In the literature seeking to explain concepts in terms of their point, talk of ‘the point’ of concepts remains under-theorised. I propose a typology of points which distinguishes practical, evaluative, animating, and inferential points. This allows us to resolve tensions such as that between the ambition of explanations in terms of the points of concepts to be informative and the claim that mastering concepts requires grasping their point; and it allows us to exploit connections between types of points to understand (...) why they come apart, and whether they do so for problematic ideological reasons or for benignly functional reasons. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt Journal of Philosophy, 66, 829–39 famously attacked what he called the principle of alternate possibilities. PAP states that being able to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility. He gave counterexamples to PAP known since then as “Frankfurt cases.” This paper sidesteps the enormous literature on Frankfurt cases while preserving some of our salient pretheoretical intuitions about the relation between alternate possibilities and moral responsibility. In particular, I introduce, explain, and defend a principle that has so far been (...) overlooked, namely, “the principle of doxastic moral asymmetry” : a rational agent, S, is morally responsible for an action that S performed, E, only if, when S did E, S justifiably believed either that E was closer to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility, or that E was closer to S’s most blameworthy alternate possibility than it was to S’s most praiseworthy alternate possibility. (shrink)

Quine famously argued that analyticity is indefinable, since there is no good account of analyticity in terms of synonymy, and intensions are of no help since there are no intensions. Yet if there are intensions, the question still remains as to the right account of analyticity in terms of them. On the assumption that intensions must be admitted, the present paper considers two such accounts. The first analyzes analyticity in terms of concept identity, and the second analyzes analyticity in terms (...) of the analysis relation. The first fails in light of possible counterexamples. The second is defended, both by considering test cases of intuitively clear analyticities, and by developing the account in light of possible counterexamples. (shrink)