Carlos Moya

In his article 'Individualism and Descartes' (Teorema, vol. 16, pp. 71-86), William Ferraiolo puts into question the widely accepted interpretation of Descartes as an individualist about mental content. In this paper, I defend this interpretation of Descartes thought against Ferraiolo's objections. I hold, first, that the interpretation is not historically misguided. Second, I try to show that Descartes’s endorsement of anti-individualism would lead either to depriving skeptical hypotheses of their force or to rejecting the epistemological privilege of the first person. Finally, I argue that Ferraiolo’s objections to the individualistic interpretation rest on two important errors: a misapprehension of the argumentative order of the Meditations and a confusion between the notions of causal and constitutive dependence of content on the external environment.

In this paper, we distinguish two ways in which someone can be said to believe a proposition. In the light of this distinction, we question the widely held equivalence between considering a proposition true and believing that proposition. In some cases, someone can consider a proposition true and not properly believe it. This leads to a distinction between the conventional meaning of the sentence by which a subject expresses a belief and the content of this belief. We also question some principles of belief ascription, suggest a solution to a famous puzzle about belief and defend the unity of the semantic and causalaspects of beliefs.

We are strongly inclined to believe in moral responsibility - the idea that certain human agents truly deserve moral praise or blame for some of their actions. However, recent philosophical discussion has put this natural belief under suspicion, and there are important reasons for thinking that moral responsibility is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, therefore potentially rendering it an impossibility. Presenting the major arguments for scepticism about moral responsibility, and subjecting them to sustained and penetrating critical analysis, _Moral Responsibility_ lays out the intricate dialectic involved in these issues in a helpful and accessible way. A well-written and lively account, the book then goes on to suggest a way in which scepticism can be avoided, arguing that excessive pre-eminence given to the will might lie at its root. Offering an alternative to this scepticism, Carlos Moya shows how a cognitive approach to moral responsibility that stresses the importance of belief would rescue our natural and centrally important faith in the reality of moral responsibility

Davidson’s antisceptical considerations, like Putnam’s, are transcendental in character: they start from facts that the sceptic has to accept, and are intended to show that those facts would not be such if the sceptical hypotheses were true. It is doubtful that these considerations are finally successful. However, I do not think that Davidson was really interested in a detailed refutation of scepticism. His interest focused instead on the context which gives rise to it: the Cartesian image of the relationships between subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and objectivity. Correspondingly, the true value of Davidson’s antisceptical reflections lies in the alternative image that inspires them, in the light of which scepticism no longer appears as an urgent and interesting problem.

This new textbook is an exceptionally clear and concise introduction to the philosophy of action, suitable for students interested in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of social sciences. Moya begins by considering the problem of agency: how are we to understand the distinction between actions and happenings, between actions we perform and things that happen to us? Moya outlines and examines a range of philosophical responses to this problem. He also develops his own original view, treating the analysis of meaningful action as the basis for understanding the distinctive interplay of agency, intention and commitment. Subsequent chapters examine recent attempts to integrate our understanding of action with the view of the world provided by the natural sciences. The work of Donald Davidson is examined in detail. Moya also discusses the views of many other authors who have contributed to recent debates in the philosophy of action, including Anscombe, Churchland, Harman, Hornsby, Goldman and O'Shaughnessy.

This paper is intended to defend the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (pap)against two recent putative counterexamples to it, inspired by the one that HarryFrankfurt designed forty years ago. The first three sections provide a summary of the state of the art. In the remaining sections, the counterexamples to pap o Widerker’s (“Brain-Malfunction-W”) and Pereboom’s (“Tax Evasion”) are successively presented and discussed. We hold that both examples breach at least one otwo conditions that are required in order to refute pap, namely, (1) that the agent is morally responsible for his/her decision and (2) that s/he lacks any morally significant (“robust”) alternatives to it. Regarding (1), the examples face several problems concerning the “reasons-responsiveness” of the agent’s mechanism of deliberation and decision making, which throws doubts upon his/her moral responsibility. Regarding (2), we try to show that the respective agents have robust alternatives within their reach. We conclude, then, that pap is not refuted by these examples.

En su Investigación sobre el entendimiento humano, David Hume consideró la cuestión de las relaciones entre libertad y necesidad como “el tema más discutido de la metafísica, la ciencia más discutida”. El debate sobre esta venerable cuestión sigue siendo hoy tan vivo como lo fue en tiempos de Hume. El presente volumen colectivo es una buena muestra de ello. Los ensayos que lo forman, escritos desde una pluralidad de perspectivas, ponen de manifiesto la complejidad y la unidad interna del problema al que responden. Elaborados con un estilo carente de tecnicismos, pero no de rigor, estos Ensayos sobre libertad y necesidad despertarán el interés tanto de la persona culta como del especialista en filosofía.

Davidson’s famous 1963 paper “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” contains, in nuce, the main lines of Davidson’s philosophy of action and mind. It also contains the seeds of some major problems of Davidson’s thought in these fields. I shall defend, following Davidson, that rationalization or reasons explanation is a species of causal explanation, but I will be contending, against Davidson’s approach, that causality is best viewed, in this kind of explanation, as an integral aspect of justification itself, and not as an independent, additional condition.

This paper is a critical comment on an article of David Widerker which also appeared in the Journal of Philosophy. In this article, Wideker held, against positions previously defended by him, that in was possible to design effective counterexamples, in the line initiated by Harry Frankfurt in 1969, to the so-called “Principle of Alternative Possibilities”. The core of my criticism of Widerker is to deny that agents, in his putative counterexamples, are morally responsible for their decisions, owing to the fact they are not able to respond appropriately to moral reasons.

In this paper I address the question whether self-knowledge is compatible with an externalist individuation of mental content. Against some approaches, I consider self-knowledge as a genuine cognitive achievement. Though it is neither incorrigible nor infallible, self-knowledge is direct, a priori (no based on empirical investigation), presumptively true and authoritative. The problem is whether self-knowledge, so understood, is compatible with externalism. My answer will be affirmative. I will defend this species of compatibilism against several objections, in particular those based on the possibility of an individual’s being unwittingly switched between worlds

This paper is intended to meet some objections that Vermazen has raised about the treatment of the regress-problem in the author's book on the philosophy of action. This problem is shown to involve a skeptical claim about the very existence of actions as distinct from happenings. It is argued, against Vermazen's contention, that only one version of the problem is at work in that book and that, while Danto's basic actions, McCann's volitions and O'Shaughnessy's and Hornsby's tryings do not solve, after analysis, that version of the problem, the author's proposal does in fact provide a solution to it