William Blake's dark Satanic mills were apparently not the industrial mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but the schools of his day, which in his view ground all the spirit out of those who were unfortunate enough to suffer them. The clergy who ran Blake's mills were grinding out deadened souls, not industrial riches.

John R. Searle

John R. Searle is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is author of many distinguished works on the philosophy of language and mind.

Luke Purshouse

Temporary Lecturer in Philosophy at St John's College Cambridge who has researched interests in accounts of emotions and their rational appraisal and has recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the subject.

Christopher Cordner

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His book Ethical Encounter will soon be published by Palgrave.

Thom Brooks

Recently received his MA from University College Dublin. He is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Sheffield. His dissertation is on Hegel's political philosophy.

Roberto Casati

A researcher at the Nicod Institut of CNRS, Paris. His most recent works are The Discovery of the Shadow (Little Brown/Knopf) and Parts and Places (MIT Press, with Achille C. Varzi).

Achille C. Varzi

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. His most recent works are An Essay in Universal Semantics (Kluwer) and Parts and Places (MIT Press, with Roberto Casati).

Jeremy Randel Koons

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. His primary research interests are in ethical theory and epistemology. His article ‘Do Normative Facts Need to Explain?’ recently appeared in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Hilary W. Putnam

Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. His books include Reason, Truth and History, Realism with a Human Face, Words and Life, Pragmatism and The Threefold Cord: Body and World.

Graham Oppy

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. His research interests lie in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is the author of Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

The problem of free will arises because of the conflict between two inconsistent impulses, the experience of freedom and the conviction of determinism. Perhaps we can resolve these by examining neurobiological correlates of the experience of freedom. If free will is not to be an illusion, it must have a corresponding neurobiological reality. An explanation of this issue leads us to an account of rationality and the self, as well as how consciousness can move bodies at all. I explore two hypotheses. On the first, freedom is a complete illusion. On the second, it is not an illusion, and there is a corresponding indeterminism at the neurobiological level. This can only occur if there is in fact a quantum mechanical element in the fundamental neurobiology of consciousness.

This paper considers the sorts of evaluations that underlie the emotion of embarrassment, by questioning what unifies the various kinds of situations in which this emotion typically arises. It examines the difference between embarrassment and shame, and then addresses problems with the accounts of embarrassment proposed by previous authors, in particular Solomon, Taylor and Goffman. It proposes a new model, on which the emotion involves viewing an interpersonal situation, in which you are involved, as containing an exposure to which you are averse. This may either be your own exposure to others, or others' exposure to yourself. The emotion thus reflects the value we attach to placing limits on the sorts of interactions and contact we have with other people.

Against moral philosophers' traditional preoccupation with ‘ought’ judgments, Bernard Williams has reminded us of the importance of locutions such as ‘I must’, ‘I have to’ and ‘I can't’. He develops an account of the ethical necessity and impossibility these locutions are able to mark. The account draws on his thesis that all reasons for action are ‘internal’. I sketch the account, and then try to show that it is insensitive to important aspects of how the concepts of ethical necessity and impossibility inform our lives.

The purpose of this essay is to critically appraise J. Angelo Corlett's recent interpretation of Kant's theory of punishment as well as his rejection of Hegel's penology. In taking Kant to be a retributivist at a primary level and a proponent of deterrence at a secondary level, I believe Corlett has inappropriately wed together Kant's distinction between moral and positive law. Moreover, his support of Kant on these grounds is misguided as it is instead Hegel who holds such a distinction. Finally, I attempt to refute the almost timeless retributivist rejection of deterrence-based theories of punishment on the grounds that the latter somehow would condone in some cases the punishment of innocent persons. These individuals almost always demand that no innocent person be punished as a rule of the highest order.

Dear ‘Time Machine’ Research Group; if in order to travel to the past one has to have been there already, and if one can only do what has already been done, then why build a time machine in the first place? À quoi bon l'effort?

Many authors have argued that emotions serve an epistemic role in our moral practice. Some argue that this epistemic connection is so strong that creatures who do not share our affective nature will be unable to grasp our moral concepts. I argue that even if this sort of incommensurability does result from the role of affect in morality, incommensurability does not in itself entail relativism. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that one must share our emotions and concerns to be able to apply our moral concept successfully. Finally, I briefly investigate whether the moral realist can seek aid and comfort from Davidsonian arguments to the effect that incommensurability in ethics is in principle impossible, and decide that these arguments are not successful. I conclude that the epistemic role our emotions play in moral discourse does not relativize morality.

In ‘Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline,’ Williams is mistaken in thinking that I accused him of thinking that that we can describe the world ‘as it is anyway’ without using concepts. Our real disagreement is over whether it makes sense to think that the concepts of physics do this. The central issue is this: the notion of ‘absoluteness’ is defined using at least one semantical notion (‘convergence’). If Williams' view is to work, I argue, at least one semantical notion needs to be absolute. But Williams himself concedes that semantical notions cannot be reduced to physical ones, and the ‘absolute conception’ is supposed to be given in terms of primary qualities alone.

Mark Nelson claims that Russell's remarks—in his History of Western Philosophy—about Aquinas are ‘breathtakingly supercilious and unfair’ and ‘sniffy’. I argue that Nelson completely misrepresents Russell's criticisms of Aquinas. In particular, I argue that the silly epistemological doctrine which Nelson attributes to Russell plays no role at all in the criticism which Russell actually makes of Aquinas. Since—as Nelson himself concedes—there is no other reason to think that Russell commits himself to the epistemological doctrine in question, either in the passages under discussion or elsewhere, I conclude that there is equal justice in the claim that it is Nelson's dismissal of Russell which is ‘unfair’ and ‘sniffy’.