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This chapter provides an overview of the development of Armstrong’s metaphysics, with special reference to his contributions to Ontology proper, and to the place that ontology now commands in Anglophone philosophy. Armstrong was among the most influential philosophers in the transformation of philosophy away from the linguistic and positivist stance of the mid-20th century. After beginning with realist excursions into epistemology, he returned to the classic program of western philosophy, presenting a Materialist theory of mind. This was followed by, first, the development of an Aristotelian Realism, the application of this theory to accounts of Laws of Nature and of Possible Worlds, then, the presentation of an ontology of States of Affairs which embraces modality, the objects of mathematics, and an account of truth. While the treatment is sympathetic, questions are raised over the need for properties to be Universals, and whether his system of higher-order properties is fully consistent.

The chapter explores the development of law teaching in the University of Edinburgh in the later eighteenth-century, showing how Adam Smith's thinking promoted the development by law professors, all linked to Henry Dundas, of an empirical and historically oriented attitude to law and government in the teaching of Civil Law, the Law of Nature and Nations, Scots Law, and Universal History. This development had a major impact on Scottish thinking about law and government, not just among the lawyers. It raises the possibility of a route for the continuing impact of Enlightenment thought into the Nineteenth Century.

The Lockean form of modernity was generally more attractive than the Machiavellian and far more successful. Locke appealed to what seemed a version of traditional natural law and cast his argument in many places in theistic terms. In Natural Right and History Strauss argued that this appearance was mostly a clever subterfuge. The chapter in Natural Right and History had been written prior to the 1954 appearance of a text, the Essays on the Law of Nature, that had been found in Locke’s papers. The new text was sometimes seen as a definitive rebuttal to Strauss’s version of Locke. In an essay on this new text Strauss vindicates his original reading and, building on Locke’s presentation, goes on to offer his own serious refutation of natural law philosophy, in particular the version of that doctrine associated with Thomas Aquinas.

The Formula of the Universal Law of Nature is perhaps the most well-known version of the Categorical Imperative. This chapter sets out the author’s understanding of this Formula and explains in detail the structure of a Kantian argument for self-improvement based on it. The central argument of the chapter is thatthis Formula can only establish that persons ought to perform certain self-developing acts. It cannot establish, however, that persons ought to pursue self-development as a goal.

Cartesian skepticism, unlike Pyrrhonism, was total, calling into question low beliefs as well as high. Descartes himself was not a skeptic but set out the argument in its favor for the purpose of refuting it and thereby strengthening theology. His argument was only possible against a specifically medieval background, his Evil Demon being the Omnipotent Creator-Legislator (OCL) in disguise. But as the skepticism was more convincing than the refutation, this concept is still around in our day, responsible for ‘modern’ philosophy's obsession with finding ‘foundations’ for knowledge. The pattern of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, which moves from subjective conceivability to objective existence, can still be discerned in David Chalmers's advocacy of mind-body dualism: the subjective ‘logical possibility’ of zombies purporting to show the objective reality of the schism.

This chapter presents a philosophical discussion of the assumption that everyone continues to do whatever they are now doing within the context of Immanuel Kant's formulas on universal laws, including the Law of Nature Formula. It first considers each-we dilemmas in relation to Kant's Law of Nature Formula, which works best when it is applied to maxims or acts of which three things are true: it would be possible for many people to act on this maxim, or in this way; whatever the number of people who act in this way, the effects of each act would be similar; these effects would be roughly equally distributed between different people. All of these each-we dilemmas raise both practical and theoretical problems. The chapter also explores the so-called Threshold Objection and Ideal World Objection.

This chapter presents a philosophical discussion of Immanuel Kant's Formula of Universal Law as an alternative to consequentialist reasoning. It first considers one version of Kant's Formula of Universal Law, known as the Impossibility Formula, which says it is wrong to act on maxims that could not be universal laws. It then examines Onora O'Neill's revised version of Kant's formula, that is: it is wrong to act on any maxim whose being successfully acted on by some people would prevent some other people from successfully acting on it. According to O'Neill, this formula condemns deception and coercion, since those who deceive or coerce others thereby ‘guarantee that their victims cannot act on the maxims they act on’. The chapter also explores Kant's Law of Nature Formula, Permissibility Formula, and Moral Belief Formula before concluding with an analysis of the notion that the agent's maxim determine whether some act is wrong.

What are miracles? They are events that involve a violation of natural law due to the intervention of a supernatural, typically divine, being. Because we think that such interventions are extremely rare, miracles too should be among the least frequent of events. This makes justifying beliefs about miracles especially difficult.

Quantitative properties are those that come in degrees, which we represent with numbers. A metaphysical account of quantity - in my view an account of the fundamental quantitative features - must explain the possibility of numerical representation; and such an account will have implications for the laws of nature in which quantitative properties figure. One such account is comparativism, the view that the fundamental quantitative features are comparative relations. Comparativism passes a minimum test (which certain other accounts fail): enabling strong laws of nature. But questions arise about the kinds of laws it enables. Hartry Field's insistence on "intrinsic" laws is examined, as well as David John Baker's argument that comparativism undermines determinism. In the end a pessimistic conclusion emerges: any account of the fundamental quantitative features, whether comparativist or no, seems to require unattractively arbitrary choices.