How do language and thought connect to things in the world? John Hawthorne and David Manley offer an original and ambitious treatment of the semantic phenomenon of reference and the cognitive phenomenon of singular thought, leading to a new unified account of definite and indefinite descriptions, names, and demonstratives.

This work is organized around an epistemological puzzle: in many cases, we seem consistently inclined to deny that we know a certain class of propositions while crediting ourselves with knowledge of propositions that imply them. The text explores questions on the nature and importance of knowledge.

John Hawthorne is widely regarded as one of the finest philosophers working today. He is perhaps best known for his contributions to metaphysics, and this volume collects his most notable papers in this field. Hawthorne offers original treatments of fundamental topics in philosophy, including identity, ontology, vagueness, and causation. Six of the essays appear here for the first time, and there is a valuable introduction to guide the reader through the selection.

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

Can there be 'narrow' mental content, that is entirely determined by the goings-on inside the head of the thinker? This book argues not, and defends instead a thoroughgoing externalism: the entanglement of our minds with the external world runs so deep that no internal component of mentality can easily be cordoned off.

Epistemology has flourished in this millennium, with new ideas and approaches of many kinds: Knowledge, Belief, and God shows how these developments can illuminate the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. And philosophy of religion is shown to be a valuable testing-ground for epistemology.--

This book offers a sustained re-evaluation of the most central and perplexing themes of Leibniz's metaphysics. In contrast to traditional assessments that view the metaphysics in terms of its place among post-Cartesian theories of the world, Jan Cover and John O'Leary-Hawthorne examine the question of how the scholastic themes which were Leibniz's inheritance figure - and are refigured - in his mature account of substance and individuation. From this emerges a sometimes surprising assessment of Leibniz's views on modality, the Identity of Indiscernibles, form as an internal law, and the complete-concept doctrine. As a rigorous philosophical treatment of a still-influential mediary between scholastic and modern metaphysics, this study will be of interest to historians of philosophy and contemporary metaphysicians alike.