...Seana Valentine Shiffrin The power to promise is morally fundamental and does not, at its foundation, derive from moral principles that govern our use of conventions. Of course, many features of promising have conventional components—including which words, gestures, or conditions of silence create...

...Stuart Brock This essay explains why creationism about fictional characters is an abject failure. Creationism about fictional characters is the view that fictional objects are created by the authors of the novels in which they first appear. This essay shows that, when the details of creationism...

... or after. For biological conception is most plausibly seen as a momentous event in the continuing life of a preexisting organism—the egg—rather than a cataclysmic event ending one life and creating another. This article considers and rebuts the most likely challenges to this claim. This metaphysical point...

...) may also be shifted by operators in the representation language. Indeed verbs that create hyperintensional contexts, like `think', are treated as operators that simultaneously shift the world and assignment parameters. By contrast, metaphysical modal operators shift the world of assessment only. Names...

... individuals) can develop into. This is because the early education ensures that the auxiliary and the philosopher share the same basic structure of soul, with reason being in control of each, though the auxiliary's natural deficiencies create some limitations in terms of his or her moral self-sufficiency...

...Cian Dorr; John Hawthorne Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition...

... argue against this consensus. I adduce a variety of data that I argue can best be accounted for if we treat Wittgenstein sentences as being classically inconsistent. This creates a puzzle, since there is decisive reason to think that ⌜Might p⌝ is consistent with ⌜Not p⌝. How can it also be that ⌜Might p...

... these issues might seem independent of one another, there is potential for an interesting sort of conflict: the epistemologist might think we ought to have beliefs that, according to the philosopher of mind, it is impossible to have. This essay argues that this conflict does arise and that it creates problems...

... Jeffrey K. McDonough Harvard University 0. Introduction Leibniz famously maintains that God has created the best of all possible worlds. Not surprisingly, it is often objected that other possible worlds seem better and so that a benevolent, all-powerful God should...

...; that is, there is no distinctly intelligible meaning of the term which is common to God and to his creatures. In the case of created things, some are of such a nature that they cannot exist without other things, while some need only the ordinary concurrence of God in order to exist. We make this distinction by calling the latter...

... creating things that are inferior (necessarily) to God. All created things are good, contrary to Manichean doctrine. Having been created ex nihilo, all material things are inherently mutable. (4) Moral evil or sin always involves choosing a lesser good over a greater good. Sin is a voluntary act...

...-ordered variety (14), and still other times harmony is a particular kind of good order, namely the connection or agreement between created objects. This certainly reflects some unclarity in Leibniz’s own writing, but the latter description of harmony is the one that is central to Leibniz’s...

... in favor of pluralism, there remain questions concerning the metaphysical implications of the Synopsis passage (as I call it) for an account of the material world. For instance, there is the question of why Descartes thinks in this passage that the nature of created substance in general, as well...

... are ful- filled just as well as they are in the actual world and whose natural laws and history are just like those in the actual world, with the exception that God intervenes systematically to prevent prehistoric NERNP.3 It seems that no good would have been lost if he had created Wp instead...

... on premises about what kind of a world one would expect a perfect being to create, and thus must assume some views about how God or the Anselmian being would act. Murphy argues persuasively that on his account of “God's ethics” (discussed in more detail below) there is no cogent argument from evil...

..., and duties recognized, and then grant each based on de facto financial and emotional practices, and the dependencies, interdependencies, and reasonable expectations created by actual living or support arrangements. Chambers spends the first half of her book taking down the arguments of liberal political...

...? It may seem obvious that they are not. After all, Leibniz frequently relies on theological doctrines and argues that everything in the created world consists at bottom of immaterial substances that are beyond the scope of the natural sciences. Yet, Larry Jorgensen’s book argues the opposite—namely...

... our assessment and endorsement of a par- ticular desire at least in part determines whether that desire pro- vides us with a reason. In legislating for ourselves we create our reasons. And in the process of giving ourselves particular reasons, we also generate reasons to respect our own...

.... We have reason to care about global economic inequality, since it is the global institutional set that creates it; we do not, however, have to focus on all imagined cases of difference, because Tan's “institutional egalitarianism” (2) is not in the business of eliminating all forms of difference...

... an apparently rigid production system. Wilson argues that von Sternberg’s late films are marked by turns of narrative that draw attention to their own creative circumstances. Peter Lamarque is the one author to ask about creation rather than creativ- ity. He argues that it is possible to create...