Politicians of all stripes are committed to equality of opportunity. At least almost all of them put it in their statements of fundamental principle. It sounds like something we should all in fairness support, and it is supposed to be free of the radically redistributive and tyrannical implications of attempting to ensure equalities of outcome.

Wittgenstein has often been criticized, and even dismissed, for being a patron of ordinary language, a champion of the vernacular, a defender of the status quo. One critic has written: ‘When Wittgenstein set up the actual use of language as a standard, that was equivalent to accepting a certain set up of culture and belief as a standard … It is lucky no such philosophy was thought of until recently or we should still be under the sway of witch doctors …’ In what follows I want to show just how wide of the mark criticisms of this sort are.

James McCosh considered his product of ‘a labor of love’, The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, From Hutcheson To Hamilton to fall within ‘what may be regarded as a new department of science, the history of thought’. The value of the book lies, therefore, in not just its outlines of works of philosophers of the period with the views afforded of the academic life most of them led; but its sense—albeit unsure—that ‘the Scottish school of philosophy’ (1) after its rise evolved into something less distinctive, more commonplace philosophically. McCosh could not admit that the school had declined. Noting the change, he barely hints at why it happened. The explanation, it will be argued, involves the central place assigned to belief in the doctrines of the school, so is of current interest given the undue prominence belief continues to be accorded by philosophers.

In 1973, the philosopher George Dickie proposed an ingenious new answer to the old question: what is art? Arthood, he suggested, is not an intrinsic property of objects, but a status conferred upon them by the institutions of the art world. He accordingly attached an exemplary significance to works like Duchamp's urinal, whose very lack of intrinsic distinction focuses our attention upon their institutional context. But his theory was about art in general, and not just readymades. ‘I am not claiming that Duchamp and his friends invented the conferring of the status of art; they simply used an existing institutional device in an unusual way.’

Virtue ethics (VE for short) is currently so widely embraced that different versions of the theory can now be distinguished. Some of these are mapped out in Statman's useful introduction to his collection. There are enough of these versions to constitute a family, and consequently what they share is a family resemblance rather than agreement to a defining set of necessary and sufficient conditions. What I propose to do, therefore, is to criticise one of the main versions of VE. Rosalind Hursthouse is the main proponent of the version which I will criticise. I choose her as a spokesperson, not because her version of VE is especially weak. On the contrary, it is because she is one of the leading protagonists of VE, and because her writings provide a lucid, powerful and elegant exposition of VE that her version of the theory is an appropriate object of scrutiny.

It has been a commonplace, embodied in philosophy curricula the world over, to think of Descartes' philosophy as he seems to present it: as a radical break with the past, as inaugurating a new philosophical problematic centred on epistemology and on a radical dualism of mind and body. In several ways, however, recent scholarship has undermined the simplicity of this picture. It has, for example, shown the considerable degree of literary artifice in Descartes' central works, and thereby brought out the deceptive character of his self-presentation there. In particular, it has revealed the extent of his debts to the Neoplatonist tradition, particularly to Augustine, and of his engagement with the Scholastic commentators of his day. My aim in this paper is to push this interpretative tendency a step further, by bringing out Descartes' indebtedness to Plato. I begin by offering some reminders of the broadly Platonic nature of Cartesian dualism. I then argue that he provides clues sufficient for—and designed to encourage—reading the Meditations on First Philosophy in the light of distinctively Platonic doctrines, and in particular, as a rewriting of the Platonic allegory of the cave for modern times. It will further be argued that some puzzles about the Discourse on the Method can be resolved by recognizing that Descartes there presents himself as a Socratic enquirer after truth. I conclude by drawing attention to some practical benefits that flow from recognizing these linkages.

In his autobiography, Mein Leben, Wagner tells us that it was partly his reading of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), and the need to give ‘rapturous expression’ to the ‘frame of mind produced’ by that reading, that gave him the initial conception of Tristan and Isolde.

This paper is not about truth but about consistency. Pointing to inconsistency would be a dry worthless exercise were there not people who are inconsistent in the specific way described and for whom such inconsistency matters. There are those who tell us that life has no value and is pointless, that it is ‘absurd’, and yet that it matters how we live our lives; in particular that we ought to square up to the truth that life has no value and is pointless. Philosophy and art, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have often seen this view in the ascendant when they get onto the issue of ‘the meaning of life’.