Transparency and Apperception: Exploring the Kantian Roots of a Contemporary Debate explores the links between the idea that belief is transparent and Kant's claims about apperception. Transparency is the idea that a person can answer questions about whether she, for instance, believes something by considering, not her own psychological states, but the objects and properties the belief is about. This marks a sharp contrast between a first-person and third-person perspective on one's current mental states. This idea has deep roots in Kant's doctrine of apperception, the claim that the human mind is essentially self-conscious, and Kant held that it underlies the responsibility that a person has for certain of their own mental states. Nevertheless, the idea of transparency and its roots in apperception remain obscure and give rise to difficult methodological and exegetical questions. The contributions in this work address these questions and will be required reading for anyone working on this intersection of the philosophy of mind and language, and epistemology. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

This book examines Aristotle's four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final), offering a systematic discussion of the relation between form and matter, causation, taxonomy, and teleology. The overall aim is to show that the four causes form a system, so that the form of a natural thing relates to its matter as the final cause of a natural process relates to its efficient cause. Aristotle's Four Causes reaches two novel and distinctive conclusions. The first is that the formal cause or essence of a natural thing is not a property of this thing but a generic natural thing. The second is that the final cause of a process is not its purpose but the course that processes of its kind typically take.