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Abstract By invoking surprising rationalist considerations that Bernard Williams does not anticipate, this paper defends Williams’s claim that that moral criticism on the basis of purported external reasons amounts to ‘bluff’. After strengthening this rejection of external reasons by drawing parallels to compelling rationalist arguments in other domains, the paper mounts a similarly rationalist critique of internal reasons invoked by Kantian moral philosophers. The paper closes with an apocalyptic line of thought that develops the preceding rationalist arguments into a challenge to the notion of acting for reasons in general.

Garber does a great job of conveying the range of uses to which I put the PSR in an attempt to bring Spinoza's system under control, so I will not go into the details except to say that the interpretation I offer covers not only Spinoza's metaphysics, but also his epistemology, philosophy of mind, psychology, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and, in a way, his account of human salvation. FIRST-ORDER SKIRMISHES The heart of my reading of Spinoza as what Garber calls a super-rationalist turns on my attributing to Spinoza the PSR, which I express as the claim that there are no brute facts.

This paper presents an argument for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the PSR, the principle according to which each thing that exists has an explanation. I begin with several widespread and extremely plausible arguments that I call explicability arguments in which a certain situation is rejected precisely because it would be arbitrary. Building on these plausible cases, I construct a series of explicability arguments that culminates in an explicability argument concerning existence itself. This argument amounts to the claim that the PSR is true. The plausibility of the initial cases in the series provides the basis of an argument for the PSR, an argument that can be rebutted only by drawing a line between the plausible early cases in the series and the apparently unacceptable later cases. I argue that no principled reason for drawing this line has been found and that one cannot draw an unprincipled or arbitrary line without begging the question. The paper concludes that, therefore, this defense of the PSR remains unrebutted and that we have a powerful, new reason to embrace the PSR.

This first extensive study of Spinoza’s philosophy of mind concentrates on two problems crucial to the philosopher’s thoughts on the matter: the requirements for having a thought about a particular object, and the problem of the mind’s relation to the body. Della Rocca contends that Spinoza’s positions are systematically connected with each other and with a principle at the heart of his metaphysical system: his denial of causal or explanatory relations between the mental and the physical. In this way, Della Rocca’s exploration of these two problems provides a new and illuminating perspective on Spinoza’s philosophy as a system.

The arguments for three-dimensionalism (3d'ism) from the reality of change and from the notion of what it is to be the proper subject of contradictory properties: the four-dimensionalist (4d'ist) has perfectly coherent accounts of these matters, and the argument that these accounts are inadequate is simply question begging. The argument for 3d'ism from the claim that four-dimensionalism (4d'ism) is committed to something like a counterpart theory of modality and trans-world identity: this is merely a nice statement of what may be a difference between 3d'ism and 4d'ism; it is not really an argument. If the alleged commitment to counterpart theory is to provide an argument against 4d'ism, one must argue against counterpart theory itself. Here, Della Rocca talks about the impasse between 3d'ist and 4d'ist.

This paper critically examines a prominent and perennial strategy—found in thinkers as diverse as Kant and Shamik Dasgupta—of simultaneously embracing the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and also limiting it so as to avoid certain apparently negative consequences of an unrestricted PSR. I will argue that this strategy of taming the PSR faces significant challenges and may even be incoherent. And for my (nefarious) purposes, I will enlist a generally derided argument by Leibniz for the PSR which will help us to see the connections between the PSR and a radical form of monism.

This paper critically examines a prominent and perennial strategy—found in thinkers as diverse as Kant and Shamik Dasgupta—of simultaneously embracing the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and also limiting it so as to avoid certain apparently negative consequences of an unrestricted PSR. I will argue that this strategy of taming the PSR faces significant challenges and may even be incoherent. And for my (nefarious) purposes, I will enlist a generally derided argument by Leibniz for the PSR which will help us to see the connections between the PSR and a radical form of monism.

Spinoza's response to a certain radical form of scepticism has deep and surprising roots in his rationalist metaphysics. I argue that Spinoza's commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason leads to his naturalistic rejection of certain sharp, inexplicable bifurcations in reality such as the bifurcations that a Cartesian system posits between mind and body and between will and intellect. I show how Spinoza identies and rejects a similar bifurcation between the representational character of ideas or mental states and the epistemic status of these ideas, a bifurcation to which Spinoza sees the radical sceptic committed. Spinoza's rejection of this bifurcation helps to explain some of his most cryptic statements concerning scepticism and also reveals a promising and highly metaphysical strategy for understanding and responding to scepticism.