Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The main purpose of the paper is to present and discuss Bernard Suits’ account of constitutive rules presented in his opus magnum—The Grasshopper. Games, Life and Utopia—and in several minor contributions, which supplement or modify his original position. This account will be regarded as a crucial part of Suits’ theory of ludic activities, mainly game-playing. The stress will be put on peculiarities of constitutive rules—their relation to ends in games, players’ attitudes and their limitative nature. The analysis of the consequences of breaking a rule in different types of actions…

In this paper I will attempt to show that there are some essential connections between essence and knowledge, and to clarify their nature. I start by showing how the standard Finean counterexamples to a purely modal conception of essence suggest that, among necessary properties, those that are counted as essential have a strong epistemic value. I will then propose a “modal-epistemic” account of essence that takes the essential properties of an object to be precisely the sub-set of its necessary properties that constitute a significant source of knowledge about it.…