"In this exceptionally brilliant book, ranging effortlessly from Herodotus and Thucydides to Diderot and Nietzsche, Bernard Williams daringly asks--and still more daringly answers--one of the central questions of philosophy: what is the ...

Some philosophers worry that it can never be reasonable to act simply on the basis of trust, yet you act on the basis of self-trust whenever you merely follow through on one of your own intentions. It is no more reasonable to follow through on an intention formed by an untrustworthy earlier self of yours than it is to act on the advice of an untrustworthy interlocutor. But reasonable mistrust equally presupposes untrustworthiness in the mistrusted, or evidence thereof. The concept (...) of an intention, I argue, codifies the fact that practical reason rests on a capacity for reasonable trust. (shrink)

One thing wrong with lying is that it can be manipulative. Understanding why lying can be a form of manipulation involves understanding how our telling someone something can give them a reason to believe it, and understanding this requires seeing both how our telling things can invite trust and how trust can be a reason to believe someone. This paper aims to outline the mechanism by means of which lies can be manipulative and through doing so identify a unique reason (...) for accepting testimony; a reason based on trusting a speaker’s telling. (shrink)

How far, if at all, do our intrapersonal and our interpersonal epistemic obligations run in parallel? This paper treats the question as addressing the stability of doxastic commitment in the two dimensions. In the background lies an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. We’ll pursue the question of doxastic stability by coining a doxastic analogue of Gregory Kavka’s much-discussed toxin case. In this new case, you foresee that you will rationally abandon a doxastic commitment by undergoing a shift in the (...) context in which you doxastically deliberate. The case reveals an important stability condition on doxastic commitment that plays no role in cases modeled on Ulysses and the Sirens, the scenario that has shaped previous attempts to draw an analogy between doxastic and practical commitment. The stability condition thereby revealed is not diachronic -- it does not involve a shift in belief -- but we can construct specifically diachronic cases that reveal an important intrapersonal epistemic obligation. This obligation arises when you expect the shift in belief by ‘projecting’ yourself into a future doxastic context -- thus vindicating a restricted, but only this restricted, application of Bas van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle. Despite some important differences, we can use these diachronic cases as a model for interpersonal cases that reveal an important role for doxastic context in the epistemology of disagreement. But the roles played by projection and context in disagreement ensure that there is no general obligation to be responsive to the opinion of an epistemic peer who disagrees with you. (shrink)