David B. Martens

Robert Shope states at the outset of The Nature of Meaningfulness that his goal is "to present a unified view of meaningfulness". As the book unfolds, the unity in his view turns out to be subtle and complex, and to take in many distinct topics. His discussion is dense with arguments and counterexamples, and engages with many other contemporary analytic philosophers' writings on each topic. Readers are justified, I think, in treating the book as a collection of quite independent essays on various metaphysical topics that can profitably be engaged selectively on the basis of a reader's interests and on the reader's methodological terms.

In this dissertation I investigate the nature of first-person thoughts, i.e., thoughts typically expressed in English with sentences containing 'I'. ;Led by McTaggart and Castaneda, many philosophers have advanced various arguments and putative counter-examples designed to show that no theory of first-person thoughts can be correct which holds that the reference of a first-person thought to its subject is mediated by descriptive content of that thought. I thoroughly review classical and contemporary theories of first-person thoughts, from Russell through the present, carefully noting the data, arguments, and putative counter-examples that an adequate theory must accommodate. ;Taking a position contrary to that of McTaggart, Castaneda, et al., I describe a class of descriptional theories of first-person thoughts able to meet all of the principal anti-descriptionalist arguments and putative counter-examples, and to explain many of the peculiar properties of first-person thoughts. Those theories impute to a first-person thought a complex descriptive content derived from its subject's introspection of his or her own nonfirst-person mental states; certain causal relationships with its subject's actions; and a structure that includes an aspect under which the content is thought, obscuring part of that content from the introspective awareness of its subject

This sophisticated, difficult, and puzzling book consolidates and continues the exploration of our finitude pursued in Adrian Moore’s earlier book The Infinite and in a number of previous and intervening articles by him. One of Moore’s purposes in Points of View is to defend an affirmative answer to the question “Are absolute representations possible?” Moore takes this question to be an expression of an essential connection between current concerns about language and mind, and what he regards as deeper perennial concerns about our finitude. Another of his purposes is to recommend acquisition of a certain taste for nonsense as an apt response to those connected concerns, as “a philosophical tactic of very general utility.”

Epistemic minimalism affirms that mere true belief is sufficient for propositional knowledge. I construct a taxonomy of some specific forms of minimalism and locate within that taxonomy the distinct positions of various advocates of minimalism, including Alvin Goldman, Jaakko Hintikka, Crispin Sartwell, Wolfgang Lenzen, Franz von Kutschera, and others. I weigh generic minimalism against William Lycan’s objection that minimalism is incompatible with plausible principles about relations between knowledge, belief, and confidence. I argue that Lycan’s objection fails for equivocation but that some specific forms of minimalism are better able than others to articulate that defense.

This is a critical exposition and limited defence of a theory of first- person belief transiently held by Roderick Chisholm after giving up the early haecceity theory of Person and Object and before adopting the late self-attribution theory of The First Person. I reconstruct that 'middle' theory as involving what I call a 'hard-core' approach to de re belief and I rebut objections concerning epistemic supervenience and abnormal consciousness. In my rebuttals, I sketch a variant of the middle theory according to which first- person belief essentially involves the believer's introspective acquaintance with herself