I compare three sorts of case in which philosophers have argued that we cannot assert the Law of Excluded Middle for statements of identity. Adherents of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis deny that Excluded Middle holds for statements saying that an infinitesimal is identical with zero. Derek Parfit contended that, in certain sci-fi scenarios, the Law does not hold for some statements of personal identity. He also claimed that it fails for the statement ‘England in 1065 was the same nation as England in 1067’. I argue that none of these cases poses a serious threat to Excluded Middle. My analysis of the last example casts doubt on the principle of the Determinacy of Distinctness. While David Wiggins's ‘conceptualist realism’ provides a metaphysics which can dispense with that principle, it leaves no house-room for infinitesimals.

A famous section of 1 Corinthians and some influential passages in the work of Iris Murdoch seem to suppose a significant connection between the higher human love of agape and moral knowledge: that, perhaps, the former may provide access to the latter. Following some sceptical attention to this possibility, this paper turns to a more modest suggestion of Plato's Symposium that the ‘lower’ human love of eros might be a transitional stage to higher moral love or knowledge of the good. Still, while conceding that this may be so, the present paper argues that any moral transformations of such loves would need to be informed by moral wisdom or knowledge rather than vice versa. However, the paper concludes that there are ultimately deep and perhaps irreconcilable tensions between the epistemic and agapeic dimensions of moral life.

This article intends to review William Dembski's recent monograph entitled Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information, in which he establishes an entire information-centric metaphysics. This viewpoint is compared with al-Ghazālī’s perspective, a Muslim philosophical theologian from the Medieval period. It is concluded that what Dembski defines as information, which for him is the ontological basis of the natural world, seems remarkably close to al-Ghazālī’s notion of God's will and omnipotence. This article is an explorative comparison of their metaphysical frameworks that are discussed in light of modern scientific developments, highlighting their differences and similarities.

I argue that a careful consideration of the internal relation between the expression of an emotion, ‘I am angry’, and the description of the object of that emotion, ‘That was wrong’, illuminates the sense in which emotions are intentional, and perhaps also rational, as brought out in cognitive accounts of emotion. It also throws light on the moral and interpersonal aspects of our emotional life, which I instantiate through a discussion of the different perspectives on what has happened between the parties in a quarrel and the kinds of failures of understanding that may take place in such cases.

Few have given an extended treatment of the non-statistical sense of normality: a sense captured in sentences like “dogs have four legs,” or “hammers normally have metal heads,” or “it is normal for badgers to take dust baths.” The most direct extant treatment is Bernhard Nickel's Between Logic and the World, where he claims that the normal or characteristic for a kind is what we can explain by appeal to the right sorts of explanations. Just which explanatory strategies can ground normalities, though, is difficult to determine without inviting circularity into the account. After raising this and other worries for Nickel's account, I develop my own account according to which normal features are those which are explained by the kind of thing involved.

I offer a novel interdisciplinary approach to understanding the communicative task of listening, which is under-theorised compared to its more conspicuous counterpart, speech. By correlating a Rylean view of mental actions with a virtue ethical framework, I show listeners’ internal activity as a morally relevant feature of how they treat people. The listener employs a policy of responsiveness in managing the extent to which they allow a speaker's voice to be centred within their more effortful, engaged attention. A just listener's policy of responsiveness avoids unwarrantedly dismissing speakers’ messages on the basis of peripheral attention alone.

What kind of activity are non-human animals capable of? A venerable tradition insists that lack of language confines them to ‘mere behaviour’. This article engages with this ‘lingualism’ by developing a positive, bottom-up case for the possibility of animal agency. Higher animals cannot just act, they can act intelligently, rationally, intentionally and for reasons. In developing this case I draw on the interplay of behaviour, cognition and conation, the unduly neglected notion of intelligence and its connection to rationality, the need to recognize that reasons are objective conditions, and the difference between the ability to act for reasons and the capacity to reflect on reasons.

Why do some philosophers (Nagel, McGinn, Chomsky), despite all we know about evolution and embryology, think that consciousness makes the mind-body relation a problem still unsolved and perhaps insoluble by those with human brains? They ask how consciousness arises in matter, not in living organisms, whereas non-philosophers ask how far down the ladder of life it extends and when it arises in individuals of sentient and intelligent species. They desire the privacy of Locke's closet, furnished with phenomenological properties; and besides replacing Aristotle's ‘folk’ conception of causation by Hume's, they mathematicise physical explanation in line with Newton's First Law of Motion. Non-philosophers operate with ‘vague’ concepts of life, sentience and intelligence which allow them to treat these things as truly and naturally emergent. Machines that perform intelligent tasks are no more conscious of the reasons for their movements than actors performing them on the stage.