Leibniz has enjoyed a prominent place in the history of thought about possible worlds. I shall argue that on the leading interpretation of Leibniz's account of contingency - an ingenious interpretation with ample textual support - possible worlds may be invoked by Leibniz only on pain of inconsistency. Leibnizian contingency, as reconstructed in detail by Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., will be shown to preclude propositions with different truth-values in different possible worlds.

Recently Robert Almeder has invoked Aristotle's celebrated regress argument to argue for the existence of basic knowledge that does not require the satisfaction of any justification condition. After outlining Almeder's argument, I shall show why it ultimately fails.

Aristotle's regress argument in Book I of the Posterior Analytics is basically that because we have inferential knowledge, we must also have non-inferential knowledge. Aristotle plausibly assumes that to know the conclusion of an argument on the basis of its premises, one must know its premises. But he notes that if knowledge of any premise requires knowledge of some other proposition, then knowing any proposition would require knowledge of each member of an infinite regress of propositions. According to Aristotle, we cannot know each member of such a regress, but we do have some inferential knowledge; consequently there must be some basic, non-inferential knowledge, i.e., knowledge that does not depend for its justification on inferential relations to other known propositions.

Robert F. Almeder believes he has discovered a ‘pressing problem': ‘stating the conditions under which we determine whether a person's basic belief is true without introducing an evidence condition for knowledge’. He believes further that this is ‘a problem needing resolution before any ultimately satisfying explication of basic knowledge can be offered’.

My aim is to show that Almeder has failed to discover any problem at all, but I begin by asking: how could the question how we determine the (mere) truth of another's basic belief (regardless of how we do so) have any bearing on the correct explication of the concept of basic knowledge?

One argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom runs as follows:

In other words it is argued that if an essentially omniscient being (God) believes prior to the actual performance of a certain action that that action will be performed at a particular time the action in question cannot be a voluntary action. The crucial premise in the argument, it seems to me, is (b) the assumption that an essentially omniscient being can know the outcome of human actions in advance of their performance, or more simply put, that essential omniscience implies knowledge of future free acts. My purpose here is to argue that this assumption is self-contradictory.

In her influential paper, ‘The First Person,’ Elizabeth Anscombe brings together a number of considerations which, she believes, lead to the startling conclusion that the first person pronoun is not a referring expression — that ‘I’ is never used to refer. This is startling, because if we consider even superficially the logical properties of first person statements, nothing could, prima facie, seem more obvious than that in any such statement, the first person pronoun functions logically as a singular referring expression. Moreover, Anscombe herself offers the following informal gloss on the truth conditions of first person assertions: ‘If X asserts something with ‘I’ as subject, his assertion will be true if and only if what he asserts is true of X.’

The conditional analysis of ability statements has many versions. In this paper I will deal with the version which claims that ‘x can do y’ is equivalent to ‘if x were to choose to do y, then x would do y.’ However, my comments should be equally applicable to any analysis of ability statements that can properly be called a version of the conditional analysis. The intuition behind the conditional analysis is that what it is for one to be able to do something is for one's choice to be effective. To have an ability to do y is for it to be true that one's choosing to do y would be effective - one's choosing to do y would result in one's doing y . But this intuition is not captured by the conditional analysis in its standard form, and a restriction is needed to mend this defect. This restriction is based on a distinction among counterfactual conditionals.

Plato's Euthyphro is a dialogue about the virtue of piety. It is also one of the aporetic dialogues, ending in apparent failure to discover what piety is. It is common to understand the dialogue as teaching lessons about other things, about definition, for instance, or about the logic of refutation. About piety, however, it is thought to teach us only negatively, showing a few of the many things which piety is not.

My thesis, on the contrary, is that there is a positive account of the nature of piety in the dialogue; it is, moreover, an account which cannot be separated from the other lessons which the dialogue teaches. I shall find it necessary to expose the structure of the logical lessons in order to develop my account of the holy.

This paper is devoted to a solution to Moore's problem. After explaining what Moore's problem is and after considering the main approaches toward solving the problem, I provide a definition of Moorean sentences in terms of pure Moorean propositions. My solution to Moore's problem essentially involves a description of how one can contradict oneself without uttering a contradiction, and a set of definitions that exactly determines which sentences are Moorean and which are close relatives of Moorean sentences.

Regarding the identity of artifacts in time, four positions may be discerned: first, the view reducing the continuing identity of an object to the continuing identity of its parts; second, the more generally accepted position that spatiotemporal continuity under a kind is necessary; third, the claim that while continuity is not a necessary condition, the sameness of parts and the sameness of form are sufficient together; and fourth, the suggestion that continuity of form is a sufficient and non-defeasible condition for reidentifying artifacts. Others such as Scaltsas believe that the different conditions claimed to be sufficient by the views mentioned are, in fact, only criteria of identity applicable in different circumstances, and that no sharply defined hierarchy can be said to hold between them.

To paraphrase Freud, what do socialists really want? It is undoubtedly difficult to give a complete answer to this question that all socialists would be satisfied with, but there are some common elements that can hardly be denied. First and foremost among these is the elimination of capitalism; the elimination of capitalism would seem to require the elimination of capitalists (qua capitalists). Why might that be desirable? Well, many reasons might be offered, but one is suggested by the very nature of capitalism.

In ‘Skeptism Oisarmed,’ L.S. Carrier asserts the following:

Premise (1), actually a premise schema attributed to Peter Unger, is the following:

I suggest, contrary to Carrier's assertion, that many reasonable people, including many philosophers, would regard (1) as a necessary truth knowable a priori, and would be quite happy to accept its universal quantification, with no implied restriction to propositions for which we can get any evidence at all.

How is such a dispute about what reasonable people would do to be resolved? I suggest that, at the very least, Carrier owes us an explanation of the grounds on which he would reject particular instances of the schema, e.g.,

Quantified modal logic and propositional attitudes have long been regarded as sites susceptible to referential opacity — that curious affliction first diagnosed by Quine. In this paper I suggest a way of alleviating the symptoms of referential opacity as they manifest themselves in fictional contexts, contexts in which we are confronted by discourse about fiction(s). Indeed, a case might be made against Quine that it is fictional, rather than quotational, contexts which are the referentially opaque contexts par excellence. For whether we take a Fregean line on the matter and consider the obliquity of fictional terms as due to shift of reference, or a Quinean line and consider their opacity as due to failure of reference, their non-standard (or as Kaplan might put it, non-vulgar) occurrence is clear and avowed. Moreover, as the non-standardness or non-vulgarity of terms in fictional contexts is by design and not due to some mere accident of orthography, they seem in many ways to be both more interesting and potentially more revealing.