Oxford Philosophical Monographs – serie

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases: the property of being bald is vague because there are people who are neither definitely bald, nor definitely not bald. The epistemology of vagueness concerns the sorts of attitudes we ought to have towards propositions we know to be borderline. Is it possible to discover whether a borderline bald man is bald? Could two people with access to the same facts reasonably disagree about whether he is bald? Does it matter, when making practical decisions, whether he is bald? By drawing on such considerations, Andrew Bacon develops a novel theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, and is explicated in terms of its role in thought. On this theory, language plays little role in explaining the central puzzles of vagueness.Part I of the book outlines some of the central questions regarding the logic and epistemology of vagueness, and criticizes some extant approaches to them. Part II concerns issues in the epistemology of vagueness, touching on the ramifications of vague thoughts on the study of evidence, ignorance, desire, probability theory, and decision theory. By examining the effects of vague information on one's beliefs about the precise, a positive theory of vagueness is proposed. Part III concerns the logic of vagueness, including the interaction between vagueness and modality, vague identity, and the paradoxes of higher-order vagueness. Bacon suggests that some familiar philosophical notions -- including the concept of a fundamental proposition, a possible world and a precisification -- need to be revised.

Mathieu Marion offers a careful, historically informed study of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics. This area of his work has frequently been undervalued by Wittgenstein specialists and by philosophers of mathematics alike; but the surprising fact that he wrote more on this subject than on any other indicates its centrality in his thought. Marion traces the development of Wittgenstein's thinking in the context of the mathematical and philosophical work of the times, to make coherent sense of ideas that have too often been misunderstood because they have been presented in a disjointed and incomplete way. In particular, he illuminates the work of the neglected 'transitional period' between the Tractatus and the Investigations. Marion shows that study of Wittgenstein's writings on mathematics is essential to a proper understanding of his philosophy; and he also demonstrates that it has much to contribute to current debates about the foundations of mathematics.

The last decade has seen a very considerable revival of interest in Nietzsche. However, many of the studies available in English fail to do justice to the complexity of his writings and tend to involve only very partial and limited readings of his work. This book offers a new and comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished in English.The author examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. Throughout the book, considerable attention is paid both to the historical context of his writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy--English-language as well as Continental European.Among the themes discussed are Nietzsche's relation to scepticism and to evolutionary epistemology; his analysis of `objective reality' and the associated `perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's `will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the `ascetic ideal'; and his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Dr Peollner, while recognizing the originality of Nietzsche's influential new philosophical paradigm, shows that his thought has closer affinities to the orthodox philosophical tradition than is generally supposed.

William Child examines two central ideas in the philosophy of mind, and argues that (contrary to what many philosophers have thought) an understanding of the mind can and should include both. These are causalism, the idea that causality plays an essential role in our understanding of the mental; and interpretationism, the idea that we can gain an understanding of belief and desire by considering the ascription of attitudes to people on the basis of what they say and do.

Freedom is the value that Hegel most greatly admired and the central organizing concept of his social philosophy. Alan Patten offers the first full-length treatment in English of Hegel's idea of freedom - his theory of what it is to be free and his account of the social and political contexts in which this freedom is developed, realized, and sustained. Patten's investigation illuminates and resolves a number of central questions concerning Hegel's ethics and political theory. Is Hegel's outlook unacceptably conservative? Can freedom be equated with rational self-determination? Is there any special connection between freedom and citizenship? By offering interpretations of Hegels views on these and other questions, Patten develops an original 'civic humanist' reading of Hegel's social philosophy that restores to its proper, central place Hegel's idea of freedom. The book is written in a clear and jargon-free style and will be of interest to anyone concerned with Hegel's ethical, social, and political thought and the sources of contemporary ideas about freedom, community, and the state.

Jonardon Ganeri defends a conception of language as essentially a means for the reception of knowledge through testimony. He argues that the possibility of testimony constrains the form of a theory of meaning. In particular, the semantic power of a word, its ability to stand for or take the place of a thing, derives from the epistemic powers of understanders, their capacity to acquire knowledge simply by understanding what is said. Ganeri finds this account in the work of certain Indian philosophers of language, those belonging to the late classical school of Navya-Ny(ya. He presents a detailed analysis of their theories, paying particular attention to the influential seventeenth-century philosopher Gad(dhara. Ganeri examines the Indian account of the meaning relation and its relata, the role of modes of thought as meaning constituents, and the application of the theory to theoretical names and anaphora. The aim of Semantic Powers is to give epistemology a central place in the study of language. It also shows how classical Indian theory of language can inform and be informed by contemporary philosophy.

Transcendental arguments have gained a lot of attention over the past twenty years, mainly in the field of theoretical reason. Yet few scholars have looked at their relevance to practical reason. Christian Illies argues that although this methodological avenue is not yet well-paved, transcendental arguments have great potential in ethics, as they promise rational justification of normative judgements.There are two main types of transcendental argument that have been developed for this purpose in recent years. One is based on an analysis of the implications of agency (mainly by Alan Gewirth), the other on an analysis of reason as a discursive process with normative presuppositions (Karl-Otto Apel and other continental philosophers, but also Onora O'Neill). Illies finds that these arguments have severe limitations, and argues that practical reason should involve a different analysis: judgement formation must be analysed as a form of agency. Once this starting point is secured, by showing that it cannot rationally be denied, then two things can be transcendentally inferred: first, that there exists a categorical demand upon agents to arrive at true judgements, and second, that we must respect freedom of agency in general. Here our ordinary notions of right and wrong find secure ground. Compelling and original, The Grounds of Ethical Judgement offers ample evidence that transcendental arguments may provide long-sought foundations for morality.

In recent years Kant's aesthetic theory has been the subject of a widespread revival of interest amongst English-speaking philosophers. This revival, however, has not so far encompassed Kant's aesthetic of the sublime. This neglect is unfortunate because, amongst Continental philosophers, the Kantian sublime is currently receiving widespread discussion in debates about the nature of postmodernism.Paul Crowther thus breaks new ground by providing what is probably the first monograph in any language to be devoted exclusively to Kant's theory of the sublime.

This book provides a radical alternative to naturalistic theories of content, and offers a new conception of the place of mind in the world. Confronting head-on the scientific conception of the nature of reality that has dominated the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, Michael Morris here presents a detailed analysis of content and propositional attitudes, based on the idea that truth is a value. In the course of this analysis, he rejects the causal theory of the explanation of behaviour and replaces it with an alternative which depends upon a rich conception of the behaviour we explain with reference to states of mind. According to the theory presented here, our understanding of other people is inextricably involved with our evaluation of what they do, and the objectivity of truth depends on the objectivity of moral goodness.Dr Morris's lucid and detailed exposition of his controversial argument sounds an emphatic challenge to the naturalistic orthodoxy in areas as diverse as metaphysics, ethics, and cognitive science.

This book presents a novel theory of probability and judgements of probability: strong coherentist subjectivism. Logue combines three claims in his exposition of this theory. The first states that probabilities may be treated as the degrees of partial belief of (ideally rational) agents, best established by the examination of behaviour. Thus, probability is personalist. The second claim contends that only such degrees of belief can be construed as probabilities: on this strongly subjectivist view the notion objective chance is, if not conceptually impossible, at any rate redundant. The third, coherentist, claim maintains that minimal coherence of probability-beliefs is all that is necessary for those beliefs to be rational; that is, on this view, weak coherence of a set of beliefs is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the rationality of those beliefs.This theory suggests a quasi-realist perspective, in which probabilities are viewed as projections of subjective evaluations. Provided that these evaluations conform to the standards of coherence, they come legitimately to be expressed in apparently realist of objectivist language. This projectivist outlook provides a convincing rationale for the theory, helps to free it from psychologism and excessive 'Bayesian' zeal, and provides it with smoother solutions to longstanding problems in the area of probability.

A. E. Denham examines the parallels between moral and metaphorical discourse, and the ways in which our engagement with literary art, and metaphorical discourse in particular, informs our moral beliefs. She suggests that there are three ways in which one's beliefs can be improved: if more of them are true, if more of them are warranted or justified, or if the warrant or justification for some of them is strengthened. So she considers whether and how such improvements can be made to moral beliefs, and what role metaphor can play. It is an integral aim of the work to discern to what extent moral and metaphorical discourse deserve to be regarded as cognitive at all. This involves investigating to what extent such discourses are capable of truth or falsehood, warrant or justification, and how it is that we understand moral judgements and metaphorical expressions. This investigation is founded on an account of the nature of value and of our experience of value. Metaphor and Moral Experience offers a fresh view of the nature of the moral and the metaphorical, and thus throws light on the relations between art and morality, and on our understanding of both.

Believers and non-believers often take it for granted that traditional religious faith is, in principle, incapable of the sort of justification which might be given to a scientific theory. Yet how are scientific theories justified and is it the case that religious belief cannot satisfy the same standards of rationality?Based on a critical examination of recent accounts of the nature of science and of its justification given by Kuhn, Popper, Lakatos, Laudan, and Newton-Smith, this book contends that models of scientific rationality which are used in criticism of religious belief are in fact often inadequate as accounts of the nature of science. It is argued that a realist philosophy of science both reflects the character of science and scientific justification, and also suggests that religious belief could be given a justification of the same sort.

This book departs from much of the scholarship on Kant by demonstrating the centrality of imagination to Kant's philosophy as a whole. In Kant's works, human experience is simultaneously passive and active, thought and sensed, free and unfree: these dualisms are ofen thought of as unfortunate byproducts of his system. Gibbons, however, shows that imagination performs a vital function in 'bridging gaps' between the different elements of cognition and experience. Thus, the role imagination plays in Kant's works expresses his fundamental insight into the complexity of cognition for finite rational beings such as ourselves.Gibbons begins with an interpretation of synthesis which shows it to be a broader activity than most accounts suggest. Examining the first Critique, she presents a reading of the Transcendental Deduction and the chapter on Schematism that spells out the extraconceptual activities of imagination essential to cognition. This account of imagination is built upon in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant elaborates its role in characterizing the subjective conditions of judgement.Throughout, the cooperation of imagination and reason is highlighted; Gibbons shows that on Kant's account, human beings pursue reason's ideal ends through the provisional and continuing attempt to articulate them. This attempt involves an appeal to a shared social and historical imagination - thus, a full characterization of the subjective conditions of judgement must include the role of imagination.

Philosophers have usually argued that the right way to explain people's actions is in terms of their beliefs and intentions rather than in terms of objective facts. Rowland Stout takes the opposite line in his account of action. Appeal to teleology is widely regarded with suspicion, but Dr Stout argues that there are things in nature, namely actions, which can be teleologically explained: they happen because they serve some end. Moreover, this teleological explanation is externalist: it cites facts about the world, not beliefs and intentions which only represent the world. Such externalism about the explanation of action is a natural partner to externalism about knowledge and about reference, but has hardly ever been considered seriously before. One dramatic consequence of such a position is that it opens up the possibility of a behaviourist account of beliefs and intentions.

There is not one but many ways to picture the world - Australian `x-ray' pictures, cubist collages, Amerindian split-style figures, and pictures in two-point perspective each draw attention to different features of what they represent. The premise of Understanding Pictures is that this diversity is the central fact with which a theory of figurative pictures must reckon.Lopes argues that identifying pictures' subjects is akin to recognizing objects whose appearances have changed over time. He develops a schema for categorizing the different ways pictures represent--the different kinds of meaning they have--and he contends that depiction's epistemic value lies in its representational diversity. He also offers a novel account of the phenomenology of pictorial experience, comparing pictures to visual prostheses like mirrors and binoculars.The book concludes with a discussion of works of art which have made pictorial meaning their theme, demonstrating the importance of the issues this book raises for understanding the aesthetics of pictures.

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the nature of some sorts of mental entities it postulates -- the nature of events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinction between them, and argues specifically that the assumption that states can be treated as particular, event-like entities has been a huge and serious mistake. Steward argues that the category of 'token state' should be rejected, and develops an alternative way of understanding those varieties of causal explanation which have sometimes been thought to require an ontology of token states for their education. She contends that many current theories of mind are rendered unintelligible once it is seen how these explanations really work. A number of prominent features of contemporary philosophy of mind -- token identity theories, the functionist's conception of token role, a common form of argument for eliminative materialism, and the structure of the debate about the efficacy of mental content-- are impugned by her arguments. Steward concludes that the modern mind-body problem needs to be substantially rethought.

The literature on methodological individualism is characterized by a widely held view that if the doctrine were stated with sufficient care it would be seen to be trivially true. Professor Bhargava questions this view. He begins by carefully disentangling the various formulations of the doctrine, identifies its most plausible version, and finally locates the principal assumption underlying it, namely that beliefs are attitudes individuated entirely in terms of what lies within the individual mind. Bhargava argues that once this individualist assumption is challenged it is possible to rehabilitate a non-individualist methodology which permits a contextual study of beliefs and actions, and even a study of social context relatively independent of the beliefs and actions of individuals.

This book is a contribution both to analytical philosophy of mind and to Marxist philosophy. Marxists see pervasive irrationality in the conduct of human affairs, and claim that people in a class-divided society are prone to a variety of misconceptions. They say that we can suffer from `false consciousness' in our views about what inspires our behaviour and in our judgements about what is good for us. Denise Meyerson uses the techniques of analytic philosophy to investigate this picture. She argues that Marxism is committed to the idea of motivated belief, and that the idea is philosophically defensible. She shows that there are other philosophically defensible claims which are congenial to Marxism: that there are facts about interests that are not based on wants; that a desire can be contaminated by its history; that our judgements about our interests do not automatically motivate us; and that beliefs can survive the evidence that they are false. In doing so she throws light on certain puzzling psychological phenomena which confront everyone in their everyday political experience.

This book casts new light on the classic dispute between `compatibilists' and `incompatibilists' about determinism and moral responsibility. Martha Klein argues that the traditional account of the dispute, turning as it does on the notion of the agent's `ability to have acted otherwise', misrepresents the real disagreement, which arises from the compatibilists' conviction that it is sufficient for blameworthiness that an agent's wrongdoing was the result of a morally reprehensible frame of mind, and the incompatibilists' insistence that wrongdoers cannot be morally responsible for their actions if they are not responsible for their motivating desires and beliefs. The incompatibilist position seems compelling when, for instance, we consider wrongdoers whose desires and attitudes can be traced to early emotional deprivation. The author argues that our response to these and other `problem cases' commits us to an incompatibilist condition for blameworthiness which is actually unfulfillable. In her view, however, some reflections on emotional deprivation should also encourage acceptance of a compatibilist condition which will satisfy our desire to be just more fully than the usual proposals emanating from either side of the debate.

Recent years have seen a very considerable revival of interest in Nietzsche. However, many of the studies available in English fail to do justice to the complexity of his writings and tend to involve only very partial and limited readings of his work. Peter Poellner offers a new and comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also on his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished. Poellner examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. Throughout the book, considerable attention is paid both to the historical context of his writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy – English-language as well as Continental European. Among the themes discussed are Nietzsche's relation to scepticism and to evolutionary epistemology; his analysis of 'objective reality' andthe associated 'perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's 'will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the 'ascetic ideal'; his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Poellner, while recognizing the originality of Nietzsche's influential new philosophical paradigm, shows that his thought has closer affinities to the orthodox philosophical tradition than is generally supposed.

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the nature of some of the sorts of mental entities it postulates–the nature of events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinction between them, and argues specifically that the assumption that states can be treated as particular, event-like entities has been a huge and serious mistake. Steward argues that the category of token state should be rejected, and develops an alternative way of understanding those varieties of causal explanation which have sometimes been thought to require an ontology of token states for their elucidation. She contends that many current theories of mind are rendered unintelligible once it is seen how these explanations really work. A number of prominent features of contemporary philosophy of mind–token identity theories, the functionalists conception of causal role, a common form of argument for eliminative materialism, and the structure of the debate about the efficacy of mental content–are impugned by her arguments. Steward concludes that the modern mind-body problem needs to be substantially rethought.

Vagueness is the study of concepts that admit borderline cases: the property of being bald is vague because there are people who are neither definitely bald, nor definitely not bald. The epistemology of vagueness concerns the sorts of attitudes we ought to have towards propositions we know to be borderline. Is it possible to discover whether a borderline bald man is bald? Could two people with access to the same facts reasonably disagree about whether he is bald? Does it matter, when making practical decisions, whether he is bald? By drawing on such considerations, Andrew Bacon develops a novel theory of vagueness in which vagueness is fundamentally a property of propositions, and is explicated in terms of its role in thought. On this theory, language plays little role in explaining the central puzzles of vagueness.Part I of the book outlines some of the central questions regarding the logic and epistemology of vagueness, and criticizes some extant approaches to them. Part II concerns issues in the epistemology of vagueness, touching on the ramifications of vague thoughts on the study of evidence, ignorance, desire, probability theory, and decision theory. By examining the effects of vague information on one's beliefs about the precise, a positive theory of vagueness is proposed. Part III concerns the logic of vagueness, including the interaction between vagueness and modality, vague identity, and the paradoxes of higher-order vagueness. Bacon suggests that some familiar philosophical notions -- including the concept of a fundamental proposition, a possible world and a precisification -- need to be revised.

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: (1) Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; (2) formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and (3) semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects (and, crucially, not of possible worlds). This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics.

Almost no systematic theorizing is generality-free. Scientists test general hypotheses; set theorists prove theorems about every set; metaphysicians espouse theses about all things regardless of their kind. But how general can we be and do we ever succeed in theorizing about absolutely everything? Not according to generality relativism. In its most promising form, this kind of relativism maintains that what 'everything' and other quantifiers encompass is always open to expansion: no matter how broadly we may generalize, a more inclusive 'everything' is always available. The importance of the issue comes out, in part, in relation to the foundations of mathematics. Generality relativism opens the way to avoid Russell's paradox without imposing ad hoc limitations on which pluralities of items may be encoded as a set. On the other hand, generality relativism faces numerous challenges: What are we to make of seemingly absolutely general theories? What prevents our achieving absolute generality simply by using 'everything' unrestrictedly? How are we to characterize relativism without making use of exactly the kind of generality this view foreswears?This book offers a sustained defence of generality relativism that seeks to answer these challenges. Along the way, the contemporary absolute generality debate is traced through diverse issues in metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of language; some of the key works that lie behind the debate are reassessed; an accessible introduction is given to the relevant mathematics; and a relativist-friendly motivation for Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is developed.

Everyone agrees that discrimination can be a grave moral wrong. Yet this consensus masks fundamental disagreements about what makes something an act of discrimination, as well as precisely why (and hence when) such acts are wrong. In Discrimination and Disrespect, Benjamin Eidelson develops illuminating philosophical answers to these two questions. Discrimination is intrinsically wrong, Eidelson argues, when it manifests disrespect for the personhood of those it disfavours. He offers an original account of what such disrespect amounts to, explaining how attention to two different facets of moral personhood -- equality and autonomy -- ought to guide our judgments about wrongful discrimination. At the same time, however, Eidelson contends that many forms of discrimination are morally impeachable only on account of their contingent effects. The book concludes with a discussion of the moral arguments against racial profiling -- a practice that exemplifies how controversial forms of discrimination can be morally wrong without being intrinsically so.

Category mistakes are sentences such as 'Green ideas sleep furiously', 'Saturday is in bed', and 'The theory of relativity is eating breakfast'. Such sentences strike most speakers as highly infelicitous but it is a challenge to explain precisely why they are so. Ofra Magidor addresses this challenge, while providing a comprehensive discussion of the various treatments of category mistakes in both philosophy of language and linguistics. The phenomenon of category mistakes is particularly interesting to both these fields because a plausible case can be (and has been) made for explaining it in terms of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics--making it a fruitful case for exploring the relations between and nature of these three fundamental realms of language. Category Mistakes follows this division. After an introduction which explains the aims and motivations for the project and provides a brief historical survey of the (modern) treatment of category mistakes in each of philosophy, linguistics, and computer science, Magidor discusses four approaches in turn: first, the syntactic approach, which maintains that category mistakes are syntactically ill-formed; then two semantic approaches, though ones that appeal to different semantic facets: the meaninglessness view, which maintains that category mistakes are meaningless, and the MBT view, according to which category mistakes are meaningful but truth-valueless; and finally the pragmatic approach, according to which category mistakes are syntactically well-formed, meaningful, truth-valued but nevertheless pragmatically inappropriate. Magidor argues that the first three approaches ought to be rejected, and in the final chapter addresses the main challenge by developing and defending a particular version of the pragmatic approach: a presuppositional account of category mistakes.

Five Modes of Scepticism examines the argument forms that lie at the heart of Pyrrhonian scepticism as expressed in the writings of Sextus Empiricus. These are the Agrippan modes of disagreement, hypothesis, infinite regression, reciprocity and relativity; modes which are supposed to bring about that quintessentially sceptical mental state of suspended judgement. Stefan Sienkiewicz analyses how the modes are supposed to do this, both individually and collectively, and from two perspectives. On the one hand there is the perspective of the sceptic's dogmatic opponent and on the other there is the perspective of the sceptic himself. Epistemically speaking, the dogmatist and the sceptic are two different creatures with two different viewpoints. The book elucidates the corresponding differences in the argumentative structure of the modes depending on which of these perspectives is adopted. Previous treatments of the modes have interpreted them from a dogmatic perspective; one of the tasks of the present work is to reorient the way in which scholars have traditionally engaged with the modes. Sienkiewicz advocates moving away from the perspective of the sceptic's opponent - the dogmatist - towards the perspective of the sceptic and trying to make sense of how the sceptic can come to suspend judgement on the basis of the Agrippan modes.

What is it to have a reason to do something? is one sort of question; what is it we have reason to do? is another. These questions are often explored separately. But our answers to them may not be independent: what reasons are may have implications for what reasons there are. So the door is opened to a troubling tension--the account of what reasons are that is most plausible in its own right could entail a view of what we have reason to do that is independently implausible. In fact, it looks like this is the case. In the first half of Moral Reason, Julia Markovits develops and defends a version of a desire-based, internalist, account of what normative reasons are. But does that account entail that there are no moral reasons that apply to all of us, regardless of what we happen to desire? It may look obvious that it does--that a bullet must be bitten somewhere. If what we have reason to do depends on what we antecedently desire, corrected only for misinformation and procedural irrationalities, and if desires differ from person to person, there seems to be no basis for assuming that everyone has reason to be moral. But the bullet may yet be avoided. In the second half of the book, Markovits shows how we may do so, building on Kant's argument for his formula of humanity to provide an internalist defense of universal moral reasons. In doing so, she provides a more satisfying answer to the age-old question: why be moral?

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: (1) Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; (2) formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and (3) semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects (and, crucially, not of possible worlds). This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality and Possibility is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics.