a contract. Protagoras was a Sophist, the first European inventors of logical puzzles who also argued that there cannot be false thinking. A paradox, however, does not say anything, and there is no solution to the question as to who is right in the exchange between Protagoras and Euthalos. On the other hand there is a real question as to how it is that a false proposition makes sense, and the Sophists were right in as much as a false proposition, while it does say something does not, being believed, tell its believer anything. The exclusion of paradoxical propositions is not to be achieved, as Russell supposed, by applying some general principle; rather matters need arguing through in particular cases as they arise.

Our paradigm for religion is Christianity, which appeared as a sub-society, the culture of which differed both from Jewish culture and from that of the Greeks and Romans. Human beings are essentially social, depending upon society for all rational thought and activity. As social beings we live with regard to customs we think good on the whole. Customs are rationalised by theoretical and moral beliefs. They contrast with nature and also with convention and habit. Religions, like families, are societies intermediate between individuals and states. So-called secular values concern the same things as religious and have comparable practical consequences.

Life poses a threat to materialism. To understand the phenomena of animate nature, we make use of a teleological form of explanation that is peculiar to biology, of explanations in terms of what I call the ‘vital categories’ – and this holds even for accounts of underlying physico-chemical ‘mechanisms’. The materialist claims that this teleological form of explanation does not capture what is metaphysically fundamental, whereas her preferred physical form of explanation does. In this essay, I do three things. (1) I argue that the ‘vital categories’, such as life form and life-process, do not reduce to the ‘physical categories’ and show that there are no grounds for the materialist's metaphysically limiting claim; (2) I sketch a positive view on how vital and physical explanations can both apply to a given phenomenon, and on how they interrelate; and (3) I show that this view meshes nicely with evolutionary theory, despite being committed to a form of ‘biological essentialism’.

This paper considers the ethical choices confronting European countries in relation to what has been described as border anxiety. Last year over a million migrants and asylum-seekers crossed European Union borders and the flow has shown no sign of diminishing. This unprecedented movement of people has attracted two main responses. A core issue for both is the Schengen principle of open borders and opinion is split between those who believe that the sheer weight of numbers of would-be migrants requires the reintroduction of strictly controlled frontiers, and those who demand a prompt and sympathetic response to the plight of refugees from war-torn countries. These two positions, however, do not constitute the sum of the moral debate. A broader appraisal of the issues must take account of matters of culture and identity, partiality and preference, and also of some rather more arcane questions about the ethics of ownership, the notion of belonging, and the legitimacy of preferring your ‘own’, whether at a global, national, or personal level. The complexity of this debate and its internal paradoxes throw light on some contemporary concerns about the threat the current situation may pose to Europe's own historic culture and identity.

Philosophy as well as anthropology is a discipline concerned with what it means to be human, and hence with investigating the multiple ways of making sense of human life. An important task in this process is to remain open to diverse conceptions of human beings, not least conceptions that may on the face of it appear to be morally alien. A case in point are conceptions that are bound up with cannibalism, a practice sometimes assumed to be so morally scandalous that it probably never happens, at least in a culturally sanctioned form. Questioning this assumption, along with Cora Diamond's contention that the very concept of a human being involves a prohibition against consuming human flesh, the present article explores how cannibalism can have an intelligible place in a human society – exemplified by the Wari’ of western Brazil. By coming to see this, we are enabled to enlarge our conception of the heterogeneity of possible ways of being human.

Materialism claims that everything is physical; everything can be exhaustively described and explained in principle by physics. For over half a century challenges to materialism have focused on mental phenomena such as consciousness, reason, and value. The tacit assumption among most materialists – one shared by most of their critics – has been that more basic biological phenomena, such as metabolism and reproduction, do not pose a serious obstacle to the materialist program, that these can be easily accommodated within a materialist framework. But there is reason to think that this assumption is false. Thomas Nagel has recently argued that materialism cannot countenance biological phenomena at large. Like so many anti-materialist arguments, however, his focuses on mental phenomena. After explaining why this is a liability for him and other would-be critics of materialism, I advance an anti-materialist argument that appeals directly to biology. Materialism is false, it says, because our best empirical descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena appeal to biological organization or structure, and there is good reason to think that these appeals cannot be eliminated, reduced to, or paraphrased in favor of descriptions and explanations framed in exclusively physical terms. As a result, not everything can be described and explained exhaustively by physics. Materialism must be false. The reason, however, has nothing to do with mental phenomena specifically.

The concept of representation has a vast and highly diverse extension. In this paper I distinguish four kinds of representation, viz. proxy, make-believe, and intentional representation, as well as representation simpliciter. The bulk of the paper is devoted to intentional representation. I argue that the relation of intentional representation is non-reflexive, non-symmetrical, and non-transitive. I articulate a fundamental distinction between two aspects of the content of intentional representations, viz. subject and predicative content. Finally, I qualify and defend the distinction between iconic and symbolic intentional representation. Along the way, I also argue that psychological intentions play a constitutive role in representation.

The prominence of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in contemporary philosophy of religion has led it to overshadow his other short work, The Natural History of Religion, and thus obscure the fact that the social psychology of religion was in many ways of greater interest and more widely debated among the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment than philosophical theology. This paper examines and compares the social psychology of religion advanced by Hume and Adam Smith. It argues that Hume's account of the psychological sources and social significance of religion is less satisfactory than Smith's.

In this essay I examine Nietzsche's shifting understanding of the saintly ideal with an aim to bringing out its philosophical importance, particularly with respect to what I call the problem of ‘cosmodicy’, i.e., the problem of justifying life in the world as worthwhile in light of the prevalent reality of suffering. In his early account Nietzsche understood the saint as embodying the supreme achievement of a self-transcending ‘feeling of oneness and identity with all living things’, while in his later account he viewed the saint as a representative of an unhealthy, life-denying ‘ascetic ideal’. This shift, I contend, is due in large part to Nietzsche's development of an ‘ethic of power’ as part of his turn against Schopenhauer's ethic of compassion, which needs to be seen in light of his ongoing effort to articulate and defend an adequate cosmodicy. My ultimate aim in this essay is to read the earlier Nietzsche against the later Nietzsche – with the help of Dostoevsky's novelistic depiction of the saintly ideal – and to suggest that when properly articulated the saintly ideal is able to provide a more adequate cosmodicy than that which is offered in Nietzsche's ethic of power.

Two recent critics of Mill's qualitative hedonism, Michael Hauskeller and Kristin Schaupp, argue that Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures was largely unsuccessful. They allege that Mill failed to demonstrate that some pleasures are lexically preferred to others, and indeed that this can be shown false by the fact that most people would not renounce supposedly lower pleasures, such as chocolate or sex, even for greater amounts of higher pleasures, such as reading or opera. I respond that many of these criticisms rest on uncharitable assumptions or interpretations of Mill's position. We need not suppose that Mill was even trying to do the things he supposedly failed to do. However, considering these objections may lead us to a more plausible interpretation of Mill's views, according to which the quality of pleasures, along with their quantity, contributes towards happiness. There is no need to suppose that ‘higher pleasures’ must be lexically preferred to lower ones, or even to be dogmatic about which pleasures are higher.

Conservatism is now often said to be a disposition. Against definitions of conservatism as a disposition, critics say that it is also an ideology, and against any such abstract definitions, that it is a historical entity. But no one has yet indicated how these criticisms can be used to improve the definition of conservatism. Here I argue that the dispositional understanding of conservatism, while not wrong in itself, is only the first and simplest element in what has to be an extended or dialectical definition of conservatism. This article is a statement of such a definition.

Anscombe claims that whenever a subject is doing something intentionally, this subject knows that they are doing it. This essay defends Anscombe's claim from an influential set of counterexamples, due to Davidson. It argues that Davidson's counterexamples are tacit appeals to an argument, on which knowledge can't be essential to doing something intentionally, because some things that can be done intentionally require knowledge of future successes, and because such knowledge can't ever be guaranteed when someone is doing something intentionally. The essay argues that there are apparently sensible grounds for denying each of these two premises.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes fairly sharply between the practical deliberation of moral virtue and the epistemic reflection of theoretical or truth-focused enquiry. However, drawing on insights from Plato and Iris Murdoch, the present paper seeks a more robust epistemic foundation for virtuous deliberation as primarily grounded in clear or correct perception of the world and human association, character and conduct. While such perception may not be sufficient for moral virtue, it is here argued that it is necessary. Murdoch's view that literature may afford especially effective correction of moral misperception is also supported by appeal to literary examples.

In this paper, I argue that religious belief is epistemically equivalent to mathematical belief. Abstract beliefs don't fall under ‘naive’, evidence-based analyses of rationality. Rather, their epistemic permissibility depends, I suggest, on four criteria: predictability, applicability, consistency, and immediate acceptability of the fundamental axioms. The paper examines to what extent mathematics meets these criteria, juxtaposing the results with the case of religion. My argument is directed against a widespread view according to which belief in mathematics is clearly rationally acceptable whereas belief in religion is not. The paper also aims to make some of the implications of contemporary mathematics available to philosophers working in different fields.1

The emerging field known as experimental philosophy has expanded into moral philosophy: by presenting experimental subjects with vignettes describing scenarios with moral implications, data about people's moral intuitions are gathered and analyzed. This paper examines the adequacy of applying the common methodology of experimental philosophy to the study of moral thought. By employing Raimond Gaita's notion of moral seriousness and his distinction between form and content, it argues that the kind of empirical research on moral intuitions conducted by experimental philosophers fails to take into consideration some fundamental characteristics of moral thinking.

In at least one respect, classical music is superior to popular music. Classical music (understood as common practice composition) has greater potential for expressiveness and, consequently, has more potential for psychological insight and profundity. The greater potential for expressiveness in classical music is due, in large part, to it greater harmonic resources. The harmonies in classical music are more likely to be functional, more contrary motion is employed, and modulation is more common. Although popular music employs rhythms not found in classical music, on the whole there is less rhythmic variety in popular music than there is in classical.