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.

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.

Both contextualist and relativist solutions to the faultless disagreement problem clash with our intuitions: contextualism, with the intuition that two people arguing about a matter oftaste are in fact disagreeing; and relativism, with the intuition that the truth of a proposition is independent of who is evaluating it. In this paper, I will outline a solution that explains our intuition of disagreement without clashing with our intuitions about truth. I will do this by proposing a definition of propositions as ideally clarified assertoric content, having one absolute truth-value that does not vary across any contexts. I will argue that this definition is plausible, that it best serves the purposes of philosophy, and that it best solves the problem of faultless disagreement.

David Lewis' thesis of Humean Supervenience combines the claims 1) that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences and 2) that truth supervenes on being. Contra Lewis, we should adopt a dispositional rather than a categorical theory of property individuation. Moreover, contra the conventional wisdom, such a theory is consistent with claim 1). However, it cannot be made consistent with claim 2) without abandoning the standard semantics for counterfactuals.

ln the Phaedrus, Socrates cnt1c1zes wntmg as non-living and deceptive. He later also claims that a good writer will write only for the sake of self-amusement. These apparent indictments of the written word seem to be at odds with the fact that the Phaedrus is itself a written text, to which Plato has presumably devoted some care and effort. I will show, however, that Plato uses these claims ultimately to suggest that the reader is responsible for transforming a written text into a dialogue with the text's author. I argue that Plato gets this message across via deliberate but not unsubtle flaws in Socrates' arguments and by highlighting the frivolity of written words, thereby directing the careful reader to recognize the significance of what Socrates leaves unsaid. For Plato, what is left unsaid is a more rel iable vehicle for conveying some understanding of reality and truth than mere written words.

Over the last half-century, Plato's Third Man Argument [TMA] has received a surge of attention. The challenge which numerous critics have undertaken is to provide a viable interpretation of Plato's puzzling passage at Parm. 132a1-b2. The exegetical part of this paper attempts to bring together some of the most plausible interpretations offered to date, distilling the good moves from the bad. The not-so-exegetical part of this paper draws out the consequences of these most plausible interpretations. In pa1ticular, it considers the possibility, inspired in the first instance by a stage-functional interpretation of Plato's one-over-many principle, that Plato held a recursive theory of knowledge. In Part I, I give a textual and logical analysis of the TMA I try to formulate the TMA such that it validly generates a regress from consistent premises, while remaining faithful to the text. In Part 11, I ask whether Plato is vulnerable to the TMA so conceived. I argue that some textual evidence suggests that he is not. In Part III, I assume for the sake of argument that Plato is vulnerable, and ask: (1) ls the conclusion of the TMA vicious - does it pose a problem for Plato? And (2), what are the consequences of the IMA (if it goes through) for Plato's claim that knowledge is possible?

Daniel Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His research has centered on philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, with particular interests in cognitive science and evolutionary biology. He is a steadfast and vocal atheist and secularist. His many books have been read widely both in and out of the academy. They include Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin 's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life ( l 996), and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006). We spoke with Professor Dennett in June 2010.

There is a broadly Aristotelian conception of substance, supported in various forms by Aristotle himself, and later by Ayers and Wiggins, which takes substance as the ontologically basic, absolute, persistent, unitary, irreducible, and individual subject of all predicates. This paper interrogates this account in light of the everyday intuitions which underlie it—metaphysical intuitions about the persistence of particulars over time, as well as semantic and linguistic intuitions regarding the practices of individuation and predication. After surveying some of the relevant literature on Aristotelian substance-theory, Foster argues that in its current state, the Aristotelian conception of substance is unattractively dualistic, as well as metaphysically extravagant. As an alternative, the paper argues for a modified “bundle-theory” of substance, which holds that Aristotelian substances can and should be understood as nothing more than structured matter with manifest “bundles” of properties. On this basis, Foster attempts to demonstrate that our semantic and logico-linguistic intuitions can be fruitfully explained and vindicated by a bundle-theory, while remaining agnostic about the richer metaphysics suggested by the Aristotelian theory.

The idea of “moods” is ubiquitous in our everyday lives; theories about mood attempt to capture these commonplace intuitions, while providing a clear and philosophically satisfying definition of the phenomena. In this paper, Prescott-Couch uses a set of criteria suggested by Eric Lormand to evaluate competing theories of mood. Focusing on three of the most plausible accounts—Generalization, Functional Component, and Higher Order Functional State theories—the paper argues that the third view, held by P. E. Griffiths, is the most plausible. Prescott-Couch then entertains objections to the functional approach, paying particular attention to the phemenological worry—that is, that this type of theory fails to grasp at our subjective experience of moods.

From Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, we have a famous and troubling problem: is the good indeed good because it is loved by the gods, or is it loved by the gods precisely because it is good? Traditionally, most philosophers have responded to Euthyphro’s dilemma by affirming that the good is loved by God because it isgood. In contrast, John Duns Scotus, the 13th Century theologian and philosopher, is often interpreted as a voluntarist who defends the opposite claim: that the good is good because it is loved by God. In this paper, Penner argues that recent Scotus interpreters, such as Thomas Williams, who present the philosopher as a strong voluntarist, are inattentive to a number of key passages by Scotus that appear to be inconsistent with such a stance. If moral dictates are not simply contingent on God’s will, this paper argues, it becomes easier to see how Scotus can claim that moral goodness is accessible to natural reason. Finally, Penner argues that strong voluntarism is susceptible to a serious epistemological problem: it makes morality contingent upon God’s willing, but leaves reason bereft of the knowledge of which god’s commands to obey.

The Universal Law formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative is often troublingfor ethicists, as different interpretations can yield significantly different moral results in individual cases. This paper addresses two of the most important contemporary interpretations of Kant’s Universal Law formulation, namely that of Christine Korsgaard and Onora O’Neill. In the paper, Leach-Krouse argues that no satisfactory compromise between these two interpretations can be found. Specifically, the papers argues that Korsgaard’s account avoids rigorism—the over broad application of moral rules—by interpreting the Universal Law Formula as a guide to particular actions, and that O’Neill’s account avoids formalism—the failure to prohibit immoral acts—by interpreting the formula as a source of overarching rules for conduct. Leach-Krouse argues that by examining morally indifferent actions that are similar in certain ways to morally unacceptable actions, we see that there can be no acceptable midpoint of maxim-generality that avoids both formalism and rigorism.

René Descartes’s Second Meditation famously begins with the philosopher’s musings on a melting ball of wax. Within this simple narrative, Descartes and generations of philosophers after him found passageways to many of modern philosophy’s most troubling metaphysical and epistemological problems. In this paper, Lambert summarizes Descartes’s theoretical treatment of the wax, and then argues that this treatment is inadequate. By unpacking the implications of the wax experiment further, Lambert argues that a large number of distinct and troubling questions are implied, but left unresolved, by Descartes. Moreover, the implications that Descartes hopes to draw from the argument, Lambert argues, are unfounded. After critiquing Descartes’s approach to the wax argument, the paper takes up one particularly provoking issue—the nature of perceptual content. Here, Lambert argues in favor of the phenomenological approach to this problem, and offers his own contribution to this brand of response.

John Perry is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and a founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information. He is preeminent in the philosophies of language and mind. His many important publications include situations and Attitudes (with Jon Barwise), The Problem of the Essential Indexical, and Identity, Personal Identity and the Self. Perhaps most important, he is famed for his warmth, his genius, and his wit. He co-hosts Philosophy Talk, the popular philosophy radio show out of San Francisco, California. The interview was conducted via email over the week of April 11, 2005.