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Morality and law, on the other hand, begin when controversy arises. We invent both when we can no longer just do what comes naturally, when routine is no longer good enough, or when habit and custom no longer suffice. These will no longer suffice when the individual's needs begin to clash with thos…

We antiessentialists [...] cannot afford to sneer at any human project, any chosen form of human life. In particular, we should not allow ourselves to say what I have just said: that by taking this view of physical science we seem to see ourselves as more than human. For an antiessentialist canno…

I conclude that, whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures, numbers do not - that it simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. We antiessentialists would like to convince you that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic…

[...] For pragmatists, there is no such thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing as the intrinsic nature, the essence, of X. So there can be no such thing as a description which matches the way X really is, apart from its relation to human needs or consciousness or…

For, a believer who is (unlike a child or a psychotic) a fully fledged member of her community will always be able to produce justification for most of her beliefs - justification which meets the demands of that community. There is, however, no reason to think that the beliefs she is best able to j…