The standard account of counterfactuals that most philosophers endorse—Lewis's 'Analysis 1' — is wrong. The correct theory is one invented by Jonathan Bennett in 1984 which he called 'The Simple Theory'. Bennett later argued himself out of that theory and went on to champion the standard account. But those arguments fail. The Simple Theory has been right all along.

The Computational Theory of the Laws of Nature entails that the accessibility relation for nomological necessity is not symmetric or transitive. This means that nomologically possible worlds need not share our world's laws. This subverts a standard style of argument against Humean Supervenience.

A new account of the of the laws of nature based upon Algorithmic Information Theory.

Our justification for punishing the wrong doer is not that we are enacting God-like retribution. Neither do we have to argue that inflicting the punishment will make any person, living or dead, happier or better off. We punish to keep a promise to the victims: a promise made before they were victims, a promise they were entitled to ask for; that we were entitled to give and that we are now obliged to honor.

Quine taught us that the collapse of positivism entails that empirical theories are, in principle, undetermined-- not just by the available evidence-- but by all possible evidence. Without disputing that conclusion, contemporary philosophers-- exampled here by Simon Blackburn and Jerry Fodor-- have wanted to treat this as a merely abstract possibility that need not undermine our confidence in actual scientific theory and practice. I argue that there is no basis for this complacency.

Introduces 'Turing Worlds' as a device for thinking about Metaphysical Problems and uses them to examine several different theories of counter-factuals.

If there are rights there is surely a right to self-defense. But self-defense has proved very puzzling to rights theorists. The central puzzle has been called the "paradox of self-defense": If our right not to be harmed gives rise to our right to fight back, what happens to the attacker's right not to be harmed when the defender fights back? If the attacker somehow forfeits his right to self-defense because he is a bad actor, what do we say about innocent (...) threats? I argue that these problems stem from a confusion about the nature of rights. (shrink)