Central to R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of history, and among the most controvrsial of his doctrines, is the contention that historical understanding requires a re-anactment of past experience or a re-thinking of past thought. Some critics have found this contention in it-self incoherent or otherwise unsatisfactory, even as applied to what Collingwood apparently regarded as paradigm cases of historical thinking: for example, accounting for Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in terms of his political ambitions. Others, while accepting the applicability of notions like re-enactment and re-thinking to such cases, have nevertheless rejected them as a basis for a general theory of historical understanding on the ground that their range of application is too narrow to encompass anything like the normal concerns of historians. In particular, these notions have been held to throw little light on what historians have had to say about largescale social events, conditions and processes.

Husser believed that Kant's great attempt to achieve and to understand the viewpoint of transcendental subjectivity failed. For “Kant, … so many presuppositions are ‘obviously’ valid, presuppositions which in the Humean sense are included in the world enigma (of how objectivity based on subjectivity is possible), (that he) never penetrated to the enigma itself.” The attempt failed in its origins, because Kant did not fully appreciate the character and extent of Hume's problem of the nature of the self and the possible extent of knowledge. Kant's attempt failed also in its results because Kant created mythical constructions; the noumenal object ‘behind’ sensible appearances, and the noumenal self ‘behind’ conscious describable acts and experiences. “Because he understands inner perception in this empiricist, psychological sense and because, warned by Hume's scepticism, he fears every recourse to the psychological as an absurd perversion of the genuine problem of the understanding, Kant gets involved in his mythical concept formation.”

A typical view of Leibniz’ extraordinary metaphysical and methodological views is to regard them as having appeared by certain “applications” of his mathematical and physical discoveries. If we believe Couturat and Russell the monadology is largely only the expression of certain logically formal relationships: it is the logic of Leibniz that is basic to his mature metaphysics. Even more typical is the view that Leibniz’ work in mathematics, especially his work on the calculus, is the source of the key ideas in his metaphysics. J. M. Child, the translator of the early mathematical manuscripts, says it straight out: “ … the main ideas of [Leibniz’] philosophy are to be attributed to his mathematical work, and not vice versa.” In a philosophically much more interesting way Paul Schrecker argues that what he calls Leibniz’ “infinitesimal method,” a method obviously derived from his mathematical work, pervades all of the important basic contributions of both his metaphysics and methodology.

So much of importance hinges on judgments about someone's rationality that it is nearly disgraceful how unclear we are about this concept. Judgments of irrationality are used to justify paternalistic intervention into people's lives and, as a result, mental institutions are replete with people who are in cages because their actions are ‘contrary to reason'. Furthermore, when someone engages in extremely dangerous or bizarre behaviour simply because he enjoys it, this is seen by many as proof of at least some degree of irrationality. The idea appears to be that imprudent acts are irrational.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls defines a hypothetical contract situation and argues rational people will agree on reflection it is fair to contractors. He solves the rational choice problem it poses by deriving two lexically-ordered principles of justice and suggests the derivation justifies the principles. Its soundness aside, just what justificatory force does such a derivation have?

On one view, there is no justificatory force because the contract is rigged specifically to yield principles which match our pre-contract moral judgments. Rawls provides ammunition for this claim: “By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments [about what is just] and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted.”

Owing to a genral dissatisfaction with hedonistic theories of value, a number of recent discussions have sought to identify an agent's selfinterest, individual utility, or personal welfare with what the agent most wants to do, all things considered. Two features of these accounts merit special attention for the argument in this paper. First, on such accounts any desire or aversion which persists in the face of complete information is logically relevant to the determination of an agent's self interest. This includes apparently altruistic desires like a desire for another's happiness as well as more narrow and self-regarding desires like a desire to eat a good meal. Second, when the agent finds himself in a situation where he must choose between incompatible desires, his informed preference determines the act which is most in his self-interest.

When I was first introduced to Zeno's paradoxes I thought how wonderful it is that the philosophers can prove things that are obviously not the case. The paradoxes of Zeno are particularly engaging for they, unlike such paradoxes as the set theoretic paradoxes of Russell and Löwenheim and Skolem, are straightforward and untechnical arguments about straightforward and untechnical concepts. Unquestionably, the most elegant refutation of any ‘proof’ that there is no motion was that of Diogenes of Sinope who, as Diogenes Laertius relates, simply walked about. Ingenious and incontestable as Diogenes’ response was, it does little to quell our intellectual uneasiness that something is gravely amiss about logic - it should not be possible to prove absurdities. I believe that logic is, for the present anyway, secure: that Zeno's paradoxes are in fact pseudo-paradoxical confusions.

Both in ethics and in epistemology one source of scepticism in its contemporary version is the realization, often belated, of the full consequences of atheism. Modern non-moral philosophy looks back to Descartes as its father figure, but disowns the Third Meditation. But if God does not underwrite one's cognitive powers, what does? The largely unknown evolution of them, which is just a version of Descartes’ unreliable demon? “Let us … grant that all that is here said of God is a fable, nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arived at the state of being that I have reached, whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method — since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my being the less powerful” (Meditation I, Haldane and Ross, tr.).