Many philosophers have taken there to be an important relation between personal identity and several of our practical concerns (among them moral responsibility, compensation, and self-concern). I articulate four natural methodological assumptions made by those wanting to construct a theory of the relation between identity and practical concerns, and I point out powerful objections to each assumption, objections constituting serious methodological obstacles to the overall project. I then attempt to offer replies to each general objection in a way that leaves (...) the project intact, albeit significantly changed. Perhaps the most important change stems from the recognition that the practical concerns motivating investigation into personal identity turn out to be not univocal, as is typically thought, such that each of the different practical concerns may actually be related to personal identity in very different ways. (shrink)

The main body of Meynell's book The Intelligible Universe divides into two parts of roughly equal length. It is argued in the first that the universe manifests the property of ‘ intelligibility ’, and in the second that this could not be so unless there were ‘something analogous to human intelligence in the constitution of the world’. The concern of this article is limited to the argument of the first part. It will be maintained that it consists of three intertwined (...) arguments which, when disentangled, turn out not to be mutually supportive, as Meynell intends, but logically incompatible, and that neither singly nor in synthesis do they yield a notion of universal intelligibility which could provide the basis of an argument for the existence of God. (shrink)