The author examines three fundamental concepts: existence, a priori knowledge, and value. These concepts have been recurrent concerns of western philosophy and also reveal important similarities and differences between the movements from which the author takes his departure.

I discuss aspects of Freudian theory that have entered folk psychology.

Experiments are actions, performed in order to gain information. Like other acts, there are virtues of performing them well. I discuss one virtue of experimentation, that of knowing how to trade its information-gaining potential against other goods.

I consider Glimcher's claim to have given an account of mental functioning that is at once neurological and decision-theoretical. I am skeptical, but remark on some good ideas of Glimcher's.

I discuss Bermudez' minimalist approach to self-consciousness approvingly, connecting it with other positions in philosophy and trying to separate it from ideas about non-conceptual content.

I argue that considerations about computational complexity show that all finite agents need characteristics like those that have been called epistemic virtues. The necessity of these virtues follows in part from the nonexistence of shortcuts, or efficient ways of finding shortcuts, to cognitively expensive routines. It follows that agents must possess the capacities – metavirtues –of developing in advance the cognitive virtues they will need when time and memory are at a premium.

An account of the virtues of limitation management: intellectual virtues of adapting to the fact that we cannot solve many of the problems that we can describe. I argue that the best response to many problems depends not on the most rationally promising solution, but on the most likely route to success. I argue against techniques that assume that one will fulfil ones intentions, and distinguish between failures of rationality and failures of intelligence. I describe the trap of supposing that (...) one will be capable of following the plan that would best exploit ones limited resources. (shrink)

How does one explain the dramatic spread of judicial review after World War II, which culminated in a world-wide constitutional revolution during the 1990s? In order to explore this question, this Article first attempts to examine some methodological difficulties that regularly impede the study of constitutional transplants. It concludes with speculation about the relationship between the rise of judicial authority and the decline in the legitimacy of democratic institutions.