Roy Sorensen

For most of his career, Kant accepts Augustine's requirement that lying requires an intention to deceive. However, he eventually converts to Aquinas, following him in rejecting this requirement in favor of Aristotle's teleological conception of lying. This change of view amounts to an improvement, for it makes room for the possibility of lying to an omniscient being—and such lies, we argue, are indeed possible. We accompany these historical and philosophical theses with a biographical thesis taking the form of the following story. Kant believed that in his youth he had lied to God, largely because of his religious training. He adopted policies designed to help him resist the habit of lying to God. However, this program conflicted with his desire to lead a well‐rounded life as a public intellectual. This worldly ambition led him to forego the Quaker solution to the problem of lying to God: refuse to swear any oath to God, avoid set prayers and hymns, decline offers of intercession by clergy. Kant's worldly compromise served him well, but as he entered his twilight years, he came to worry that his only surviving argument for theism—the moral argument—might constitute a relapse into the vice of lying to God.

Since 1970, a United States prosecutor can prove perjury without specifying which statement is perjurious. A bold prosecutor could concede ignorance of which statement is false. A bolder prosecutor could further concede that the witness himself does not know. The boldest prosecutor could concede there is no specific lie. Instead of there being a statement that is intrinsically perjurious, the perjury is relational. Just as two statements can be inconsistent without either being inconsistent, two statements can be perjurious without either being perjurious. These consequences are reconciled with the generalisation that all perjury involves lying. Corollaries about culpability are drawn from the phenomenon of nonspecific perjury. The reasoning is generalised to other forms of illegal lying.

Immanuel Kant promised, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’, to abstain from all public lectures about religion. All past commentators agree this phrase permitted Kant to return to the topic after the King died. But it is not part of the ‘at-issue content’. Consequently, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’ is no more an escape clause than the corresponding phrase in ‘I guarantee, as your devoted fan, that these guitar strings will not break’. Just as the guarantee stands regardless of whether the guarantor ceases to be your devoted fan, the compliance conditions of Kant's promise are not affected by Kant's ceasing to be the king's loyal subject. For good or ill, Kant made a lying promise to King Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1794.

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Consider the beginningless sequence: ... being less than 0.01 grams, being less than 0.1 grams, being less than 1 gram, being less than 10 grams ... There is no super-determinate in this chain. Just as the possibility of bottomless constitution shows that there may be no fundamental layer of reality with respect to objects , the possibility of bottomless determination shows that there may be no fundamental level of reality with respect to properties . This possibility supports Stephen Yablo's proportionality principle that the cause of an event is the most specific property that makes a difference

The principle of charity says that all agents are rational. The principle of meta-charity says that all agents believe all agents are rational. My thesis is that the arguments which are used to support charity also support meta-charity. Meta-charity implies meta-metacharity. By recursion, the principle of charity implies that it is common knowledge. But there appears to be intelligent, well-informed disagreement with the principle of charity. So if the entailment thesis holds, opponents of the principle of charity have a new objection to the principle. Defenders of the principle of charity must either refute the entailment thesis or accept much stronger consequences than they expected.

To understand death, you need to compare mortality with immortality. I am here to help. In addition to my personal testimony, I present highlights from a survey of immortal species and a survey of infinitistic varieties of mortality. These field studies rebut Fredrich Nietzsche’s thesis that immortality is inevitably repetitious, Bernard Williams’ allegation that immortality is inevitably boring, and Epicurus’ thesis that death cannot be bad for you. On the positive side, the study shows that the main difference between immortality and mortality are quantitative. Attention is also given to some striking qualitative differences.

Charitable interpreters of David Hume set aside his sprinkles of piety. Better to read him as lying than as clumsily inconsistent. We argue that the attribution of lies can pay dividends in historical scholarship no matter how strongly the theorist condemns lying. Accordingly, we show that our approach works even with one of the strongest condemners of lying: Immanuel Kant. We argue that Kant lied in his scholarly work and even in the first Critique. And we defend the claim that this lie attribution, strange as it may sound, amounts to a kind of scholarly charity.

A Brief History of the Paradox is the first narrative history of paradoxes. Sorenson draws us deep inside the tangles of riddles, paradoxes and conundrums by answering the questions which are seemingly unanswerable. Can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift? Can time have a beginning? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Filled with illuminating anecdotes, A Brief History of the Paradox is vividly written and will appeal to anyone who finds trying to answer unanswerable questions a paradoxically pleasant endeavour.

If a spinning sphere casts a shadow, does the shadow also spin? This riddle is the point of departure for an investigation into the nature of shadow movement. A general theory of motion will encompass all moving things, not just physical objects. Ultimately, I argue that round shadows do indeed spin. Shadows are followers of the objects that cast them. Parts of the shadow correspond to parts of the leader, so motion of the caster's parts accounts for motions of the shadow's parts. I conclude with a discussion of how the dynamic aspects of shadows impose subtle constraints on other puzzles about shadows