Recent Work on Human Nature: Beyond Traditional Essences

Recent Work on the Nature and Development of Delusions

In this paper we review two debates in the current literature on clinical delusions. One debate is about what delusions are. If delusions are beliefs, why are they described as failing to play the causal roles that characterise beliefs, such as being responsive to evidence and guiding action? The other debate is about how delusions develop. What processes lead people to form delusions and maint...

RECENT WORK Recent Work: Dispositions

Controversy about dispositions ranges over the following four domains: (i) the semantics of disposition ascriptions; (ii) the distinction between dispositional and categorical properties; (iii) the metaphysical status of dispositions, i.e. their fundamentality, naturalness and intrinsicness; and (iv) the various dispositional analyses of philosophical notions like causation, laws, modality, cou...

Recent Work on Virtue Epistemology

Recent work on thyroid hormones.

Progress in research frequently awaits the application of new techniques developed in unrelated fields. The biochemistry of the thyroid gland is a particularly good example, for remarkable advances have followed the introduction of paper chromatography and autoradiography with radioactive iodine (131I). Classical methods had previously shown that the circulating form of thyroid hormone was the ...

Recent Work on Radical Skepticism

This discussion surveys recent developments in the treatment of the epistemologi-cal problem of skepticism. These are arguments which attack our knowledge of certain truths rather than, say, our belief in the existence of certain entities. In particular , this article focuses on the radical versions of these skeptical arguments, arguments which purport to show that knowledge is, for the most pa...