According to Christopher New, prepunishment is punishment for an offence before the offence is committed. I will first analyze New’s argument, along with theepistemic conditions for practicing prepunishment. I will then deal with an important conceptual objection, according to which prepunishment is not a genuine kind of ‘punishment’. After that, I will consider retributivism and present conclusive reasons for the claim that it cannot justify prepunishment without leading to paradoxical results. I shall then seek to establish that from the utilitarian point of view it is possible to provide a plausible justification of this practice. Finally, I shall attempt to defend the claim that the fact that utilitarianism can justify prepunishment in a satisfactory way is clearly a favourable characteristic of this ethical position.

In this paper I present a way of formally representing proper names in accordance with a description theory of reference–fixing and show that such arepresentation makes it possible to retain the claim about the rigidity of proper names and is not vulnerable to Kripke’s modal objection.

In “A Defense of Presentism,” Ned Markosian addresses the problem of singular propositions about non-present objects. The proposed solution uses aparaphrasing strategy that differentiates between two kinds of meaning in declarative sentences, and also distinguishes between two truth-conditions for singularpropositions. The solution, however, is unsatisfactory. I demonstrate that both truth-conditions suffer from the same problems in spite of the examples used to support the claim that one is a proper treatment for singular propositions. Part of the difficulty is in the limited expressivity of logical formalisms, a limitation not unique to the philosophy of time, but one which calls for greater attention.

Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies have proposed a revised contextual analysis of sentences that make use of “might” epistemically. On their view, when aspeaker uses an epistemic modal term, several propositions are made available to his conversational partners and, as a result, there are several propositions that may be picked up on by those partners. Because there is no concrete “context of utterance,” there is no one proposition that the speaker could be said to have asserted. This is meant to resolve conflicting truth evaluations by different speakers of a single utterance. I argue that the position is unworkable for two reasons: First, on their view there is no single proposition that counts as being asserted or semantically expressed by a “might” utterance; this has several counterintuitive consequences. Second, their position does not address several of the original problems that led many to abandon a contextual account.

This article compares David Lewis’s understanding of counterfactuals with a Platonic theory of counterfactual truthmakers. By pointing to some weaknesses in Lewis’s theory, it will highlight some of the strengths of the Platonic theory. The article will progress in the following way. First, I present David Lewis’s understanding of counterfactuals, and discuss some problems the theory has. Next, I discuss Platonic truthmakers, in general, and then show how this applies to counterfactuals. Finally, I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Platonic theory, and how it is superior to Lewis’s theory.

This paper is devoted to Franz Brentano’s conception of intentionality, and aims to reveal some of its lesser known aspects, like the implications of his studies for our understanding of Aristotle’s psychology. I try to show two “currents” in Brentano’s thought: beside what is widely known as Franz Brentano’s philosophy of mind, I also present the Aristotelian side of his thinking. Each of these currents, which I call A (Aristotelian) and B (Brentanian), makes different assumptions about the ontological status of the soul and God, and from these different conceptions of mental life and its relation to God follow different accounts of immortality. By discussing them in detail I also hope to show Brentano as a philosopher of religion.

The debates about qualia are common in contemporary analytical philosophy, especially in the area of philosophy of mind or epistemology. Notwithstanding the significance of this notion in present-day investigations, there still appears to be a lack of agreement over how to understand the term “quale”. Due to this fact, our goal is to shed light on the concept of quale as it entered the modern history of philosophy. Strictly speaking, our concern shall be devoted to the American pragmatist philosophy of C. S. Peirce and C. I. Lewis. Therefore, we intend to outline the understanding of quale within Peirce's theory of categories at the beginning, and afterwards we shall present Lewis' remarks on quale in the context of his theory of the given. This approach will not only provide the grounds for relating Peirce's and Lewis' views with each other, but also it will let us interpret Lewis' notion of quale within the pragmatic framework.

Principles are investigated that allow one to establish a preference ordering between possible actions based on the question of whether the acting agent himself or other agents will benefit or be harmed by the consequences of an action. It is shown that a combination of utility maximization, an altruist principle, and weak negative utilitarianism yields an ordering that seems to be intuitively appealing, although it does not necessarily reflect common everyday evaluations of actions.

In this article, I am interested in an issue concerning eliminativism about ordinary objects that can be put as the claim that the eliminativist is guilty of postulating the existence of something (atoms arranged tablewise), but not of something that is identical to it (the table). But, as we will see, this turns out to be a problem for everybody except the eliminativist. Indeed, this issue highlights a more general problem about the relationship between an entity and the parts the compose it. Furthermore, I am not interested in this issue only for its own sake and for the sake of understanding and defending eliminativism, but also for the way it allows me to discuss the differences and relations between eliminativism and reductionism. What difference is there between eliminating an entity and reducing it to something else?

Quine tries to combine truth conditional semantics with linguistic behaviourism. To this end, he identifies the truth conditions of a sentence with the conditions that prompt speakers to assign truth or falsity to the sentence. The first problem with this conception is that truth conditions determine not when truth-value assignments are made, but when they are correct. This fact vitiates Quine’s account of observation sentences (section 2). A second difficulty pertains only to theoretical sentences. The correctness of truth-value assignments to such sentences depends not on current experiences, but on what can be experienced on other occasions. This observation militates against Quine’s general verification holism and against his account of predications (section 3 and 4). Combining truth conditional semantics and linguistic behaviourism is possible, though, if both these lessons are taken into account (section 5).

In this paper, I defend a contextualist reading of the KK-thesis. In the first part, I present the general problem and I contrast three concepts of knowledge with respect to the KK-thesis, (Hintikka, Lemmon, and Williamson) that all rely on a univocal interpretation of the K-predicate. In the second part, I provide a contextualist framework based upon an indexical interpretation of the K-predicate and the notion of epistemic context. I show how this framework can integrate different concepts of knowledge, and how it highlights the crucial significance of the KK-thesis for epistemology.

Imre Lakatos' views on the philosophy of mathematics are important and they have often been underappreciated. The most obvious lacuna in this respect is the lack of detailed discussion and analysis of his 1976a paper and its implications for the methodology of mathematics, particularly its implications with respect to argumentation and the matter of how truths are established in mathematics. The most important themes that run through his work on the philosophy of mathematics and which culminate in the 1976a paper are (1) the (quasi-)empirical character of mathematics and (2) the rejection of axiomatic deductivism as the basis of mathematical knowledge. In this paper Lakatos' later views on the quasi-empirical nature of mathematical theories and methodology are examined and specific attention is paid to what this view implies about the nature of mathematical argumentation and its relation to the empirical sciences.