The articles in this volume celebrate the work of Steven Burns. Versions of the articles were presented originally at two sessions organized in Burns's honour at the 2022 meeting of the Atlantic Regional Philosophers’ Association (ARPA), held at Dalhousie University in Halifax. This introduction presents a brief academic biography and summarizes each of the contributions. The articles, by Michael Hymers, Robbie Moser and Darren Bifford, Alice MacLachlan, Jason Holt, and Warren Heiti, address perennial themes in philosophy, such as self-knowledge, attention, friendship, interpretation, and judgement. The collection concludes with some last words by Burns himself.

This article is inspired by two of Steven Burns's many philosophical interests — self-deception and Wittgenstein — as well as by a wariness that we share of the analytic-continental divide in contemporary philosophy. I argue here that, despite obvious differences of temperament and concern, Sartre and Wittgenstein share a scepticism about the “epistemic model” of first-person authority. This shared scepticism emerges in a striking way in their challenges to the idea that psychological phenomena should be understood on the model of objects in physical space. Wittgenstein's scepticism is more thorough-going, but emphasizing the similarity allows us to see Sartre as making an important contribution to our understanding of first-person authority, even if we are wary of the voluntarism of his approach.

This collection maintains a dialogue between the analytic and continental traditions, while aspiring to situate itself beyond the analytic-continental divide. It divides into four parts, (1) Methodologies, (2) Truth and Meaning, (3) Metaphysics and Ontology, and (4) Values, Personhood and Agency, though there is considerable overlap among the categories. History and temporality are recurrent themes, but there is a lot of metaphysics generally, with some philosophy of language, philosophy of social science, ethics, political philosophy and epistemology. Less prominent is a pragmatic, deflationary attitude, and at a number of points I argue for the virtues of such an approach.

Since Russell and Moore forsook idealism, it has often been assumed that only analytic truths can express internal relations — relations which, in Russell's words, are ‘grounded in the natures of the related terms.’ An object, a, is internally related to another object, b, if and only if a is related to b in virtue of a's possessing some property, P. So if a has the property of being a branch, then it is internally related to some tree, b, as part to whole. In turn, ‘A branch is a part of some tree’ is (at least a plausible candidate for) an analytic truth. It is true in virtue of the meanings of its terms, or because the concept of the predicate contains the concept of the subject.

Quine's critique of analyticity has thus made the pragmatically minded wary of talk of internal relations.