Given Hume’s theory of belief and belief production it is no small task to explain how it is possible for a belief in a miracle to be produced. I argue that belief in a miracle cannot be produced through Hume’sstandard causal mechanisms and that although education, passion, and testimony initially seem to be promising mechanisms for producing belief in a miracle, none of these is able to produce the belief in amiracle. I conclude by explaining how this poses a problem for Hume’s theory of belief and I briefly investigate the alternatives available for solving this problem.

This paper presents arguments against two crucial elements of recent versions of the Two-Worlds interpretation of Plato. I argue first that in addition to knowledge of the forms, Plato allows beliefs about them as well. Then I argue that Plato sees knowledge as a state in which the subject is conscious of information about the forms. Thus, the infallibility of knowledge must be understood in a way that is consistent with its being informational. Finally, I argue that my conclusions about knowledge do not preclude the possibility that cognition of forms has a direct, nonrepresentational aspect.

This essay discusses the role of being and ontology in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Starting from an examination of Alain Badiou’s ontology and theory of the event, I discuss the possible opposition of being and the event in Deleuze’s work. Though famous for his discussions of the univocity of being, Deleuze does discuss the event as that which is not being. Deleuze’s theory of the event is similar to that of Badiou in that he considers the event to be extra-ontological. The essay closes by considering the differences between Deleuze and Badiou on the subject of the event.

It is now a commonplace that emotions are not mere sensations but, rather, conceptually contentful states. In trying to expand on this insight, however, most theoretical approaches to emotions neglectcentral intuitions about what emotions are like. We therefore need a methodological shift in our thinking about emotions away from the standard accounts’ attempts to reduce them to other mental states andtoward an exploration of the distinctive work emotions do. I show that emotions’ distinctive function is to engage us with both objective and personal values. Attention to emotions’ work reveals that it is precisely their “unruliness” that allows them to play meaningful roles in our lives.

The question has been raised whether Nietzsche intends eternal recurrence to be like a categorical imperative. The obvious objection to understanding eternal recurrence as like a categorical imperative isthat for a categorical imperative to make any sense, for moral obligation to make any sense, it must be possible for individuals to change themselves. And Nietzsche denies that individuals can changethemselves. Magnus thinks the determinism “implicit in the doctine of the eternal recurrence of the same renders any imperative impotent.… How can one will what must happen in any case?” At the other end of the spectrum, those who do hold that eternal recurrence is like a categorical imperative, for their part, tend to ignore or deny the determinism involved in eternal recurrence. This article explores the extent to which it can be claimed that eternal recurrence is like a categorical imperative without downplaying Nietzsche’s dterminism.

This article explores the conviction that the durability of communities is contingent, at least in part, on the conception of reason in play. It proposes that prospects for building and sustaining community areenhanced to the degree that rationalistic theories of rationality are rejected. The resulting equivocation in the processes of rule-making, moral thinking, analysis, and critique, while problematic, will bepreferable to the alternative and caricatured approaches premised on a strong division between reason and its so-called others. This desirable equivocation involves an analysis of the role of trust in human relations and a revised conception of reason developed by philosopher and social critic Gillian Rose (1947–1995). Through an analysis of Rose’s commentary on the folk legend of Camelot and the phenomenology of friendship, this article tries to show how relations constrained by alterity can be transformed.

Many scholars, in view of the close link that he draws between morality and freedom, argue that Kant does not think that there are free choices between nonmoral ends. On this view, Kant only posits afreedom to resist our desires and act morally. We are still responsible for immoral choices because we always have the power to act morally. Henry Allison has opposed this reading by arguing that Kant grounds a notion of nonmoral freedom in the Incorporation Thesis. In this paper, I criticize Allison’s argument and then try to replace it with an alternative that grounds nonmoral freedom in morality.

There has been significant debate over both the imiplications and the merit of Leopold’s land ethic. I consider the two most prominent objections and a resolution to them. One of these objections is that, farfrom being an alternative to an “economic” or cost–benefit perspective on environmental issues, Leopold’s land ethic merely broadens the range of economic considerations to be used in addressing such issues. The other objection is that the land ethic is a form of “environmental fascism” because it subordinates the welfare of humans to the good of the ecological whole. I argue that these objections are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of his theory by advocates and detractors alike. The land ethic is centrally a psychological theory of moral development and ecological rationality that advocates a shift in the way that environmental problems are conceptualized and approached.

There are general aspects of mental life it is reasonable to believe do not vary even when subjects vary in their first-person judgments about them. Such lack of introspective agreement gives rise to “phenomenological disputes.” These include disputes over how to describe the perspectival character of perception, the phenomenal character of perceptual recognition and conceptual thought, and the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness. Some supposethat when we encounter such disputes we have no choice but to abandon first-person reflection in philosophy of mind in favor of a third-person methodology. Such reaction is unwarranted. A reasoned assessment of phenomenological disputes that relies on first-person reflection is explained, illustrated, and advocated.

This paper supports Charles Siewert’s criticism of those criticizing first-person approaches because they disagree by arguing that such critics adopt a noncommittal, third-person observer standpoint on the debates themselves before recommending only third-person natural scientific approaches to mind and that they oversimplify when they portray philosophy as contentious and natural science as ruled by consensus. Further, a complete account of first-person intentionality in terms of acts and their correlative objects in their temporal and bodily interrelationships make it possible to defend Siewert’s theses: that thought is phenomenally conscious, that there is a phenomenal consciousness beyond sensing, that the Protean view that equates change in a shape’s appearance with an apparent change in the shape of what appears is incorrect, and that Hume’s two-dimensional phenomenalism is mistaken.

This paper attempts to clarify how one might understand philosophy as necessarily involving both third-person and first-person perspectives. It argues, first, that philosophy must incorporate the first-person perspective in order to provide an adequate account of consciousness and the prereflective awareness of the self and, second, in opposition to Dennett’s hetero-phenomenology that this incorporation is possible only within a transcendental perspective. The paper also attempts to meet the challenge of those who claim that the notion of the self—and along with it, the idea of first-person perspective—is dependent upon a second-person perspecive. It argues that the second-person challenge depends upon a sense of “self ” different from that at stake in the first-person perspective operative in prereflective self-awareness.

Drawing creatively on the resources of transcendental philosophy, John Drummond makes a persuasive case for the importance of the first-person perspective in philosophical explanations of consciousness.

In this commentary, I examine John Tienson’s argument that reflection on the epistemic situation of the Cartesian meditator suggests that intentional content is narrow. My aim is to show how his argument is closely connected to another prominent objection to externalism—the McKinsey argument.

Phenomenology and analytical philosophy share a number of common concerns, and it seems obvious that analytical philosophy can learn from phenomenology, just as phenomenology can profit from an exchange with analytical philosophy. But although I think it would be a pity to miss the opportunity for dialogue that is currently at hand, I will in the following voice some caveats. More specifically, I wish to discuss two issues that complicate what might otherwise seem like rather straightforward interaction. The first issue concerns the question of whether the current focus on the first-person perspective might have a negative side-effect by giving us a slanted view of what subjectivity amounts to. The second issue concerns the question of whether superficial similarities in the descriptive findings might actually conceal some rather deep-rooted differences in the systematic use these findings serve.

Dan Zahavi raises doubts about the prospects for combining phenomenological and analytical approaches to the mind, based chiefly on the claim that phenomenology is a form of transcendental philosophy. I argue that there are two ways in which one might understand the claim that phenomenology is transcendental: (1) as the claim that the methods of phenomenology essentially involve addressing transcendental questions or making transcendental arguments, or (2) as the claim that phenomenology is committed to substantive theses of antirealism and the like, which are sometimes thought to follow from atranscendental approach. I argue that while (1) is appropriate, it in no way leads to conflicts with analytic work in philosophy of mind. Moreover, adopting this method and practicing phenomenology in no way commits us to claims of type (2) that might be thought to conflict with common assumptions in analytic philosophy of mind.

It is argued that results from first-person methodologies are unacceptable for incorporation into a fundamental philosophical theory of the mind unless they satisfy a necessary condition, which I introduce and defend. I also describe a narrow, nonphenomenal, first-person concept that I call minimal content that satisfies this condition. Minimal content is irreducible to third-person concepts, but it is required for an adequate account of intentionality, representation, and language. Consequently, consciousness is implicated in these as strongly—but differently—than it is in our phenomenal states. Minimal content provides a foundation for an objective philosophical theory of the mind and language. (Some support for these claims is given here. They are extensively argued for in my The Primacy of the Subjective.)

Three problems are raised for Nicholas Georgalis’s recent work: (1) a problem with regard to the supposed noninferential knowledge of minimal content, (2) a problem with the “necessary condition” Georgalis stipulates for the legitimate application of a first-person methodology to a science of the mind, and (3) a problem with regard to denying phenomenal content to intentional acts.