"Essentialism about species is today a dead issue" (Sober 1980: 204)

"Folk essentialism is both false and fundamentally inconsistent with the Darwinian view of species" (Griffiths 2002: 72)

The paper defends "Intrinsic Biological Essentialism," the doctrine that biological kinds, particularly species, have essences that are partly, if not entirely, underlying intrinsic, mostly genetic, properties. Such doctrines are appealing but the consensus among philosophers of biology is that they are wrong, indeed incompatible with Darwinism. My defense has four main points. First, a genetic essence does not have to be "neat and tidy"; there does not have to be "a tiger gene." Second, we need genetic essences to do explanatory work in biology; biological generalizations about the morphology, physiology, and behavior of species require structural explanations that must advert to underlying intrinsic properties. Third, biology faces a classic sorites problem in drawing a line between a species and its successor. The resulting indeterminacy is no special problem for Essentialism. Fourth, the central problem for Essentialism is thought to be that, according to all current views, species are relational. The paper argues that these relational views, including the popular phylogenetic-cladistic one, should be abandoned because they are incompatible with the explanatory role of our talk of species.

In this paper, I take some steps toward rehabilitating Harry Frankfurt's old and abandoned interpretation of Descartes as espousing a coherence theory of truth. After rebutting the reasons typically deployed against this reading of Descartes, I show precisely where Frankfurt's original reasons for this reading were lacking. To rectify these shortcomings, I lay out a potentially devastating and previously unnoticed circle that besets Descartes' epistemological enterprise in his wonderful Fourth Meditation. This circle is more pernicious and more intriguing than the more famous circle often thought to arise in connection with Descartes' Third Meditation, and thus his new circle invites drastic steps in response. In particular, seeing Descartes as espousing a coherence theory of truth can forestall the damage threatened by the Fourth Meditation circle. To further buttress this reading of Descartes as a coherence theorist, I then argue that there are deeper reasons—stemming from Descartes overall metaphysical system—for seeing Descartes this way. Crucial here will be Descartes' systematic views on freedom, substance and, especially, his diabolically clever thesis of the creation of the eternal truths, according to which God could have made it false that 2 + 2 = 4. In each of these cases, Descartes espouses a distinction between absolute and restricted phenomena that is of a piece with the kind of approach to truth that I see as at work in Descartes.

How do artifacts get their functions?

It is typically thought that an artifact's function depends on its maker's intentions. I shall argue that this common understanding is fatally flawed. Nor can artifact function be understood in terms of current uses or capacities.

Instead, I propose that we understand artifact function on the etiological model that Millikan and others have proposed for the biological realm. This model offers a robustly normative conception of function, but it does so naturalistically by employing our best scientific theories, in particular natural selection. To help make this case, I propose "naturfacts" as a bridge between the artifactual and the biological realms. "Naturfacts" are organisms designed for human purposes through artificial selection.

I will talk about how properly to characterize our experience of objects as having constant shapes, sizes, and colors throughout changes in presentational context. A number of philosophers are committed to an account of these experiences that retains a residual kind of sense-datum theory. I have designed and begun to run some psycho-physics experiments that I think will show this is bad phenomenology.

Hume famously said "There is no object, which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves". On a rough but standard contemporary reading, Hume's Dictum (HD) is the thesis that there are no metaphysically necessary connections between wholly distinct existences. HD plays a central role in contemporary metaphysics; yet this role is puzzling. On the one hand, many good philosophers (e.g., Lewis, Armstrong) take HD to be obvious, or as close as it gets in philosophy. Such philosophers appeal to HD both in defining positions and notions (e.g., supervenience-based formulations of physicalism) and in assessing doctrines (violating HD being enough to render a doctrine unacceptable). On the other hand, many good philosophers (e.g., Shoemaker, Broad) reject HD either explicitly or implicitly, in endorsing doctrines incompatible with HD (e.g., causal accounts of natural properties). In this talk I explore and diagnose this puzzling split in between philosophers. There are, I find, two interesting ways in which the contemporary formulation of HD can be precisified in such a way that HD looks obvious. The first stems from endorsing a particular approach to intrinsicality; the second from endorsing one or other account of laws of nature. These sources ultimately weigh in favor of HD's unobviousness, for insofar as it is not obvious what accounts of intrinsicality and laws are correct, neither is it obvious whether HD is true. I go on to consider arguments that HD is obvious (Ayer), that HD is close to obvious (Schaffer), and that even if HD is not obvious, its denial is unobviously unintelligible (Weatherson).