Knowledge of the basic rules of logic is often thought to be distinctive, for it seems to be a case of non-inferential a priori knowledge. Many philosophers take its source to be different from those of other types of knowledge, such as knowledge of empirical facts. The most prominent account of knowledge of the basic rules of logic takes this source to be the understanding of logical expressions or concepts. On this account, what explains why such knowledge is distinctive is that it is grounded in semantic or conceptual understanding. However, I show that this cannot be the correct account of knowledge of the basic rules of logic, because it is open to Gettier-style counter-examples.

The aim of this paper is to show what sorts of logics are required by externalist and internalist accounts of the meanings of natural kind nouns. These logics give us a new perspective from which to evaluate the respective positions in the externalist–internalist debate about the meanings of such nouns. The two main claims of the paper are the following: first, that adequate logics for internalism and externalism about natural kind nouns are second-order logics; second, that an internalist second-order logic is a free logic—a second order logic free of existential commitments for natural kind nouns, while an externalist second-order logic is not free of existential commitments for natural kind nouns—it is existentially committed.

Matthias Steup (Steup 2008) has recently argued that our doxastic attitudes are free by (i) drawing an analogy with compatibilism about freedom of action and (ii) denying that it is a necessary condition for believing at will that S's having an intention to believe that p can cause S to believe that p. In this paper, however, I argue that the strategies espoused in (i) and (ii) are incompatible.

This paper compares Marx's first conception of capital, in 1844, to his conception of the modern political state in 1843. It argues that in 1843 Marx conceives the modern democratic state as realising human 'species-being', that is, the universality and freedom inherent in human nature, but only in the form of 'abstract' universality and freedom, and therefore inadequately. In 1844 he conceives capital in the same way, as an abstract and therefore inadequate realisation of human species-being. Accordingly the transition from capital to communism consists essentially in transforming the abstract universality and freedom realised in capital into a 'concrete' universality and freedom. The paper concludes by commenting on the implications of this early philosophical conception of capital for Marx's later writings.

Rowbottom (2008) has recently challenged my definition of epistemic reasons for action and has offered an alternative account. In this paper, I argue that less than giving an 'alternative' definition, Rowbottom has offered an additional condition to my original account. I argue, further, that such an extra condition is unnecessary, i.e. that the arguments designed to motivate it do not go through.

It is well known that Russell's theory of descriptions has difficulties with descriptions occurring within desire reports. I consider a flawed argument from such a case to the conclusion that descriptions have a referring use, some responses to this argument on behalf of the Russellian, and finally rejoinders to these responses which press the point home.

Plato articulates a deep perplexity about inquiry in 'Meno's Paradox'-the claim that one can inquire neither into what one knows, nor into what one does not know. Although some commentators have wrestled with the paradox itself, many suppose that the paradox of inquiry is special to Plato, arising from peculiarities of the Socratic elenchus or of Platonic epistemology. But there is nothing peculiarly Platonic in this puzzle. For it arises, too, in classical Indian philosophical discussions, where it is formulated with great clarity, and analysed in a way that casts it in a new light. We present three treatments of the puzzle in Indian philosophy, as a way of refining and sharpening our understanding of the paradox, before turning to the most radical of the Indian philosophers to tackle it. The Indian philosophers who are optimistic that the paradox can be resolved appeal to the existence of prior beliefs, and to the resources embedded in language to explain how we can investigate, and so move from ignorance to knowledge. Highlighting this structural feature of inquiry, however, allows the pessimist philosopher to demonstrate that the paradox stands. The incoherence of inquiry is rooted in the very idea of aiming our desires at the unknown. Asking questions and giving answers rests on referential intentions targeting objects in a region of epistemic darkness, and so our 'inquiry sceptic' also finds structurally similar forms of incoherence in the pragmatics of interrogative discourse.

The 'idea of India' is indeed an open, assimilative, and spacious one, sustaining a plurality of voices, orthodox and dissenting, of many ages, regions, and affiliations. Modern Indian identities in the global diaspora, as much as in India itself, can call upon all these voices and traditions, rethink them, adapt and modify them, use the resources of reason they make available in deliberation about who to be, how to behave, and on what to agree. Amartya Sen argues the case with great force in his recent book, The Argumentative Indian . In the first part of my paper, I examine his argument in some detail and comment on what I perceive to be a serious omission in the book - the lack of any real engagement with India's intellectual traditions, with roots in one or another of its religious systems. The background worry is that in developing the resources of reason within Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism, we are in some way making reason subordinate to tradition and religious command. Sen reads Akbar as resisting that threat with a strong insistence on the autonomy of reason. My argument is that we can respect the need for autonomy without restricting reason's resources to those merely of allegedly value-free disciplines such as rational choice theory. My claim will be that the appeal to India's traditions of argumentation and public reasoning is hollow if it does not engage with the detail of those traditions, for only in this way does the full panoply that a well-informed 'argumentative Indian' has available to himself or herself come to the fore, in contrast with the restricted vision of a sectarian approach. Pointing to the brute existence of skeptical voices like that of Javali is only the beginning of the story. What we really need to know is how a skeptic like Javali adapted and manipulated the tools of justification and argument at his disposal so as to make possible his dissent. If nothing else, that would be a step towards understanding how heterodox voices might similarly empower themselves in global public discourse today. It is important to understand how the resources of reason can make internal dissent possible. In the second section, I document some of the evidence and begin to make good the lacuna I perceive in Sen's work. In the third part of the essay, I show how 'spacious' intellectual India really was in the seventeenth century, a period of increasing globalization, and one in which there was a rapid circulation of ideas between India and Europe.

This essay interprets the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch with the help of phenomenological examinations by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Heidegger. Pina Bausch's choreography not only shares basic themes like the everyday, the body, and moods with phenomenology, but they also yield similar results in overcoming traditional dualist frameworks. Rather than being an instrument for expressing ideas, the body is in constant exchange with the natural elements, exhibiting vulnerability and passivity. Moods, in turn, are neither subjective nor objective; this also holds for longing, an essential constituent of Pina Bausch's work. Dance theater and phenomenology, each in their unique ways, are capable of acknowledging and accommodating the ambiguity of our human existence.

This paper presents a new treatment of the paradox of Wittgensteins Tractatus: a paradox resulting from the fact that the work seems to declare itself to be nonsense. Current approaches assume that the Tractatus is concerned to communicate truths, and thus have to treat the paradox in one of two ways. Either the work is supposed to communicate ineffable truths, or some part of the work is taken not to be nonsense and hence capable of communicating truths straightforwardly. According to the view presented in this article, neither approach is credible and, as a result, the assumption on which both approaches rest must be abandoned. The paper argues that the function of the work is not to communicate truths, but to engender in the reader a mystical experience of the limits of the world

A new way of understanding the normative problem of critical social theory. Examination of the respective social theories of Adorno, Habermas, and Honneth in the light of their proposed solutions of the problem.

John McDowell has attempted to defend himself against the charge that the view presented in his influential book Mind and World is idealist. This paper argues that in spite of that defence, there is a clear way in which the view does depend on a form of idealism. McDowell is committed to the thought that the world is ‘conceptually organized’. I consider what this means, and argue that, although it does not formally imply idealism, it is only defensible from a broadly idealist view—one which is in fact in tension with important claims made by McDowell in other works.

In Knowledge and Its Limits Timothy Williamson argues against the luminosity of phenomenal states in general by way of arguing against the luminosity of feeling cold, that is, against the view that if one feels cold, one is at least in a position to know that one does. In this paper I consider four strategies that emerge from his discussion, and argue that none succeeds.

Space is not an empirical concept that has been drawn from outer experiences. For in order for certain sensations to be related to something outside me (i.e., to something in another place in space from that in which I find myself), thus in order for me to represent them as outside and next to one another, thus not merely different but as in different places, the representation of space must already be their ground. Thus the representation of space cannot be obtained from the relations of outer appearance through experience, but this outer experience is itself first possible only through this representation.

In his article Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen, Roger Scruton offers an account of fantasy, arguing that it is directed away from reality in some important sense, and that cinema is its natural representational medium. I address certain problems with Scruton's basic account, thereby producing a significantly amended version, though one that owes a great debt to his. I explain why, as he says, much fantasy is significantly directed away from reality; and conclude with some brief remarks about why it might be that cinema is indeed a good medium for the fantasist's ends.