The aim of this thesis is to defend fictionalism as a response to the mathematical placement problem. As we will see, against the backdrop of philosophical naturalism, it is difficult to see how to fit mathematical objects into our best total scientific theory. On the other hand, the indispensability argument seems to suggest that science itself mandates ontological commitment to mathematical entities. My goal is to undermine the indispensability argument by presenting an account of applied mathematics as a kind of revolutionary prop-oriented make-believe, the content of which is given by a mapping account of mathematical applications. This kind of fictionalism faces a number of challenges from various quarters. To begin with, we will have to face the challenge of a different kind of indispensability argument, one that draws ontological conclusions from the role of mathematical objects in scientific explanations. We will then examine one recent theory of mathematical scientific representation, and discover that the resulting position is Platonistic. At this point we will introduce our fictionalist account, and see that it defuses the Platonist consequences of mathematical representation. The closing chapters of the thesis then take a metaphilosophical turn. The legitmacy of a fictionalist response to the mathematical placement problem is open to challenge from a metaphilosophical perspective in two different ways: on the one hand, some modern pragmatists have argued that this kind of metaphysics relies on questionable assumptions about how langauge works. On the other, some modern philosophers have developed forms of metaontological anti-realism that they believe undermine the legitimacy of philosophical work in metaphysics. In the final two chapters I defend the fictionalist account developed here against these sceptical claims. I conclude that the fictionalist account of applied mathematics offered here is our best hope for coping with the mathematical placement problem.

The thesis I try to develop here hopes to contribute to some recent discussions on the evolution of human creative cognition. In particular, it is a response to the view that pretend play was a primary driver of the evolution of human creativity, a position defended in Carruthers (2002), Picciuto and Carruthers (2014) and elsewhere. This thesis doesn’t directly address what we might think of as a traditional philosophical puzzle. Instead, my concern here is with a puzzle that has its origins in palaeoanthropology. While it might not be ‘our’ puzzle, it nonetheless touches upon areas which have long been the concern of philosophers: the nature of thought and its relationship to language, the nature of representation in art, and more recent concerns with our understanding of concepts like the imagination and creativity and what their relationship might be. It appears as though the emergence of our species saw a rapid (in evolutionary terms) development of material culture, from new hunting techniques to the production of representational art. Because of its dramatic contrast with the relatively stagnant material culture of pre-cursor hominids this has sometimes been described as a ‘creative explosion’. One of the central questions this dramatic change prompts is what drove this explosion? Many answers have been posited, including the emergence of language, the appearance of pretend play in childhood, and the accumulation of material wealth in the form of skills and improved tools that allowed our ancestors the time to be creative. I develop an alternative thesis which sees a co-evolution of language, a tendency to engage in fantasy, and the externalisation of this tendency in storytelling as the explanation.

The following thesis aims to demonstrate the relevance of the work of Albert Camus to contemporary ethics. Drawing on recent debates around philosophical style and ethical communication, I suggest that Camus' work is characterised by an endeavour to formulate new ways of communicating moral issues and provoking ethical reflection. The following thesis is broken up into eight chapters. Chapter One is an introductory chapter which sets out the context to the current thesis, drawing on research on the significance of philosophical style (such as those of Berel Lang and Jon Stewart), as well as texts which assess the possibility of reading literature for ethical content (from Martha Nussbaum and Richard Posner), among other works. Chapter Two examines Camus' response to Christianity as the basis for the formulation of his own ethics, arguing that it is his inability to accept the concept of transcendence that motivates his desire to devise an alternative moral philosophy. The following four chapters (Chapter Three through to Six) examine specific devices used by Camus in both his literary and philosophical works, in order to demonstrate his endeavour to formulate new modes of ethical communication, all the way from grammatical constructions to ethical fables. Chapter Seven is a case study of a novel which I argue follows in Camus' footsteps in its attempt to elicit ethical reflection through narrative technique-that is, Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête. Chapter Eight summarises the contribution that Camus' diverse writings make to ethical understanding, suggesting that drawing on interdisciplinary writings such as Camus' could beneficially expand the methodological arsenal of contemporary ethics.

There is no doctrine more central to Christianity than the doctrine of the Atonement. However, there is also no doctrine more contested. I claim that these disputations stem from a failure to attend to what the Atonement is supposed to achieve, namely, maximal union with God at the beatific vision. I therefore argue that understanding the Christian doctrine of the beatific vision is key to understanding the nature of the Christian doctrine of the Atonement.

Locke has long been read in the light of the ideas of Hobbes, that is, as a materialist philosopher, endorsing a conventional view of morality. Hobbes does this through an instrumentalist interpretation of the human reason and Epicurean naturalism (i.e. the hypothesis that everything is made of atoms). Even though Locke’s writings are replete with expressions of his Christian thought, scholars have suggested that Locke is committed to an empirical stance underwritten by these ultimately Epicurean commitments. There is, therefore, a tension in Locke’s philosophy between three divergent thought complexes: his empiricism, his commitment to Christianity, and what seems to be a form of scepticism. This tension poses an interpretative problem, especially concerning Locke’s claims about morality and theology, and the sincerity of his commitment to God. The Hobbist interpretation of Locke has gained ground in recent years, and as a result, Locke’s religious philosophy has been criticised for being either irrelevant or inconsistent. The purpose of this thesis is to engage in and refute that line of criticism by demonstrating that it is possible to give an alternative and richer account of Locke’s intellectual background. By focusing on Locke’s conception of reason, I trace new sources through an overlooked history of ideas from the ancient Platonic tradition, the Stoics, and the Jewish Neo-Platonist philosopher Philo of Alexandria, to the so-called Cambridge Platonists. In particular, I reinterpret Locke’s definition of reason in the light of the Platonist tradition, as containing certain metaphysical and universal traits that are inherently Platonist, and not as something instrumental. The Cambridge Platonists were prominently engaged in a debate against Hobbes, aiming to refute his materialism and arguing for the retainment of a classical understanding of the concept of reason in order to save Christian ethics from Epicureanism and atheism. With this thesis, I show that this debate was very much alive and present to Locke, which he also crucially partook in, and that he in fact sides with the Platonists more so than with Hobbes.

Henry Kyburg’s theory of Evidential Probability offers a neglected tool for approaching problems in confirmation theory and decision theory. I use Evidential Probability to examine some persistent problems within these areas of the philosophy of science. Formal tools in general and probability theory in particular have great promise for conceptual analysis in confirmation theory and decision theory, but they face many challenges. In each chapter, I apply Evidential Probability to a specific issue in confirmation theory or decision theory. In Chapter 1, I challenge the notion that Bayesian probability offers the best basis for a probabilistic theory of evidence. In Chapter 2, I criticise the conventional measures of quantities of evidence that use the degree of imprecision of imprecise probabilities. In Chapter 3, I develop an alternative to orthodox utility-maximizing decision theory using Kyburg’s system. In Chapter 4, I confront the orthodox notion that Nelson Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction makes purely formal theories of induction untenable. Finally, in Chapter 5, I defend probabilistic theories of inductive reasoning against John D. Norton’s recent collection of criticisms. My aim is the development of fresh perspectives on classic problems and contemporary debates. I both defend and exemplify a formal approach to the philosophy of science. I argue that Evidential Probability has great potential for clarifying our concepts of evidence and rationality.

This thesis advances and defends a novel two-category ontology of objects and dimensions, latterly conceived as respects of comparability. The proposed 'dimensionist' ontology is set out (Chapter 1) and brought to bear on discussions of determinables and determinates (Chapter 2), the problem of universals (Chapter 3), fact ontologies (Chapter 4), and nomic governance (Chapter 5). Dimensionism is argued to fare well in comparison to a range of rival ontological accounts of property possession (Chapter 6). A metametaphysical framework is set out (Chapter 7) to undergird the discussion, which draws on both realist and pragmatist resources.

This thesis investigates the conceptual relationship between laws of nature and free will. In order to clarify the discussion, I begin by distinguishing several questions with respect to the nature of a law: i) do the laws of nature cover everything that happens? ii) are they deterministic? iii) can there be exceptions to universal and deterministic laws? iv) do the laws of nature govern everything in the world? In order to answer these questions I look at three widely endorsed accounts of laws: "Humean" regularity accounts, laws as relations among universals, and the dispositional essentialist account. I argue that there is nothing in the very nature of a law - in any of the accounts surveyed - that implies a positive answer to questions (i) and (ii). I show that this has important consequences for the free will problem. I then turn to the compatibility of free will and determinism. I focus on the Humean view and the dispositional essentialist account of laws. And the bulk of this discussion concerns the consequence argument, especially the question of whether the laws of nature are "up to us". I show that, on the dispositional conception of laws, there is no sense in which the laws of nature are up to us, contrary to the Humean view. However, this does not mean that there is no room for free will on the dispositional account. I argue that free will requires the laws of nature to be limited in scope, rather than being indeterministic. I conclude by showing that this allows one to resist the claim that indeterminism rules out free will.

This thesis is concerned with the theory of ontological emergence; a theory that posits a new kind of entity – usually an emergent property – that occurs in complex systems and can explain some system-level behaviour. The theory holds that these emergent entities are dependent on, but novel with respect to, the components of those systems. Such entities have been invoked to explain behaviours as diverse as symmetry breaking in molecular physics to the possibility of personal agency. As a metaphysical theory it is useful wherever there is a lack of understanding about how system-level behaviour can occur based on what we know about the parts of that system. Besides its usefulness, the theory, if true, would profoundly impact our understanding of fundamental ontology. The first half of this thesis aims to do three things: first, identify a problem that emergence can explain; second, identify what emergence must do in order to solve that problem; third, identify a theory of emergence capable of doing it. The first and second of these aims will require us to outline issues in fundamental ontology and metaphysical methodology that are critical to any assessment of the possibility of emergence. They both also require making some commitments on these issues. Among such commitments will be a commitment to an ontology of properties as causal powers. I argue that emergence is a theory of macro-properties and that the primary problem it solves is the Problem of Reduction. I thereafter defend the theory of causal powers emergence against charges that it is incoherent and inconsonant with science and natural unity; these and other conflicts are shown to be unproblematic once the theory is properly explicated. In these respects, this thesis finds no fault with the coherence of emergence. The key claims in the second half of the thesis instead pertain to the necessity of emergence to solve the problem that I have identified. The argument is that even if causal novelty, holistic effects and top-down causation are apparent in a system, a properly developed causal powers ontology can account for them without positing new fundamental properties. I develop an option called non-reductive inherence based on a theory of powers admitting a plurality of compositional principles. The thesis ends by expounding this alternative to emergence and setting out some of the trade-offs between the positions.

This thesis is an evaluation of doxastic normativism. Doxastic normativism is the theory that belief is essentially normative, and that the norm of belief is a constitutive norm. After introducing the taxonomy of normativist views I use throughout the thesis, I discuss four versions of doxastic normativism: state normativism, conceptual normativism, intentional teleologism, and teleo-functionalism. The first two are those traditionally referred to as “doxastic normativism”, and they are the main targets of the thesis. Discussion of the second two is less extensive, and serves to show that the central problem for normativism lies not in the kind of normativity that it claims is essential to belief, but in the attempt to make any normative property whatsoever a necessary condition for belief. I develop undercutting objections to two arguments for state normativism and to one argument for conceptual normativism. My objections draw on i.a. the semantics of correctness ascriptions, the norms of other intentional states, the nature of rationality, and the evidential sensitivity of belief. Then there are several rebutting objections, drawing on non-agential mental states, the normative classification of epistemically deviant mental states, and difficulties for state-differentiation through norms. The discussions of teleologism and teleo-functionalism demonstrate that these views, although making much weaker claims about belief, fall prey as well to the main problems identified for the core normativist views. The thesis closes on a chapter offering reflections about the reasons behind the failures of normativism, as well as a descriptive theory of belief that I argue can fulfil the explanatory desiderata of doxastic normativism.