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.

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.

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.

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.

What happens to our notion of political obligation when right is divorced from moral considerations? When one says that an individual’s claim to her property is a right that ought not to be abridged, on what kind of nonmoral principle can one rely? According to Matthew Sean Pines, Fichte believes that he can ground such a normative prescription on a theory of natural right, deriving a set of strict political principles from a necessary metaphysical conception of a rational being. It is the main task of this paper to work through this difficult deduction, assess its validity, and discuss the general implications of its result. What is said here concerning Fichte’s specific proposal for an objective theory of natural—as opposed to moral—right bears broader significance for the fundamental problem of the nature and source of obligation in the political world.

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.

As Wong relates, the cognitive impression was the Stoic criterion of truth. The Academic skeptics challenged this criterion in a series of arguments throughout the long history of debate between the Stoics and the Academics. In response to each Academic attack, the Stoics modified their criterion in an attempt to preserve for themselves the possibility of knowledge. In the end, the cognitive impression could not withstand the attack. The reason for this, Wong argues, is not due to the irresistibility of the Academics’ arguments, but rather due to the Stoics’ over-modification of their criterion. Wong argues that a version of the cognitive impression without these weakening modifications is a successful criterion of truth.

In this paper Graham Rhys Griffiths discusses Catherine Wilson’s assertion that many contemporary moral philosophers, their professed aims notwithstanding, ultimately provide justifications for the affluent lifestyles of citizens of developed nations. Though Wilson believes that these theorists, of whom she cites Susan Wolf and Thomas Nagel as examples, raise important points regarding the value of our personal commitments and their role in enabling us to live good lives, she suggests that they diminish the real requirements of a more impartial morality. Griffiths argues that this claim, as Wilson applies it to Nagel, is unfair. First, Griffiths shows how Nagel’s relaxation of an impartial morality’s requirements constitutes not a justification of our current lifestyles, but a dispensation due to our weaknesses. Second, he argues that Nagel does not go as far as Wilson herself in accepting the centrality of personal commitments to our lives. Finally, Griffiths argues that Nagel’s emphasis on institutions that alleviate gross inequalities gives a practical approach to creating a world in which we can all live up to the demands morality makes on us.

In this paper Matthew J. Knauff examines one of the four primary epistemic paradoxes set forth by Jonathan Kvanvig—the surprise examination paradox. He begins by offering a statement of the paradox, after which he considers a solution proposed by W.V.O. Quine. Knauff argues that Quine’s solution to the paradox must, for a number of reasons, be rejected. Finally, he offers aresolution to the paradox by means of his own approach.

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.

In grappling with the obscure nature of his writings, interpreters of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus often tend towards one of two poles. Either they choose to echo the reception Heraclitus faced in antiquity, when his peers dismissed his work as a collection of absurd riddles, or they reiterate the contemporary interpretation that sees in his work a fundamental unity despite his numerous paradoxical statements. This essay will not side with either of these readings. Instead, it will simultaneously engage both polar interpretations of “absurdity” and “unity” to re-read the characteristic “obscurity” of the Heraclitean fragments as a rhetorical strategy underscoring the irreducible ambiguity inherent in ontological and epistemological claims. More specifically, I will investigate Heraclitus’ attempt to conceptualize “Logos,” the fundamental, ontological commonality of Being, the very “order” or “essence” unifying all reality. I will go on to claim that Heraclitus advances an inherently ambiguous and somewhat “paradoxical” conceptualization of Logos, conceiving of this “essence” or “order” not as a common ratio or static unity but as a fiery, continuously-becoming unity-in-flux. Particularly important for my argument will be the explication of the role that language plays in Heraclitus’ thought, language being the medium through which reality becomes (partially) intelligible, even as the flux of this reality invariably exceeds the limited nature of linguistic signifiers. The aim of this essay, then, is to revive and conceptualize the dimension of ambiguity in Heraclitean philosophy that polarizing readings tend to dismiss or disavow, an ambiguity that permeates both the ongoing dialogue between language and reality, and the subsequent conceptualizations of reality as they take form in the realm of language. It is precisely this play between language, reality and ambiguity that remains crucial, not only for the Heraclitean quest for wisdom, but also for contemporary attempts at ontology and epistemology alike.

What can science say to moral philosophy? Not much, according to most moral philosophers. In a certain way, they are right – the is/ought divide cannot be crossed any more easily now than centuries ago. This paper argues, however, that a scientific investigation of our moral nature reveals the traditional scope of moral philosophy to be far too narrow. Modern moral theories like deontology and consequentialism typically focus entirely on influencing the process of moral reasoning, disregarding the emotional and motivational processing that determines moral output in most cases. Instead of relying on rational rules to guide us through every dilemma, this paper argues that we should turn to a scientifically informed virtue ethics in order to craft better people and more humane societies.

Kant’s theory of geometry is compatible with non-Euclidean, hyperbolic geometry. That is, on Kant’s theory, the a priori forms of space and time together with the categories of the understanding ground the possibility of hyperbolic constructions in pure intuition. To show this we first develop an interpretation of Kant’s theory of geometry to the extent that it concerns the construction of geometrical objects in pure intuition. Thus we show how the a priori forms and the categories make possible Euclidean constructions in pure intuition. We then proceed to the main result. The latter is independent from some of the details of the interpretation. Under minor assumptions the result can be strengthened to the following: if Kant’s theory is compatible with Euclidean geometry, it is compatible with hyperbolic geometry as well.

Consequentialism is often criticized on the grounds that it justifies the gross violation of individual rights in order to bring about the best overall consequences. In this paper I argue that such criticism is mistaken and that consequentialism is able to accommodate respect for rights. Consequentialism does not necessarily demand the violation of rights, if rights are understood in a positive sense as capabilities and the ability to realize important goals, instead of merely the negative demand for noninterference from other moral agents. Moreover, consequentialists do not have to view rights as mere conduits to social utility; they can acknowledge the importance of preserving individual rights while taking into account thesocial context in which rights are to be protected.

Quine’s advocacy of naturalized epistemology has left much debate and controversy in its wake. Now that the dust has settled a bit, many consider Jaegwon Kim’s polemic response to be the definitive refutation of Quine’s view. I think, however, that this issue at heart is significantly murkier than Kim seems to believe, and Kim’s treatment of Quine’s view of naturalized epistemology leaves much to be desired. In this paper, I lay out Quine’s position as explicitly as possible so as to weigh Kim’s critique in greater detail. I find that although Kim successfully touches upon the weak points of Quine’s mission, his conclusions are too strong.