Practical rationality is best regarded as a virtue: an excellence in the exercise of one’s cognitive capacities in one’s practical endeavors. The author develops this idea so as to yield a Humean conception of practical rationality. Nevertheless, one of the crucial features of the approach is not distinctively Humean and sets it apart from the most familiar neo-Humean approaches: an agent’s practical rationality has to do with the presence and form of his cognitive activity, as weIl as with how it engages his emotional and motivational states, rather than with the impact that his actions have on his utility or with how his actions relate to his expected utility. The approach also contrasts with full-information accounts of rationality. The paper ends with a discussion of our interest in operating with the conception of practical rationalitythat emerges from this approach, even if it is so demanding that it would be humanly impossible to be perfectly practically rational.

I provide a construal of the epistemic regress problem and I take issue with the contention that a foundationalist solution is incompatible with an internalist account of warrant. I sketch a foundationalist solution to the regress problem that respects a plausible version of internalism. I end with the suggestion that the strategy that I have presented is not available only to the traditional versions of foundationalismthat ascribe foundational status to experiential beliefs. It can also be used to generate aversion of internalist foundationalism based on reliabilist principles.

I consider a grand, yet neglected proposal put forward by Shoemaker-a functionalist theory of all properties. I argue that two possible ways of developing this proposal meet with substantial objections. However, if we are prepared to endorse an ontology of tropes, one of these functionalist analyses can be developed into an original and informative theory of properties.

Anti-individualists claim that concepts are individuated with an eye to purely external facts about a subject’s environment about which she may be ignorant or mistaken. This paper offers a novel reason for thinking that anti-individualistic concepts are an ineliminable part of commonsense psychology. Our commitment to anti-individualism, I argue, is ultimately grounded in a rational epistemic agent’s commitment to refining her own representational practices in the light of new and surprising information about her environment. Since anti-individualism is an implicit part of responsible epistemic practices, we cannot abandon it without compromising our own epistemic agency. The story I tell about the regulation of one’s own representational practices yields a new account of the identity conditions for anti-individualistic concepts.