William F. Vallicella

In one of its versions, the principle of sufficient reason maintains that every true proposition has a sufficient reason for its truth. Recently, a number of philosophers have argued against the principle on the ground that there are propositions such as the conjunction of all truths that are ‘too big’ to have a sufficient reason. The task of this article is to show that such maximal propositions pose no threat to the principle. According to what is perhaps the most ‘popular’ version of the principle to sufficient reason (PSR), every true proposition has a sufficient reason why it is true. Peter van Inwagen formulates the principle as follows: ‘for every truth, for everything that is so, there is a sufficient reason for its being true or being so.’ Like many contemporary philosophers, however, he rejects the principle. My purpose here is to show that the main philosophical argument against PSR rests on a mistaken assumption. There is also a ‘scientific’ argument against PSR that turns on considerations of quantum indeterminacy; but that argument lies beyond the scope of this discussion.

This article articulates and defends F. H. Bradley's regress argument against external relations using contemporary analytic techniques and conceptuality. Bradley's argument is usually quickly dismissed as if it were beneath serious consideration. But I shall maintain that Bradley's argument, suitably reconstructed, is a powerful argument, plausibly premised, and free of such obvious fallacies as petitio principii. Thus it does not rest on the question‐begging assumption that all relations are internal, as Russell, and more recently van Inwagen, maintain. Bradley does not attack external relations in order to affirm a doctrine of internal relations, and his monism is not derived from the internality of all relations, but from the self‐contradictory nature of all relations. For Bradley, it is the “relational situation”as such that is ontologically defective

It has seemed to many philosophers, even some well disposed towards materialism, that an insurmountable barrier blocks the path to a thorough-going materialist view of the world. That barrier is the problem of consciousness. The problem has two parts. The one has to do with the difficulty of providing an exhaustive reductive account of the qualitative or phenomenological features of our sensations. The other part—which will be the focus of this paper—has to do with intentionality, the directedness of mental states upon an object. To put it crudely, how can this stuff in my skull—no matter how wondrously organized it might be—be of or about anything? How can states of the brain or central nervous system have such semantic properties as truth and falsehood? How can a merely physical system be sensitive to meanings and reasons? How can the appearing of a world be nothing but physical processes within the world?