Two recent papers by Michael Burke bearing upon the persistence of people and commonplace things illustrate the fact that the quest for synchronic ontological economy is likely to encourage a disturbing diachronic proliferation of entities. This discussion argues that Burke’s promise of ontological economy is seriously compromised by the fact that his proposed metaphysic does violence to standard intuitions concerning the persistence of people and commonplace things. In effect, Burke would have us achieve synchronic economy (rejection of coincident entities) by postulating strongly counterintuitive transtemporal claims of numerical diversity. The argument is made that the price of Burkean economy is too high.

Berkeley and Hume object to Locke’s account of abstraction. Abstraction is separating in the mind what cannot be separated in reality. Their objection is that if a is inseparable in reality from b, then the idea of a is inseparable from the idea of b. The former inseparability is the reason for the latter. In most interpretations, however, commentators leave the former unexplained in explaining the latter.This article assumes that Berkeley and Hume present a unified front against Locke. Hume supplements Berkeley’s argument just where there are gaps. In particular, Hume makes explicit something Berkeley leaves implicit: The argument against Locke depends on the principle that things are inseparable if and only if they are identical. Abstraction is thinking of one of an inseparable pair while not thinking of the other. But doing so entails thinking of something while not thinking of it. This is the fundamental objection.

For the claim that the satisfaction of certain conditions is sufficient for the application of some concept to serve as part of the (‘reductive’) analysis of that concept, we require the conditions to be specified without employing that very concept. An account of the application conditions of a concept not meeting this requirement, we call analytically circular. For such a claim to be usable in determining the extension of the concept, however, such circularity may not matter, since if the concept figures in a certain kind of intensional context in the specification of the conditions, the satisfaction of those conditions may not itself depend on the extension of the concept. We put this by saying that although analytically circular, the account may yet not be inferentially circular.

The Snark is an intentional object. I examine the general philosophical characteristics of thoughts of objects from the perspective of Husserl’s, hyle, noesis, and noema and show how this meets constraints of opacity, normativity, and possible existence as generated by a sensitive theory of intentionality. Husserl introduces terms which indicate the normative features of intentional content and attempts to forge a direct relationship between the norms he generates and the actual world object which a thought intends. I then attempt to relate Husserl’s account to Fregean insights about the sense and reference of a term. Neither Husserl nor Frege suggest plausible routes to a naturalistic account of intentionality and I turn to Wittgenstein to provide a naturalistic reading of the crucial terms involved in the analysis of intentional content. His account is normative in a way required by both Husserl and Frege and yet manages a kind of Aristotelian naturalism which avoids crude biologism.

Getting people not to harm others is a central goal of morality. But while it is commonly perceived that those who benefit others merit gratitude, those who do not harm others are not ordinarily thought to merit anything. I attempt to argue against this, claiming that all the arguments against gratitude to the non-maleficent are unsuccessful. Finally, I explore the difference it would make if we thought that we owe gratitude to those who do not harm us.

Whether any beliefs are justified non empirically is important in a debate with sceptics who deny empirical justification, if the parties involved in the debate claim that their position is justified. Sceptics must assume that their premises are justified nonempirically, to avoid begging the question. The main problem with advocating nonempirical justification is that accounts tend to be either too niggardly or too generous, implying either that nonempirical justification is impossible or that peer adversaries must be equally justified. The way to solve this problem is to recognize that justification involves satisfying two conditions: having reason to hold a belief and having a ground for being confident about one’s reason. The rcason can be nonempirical even though the ground is almost always empirical. This distinction can be used to resolve a number of familiar concerns.

This paper defends a model of the internalism requirement against Michael Smith’s recent criticisms of it. On this “example model”, what we have reason to do is what we would be motivated to do were we rational. After criticizing the example model, Smith argues that his “advice model”, that what we have reason to do is what we would advise ourselves to do were we rational, is obviously preferable. The author argues that Smith’s criticisms can quite easily be accommodated by the example model. Moreover, to the extent that his model connects reasons to advice, it is not a model of the internalism requirement at all. Yet, to the extent that it connects reasons to motivation, his model collapses into the example model. The author ends by arguing that Smith’s view simply proposes an unambitious conception of practical rationality, not an alternative construal of the internalism requirement.

In this paper, the author considers an argument against the thesis that humans are irrational in the sense that we reason according to principles that differ from those we ought to follow. The argument begins by noting that if humans are irrational, we should not trust the results of our reasoning processes. If we are justified in believing that humans are irrational, then, since this belief results from a reasoning process, we should not accept this belief. The claim that humans are irrational is, thus, self-undermining. The author shows that this argument---and others like it---fails for several interesting reasons. In fact, there is nothing self-undermining about the claim that humans are irrational; empirical research to establish this claim does not face the sorts of a priori problems that some philosophers and psychologists have claimed it does