Professor John Wisdom holds that religions speak about the world we all know even when they seem to refer to what lies outside the sphere of our senses or beyond this life. He insists that even when there is little or no difference between the believer and the nonbeliever in what they expect in a future life, the difference between them is not confined to how they live their life and face death. They also differ in how they see life — though these two differences are logically dependent. So it makes sense to ask whether what they say about life is true; religious beliefs are amenable to reasons which ultimately rest on how things stand here and now. A belief in the God of the scriptures is no exception to this.

Professor John Wisdom holds that the reference to be found in many religious beliefs to what lies beyond the world and transcends the senses is misleading. Religious beliefs speak and, indeed, can only speak about this world, the world we know by means of the senses. The religious believer is himself misled when he describes the God he believes in as transcendent. What gives content to his beliefs is how certain things stand in this world. To appreciate these and so to embrace the beliefs in question is for a person to change in himself, to come into contact with something that lies within him. Here lies the spiritual aspect of the content of religious beliefs.

Hume's moral theory, I shall here argue, is explicitly and in fundamental ways a common sense theory. It is widely accepted, of course, that Hume found moral distinctions to rest on sentiment, and that he found in the principle of sympathy the means by which individual sentiments come to be experienced by others. What has not received adequate attention is Hume's concern to refute moral skepticism and his explicit reliance on appeals to “common sense,” nor,so far as I know, has anyone suggested how these several features coalesce in an outlook which is appropriately designated a common sense theory. To support my claim I shall first show that Hume is not, as is widely supposed, what we would term a “subjectivist” in morals, and that in fact he means to establish, in at least two important senses of the term, the “objectivity”of morals.

Hume, among others, has received bad press on his views about the nature of pleasure. I shall argue that such complaints rest on an incomplete and somewhat distorted view of Hume's enterprise. In addition, I shall attempt to rectify this state of affairs by explicating the manner in which Hume deploys the concept of pleasure in his value theory.

Kant gave a two-fold answer to the question, ‘Is existence a predicate?’. His view that existence is not a first-level predicate, i.e., a predicate of objects like horses, stones, and you and me, is widely known. What is not so well-known, however, is his claim that existence is a second-level predicate, a predicate of concepts or of a collection of predicates. In this paper I hope to show why his arguments for both claims are unsuccessful.

James Collins writes that some modern philosophers have not been given revisionary treatment by their critics.

Fortunately, Bentham's day has now come, and we have in David Lyons’ In the Interest of the Governed, a major new interpretation. Lyons permits us to continue to call Bentham a “utilitarian,” but we have to revise what we understand by the term in this context.

The bulk of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is divided, in its philosophical content if not its formal organization, into two parts. The first, encompassing the Introduction, the Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic, presents a theory of metaphysical knowledge; its source and nature, its proper objects, and its fundamental principles. The second part, contained in the Transcendental Dialectic, is a theory of metaphysical error, illusion, or pseudoknowledge. For various reasons, students of the Critique have tended to neglect the second part of Kant's project in favor of the first, though there is no evidence that Kant himself regarded it as less important or less essential to the critical philosophy.