Jose Luis Bermudez

This paper argues that, while there is a difference between personal and sub‐personal explanation, claims of autonomy should be treated with scepticism. It distinguishes between horizontal and vertical explanatory relations that might hold between facts at the personal and farts at the sub‐personal level. Noting that many philosophers are prepared to accept vertical explanatory relations between the two levels, I argue for the stronger claim that, in the case of at least three central personal level phenomena, the demands of explanatory adequacy require postulating horizontal explanatory relations.

Victor Verdejo’s paper ‘On Having the Same First Person Thoughts’ introduces an interesting and fruitful framework for applying the type-token distinction to first person thoughts. He draws a three-way distinction between types, instantiable types, and instantiated types, and uses that distinction to open up a conceptual space for the possibility of shareable first person thoughts. This note distinguishes two types of interpersonal shareability and argues that Verdejo’s suggestions about instantiable types can only secure shareability of the first kind, but not the second. The author then shows how his own account of what he terms the token-sense of “I” succeeds in making possible this second type of interpersonal shareability, despite the criticisms in Verdejo’s paper.

This paper explores some of the areaswhere neuroscientific and philosophical issuesintersect in the study of self-consciousness. Taking aspoint of departure a paradox (the paradox ofself-consciousness) that appears to blockphilosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, thepaper illustrates how the highly conceptual forms ofself-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation ofnonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention ispaid in particular to the primitive forms ofnonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in visualperception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoningand interpersonal psychological interactions. Thestudy of these primitive forms of self-consciousnessis an interdisciplinaryenterprise and the paper considers a range of pointsof contact where philosophical work can illuminatework in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa.

Recent Descartes scholarship has revised the traditional view of the Cartesian project as one of strictly deductive rationalism. This revision has particularly stressed the role of science in Descartes’ thought. The revisionist conception of Descartes also downplays the significance of the sceptical arguments offered in the First Meditation, seeing them as tools for ‘turning the mind away from the senses’ in the interest of Cartesian science, rather than as reflecting genuinely epistemological concerns. This paper takes issue with this aspect of the revisionist reading of Descartes. It argues that seeing scepticism as critically important for Descartes is independent of interpreting him as a canonical rationalist. In fact, it is precisely Descartes’ scientific thought and practice which make scepticism such a problem for him.

Thought, Reference, and Experience is a collection of important new essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. The starting-point for the papers is the brilliant work of the British philosopher Gareth Evans before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 34. Evans's work on reference and singular thought transformed the Fregean approach to the philosophy of thought and language, showing how seemingly technical issues in philosophical semantics are inextricably linked to fundamental questions about the structure of our thinking about ourselves and about the world. The papers, all newly written for this volume, explore different aspects of Evans's philosophical legacy, showing its importance to central areas in contemporary analytic philosophy. The volume includes a substantial introduction that introduces the principal themes in Evans's thought and places the papers in context.

Thinking about self-control takes us to the heart of practical decision-making, human agency, motivation, and rational choice. Psychologists, philosophers, and decision theorists have all brought valuable insights and perspectives on how to model self-control, on different mechanisms for achieving and strengthening self-control, and on how self-control fits into the overall cognitive and affective economy. Yet these different literatures have remained relatively insulated from each other. Self-Control, Decision Theory, and Rationality brings them into dialog by focusing on the theme of rationality. It contains eleven newly written essays by a distinguished group of philosophers, psychologists, and decision theorists, together with a substantial introduction, collectively offering state-of-the-art perspectives on the rationality of self-control and the different mechanisms for achieving it.

The framework for the papers in this volume is set by the wide-ranging philosophical contributions of Gareth Evans, who died in 1980 at the age of 34. In the papers gathered together in the posthumously published Collected Papers and in The Varieties of Reference Evans made a number of important contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of thought, and philosophical logic. Evans was a far more systematic thinker than is usual in contemporary analytical philosophy and the first part of this introduction gives an overview of his thinking, setting it in the context of four powerful and competing currents in anglo-American philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s. The second part of the introduction summarizes the papers in the collection and provides necessary background to the individual contributions.