The word ‘dualism’ can be used to pick out at least four different theories concerning the relationship between mind and body. A mind and a body are two different entities and each is “had” by a man. A man is thus a composite being with two components, one “inner”, the other “outer”. You, for example, are a man and your mind is “inner” in the sense that you alone can reflectively experience yourself thinking, or feeling pain, or seeing colours . (...) I can in a sense observe you thinking, but only by observing you use your body in certain ways—e.g. to make certain sounds, write certain things, look at the pages of an open book and frown. My “experience” of you thinking is thus not a reflective experience. Your body is “outer”, on the other hand, in the sense that you cannot experience it or its properties in any exclusive way. That is, in whatever sense you can be said to experience your body, someone else can equally be said to experience it. (shrink)

John Loke is often referred to as the first of a triumvirate of major British Empiricists, and sometimes even as the father of British Empiricism. In many cases the reference is extremely guarded, and at times the word ‘empiricist’ is being used merely as a convenient label for organising university courses, amounting to little more than a synonym for ‘Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and to some extent Bacon, Hobbes, Reid, and Mill’. Given that ‘empiricist’ is being used in a philosophically (...) interesting way, however, there is some question as to just how guarded its application to Locke should be. (shrink)

Let us use ‘sensation’ such that we can talk about ‘visual sensation’ and ‘auditory sensation’, and such that ‘sensation’ cannot readily be pluralized. It then makes sense to talk about the “objects” involved in sensation. For example, if someone sees red, where his seeing red is a case of sensation, then there is an “object” involved in the situation in the sense that we can talk about “what” he sees. One of the enduring problems in philosophy is to try to (...) determine the status of such objects. (shrink)

Almeder effectively defends his view that justification entails truth against some earlier objections and offers new arguments for the entailment. Although the arguments make clear that truth claims depend on justification claims, They still fail to establish an entailment.

Whether any beliefs are justified nonempirically 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 reason can be nonempirical even though the ground is almost always empirical. This distinction can be used to resolve a number of familiar concerns. (shrink)

The principle that epistemic justification is necessarily transmitted to all the known logical consequences of a justified belief continues to attract critical attention. That attention is not misplaced. If the Transmission Principle is valid, anyone who thinks that a given belief is justified must defend the view that every known consequence of the belief is also justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection principle is modified, the (...) possibility of deductive justification is threatened. If some known consequence fails to be justified, the failure may extend to every known consequence. To reject Transmission is to insert a logical gap between the justification of a premise and the justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection on the Transmission Principle therefore usefully brings us face to face with the following dilemma: accept the principle and hand Cartesian scepticism a powerful weapon, or modify the principle and risk undermining deductive justification. (shrink)

EVEN IF ’MIRACLE’ MEANS A VIOLATION OF A LAW OF NATURE, A CASE CAN BE MADE FOR THINKING THAT MIRACLES ARE POSSIBLE, DETECTABLE, AND COMPATIBLE WITH SCIENCE. THE CASE WORKS BY DEFINING A LAW-VIOLATION AS AN EVENT OF A KIND THAT IS EPISTEMICALLY IMPOSSIBLE UNLESS THERE IS GOOD EVIDENCE OF A GOD’S PRODUCING AN INSTANCE. HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN OBJECTIONS ARE CONSIDERED AND ANSWERED.

Suppose that a jury in a murder trial brings in a verdict of guilty and one of the jurors still wonders whether the verdict is a good one, although he is not inclined to try to have it reversed. Is his attitude coherent?

According to Plato's Republic, human knowledge in highest form owes its existence to a priori discoveries made during the course of dialectical investigations. Being a priori, such discoveries are neither empirical observations nor conclusions based upon empirical observations, although in some cases they may be “occasioned” by experience. They are matter for intellectual, not literal, vision, and making them is what distinguishes the successful philosopher from the non-philosopher. Thus, in the Phaedo, Plato is in a position to argue that the (...) separation of the soul from the body in death is no evil for a genuine philosopher: he has no need to rely on the bodily senses in order to acquire philosophical knowledge; and he is well free of the errors and confusion generated by the senses, and of the physical desires nourished in the soul as a result of residing in a body. (shrink)

One reasonably familiar argument for epistemological scepticism maintains that knowledge requires foundations and that we rarely, if ever, have such foundations. The conclusion of this argument is that we rarely, if ever, have knowledge. A second, less ambitious sceptical argument is that philosophers cannot justifiably say that they have knowledge unless their statement is based on foundations and that we never have such foundations. The conclusion of this argument is not that we never have knowledge, but that philosophers are never (...) justified in saying that they have knowledge. The scepticism is Pyrrhonic, rather than Academic, and merely attempts to counter knowledge assertions, not establish that they are false. It tries to show that in most cases the best response we can give to ‘Do we have knowledge?’ is to remain indifferent. (shrink)

Keynes introduces three different principles under the single title “the principle of indifference”. The first is Bernoulli's princple of non-sufficient reason.If there is no known reason for predicating of our subject one rather than another of several alternatives, then relatively to such knowledge the assertions of each of these alternatives have an equal probability. Thus equal probabilities must be assigned to each of several arguments, if there is an absence of positive ground for assigning unequal ones.

On First view there seem to be many possible instances of knowers who lack knowledge of their knowledge. A self-deceiver seems capable of knowing his own faults without knowing that he knows them. A philosopher seems capable of knowing that there are physical objects around him without knowing that he has such knowledge. Deep-rooted insecurity seems capable of preventing a mathematician from knowing that he has just made a genuine discovery. A child seems capable of acquiring knowledge before acquiring the (...) concept ‘knowledge’ and hence before being able to know that he knows. (shrink)

Could John Locke defend his view that the knowledge we acquire in intuition and demonstration is infallible, and should he try to defend it? Peter Schouls thinks the project is unviable, and I think Schouls is right. But I also think Locke should not even bother trying. I shall elaborate on the argument that he could not defend the view, indicate why I think he should abandon infallibility, given his other views, and then investigate what he might usefully say about (...) knowledge and certainty if he were persuaded to abandon it. (shrink)

The thirteen papers in Morality, Reason and Truth address various dimensions of the complex relationship between morality and rationality. Most of the papers are new and they are generally at the cutting edge of current research. The collection is a substantial and important contribution to metaethics. The following are the views I found most challenging. Although they do not exhaust the book's contents, they are a good sample of its unity, range, and instructive power.

Let us use ‘false’ and ‘not true’ in such a way that the latter expression covers the broader territory of the two; in other words, a statement's falsity implies its non-truth but not vice versa. For example, ‘John is ill’ cannot be false without being nontrue; but it can be non-true without being false, since it may not be true when ‘John is not ill’ is also not true, a situation we could describe by saying ‘It is neither the case (...) that John is ill nor the case that John is not ill.’. (shrink)

Applying truth-conditions to sentences about the world seems to generate paradoxes unless their application is restricted. We can avoid such restrictions by refusing to apply logical laws to sentences the truth-values of which cannot possibly be established by applying truth-conditions. Such a refusal is reasonable, since the point of logic is to help us make justified truth claims. And the basis for the refusal allows us to avoid a surprisingly wide range of contradictions, without having to exclude more than we (...) want. (shrink)

Descartes' attempt to avoid the charge of circularity is unconvincing, And more recent efforts by scholars such as frankfurt and kenny to defend him on this point have not been entirely successful. The only way to remove the circle is to replace the search for perfect knowledge by a search for knowledge that is less than perfect, Yet not obviously attainable. Philosophers can then defend knowledge claims against metaphysical doubts without fear of having to beg the question, Indeed can even (...) adopt the cartesian principle that defending knowledge claims is impossible without engaging in this type of epistemology. (shrink)