1 The intentional stance and intentional systems In Brainstorms Dennett (1981) proposes the following six conditions, each of which is necessary, of`personhood'. Although Dennett is concerned with`moral personhood', rather than personhood as such, he believes that metaphysical personhood is a necessary condition of moral personhood. The six conditions are: rationality, intentionality, stance, r...

A growing amount of research on intentionality within Anglo-American philosophy of mind has been focusing on the notion of phenomenal intentionality. How to characterize phenomenal intentionality is not a straightforward matter, but one relatively neutral option is in terms of counterfactual dependence: an intentional state has phenomenal intentionality just in case if it were not phenomenal it...

What licenses the use of a definite description? The formal and philosophical literature has approached this question in two ways. The uniqueness approach (Frege, 1892; Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1950) holds that we may use a definite determiner only if the property denoted by its complement holds of exactly one individual in some domain: Sentence (1) and (2) can only be true if there is exactly ...

The Fauconnier-Ladusaw analysis of negative polarity licensing (that NPIs are licensed in the scope of downward entailing operators) continues to be the benchmark theory of negative polarity. In this paper, I consider some of the moves that are needed to maintain its basic intuition in some recalcitrant arenas: negative polarity licensing by only, adversatives, superlatives, and conditionals. W...

This paper concerns itself with the superlative morpheme -est and its ability to license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) such as any or ever, and in particular the compositional analysis of a puzzling type of utterance which incorporates these grammatical elements. Specifically, an embedded clause structure which appears at first glance to be a restrictive relative clause modifier will be argued...

I criticize an increasingly popular set of arguments for the justifiability of punishment. Some philosophers try to justify punishment by appealing to what Peter Strawson calls the reactive attitudes – emotions like resentment, indignation, remorse and guilt. These arguments fail. The view that these emotions commit us to punishment rests on unsophisticated views of punishment and of these emot...

How can formal methods be applied to philosophical problems that involve informal concepts of ordinary language? Carnap answered this question by describing a methodology that he called “explication.” Strawson objected that explication changes the subject and does not address the original philosophical problem; this paper shows that Carnap’s response to that objection was inadequate and offers ...