Reason has an important role to play in every area of life, including religion. However, Dr. Blanshard’s definition of what is “reasonable” is too narrow. There are many kinds and degrees of evidence. Even if one should not believe contrary to the evidence, or without any evidence, one might be permitted to believe in the absence of perfect evidence. Moreover, what constitutes relevant evidence is not the same in all areas of life. The kind of evidence that is relevant to a belief in physics is not the same as the kind of evidence that is relevant to a belief about the values of music, for example.

This paper distinguishes two sub-fields of aesthetics: the study of a certain kind of experience, which is “aesthetics” proper, and the philosophy of art. The last fifty years have seen a turn away from aesthetics proper, in favor of the second sub-field, the philosophy of art. This paper argues against that trajectory, and in favor of aesthetics proper.

The characters of tragedy are in some sense responsible for their errors. However, given their ignorance of the consequences of their actions, it seems that they ought not be held responsible by others for what they have done. This is a paradox. The way to resolve the paradox is to distinguish two kinds of agent responsibility: accountability and culpability. Being accountable is primarily a private affair, whereas being culpable entails the possibility of just punishment.

Trust is more than mere reliance on another person. To trust someone is to rely on her goodwill for the care of something valuable. It is to have a confident expectation that the other person will take care of the valuable thing because she recognizes its value to you. It is to expect her to take care of it because she recognizes that she should take care of it. Therefore trust is a robustly moral attitude.

The eudaimonistic thesis claims that being virtuous is a necessary aspect of the development of some important kind of happiness. To be true, it must be the case that virtue is associated with a kind of happiness that is clearly recognizable as something that we want, that we can appreciate as a good state for us to be in, that we can identify as a state of our own well-being. So here is the empirical question: in our ordinary experiences, is it the case that virtue is necessary to developing this kind of state? This is a very large, and very important, question. In this paper, I chip away at one piece of this question by exploring virtue’s role in mediating our relationships with others. Caring about others and treating them well is clearly part of being virtuous (no matter how we construe the virtues) and I think it is also one aspect of being virtuous that we can see to be an important part of our happiness—at least, in our non-skeptical moments.

There are many ways in which filmgoing is like dreaming. The space and time of the film experience are distorted and illusory. For instance, one has the sense of being spatially present on the filmed scene. However, if we really accepted a change in the camera viewpoint as a change in our own position, rapid intercutting between different viewpoints would be intolerable. This suggests that in film our sense of space is somehow bracketed or held in suspense. Likewise, we take what we see in the film to be happening in the present, yet we tolerate jumps backward and forward in time. On reflection, these peculiarities of the film experience are extremely odd. Our ability to enjoy them testifies to the mind’s tendency to smooth things over, interpreting whatever confronts it in terms of the simplest pattern.