How can we know abstracta (properties, kinds, relations, roles, structures, ...)? I will argue that this is a problem worth taking seriously, by resisting some dismissive or quick responses. Then I will look at Russell's answer in his "The Problems of Philosophy", concentrating, as Russell does, on knowledge by acquaintance. While sympathetic to his approach, I will dispute his account of knowledge by acquaintance and point out what needs to be done to answer the original question along Russellian lines.

In this paper, I explore some ways that recent empirical psychological and neuroscientific work about the relation between reflective commitments (roughly: beliefs, which are responsive to a global set of considerations) and non-reflective habits of response (roughly: aliefs, which are responsive to local cues) can shed light on enduring debates about the moral significance of concordant /discordant attitudes. The paper is conciliatory rather than critical, in that it seeks to bring out what is deeply right about a number of traditional views.

In particular, I will argue that because fluency-demanding action has to be habit-driven, “potted Aristotle” is right that certain morally-mandated/morally-praiseworthy behaviors require alief/belief harmony. But because exception-responsive action has to be reflection-driven, “potted Kant” is right that certain morally-mandated/morally-praiseworthy behaviors require alief/belief disharmony. And because some fluency-demanding action should (as a moral matter) be exception-responsive, “potted Jonathan Edwards” is right that we are all pretty much destined to be sinners.

When it comes to epistemic normativity, should we take the good to be prior to the right? That is, should we ground facts about what we ought and ought not believe on a given occasion in facts about the value of being in certain cognitive states (such as, for example, the value of having true beliefs)? The overwhelming answer among contemporary epistemologists is: "Yes, we should." In this paper I argue to the contrary. Just as taking the good to be prior to the right in ethics often leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what an agent should do, so too, I argue, taking the good to be prior to the right in epistemology leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what a subject should believe. Epistemic value -- and, by extension, epistemic goals -- are not the explanatory foundation upon which all other normative notions in epistemology rest.

If one is to evaluate a line of thought concerning self-consciousness pursued in the German idealistic (Kant, Fichte, Hegel) as well as in the continental phenomenological (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) tradition one has to deal at some point with the problem of immediate awareness. This problem seems to be intimately connected with the question as to whether one has to rely on the idea of the Self as the subject of non-propositional states like feelings and moods which can be distinguished from the I connected with propositional states. In the talk I argue that there is no need to introduce a Self that is different from the I.