I have four responses to make, the first three very brief and the last not much longer.

On the face of it, it looks as though in attributing rights to people one is saying something about their moral position. This is so for both option-rights and welfare-rights. On H.L.A. Hart's account of rights to freedom, that is exactly what one is doing. One is asserting that those who have the right have a special kind of justification for limiting the freedom of others. On Professor Brandt's view, it appears that attributing a right to someone is just an oblique way of saying something about the moral position of others, and nothing more.

In Mental Acts Professor Peter Geach asserts that “‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term … ” In Reference and Generality Geach interjects the following note: “I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether x and y are ‘the same’, or whether x remains ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term ‘the same F’.” Here, as in Mental Acts, he goes on to say that not any general term will serve to complete ‘the same’ constructions; only substantival terms will suffice for this purpose. Finally, in his article, “ldentity,” Geach asserts that “When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this … is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance—or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought.” (We should not, incidently, conclude from this last remark that Geach thinks all and only count nouns are substantival terms.

Introduction

In November of 1785, Kant published a highly unsympathetic review of the second part of Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. Herder had once been Kant's pupil, and had greatly admired his teacher, but the content of this review shows how profound the philosophical differences between them had by then become. A central area of dispute emerging from the review concerns the nature of happiness, and its place within the ‘destiny’ or ‘vocation’ (Bestimmung) of the human race. Kant is responding, in particular, to a section of the Ideas entitled: ‘The happiness (Glückseligkeit) of human beings is everywhere an individual good; consequently, it is everywhere climatic and organic, a child of practice, tradition, and custom.’ Although Kant is not mentioned by name in this section, it clearly contains critical rejoinders, often quite harsh in tone, to aspects of his practical philosophy and philosophy of history, as Herder understands them.

Edward Erwin has recently argued against the thesis that the concepts a priori truth’ and ‘necessary truth’ are extensionally equivalent. (Following Erwin, I shall refer to this thesis as the ‘Extensional Equivalence Hypothesis’ or, for short, E. E. H.) This thesis consists of two logically independent claims: (1) all a priori truths are necessary; and (2) all necessary truths are a priori. Erwin leaves the first claim unchallenged and elects to devote his efforts exclusively to undermining the second. The brunt of his attack on the second claim rests on alleged unclarities in the concept of an a priori truth. He attempts to show that the E.E.H. cannot be defended upon any plausible interpretation of this concept. Although I agree that the E.E.H., as stated above, is open to Erwin's objections, I shall argue that a slightly revised version of it can be defended against these objections.

Jerome Bickenbach has provided a fair and sympathetic account of my argument in Trials and Punishments, and has clarified some of the book’s obscurities - for which I am very grateful: I will focus my response on his main objection to my account of punishment, since I am not persuaded that the objection holds.

Bickenbach argues that my ideal account of what punishment ought to be if it is to be adequately justified would actually show, if it succeeds, that criminal punishment (or at least punishment involving hard treatment) cannot be justified at all. ‘Criminal punishment, it would appear, is unjustifiable when it is needed, but justifiable only if it is no longer required’ (786). It would be justifiable if it was imposed on a criminal who shared the values embodied in the laws of the true community to which she belonged: but it would then be unnecessary, since in such cases ‘blame alone’ (or, one might add, a formal conviction or a purely symbolic punishment) would suffice for the communicative and persuasive purposes which punishment should ideally serve. It would be necessary if the criminal was a committed nonconformist who rejected the community’s values: but it would then be unjustifiable, since in such cases it could not serve the purposes which punishment should ideally serve.

In his highly interesting ‘Hume's Criterion of Significance,’ Michael Williams makes some references to my paper ‘Convention and Value.’ He writes that I am ‘on to something important,’ but, although he claims that my conclusion is not modest enough, he fails to make clear what modesty requires. As a result, our interpretations may seem further apart than they really are. I shall attempt to draw attention to some of our agreements and differences.

Some recent writers on practical reasoning have had it that reasoning about what to do differs in logical structure from theoretical reasoning. In particular, Anthony Kenny and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that there are permissible inferences in practical reasoning which lack analogues in theoretical reasoning. Such discussions seem inevitably to draw their impetus from what Aristotle had to say on the topic, both in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere.

Philosophical theses are sometimes assailed from so many sides that, even if they have not been refuted, it becomes difficult for them to gain a fair hearing. A case in point seems to be the thesis that the sentence ‘Every event has a cause' (commonly known as the Causal Principle) may on occasion be used to assert something which, as a matter of contingent fact, is either true or false. In the interests of logical chivalry, I want to take up its defence.

My aim, it should be noted, is not to defend the truth of the Causal Principle, to claim that our world is one in which every event is causally determined by another event or set of events. So I shall have nothing to say about the arguments of those who—like the quantum physicists, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Born—claim to have shown that the Causal Principle is false; claim, that is, that our world is fundamentally indeterministic. My concern is only to establish the right of determinists and indeterminists alike to take seriously the question whether our world is in fact one in which every event has a cause.

Le philosophe mit le pied sur la première marche du futurotron. C'était la première fois qu'il utilisait cet appareil pour ses recherches. Bien qu'il vienne seulement d'être mis au point et qu'il ne soit encore qu'à l'état de prototype, ce futurotron pouvait décidément rendre de grands services. De nombreux chercheurs de différentes disciplines l'avaient d'ailleurs déjà utilisé de manière très fructueuse.

Where in Kant's ethical theory may we find principles, guidance, or at least insights, about the morality of abortion? The formula of universal law is a natural place to begin looking. There is a long tradition of focusing on Kant's formula of universal law as a principle for evaluating maxims, resting in part on the belief that Kant intends the formula of universal law to be so used (G 4:437-38). It is hardly surprising that some philosophers have already turned to this principle searching for the — or at least a — Kantian view of abortion.

I Introduction

At Metaphysics Γ 3, Aristotle argues that it belongs to a single discipline, which he calls first philosophy, to investigate both substance (οὐσία) and a special class of claims which includes among its members the principle of non-contradiction (PNC). At Γ 4, after insisting that the PNC is, strictly speaking, indemonstrable, he sets forth a series of sketches of refutative arguments intended to show how it can, nonetheless, be substantiated. Traditionally, his main refutative argument has been taken to be embedded in the passage which runs from 1006a31 to b34. In that passage, he tries to show that anyone who denies the PNC and who can then be led, by means of an artfully arranged series of questions, to agree (whether willingly or grudgingly) to a few seemingly modest theses about the signification of expressions of a certain type — which Aristotle illustrates with the general term ‘man’ (ἄνθρωπος) — is thereby logically committed to the following modal claim: ‘It is necessary, then, if it is true to say that something is a man, that it be a bipedal animal' (1006b28-30).

In these days of inflation, perhaps we should not be surprised that the fourteenth and latest addition to the Library of Living Philosophers, should require two volumes. Previous subjects, including Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and G.E. Moore, were adequately accomodated within the covers of one volume. This expansion is hardly justified by the contents of the volumes. The most interesting and useful material is to be found in Popper's opening autobiographical section, but the other contributors and critics for the most part are disappointing in their lack of critical bite.

For this reason perhaps Popper's reply to his critics adds little to our understanding of his philosophical positions, although even when his critic is as acute as A.J. Ayer, Popper's reply has an air of defensive obfuscation.

Another recent book giving a brief but clear exposition of Popper's philosophy by a former student, Bryan Magee also fails to give his views the critical examination they deserve.

A widely held view in current philosophical theory says to be wary of conceptual analysis and its quest for analyticity. The major source of this suspicion traces back to reasons W. V. Quine gave 50 years ago in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ — namely concerns about reliance on notions of meaning and synonymy that are unclear. Since that time, there have been new sources of suspicion. In the philosophy of mind, for example, debates over consciousness have some philosophers doubting whether conceptual analysis can furnish as hefty a metaphysical conclusion as the denial of physicalism (Block and Stalnaker, 1999; Chalmers, 1996). And in epistemology, Stephen Stich and others worry that conceptual analysis of epistemic norms can only end up endorsing local intuitions about good thinking — intuitions that depend arbitrarily on the culture in which they were formed.

In the chapter entitled ‘Philosophy and the Meaning of Life’ in Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations there is an admonitory passage with many applications. ‘It is a puzzle,’ says Nozick, ‘how so many people, including intellectuals and academics devote enormous energy to work in which nothing of themselves or their important goals shines forth, not even in the way their work is presented. If they were struck down, their children upon growing up and examining their work would never know why they had done it, would never know who it was that did it. They work that way and sometimes live that way, too’ (1981, 578).

‘Ifs’ come washed or unwashed. The washed ifs are embedded in precise theories: the constantly strict implication of deductive inference, the variably strict implication of ‘nearness’ conditionals, and statements of conditional probability. By a nearness conditional I mean the common part of Stalnaker's and D. Lewis's theory of counterfactual conditionals, which depends on a notion that possible worlds are more or less near to each other, as a measure of their over-all similarity to each other.

Method may be second only to substance-dualism as the best-known among Descartes's enthusiasms. But knowing that Descartes wants to promote good method is one thing; knowing what exactly he wants to promote is another. Two views seem fairly widespread. The first rests on the claim that Descartes endorses a purely procedural picture of reason, so that right reasoning is a matter of proprieties of operation, rather than (say) respect for its objects. On this view, a method for regulating our reason would offer general rules of procedure, abstracted as much as possible from the content of particular problems. Second is the view that Descartes maintains what we might call an ‘intellectualist’ approach to method, one that restricts right reasoning to operations internal to the mind, and allows the use of external bodily resources (such as sensory perceptions, activities in the corporeal imagination, or written notes) only as initial inputs or as helpful props— convenient, but marginal to the procedure and readily eliminated from it.

According to Stephen Macedo, ‘[liberal], democratic politics is not only about individual rights and limited government, it is also about justification… political justification… understood politically.’ ‘Political justification,’ he asserts, ‘is a core liberal goal.’ Gerald Gaus, similarly, writes that the ‘idea of public justification is at the heart of a contractual liberalism.’ Very many other contemporary political philosophers believe that the politics of a liberal polity must be justifiable to its Citizens. In what follows I shall seek to understand the basis for such a belief and, in particular, to expose two possible sources in the views of Locke and Kant. Neither source, I shall argue, provides any warrant for the demand in question. First the bald claim — that the politics of a polity needs justifying — must be unpacked. By way of initial clarification I shall say something about, respectively, ‘justification’ and ‘politics.’

Faced with interminable combat over some piece of philosophical terrain, someone will inevitably suggest that the contested ground is nothing more than a philosophically manufactured mirage that is therefore not worth fighting for. Arthur Fine has long advocated such a response — the ‘Natural Ontological Attitude,’ or NOA — to the realism debate in the philosophy of science. Notwithstanding the prima facie incompatibility between the realist's and anti-realist's positions, Fine suggests that there is in fact enough common ground for NOA to stand on its own as a minimal alternative, one that enjoys the advantage of being free of the philosophical burdens of its overweight contenders.

Notwithstanding Fine's claim to have identified a position that is neither realist nor anti-realist, critics charge that NOA, as Fine describes it, is a realist position. I endorse this criticism below, with attention to the relation between NOA and Bas van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism (CE). I show that Fine's repudiation of the globalism he identifies in realism (and in anti-realism) does not insulate him from that charge.

Sometimes in THE CONCEPT OF MIND Gilbert Ryle describes what he is up to in a way which is quite unhelpful. The following passage will serve as an example of what I mean:

I call this passage unhelpful because it commits the fallacy of false alternatives. It would have us think that talk of a person's mind is either (1) talk of a special non-physical repository or else (2) talk of a person's abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc.—but not both. Yet surely talk of the mind as a non-physical repository might be one way of talking about a person's abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc.

Perhaps what Ryle should have said is that to speak of the mind as a non-physical repository that houses special, mental objects is a figurative way of putting what could be reported literally in talk of a person’s abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc. Certainly that is a point Ryle tries to make in his book. Indeed it is a major burden of THE CONCEPT OF MIND to identify and analyze those figures of speech, or tropes, in which mental activities and capacities are commonly reported and described. The idea seems to be that we are misled philosophically by our failure to recognize the tropological character of what we commonly say about the mind and by our naivete as to how the tropes work.