Alan Sidelle

In section 96 of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit offers his now familiar tripartite distinction among candidates for ‘what matters’: (1) Relation R with its normal cause; (2) R with any reliable cause; (3) R with any cause. He defends option (3). This paper tries to show that there is important ambiguity in this distinction and in Parfit's defence of his position. There is something strange about Parfit's way of dividing up the territory: I argue that those who have followed him in viewing the choice among (1)–(3) as the (or an) important question in thinking about ‘what matters’ are mistaken, and that they bypass what seems to be a more important, even crucial, set of options and considerations. I am less concerned with what he does say than with what he ought to say, given his intuitions and arguments, and the general framework within which he is working. And I am particularly concerned to show that whether or not I am correct about what he is doing with his tripartite distinction, it is a distinction with which we should not be particularly concerned in the analysis either of what matters or of psychological continuity

Plausible recent arguments for the existence of necessary truths a posteriori have led many philosophers to believe, at least implicitly, that conventionalism about necessity is false, and that necessity is in fact a real-world quantity. Necessary truths, on this view, are no more independent upon our linguistic conventions than any other truths; assertions of necessity and essential predications are, like any other claims, true or false as they correspond or not to a wholly independent reality. I believe that this view is not supported by the finding of necessary truths a posteriori, and further, that we have excellent reason to reject this realism about necessity, and to accept instead a conventionalist account. My dissertation attempts to argue for this view, and to present and defend such a conventionalist account. ;In Chapter One, I present a conventionalist explanation of necessary truths a posteriori, and thus argue that the existence of such truths does not establish realism about necessity. My account makes use of general conventions which I call 'general principles of individuation.' If these principles are products of our conventions, then we can both allow for and explain how there can be such 'empirical' necessary truths within a conventionalist framework. ;Chapter Two argues that conventionalism about necessity and essences has traditionally been grounded in metaphysical worries about necessity, not upon now outdated epistemological and semantic views, as is often claimed by the opponents of conventionalism. ;In Chapter Three, I present my central arguments for conventionalism and against realism about necessity. I argue that only conventionalism can explain how we have the knowledge that we do of what is necessary, and further, that it is not even clear that we can make sense of necessity as an independent feature of the world. Chapter Four responds to worries stemming from the fact that my account requires that there be systematically important analytic truths. ;Finally, in Chapter Five, I attempt to apply my findings to the theory of reference. I argue that if conventionalism about necessity and essences is true, then empiricist semantics must be basically correct, and that causal theories of reference must thus be either compatible with empiricist semantics, or false

I offer an understanding of what it is for a term to be rigid which makes no serious metaphysical commitments to or about identity across possible worlds. What makes a term rigid is not that it 'refers to the same object(property) with respect to all worlds' - rather (roughly) it is that the criteria of application for the term with respect to other worlds, when combined with the criteria of identity associated with the term, ensure that whatever meets the criteria of identity also meets the criteria of application and vice versa - in the simplest case, the criteria of application just are the criteria of identity - but things can be more complex to allow for the necessary a posteriori. This makes rigidity a non-metaphysically loaded semantic matters, and allows us to see that the phenomenon of and involving rigidity - especially the necessary a posteriori - are of no metaphysical significance on their own.

The Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism has seen a recent resurgence of popularity, due to the work of a number of well-known and impressive philosophers. One of the recently motivating virtues claimed for the doctrine is its ability to solve the grounding problem for philosophers who believe in coinciding entities. In this brief article, I will argue that when fully spelled out, hylomorphism does not, in fact, contribute a distinctive solution to this problem. It is not that it offers no solution at all, but that it is not really a different solution from other familiar, seemingly non-hylomorphic, solutions on offer

Most contemporary internalists are fallibilists, denying that there need be anything about which we are infallible for us to have knowledge or justified beliefs. At the same time, internalists standardly appeal to ‘internal twins’ in arguing against externalism and motivating internalism---a Cartesian demon can ruin the ‘external’ relations we have to the world, but one is equally well justified in one’s beliefs whether or not one is subject to such deception. Even if one doesn’t motivate one’s internalism by appeal to internal twins, any internalist must agree that internal twins are equally well justified in their beliefs. I argue that the internal twins argument for, or commitment of internalism, commits one to the claim that the conditions in virtue of which one is justified must be ones about which a believer is infallible. The basic argument is that for anything about which one can be mistaken, one has an internal twin who is mistaken, but is equally well justified---and so, not in virtue of that about which one can be mistaken. If the argument can be resisted, this should tell us something useful about how to properly understand both internalism in general, and the idea of internal twins in particular