This collection of essays traces the development of a range of social ideals, then addresses questions about society and the international order. With a balanced inclusion of historical and contemporary selections, this is the most comprehensive anthology available in social and political philosophy.

I specialize in epistemology and ethics.

Epistemology: In “The Epistemic Predicament” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1984) 26-50, on p. 38, I defended the condition that has come to be called the safety condition for knowledge. My version was that S knows P only if S’s belief P is caused by a sequence of events E each of which is such that if E were to occur P would be true. I then argued that knowledge construed as safety is closed under entailment, and that, as G. E. Moore claimed, we know the denials of skeptical hypotheses.

Ethics: Much of my work on ethics concerns the philosophy of death. In "Annihilation" The Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1985) 233-252, I argue that Epicurus's position that death is not bad for us makes sense only if life is not good for us. In The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) I argue that death is sometimes bad for its victims both in a timeless sense and also retroactively.