Samuel C. Rickless

Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell once argued over whether Mont Blanc is a constituent of the proposition that Mont Blanc is more than four thousand meters high. Russell thought so, but Frege disagreed. The debate has been with us ever since. ;Let us say that the content of a linguistic expression E is the entity contributed by E to the proposition expressed by a sentence of which E is a part. Russell's point, more generally, was that the content of a proper name, indexical or demonstrative is identical to its referent. By contrast, Frege argued that the contents of such expressions are representations of their referents. ;According to Descriptivism, the most influential version of Fregeanism, the Sinn of an expression E is a uniquely satisfiable property, and the referent of E is the entity that satisfies this property. In recent years, however, Descriptivism has fallen on hard times. But contemporary Russellians face problems of their own, such as the need to explain how some sentences containing empty names can be true, or how some identity-sentences can be informative. ;The main thesis of this dissertation is that the contents of linguistic expressions are varied in kind and in function: whereas proper names and some demonstratives have representational contents, the contents of first-person pronouns and that-clauses are identical to their referents. In defense of a limited non-Descriptivist Fregeanism , I argue, in particular, that proper names are their own contents, and that the contents of perceptual demonstratives are perceptual representations. Taken together, these theses may be used to solve numerous puzzles in the literature, including the puzzles faced by Russellians, Saul Kripke's puzzle about belief, and Mark Richard's "phone-booth" puzzle. ;One lesson of this investigation is that we should not look for theoretical uniformity where it does not exist. That the contents of our words should differ in nature is not surprising: content is the object of cognition, and the modes of cognition vary in accordance with the types of objects to which we have cognitive access

John Locke’s views on the nature of freedom of action and freedom of will have played an influential role in the philosophy of action and in moral psychology. Locke offers distinctive accounts of action and forbearance, of will and willing, of voluntary (as opposed to involuntary) actions and forbearances, and of freedom (as opposed to necessity). These positions lead him to dismiss the traditional question of free will as absurd, but also raise new questions, such as whether we are (or can be) free in respect of willing and whether we are free to will what we will, questions to which he gives divergent answers. Locke also discusses the (much misunderstood) question of what determines the will, providing one answer to it at one time, and then changing his mind upon consideration of some constructive criticism proposed by his friend, William Molyneux. In conjunction with this change of mind, Locke introduces a new doctrine (concerning the ability to suspend the fulfillment of one’s desires) that has caused much consternation among his interpreters, in part because it threatens incoherence. As we will see, Locke’s initial views do suffer from clear difficulties that are remedied by his later change of mind, all without introducing incoherence.