This paper discusses the interrelations between three aspects of human emotions: their intentionality, their expressivity and their moral significance. It distinguishes three kinds of philosophical views of emotions: the cognitivist (classically held by the Stoics), the emotivist which reduces emotions to non-intentional bodily sensations and physiological states, and the moral phenomenologist, the latter being held by Annette Baier, whose work is the focus of the discussion. Her view, which represents an original development of ideas found in Descartes and Hume, avoids the reductionism of congitivist and emotivist accounts. The paper gives special attention to her notion of ‘deep’ objects of emotions and to her account of the expressivity of emotions, arguing that while the first is problematic, the second is a significant contribution to our understanding of the role of emotions in our moral lives.

Manipulation by another person often undermines freedom. To explain this, a distinction is drawn between two forms of manipulation: indoctrination is defined as causing another person to respond to reasons in a pattern that serves the manipulator’s ends; coercion as supplying another person with reasons that, given the pattern in which he responds to reasons, lead him to act in ways that serve the manipulator’s ends. It is argued that both forms of manipulation undermine freedom because manipulators track the compliance of their victims, while neutral causal mechanisms do not. Manipulators see to it that their victims comply even in the face of forces that threaten to derail them from the manipulator’s desired course. It is suggested that this has an impact on freedom because part of what we desire in wanting to be free is the availability of forms of life very different from those we actually enjoy.

Dennett (1988) provides a much discussed argument for the nonexistence of qualia, as conceived by philosophers like Block, Chalmers, Loar and Searle. My goal in this paper is to vindicate Dennett’s argument, construed in a certain way. The argument supports the claim that qualia are constitutively representational. Against Block and Chalmers, the argument rejects the detachment of phenomenal from information-processing consciousness; and against Loar and Searle, it defends the claim that qualia are constitutively representational in an externalist understanding of this. The core of the argument is contained in section 3. In the first part, I contrast a minimal conception of qualia, relative to which their existence is not under dispute, with the sort of view to which I will object. In the second part I set the stage by presenting the facts about (minimal) qualia on which a Dennett-like argument can be based.

David Gauthier tries to defend morality by showing that rational agents would choose to adopt a fundamental choice disposition that permits them to cooperate in prisoner’s dilemmas. In this paper, I argue that Gauthier, rather than trying to work out a prudential justification for his favored choice disposition, should opt for a transcendental justification. I argue that the disposition in question is the product of socialization, not rational choice. However, only agents who are socialized in such a way that they acquire a disposition of this type could acquire the capacity to use language. Given the internal connection between language and thought, this means that no agent endowed with such a disposition could rationally choose to adopt another. Thus rational reflection by moral agents upon their own fundamental choice disposition will have no tendency to destabilize it.

Stephen Schiffer has argued that contextualist solutions to skepticism rest on an implausible “error theory” concerning our own semantic intentions. Similar arguments have recently been offered also by Thomas Hofweber and Patrick Rysiew. I attempt to show how contextualists can rebut these arguments. The kind of self-knowledge that contextualists are committed to denying us is not a kind of self-knowledge that we need, nor is it a kind of self-knowledge that we can plausibly be thought to possess.

In this paper, I defend the view that the values of concrete objects and persons are reducible to the final values of tropes. This reductive account has recently been discussed and rejected by Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2003). I begin by explaining why the reduction is appealing in the first place. In my rejoinder to Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen I defend trope-value reductionism against three challenges. I focus mainly on their central objection, that holds that the reduction is untenable since different evaluative attitudes have, ontologically speaking, different objects. I grant that this may well be so, but argue that the objection is based on an unwarranted, loose reading of the notion ‘value for its own sake’. On the more reasonable strict reading, it is plausible to maintain that tropes are the sole ontological category that can properly be ascribed final value.

Let thin properties be properties shared by coincident entities, e.g., a person and her body, and thick properties ones that are not shared. Thick properties entail sortal properties, e.g., being a person, and the associated persistence conditions. On the first account of realization defined here, the realized property and its realizers will belong to the same individual. This restricts the physical realizers of mental properties, which are thick, to thick physical properties. We also need a sense in which mental properties can be realized in thin physical properties shared by a person and her body. Defining this in turn requires defining a sense in which the instantiations of sortal properties and of thick properties are realized in micro-structural states of affairs. A fourth notion of realization is needed to allow for the possibility of coincident entities that share a sortal property, e.g., coincident persons.

Here I establish a parallel between modem epistemology and traditional metaphysics: between the way we know an object, on the one hand, and the way an object’s causes cause it to exist, on the other. I show that different efficient causes in the Thomistic system correspond to different questions of knowledge, as analyzed by Stanley Cavell, and that in particular the question the Cavellian skeptic asks corresponds to God’s causation in creation. As I have explained in detail elsewhere, and discuss briefly here, this parallel represents far more than a formal analogy between a series of issues in epistemology and a series of issues in metaphysics. It helps to explain, in fact, why modern philosophers (e.g., Husserl) were ultimately driven to put the human ego in the place of God, as creating (or “positing”) the objects of its knowledge, thereby denying the very distinction between epistemology and ontology.

I argue that the extant theories of self-deception face a counterexample which shows the essential role of instability in the face of attentive consciousness in characterising self-deception. I argue further that this poses a challenge to the interpretist approach to the mental. I consider two revisions of the interpretist approach which might be thought to deal with this challenge and outline why they are unsuccessful. The discussion reveals a more general difficulty for Interpretism. Principles of reasoning-in particular, the requirement of total evidence-are given a weight in attentive consciousness which does not correspond to our reflective judgement of their weight. Successful interpretation does not involve ascribing beliefs and desires by reference to what a subject ought to believe and desire, contrary to what Interpretists suggest.