Two ways of characterizing natural kinds are currently popular: the Kripke-Putnam appeal to microstructure and Boyd’s appeal to causal homeostasis. I argue that these conceptions are more divergent than is often acknowledged, that they give no credence to essentialism, and that they are both faulty. In their place, I sketch an alternative view of natural kinds, which I call “bare projectibilism”. This conception avoids the appeal to explanation common to microstructuralism and the causal homeostasis view, but is still compatible with scientific realism.

Theoreticity is closely connected in the (mainstream) philosophy of science to the idea of non-observability. A closer analysis of measurement, however, may give us a deeper perspective into this connection. This was done by Kyburg in his Theory and Measurement, where he argued that theory is much more pervasive then usually thought of -- even the simplest forms of measurement essentially invoke non-observables. In my article I advance Kyburg’s ideas and try to show that theoreticity implicitly invoked by Kyburg’s pervasive theory may be cast in terms of what I call “non-vagueness principle”. Further, I argue that this principle can provide for a natural demarcation between mature science and other more rudimentary forms of science.

According to the received view, the regularity “All F’s are G” is a real law of nature only if it supports a counterfactual conditional “If x were an F (but actually it is not), it would be a G”. Popper suggested a different approach -- universal generalisations differ from accidental generalisations in the structure of their terms. Terms in accidental generalisations are closed, extensional and terms in laws of nature are open, strictly universal, intensional. But Popper failed to develop this point and used a mistaken and unnatural interpretation of counterfactual assumptions in order to defend the view that both laws of nature and accidental generalisations support counterfactuals. The idea that terms in laws of nature stand for intensions was developed twenty-five years later in the so called DTA theory, which explains laws of nature as relations between properties.

This essay deals critically with Nietzsche’s anthropological typology of the “free spirit par excellence”, “we spirits”, persons endowed with positive as against negative power patterns, and the ideal of the Übermensch. The conclusions are twofold. The first is that actually it was not Nietzsche’s ideal of the Overman that was the pinnacle of his anthropological philosophy, but the even more ideal type of the “free spirit par excellence”. The second conclusion is that it is impossible to envisage a society consisting of such “free spirits”. This thesis is highlighted by contrasting the society of Übermenchen, who, according to Nietzsche, might live in society and even need it as a sine qua non for their cultivation, with free spirits par excellence, who are by definition free from any social ethos, and hence impossible within its framework. However, I argue that, on Nietzsche’s terms, the ideal of the Übermench is also not viable in society. Hence this essay points to an inherent flaw ofNietzsche’s existential philosophy -- thenon-viability of its most sublime ideals.

In this paper, I discuss the general features of what I call ‘the semantics of message and attachment’. According to this theory, utterances of declarative sentences may be semantically associated with a plurality of information contents. I explain how this suggestion may provide a promising tool for the analysis of a variety of phenomena in the semantics for natural languages, such as complex demonstratives, dangling adverbs, or appositive clauses. I then focus on certain structural aspects of the theory, in particular pertaining to the demands it imposes on the lexicon, and on the role it plays with respect to the truth-conditions for an utterance. In this last respect, I also discuss the logical outcomes of the theory, and I compare what I call a ‘content-containment’ approach to validity with a more traditional, truth-conditional understanding.

This essay provides a critical discussion of Philip Pettit’s book A Theory of Freedom: From the Psychology to the Politics of Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). It evaluates the general prospeets of a ‘global theory of freedom’ of the kind advocated by Pettit, i.e. one that seeks explicitly to link a metaphysical theory of free agency to a distinct conception of political liberty. Pettit’s in many ways innovative views concerning ongoing debates in metaphysics and political theory (e.g. compatibilism, republicanism, etc.) are also examined in detail. While recognising the legitimacy and originality of this intellectual endeavour, the paper concludes that, however full of important insights, Pettit’s account fails to realise the desired “reflective equilibrium” between a theory of free agency and that of political liberty.