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I defend an account of Moore’s conception of Common Sense – as it figures in 'A Defence of Common Sense' – according to which it is based in a vision of the community of human beings as bound and unified by a settled common understanding of the meaning of our words and statements. This, for Moore, is our inalienable starting point in philosophy. When Moore invokes Common Sense against idealist (and skeptical) philosophers, he is reminding them that they too are bound by this common understanding, which cannot just be left behind or overcome, as they confusedly believe. On Moore’s conception, Common Sense becomes nothing other than the affirmation that there is Common Sense, i.e. that there is such a common understanding. This yields a principled account of Common Sense as common knowledge that moves beyond a mere tallying of what we all contingently happen to believe. Moore’s attempts to further characterize our common knowledge show him struggling to apply his internalist predilections to Common Sense. Although his final position is confused, it reveals two further important points. First, our having Common Sense knowledge is not, for Moore, an introspectable mental state. Second, the Common Sense truths, on Moore’s view, acquire a liminal status between being analytic and synthetic, conceptual and empirical.

I investigate why Frege rejected the theory of types, as Russell presented it to him in their correspondence. Frege claims that it commits one to violations of the law of excluded middle, but this complaint seems to rest on a dogmatic refusal to take Russell’s proposal seriously on its own terms. What is at stake is not so much the truth of a law of logic, but the structure of the hierarchy of the logical categories, something Frege seems to neglect. To come to a better understanding of Frege’s response, I proceed to investigate his conception of the nature of the logical categories, and how it differs from Russell’s. I argue that, for Frege, our grasp of the logical categories cannot be severed from our grasp of the Begriffsschrift notation itself. Russell, on the other hand, attaches no such importance to notation. From Frege’s point of view, Russell has not succeeded in presenting an alternative conception of the logical hierarchy, since such a conception must go in tandem with the development of a notation. Moreover, Frege has good reasons to think that Russell’s proposal does not admit of a suitable notation.

I argue that no successful version of Williamson's anti‐luminosity‐argument has yet been presented, even if Srinivasan's further elaboration and defence is taken into account. There is a version invoking a coarse‐grained safety condition and one invoking a fine‐grained safety condition. A crucial step in the former version implicitly relies on the false premise that sufficient similarity is transitive. I show that some natural attempts to resolve this issue fail. Similar problems arise for the fine‐grained version. Moreover, I argue that Srinivasan's defence of the more contentious fine‐grained safety condition is also unsuccessful, again for similar reasons.