After Hume, attempts to forge an empiricist epistemology have taken three forms, which I shall call the First, Middle, and Third Way. The First still attempts an a priori demonstration that our cognitive methods satisfy some (weak) criterion of adequacy. The Middle Way is pursued under the banners of naturalism and scientific realism, and aims at the same conclusion on non-apriori grounds. After arguing that both fail, I shall describe the general characteristics of the Third Way, an alternative epistemology suitable for empiricism.

Inspired by Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sellars, I illustrate and identify certain kinds of unity which are typical (if not universal) features of our conscious experience, and argue that Kant was right to claim that such unities are produced by unconscious processes of synthesis:A perceptual experience of succession is not reducible to a succession of perceptual experiences.The experience of perceiving one object as having several features is not reducible to a conjunction of perceptual experiences of those features.A cross-modal perceptual experience is not reducible to a conjunction of single-modality perceptual experiences.Incoming perceptual information is synthesized into a single scene---a representation of the world as perceived from a spatia-temporal point of view.Any two of the simultaneous features of the experience of a subject S can be thought of together by S.Many of the experiences of a subject S can be thought of by S at a later time as part of his or her history of experience.These can be summarized in the general principle:An experience of a complex is not a complex of experiences.This is consistent with Sellars’ principle that:A sense-impression of a complex is a complex of impressionsbecause the latter applies at the sub-personal, unconceptualized level, and the former at the conscious level of conceptualized experiences.

In 1928 Heidegger argued that the transcendental philosophy he had pursued in Being and Time needed to be completed by what he called “metontology.” This paper analyzes what this notion amounts to. Far from being merely a curiosity of Heidegger scholarship, the place occupied by “metontology” opens onto a general issue concerning the relation between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics, and also between both of these and naturalistic empiricism. I pursue these issues in terms of an ambiguity in the notion of “grounding” in Being and Time and in the works of what I call Heidegger’s “metaphysical decade” (1927 - 1937), defending a phenomenological conception (giving priority to the theory of meaning) against what proves to be the illusory idea that metaphysical grounds are presupposed in such transcendental philosophy.

lnfallibilism about a priori justification is the thesis that for an agent A to be a priori justified in believing p, that which justifies A’s belief that p must guarantee the truth of p. No analogous thesis is thought to obtain for empirically justified beliefs. The aim of this article is to argue that infallibilism about the a priori is an untenable philosophical position and to provide theoretical understanding why we not only can be, but rather must be, a priori justified in believing some false propositions. The argument develops notions of obviousness and conceptual understanding as a means of affording insight into the conditions for having a priori justification and, consequently, into why infallibilism cannot stand.

Reflection on the nature of practical thought has led some philosophers to hold that some beliefs have a necessary influence on the will. Reflection on the nature of motivational explanation has led other philosophers to say that no belief can motivate without the assistance of a background desire. An assumption common to both groups of philosophers is that these views cannot be combined. Agreement on this assumption is so deep that it is taken as going without saying. The only option entertained is which of the views to reject. This way of thinking, I argue, is directly responsible for the deadlock between Humeans like Donald Davidson and Michael Smith, and anti-Humeans like Thomas Nagel and John McDowell. But there is an antidote. The traditional Greek conception of practical reason gives us an attractive way of holding both that all beliefs require assistance and that certain beliefs entail a disposition of the will.

This paper argues that there are practical problems of such a kind that neither impartial morality nor rational choice theory can provide us with comfort and guidance in our attempt to make the right choice if confronted with such a problem. It argues that both morality and rational choice theory are bound to misconstrue problems of this kind. Appreciating the limits of both morality and rational choice theory, as currently discussed in the literature (Wolf, Morton, Pettit, Hollis & Sugden), enables us to identify the features of these particular practical problems, and allows us to elaborate the idea of an alternative of oneself, which is crucial to a proper understanding of the kind of practical problem the paper draws attention to.

There is a basic distinction, in the realm of spatial boundaries, between bona fide boundaries on the one hand, and fiat boundaries on the other. The former are just the physical boundaries of old. The latter are exemplified especially by boundaries induced through human demarcation, for example, in the geographic domain. The classical metaphysical problems connected with the notions of adjacency, contact, separation, and division can be resolved in an intuitive way by recognizing this two-sorted ontology of boundaries. Bona fide boundaries yield a notion of contact that is effectively modeled by classical topology; the analogue of contact involving flat boundaries calls, however, for a different account, based on the intuition that fiat boundaries do not support the open/closed distinction on which classical topology is based. In the presence of this two-sorted ontology it then transpires that mereotopology---typology erected on a mereological basis---is more than a trivial formal variant of classical point-set topology.

Butler’s famous arguments in Sermon XI, designed to refute psychological egoism and to mitigate conflict between self-interest and benevolence, turn out to depend crucially on his own distinctive conception of self-interest. Butler does not notice (or anyway, doesn’t notice at the crucial points) the availability of several alternative conceptions of self-interest. Some such alternatives are available within the framework of Butler’s moral psychology; others can be developed outside that framework. There are a number of interesting reasons to prefer one or other such account of the ordinary concept of self-interest; but, ultimately, no such reasons prove decisive, and we should reject the idea that there is a uniquely correct account of self-interest. Since Butler’s arguments require the unique adequacy of his own distinctive conception of self-interest, they must be rejected.

Representational theories of mind cannot individuate the sense modalities in a principled manner. According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of experiences is determined by their contents. The usual objection is that inverted qualia are possible, so the phenomenal character of experiences may vary independently of their contents. But the objection is inconclusive. It raises difficult questions about the metaphysics of secondary qualities and it is difficult to see whether or not inverted qualia are possible. This paper proposes an alternative test of representationalism. Do experiences in different sense modalities have the same phenomenal character when they share content? Psychological work on the perception of shape through vision and spatial hearing is discussed. This work shows that visual and auditory experiences differ in phenomenal character even in so far as they represent similar properties. This objection to representationalism does not invite questions about secondary qualities or depend on establishing metaphysical possibilities.