Different brain mechanisms seem to mediate wanting and liking for the same reward. This may have implications for the modular nature of mental processes, and for understanding addictions, compulsions, free will and other aspects of desire. A few wanting and liking phenomena are presented here, together with discussion of some of these implications.

Genetic engineering is often looked upon with disfavour on the grounds that it involves 'tampering with nature'. Most philosophers do not take this notion seriously. However, some do. Those who do tend to understand nature in an Aristotelian sense, as the essence or form which is the final end or telos for the sake of which individual organisms live, and which also explains why they are as they are. But is this really a tenable idea? In order to secure its usage in present day ethics, I will first analyze the contexts in which it is applied today, then discuss the notion of telos as it was employed by Aristotle himself, and finally debate its merits and defend it, as far as possible, against common objections.

The received picture of linguistic communication understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. This picture is in conflict with the attractive Lewisian view of belief as self-location, which is motivated by attitudes - first-personal attitudes about oneself - as well as attitudes about subjective matters such as personal taste. In this paper, I provide a solution to the conflict that reconciles these views. I argue for an account of mental attitudes and communication on which mental content and speech act content is understood as sets of - roughly, possible worlds 'centered' on a sequence of individuals at a time. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on multicentered worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. The resulting picture is one on which the point of conversation is the coordination of individual perspectives.

Moral disagreement is often thought to be of great metaethical significance for moral realists. I explore what remains of that significance when we look at moral disagreement through the lens of a combination of two influential and independently plausible hypotheses about moral language. The Morality-As-Cooperation (MAC) hypothesis says that our capacity for and use of moral language is an adaptation to increase mutualistic cooperation. The Concepts-As-Tools (CAT) hypothesis says that we often engage in disputes about language use and that many apparent moral disagreements are linguistic disagreements in disguise. The combined MAC-CAT view that I explore suggests that we frequently engage in linguistic disputes to find optimal means for mutualistic cooperation. I show that this perspective weakens sceptical claims based on moral disagreements, that is offers a novel way for moral realists to explain the apparent genuineness of moral disagreements without the need to accept theses borrowed from non-cognitivism.

I evaluate Tanesini's attempt to provide a social approach to intellectual vices. I do this in three steps. First, I explain what I mean by a 'social approach'. Tanesini offers three senses in which her account is social, and I explain each of these before honing in on the one in which I am most interested. Second, I address the extent to which her approach to the of intellectual vices can be said to be a social approach. My assessment here will be broadly positive, though I highlight some points where I think more explicit details could be given. Third, I discuss whether Tanesini's approach to to intellectual vices is a social one. Here I decide that her approach is not social, and that she doesn't intend it to be. Finally, in the last section, I offer some remarks about what these conclusions mean, and what further work I hope they could provoke.

Alessandra Taniesini's 'The Mismeasure of the Self' develops an internalist account of epistemic vice. On this view, epistemic vices are grounded in attitudes towards the self: fatalism, self-satisfaction, narcissistic infatuation, and self-abasement. The account is internalist insofar as it claims to ground both the nature and the normativity of vice within the subject's skull. In this paper, I argue against vice internalism: epistemic vices, I show, need a normative hook outside the skull to explain their vicious nature. In other words, the 'mis' in the 'mismeasure' of the self demands externalist unpacking.