From Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, we have a famous and troubling problem: is the good indeed good because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods precisely because it is good? Traditionally, most philosophers have responded to Euthyphro’s dilemma by affirming that the good is loved by God because it isgood. In contrast, John Duns Scotus, the 13th Century theologian and philosopher, is often interpreted as a voluntarist who defends the opposite claim: that the good is good because it is loved by God. In this paper, Penner argues that recent Scotus interpreters, such as Thomas Williams, who present the philosopher as a strong voluntarist, are inattentive to a number of key passages by Scotus that appear to be inconsistent with such a stance. If moral dictates are not simply contingent on God’s will, this paper argues, it becomes easier to see how Scotus can claim that moral goodness is accessible to natural reason. Finally, Penner argues that strong voluntarism is susceptible to a serious epistemological problem: it makes morality contingent upon God’s willing, but leaves reason bereft of the knowledge of which god’s commands to obey.

There is a broadly Aristotelian conception of substance, supported in various forms by Aristotle himself, and later by Ayers and Wiggins, which takes substance as the ontologically basic, absolute, persistent, unitary, irreducible, and individual subject of all predicates. This paper interrogates this account in light of the everyday intuitions which underlie it—metaphysical intuitions about the persistence of particulars over time, as well as semantic and linguistic intuitions regarding the practices of individuation and predication. After surveying some of the relevant literature on Aristotelian substance-theory, Foster argues that in its current state, the Aristotelian conception of substance is unattractively dualistic, as well as metaphysically extravagant. As an alternative, the paper argues for a modified “bundle-theory” of substance, which holds that Aristotelian substances can and should be understood as nothing more than structured matter with manifest “bundles” of properties. On this basis, Foster attempts to demonstrate that our semantic and logico-linguistic intuitions can be fruitfully explained and vindicated by a bundle-theory, while remaining agnostic about the richer metaphysics suggested by the Aristotelian theory.

The idea of “moods” is ubiquitous in our everyday lives; theories about mood attempt to capture these commonplace intuitions, while providing a clear and philosophically satisfying definition of the phenomena. In this paper, Prescott-Couch uses a set of criteria suggested by Eric Lormand to evaluate competing theories of mood. Focusing on three of the most plausible accounts—Generalization, Functional Component, and Higher Order Functional State theories—the paper argues that the third view, held by P. E. Griffiths, is the most plausible. Prescott-Couch then entertains objections to the functional approach, paying particular attention to the phemenological worry—that is, that this type of theory fails to grasp at our subjective experience of moods.

The Universal Law formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative is often troublingfor ethicists, as different interpretations can yield significantly different moral results in individual cases. This paper addresses two of the most important contemporary interpretations of Kant’s Universal Law formulation, namely that of Christine Korsgaard and Onora O’Neill. In the paper, Leach-Krouse argues that no satisfactory compromise between these two interpretations can be found. Specifically, the papers argues that Korsgaard’s account avoids rigorism—the over broad application of moral rules—by interpreting the Universal Law Formula as a guide to particular actions, and that O’Neill’s account avoids formalism—the failure to prohibit immoral acts—by interpreting the formula as a source of overarching rules for conduct. Leach-Krouse argues that by examining morally indifferent actions that are similar in certain ways to morally unacceptable actions, we see that there can be no acceptable midpoint of maxim-generality that avoids both formalism and rigorism.

René Descartes’s Second Meditation famously begins with the philosopher’s musings on a melting ball of wax. Within this simple narrative, Descartes and generations of philosophers after him found passageways to many of modern philosophy’s most troubling metaphysical and epistemological problems. In this paper, Lambert summarizes Descartes’s theoretical treatment of the wax, and then argues that this treatment is inadequate. By unpacking the implications of the wax experiment further, Lambert argues that a large number of distinct and troubling questions are implied, but left unresolved, by Descartes. Moreover, the implications that Descartes hopes to draw from the argument, Lambert argues, are unfounded. After critiquing Descartes’s approach to the wax argument, the paper takes up one particularly provoking issue—the nature of perceptual content. Here, Lambert argues in favor of the phenomenological approach to this problem, and offers his own contribution to this brand of response.

John Perry is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and a founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. He is preeminent in the philosophies of language and mind. His many important publications include situations and Attitudes (with Jon Barwise), The Problem of the Essential Indexical, and Identity, Personal Identity and the Self. Perhaps most important, he is famed for his warmth, his genius, and his wit. He co-hosts Philosophy Talk, the popular philosophy radio show out of San Francisco, California. The interview was conducted via email over the week of April 11, 2005.