1. Conferences on the subject of need are lamentably rare. All the more honour then for this one to the Royal Institute of Philosophy (an organisation long dedicated to saving philosophy's better self from its worse), to the Philosophy Department at Durham, and to Soran Reader, the organizer and editor.

2. Someone asked me recently what first made me think it was important for philosophy to secure for itself a substantial and serious idea of needing and of thing vitally needed. What made it seem imperative to safeguard these categorizations from conceptual and rhetorical degradation? What suggested that there was a problem here?

The answer lay in my case outside formal philosophy. As almost everyone does before theory or dogma crowds in, I knew the notion of need intimately. I had even had to think about it, because, early in my working life, it had been a part of my duty as a civil servant, when working as an assistant principal in a section of the Colonial Office that was dedicated to ‘Colonial Welfare and Development’, to apply the notion. But there, as in the colonial territories where various schemes were conceived and proposed to us as falling under these heads, everyone knew in practice what need meant, knew a need from a mere desire, and knew a vital need from a need that was less than that.

The first real intimation that these obvious distinctions could not be taken for granted at the level of policy, or even of common sense, came later and from elsewhere.