A significant amount of research has been dedicated to reconciling paradoxes that arise when English conditionals (“If P, then Q”) are interpreted as bearing the same semantic relation as material implication in first order logic. For example, the statement “if it rained yesterday, then it didn’t rain hard”, by the rule of contraposition, should be logically equivalent to “if it rained hard yesterday, then it didn’t rain”. Clearly, this would be a false utterance in English. Paradoxes similar to these have led a number of theorists to conclude that English conditionals are not truth-functional. Some have attempted to explain the semantics of conditionals in terms of situational contexts. Mark Alan Wilson examines a recent attempt by Christopher Gauker to explain the semantics of conditionals. Gauker redefines the notion of the context of an utterance and uses it to replace the notion of logical validity with contextual assertibility. Wilson argues that Gauker’s notion of contextual assertibility generates at least two major problems: first, it fails on its own criteria, and second, it licenses intuitively unacceptable utterances. Further, Wilson suggests that the only way Gauker's theory might avoid these problems would be to reduce it to a mere restatement of an earlier theory of conditionals, that of Nelson Goodman.

Stephen Darwall is the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. [Editor’s note: since this interview was conducted, Darwall has been named the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. The University of Michigan has designated him the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus.] His research has centered on the foundations and history of ethics and moral theory, and he is the author of several important works in these areas, including: Impartial Reason (1983), The British Moralists and the Internal 'Ought': 1640-1740 (1995), Philosophical Ethics (1988), Welfare and Rational Care (2002), and The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (2006). This interview was conducted by Matthew Noah Smith, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, whose work focuses on political theory and the philosophy of law.

Nathan Salmon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1984. His research focuses on the philosophy of language and metaphysics, but he has written in many other areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of logic. He is perhaps best known for his work on direct reference theory and modality. In addition to numerous papers, Salmon has written several books: Reference and Essence (1981, 2005 with new appendices); Frege’s Puzzle (1986, 1991); Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning: Philosophical Papers Volume I (2006); Content, Cognition, and Communication: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (2007). Together with Scott Soames, Salmon co-edited Propositions and Attitudes in 1988. This interview was conducted for the Yale Philosophy Review by Leslie F. Wolf, a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at Yale University.

Wittgenstein was strongly influenced in his formulation of the role of description in philosophy by Goethe’s conception of description as a scientific method. However, despite retaining some superficial similarities, Wittgenstein’s notion of the role of description in philosophy turns out to be an extreme morph of its scientific predecessor. Wittgenstein extends description’s domain of application to such an extent that, unlike for Goethe, it becomes much more than a method for elucidating facts or principles, and confl icts with some of Goethe’s original reasons for favoring description over explanation.

A Theory of Justice maintains that we are morally bound to further those institutional arrangements that support those principles that would have been agreed to by contracting parties in the original position. However, some critics have rejected the implicit premise that hypothetical contracts yield contractual obligations. But this critique is misplaced according to a different interpretation of the contract’s role. Rawls arguably claims that justice is binding and that in virtue of specifying the content of justice the hypothetical contract is likewise binding. To determine whether we are bound to uphold Rawlsian justice, I shall discuss both approaches and then further analyse charges of triviality, circularity, an alleged similarity to intuitionism and the contractarian rebuttal of utilitarianism.

Professor Block has written extensively on a number of topics in the philosophy of mind, from consciousness to cognitive science, and is particularly known for his work on Functionalism. Many of his papers are collected in Consciousness, Functionalism, and Representation (2007). This interview was conducted in New Haven on March 6th, 2007.

Robert Pippin is the chair of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor. Most well-known for his work in German idealism, he is the author of Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989), Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (1991), and The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (2005), among other works. We felt that his insights on a number of topics both philosophical and non-philosophical easily warranted the relatively unedited version you see here. Even so, our discussion with him far outlasted an hour of tape, so a good deal has still been left out. The interview was conducted in Linsley- Chittenden Hall of Yale University on March 28th, 2007.

According to one theory of persistence, objects persist through change over time in virtue of being wholly present at all points in time at which they exist. According to another theory, objects are spacetime worms that persist in virtue of having temporal parts at all points at which they exist. According to a third theory, objects, strictly speaking, are momentary time slices, and ordinary medium-sized dry goods are sums of time slices related by a temporal counterpart relation. Whole object theory, parthood theory, and counterpart theory are theories of extension (in time, in this case, but they can also be applied to ordinary space and modal space). These theories are distinct from three-dimensionalism and four-dimensionalism, which do not explain how objects are extended in a domain, but rather the number and kind of dimensions an object’s extension occupies. Each theory of extension is consistent with exactly one of 3Dism and 4Dism, and 4Dism is vastly more plausible than 3Dism independent of any considerations of persistence and extension. Therefore it remains to weigh those theories of extension consistent with 4Dism against one another. Slice theory comes with an ontological price that worm theory is free of: Slice theory rises or falls with an orthogonal metaphysical principle, i.e. unrestricted mereological composition, whereas worm theory is on equally good footing given restricted or unrestricted composition. On the other hand, worm theory bears a semantic price that slice theory avoids: Worm theory is in a difficult position vis-a-vis the semantics of counting and the problem of coincidence. The author argues that worm theory can survive its semantic cost but slice theory cannot survive its ontological costs.

In this paper Day argues that there are particular actions that will always have an imperceptible effect when performed individually, but that when these actions are performed by a large number of people the collective effects can be perceptibly large. Thus, the act-utilitarian may find herself in a situation relevantly similar to a prisoner’s dilemma; as such, act-utilitarianism is directly collectively selfdefeating. The paper then discusses the practical implications of this problem, such as in the case of the dilemma of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, where imperceptible individual actions sum into perceptible effects. Day concludes by arguing that if no solution can be found to this problem, then unanimous support for act-utilitarianism will be theoretically disastrous.

If we include events in our ontology, then it is incumbent upon us to define a criterion of identity for those events. Glazier surveys the identity criteria of Davidson, Quine, and Kim, and argues that their criteria are either circular or fail to respect our intuitions in certain problematic cases. He proposes a new criterion according to which two events x and y are identical if and only if they cannot be physically analyzed as separate components of a process. Glazier argues that his criterion successfully deals with the cases that are problematic for the other three criteria.

The Blumenberg-Löwith debate over the secularization hypothesis has attracted the attention of scholars interested in the history of ideas. In this paper, Fernández draws from Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age in order to suggest how appeal to modality, in the form of William of Ockham’s notion that God’s absolute power entails the radical contingency of the universe, helped set the stage for the crossing of the epochal threshold of modernity. In the first section, Fernández gives a preliminary background to the famed dispute over the secularization hypothesis. In the second section, he argues that Blumenberg’s thesis of man’s self-assertion of reason trades on Ockham’s notion of radical contingency. And in the third section, Fernández suggests how notions of God’s absolute power helped to replace ideas of “providence” with “progress,” thus ushering in the Modern Age.

Phenomenal externalism, or the externalist version of representationism, is the view that the phenomenal character of experience—how the world seems to you—is exhausted by the intentional content of experience—how your experience represents the world. In the 1970’s, Hilary Putnam argued for externalism about meaning: what a person means by a word is in part dependent on her external environment, such that molecular duplicates whose nervous systems are in the exact same states can nonetheless mean different things by the same word, just by virtue of a difference in their environmental conditions. The lesson drawn by externalists is that meaning ain’t in the head, since it can change without any change in the brain. The phenomenal externalist wishes to say something similar about experience—it is in part dependent on the environment, such that molecular duplicates in the same states can nonetheless have different experiences, just by virtue of a difference in their environmental conditions. Phenomenolgy ain’t in the head either, phenomenal externalists maintain, and can also change without any changes in the brain. Some philosophers find this view attractive since it obviates various traditional problems with locating phenomenology in the head. However, there have also been serious objections to the view. Holliday reviews Ned Block’s famous “Inverted Earth” objection to phenomenal externalism, considers several recent replies to the objection by Michael Tye and Fred Dretske and then makes the case that these replies fail when we consider an empirical, psychological phenomenon known as cross-modal matching. Indeed, the replies of Tye and Dretske, which try to negotiate both Inverted Earth and another infamous thought-experiment involving “Swampman,” threaten to render the phenomenal character of experience epiphenomenal—i.e., causally impotent—which seems to undermine the point of providing an externalist representationist theory of it.

Richard Rorty is professor emeritus of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford University. Among his many publications are The Linguistic Turn (1967), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1988). Professor Rorty is famous for his distinct views on pragmatism, epistemology, and the fate of analytic philosophy. This interview was conducted via email over the week of March 20, 2006.