When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States, his laughter tinkled among the teacups. When Professor Ryle published Plato's Progress, his paradoxes clattered through the china shops (ὠ τς καινότητος. Ἡράκλεις τς παραδοξολογίας. Ẻυμήχανος ἄνθρωπος).

My Purpose is twofold: first, to interpret Rousseau's The Social Contract in terms of a serious interpretation of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality and second, to use as the principal interpretative concept for both, the concept of independence. One gets the impression in reading commentators that the Discourse on Inequality is not taken seriously in its own right but rather is treated as what it is, an essay which was suitable for submission as a prize essay, with the required clever rhetorical style, flashes of paradox and yet withal solemnly addressing itself to a virtually impossible question. However, if it is taken, in part, as Rousseau's social and psychological analysis of modern society, as an account of “men as they are” (The Social Contract, ed. Cranston, p.49), then it is not only worthy of serious study in itself, it also helps one to see that still puzzling book, The Social Contract, from a new perspective. Moreover, Rousseau's concept of independence is both interesting and helpful. What Rousseau means by “independence” may diner from what he means by “freedom”, but for most of this essay I shall draw from the latter a working definition of the former and thus shall mean by independence: (1) not being subject to or under the control of another person or persons, and (2) not being subject to or under the control of one's passions. The advantage of attending to the concept of independence is that it enables one to recognize that Rousseau is asserting three seemingly incompatible propositions: first, man is independent, second, no man is independent and in the given circumstances can be and, third, man must become dependent in order to become independent.

I shall show that there are two concepts of God in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, both of which conform to the main epistemo-logical tenets in his earlier writings. Firstly, Hume considers the notion of God as an explanatory cause, and rejects it; secondly, he considers the notion of God as the name of a private sentiment, and whilst not rejecting the notion, emphasises that it has no explanatory power.

That freedom involves a power (or right) to choose is a natural idea. But it requires a model of man which English philosophers have usually rejected. It requires an agent equipped with a will, who is faced with genuine alternatives and is, in some sense, autonomous. So it is rejected both by those, like Hobbes, who hold a strong version of determinism and by those, like Hume, who deny the existence of an autonomous self. The will, says Hobbes, is simply ‘the last appetite in deliberating’. A mind, says Hume, is ‘nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations’. The way is then apparently open for a denial that men ever act freely at all and so for a thoroughly deterministic basis for the social sciences. But this is not the usual conclusion. Hobbes and Hume both agree that there is no conflict between freedom and determinism, once ‘freeedom’ is properly understood. A man is free when he can get what he wants. As Hobbes puts it, ‘liberty is the absence of all impediments to action which are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent’. In other words freedom does not involve choice but consists instead in the power to satisfy desire.

Confidence or trust is obviously a sort of reliance or dependence. Confidence is related to fiducia, which in turn is related to fido and to the Greek peitho. The latter term implies persuasion or persuasiveness. If we follow, as we should, the nuances hidden in these terms, we may assume that confidence is a reliance stemming from persuasion or accompanied by it. Confidence may be related to a person, including oneself, and in this sense we speak of self-confidence; or it may be related to another person, either in the singular or in the plural, or even perhaps to the course of events at large, to history, to the cosmos, to God etc. It is in this sense that confidence is the opposite of or contradictory to fear. And Aristotle indeed placed the brave man between the two poles of fear and confidence. The man who exceeds in confidence is rash, and he who exceeds in fear and falls short in confidence is a coward.

A well-known paradox of strict verificationism is this one. Suppose we distinguish between evidence-statements and statements for the truth or falsity of which evidence statements are support, and suppose we could not come to know the non-evidential statements except by knowing the truth of the evidential ones. We must say: what we know is after all some set of evidential statements, and what we mean when we assert the non-evidential statement is after all a set of evidential statements. But the point of calling a set of evidential statements evidential is simply to draw the distinction between evidence and what it is evidence for. What was the initial contrast therefore, and how did we come to think of it as a contrast? If what I mean by S is what would normally be considered evidence for the truth of S, then it cannot be evidence for the truth of S.