Editorial: The Millennium and Philosophy

What is there to celebrate at the millennium? Or, to put it differently, what if we were celebrating the millennium would it be that we were celebrating? Of course, the millennium might be just an even more than usually lavish and excessive Christmas, Christmas itself having been largely emptied of any meaning, religious or secular, and little more than a pretext for lavishness and excess.

But like Christmas, the millennium is rooted in the events, mythical and historical, surrounding the founding of Christianity. And Christianity is a religion of the Book and of revelation. In the Christian scheme of things, value derives from the Book and from revelation. And as Christianity's followers and some of its critics understood, the values promulgated in Christianity may not be easy to sustain once the Book and the revelation are forgotten.

Over the Christian millennia, philosophy has played its part in upholding Book and revelation, and also, more recently, in undermining them. The latter has come to be seen as philosophy's more characteristic role, implying that Book and revelation sit uneasily with autonomous reason. But is this so, and if so, what follows for the values originally promulgated in Christianity and which many of us still accept? Hardly original questions, but ones with genuinely millennial significance.

Our world seems fine tuned in life-permitting ways. If the cosmos contains many universes, only the appropriately tuned ones can be seen by living beings. An alternative is that God acted as Fine Tuner. We might account for God in terms of an eternally powerful ethical requirement that God exists, rejecting J. L. Mackie's judgment that absolute ethical requirements are incredibly queer. Mackie viewed such requirements as logically possible, so if they were absent then this would seem a matter of synthetic necessity. Again, if they existed then their creative effectiveness would, Mackie thought, be logically possible. Their actual ineffectiveness would thus involve a further synthetic necessity. Theists could maintain that the synthetic necessities were instead ones making ethical requirements real and creatively powerful. Yet why, then, would there exist anything but divine knowledge of everything worth knowing? A spinozistic answer is that such knowledge is all that exists.

Mill's considered conception of happiness is as much stoic as hedonistic, actually more so, despite what he says in a number of places in Utilitarianism, and his considered conception of the workings of the principle of utility is pragmatic, in a sense developed years later by John Dewey. In this conception, it is a working principle, not for testing the rightness or wrongness of actions from the point of view of an uninvolved spectator, but for bringing about the sweeping changes in society that it actually requires. Mill's Utilitarianism is often cluttered up with attempts to defend the version of hedonistic utilitarianism he inherited from his father and Bentham. But it is not important whether Mill is consistent with traditional hedonism. He has much to say that is true and enlightening—this is what is important.

An important part of the mind–brain problem arises because consciousness seems inherently resistant to scientific explanation. The solution to this dilemma is to recognize, first, that scientific explanation can only render comprehensible a selected aspect of what there is, and second, that there is a mode of explanation, the personalistic, different from, irreducible to, but as viable as, scientific explanation, in terms of which consciousness can be understood. The problem of explaining why experiential or mental aspects of brain processes or things should be correlated with certain physical processes or things is a non-problem because there is no kind of explanation possible in terms of which an explanation could be couched. A physical theory, amplified to include the experiential, might be predictive but would, necessarily, cease to be explanatory; and an amplified personalistic explanation could not succeed either. There is, in short, an explanation as to why there cannot be an explanation of correlations between physical and mental aspects of processes going on inside our heads. Despite this, there are important, as yet unsolved but solvable problems of knowledge and understanding concerning such correlations. The central serious task for research is to discover how the two explanatory accounts of what goes on inside our heads, physical and personal, are inter-related.

Plausibly perceptual knowledge satisfies the following: (1) It is knowledge about things from the way they appear. (2) It can embrace more than the way things appear. (3) It is phenomenologically immediate and thus, in one sense, non-inferential. (2) and (3) place a significant constraint on adequate elucidations of (1). Knowledge about an object, from the way it looks, which embraces more than the way it looks, should not turn out to be inferential in the relevant sense. The paper shows how this constraint can be met, drawing upon a conception of a discriminative capacity. The discussion touches on literature dealing with observation in science, knowledge of other minds, and the possibility of moral knowledge.

How do people learn names for kinds of sensations? Wittgenstein identifies two possibilities. 1. Direct acquaintance: A person feels a sensation, notes its intrinsic character, and sets about to use the word thereafter for this sensation. 2. Outward signs: A person pins his use of the word to the sensation's outward signs. Wittgenstein rejects 1 and endorses 2. He thinks a sensation name can be learned only if people pin their use of the word to outward signs. I identify a third procedure and show we name many sensations and other kinds of mental states this way.

This paper considers on what basis justice may require that people be treated as equals. It begins with an examination of the argument that people are to be treated as equals because they are equals, and suggests reasons for thinking that such an argument is unlikely to succeed. The remainder of the paper considers, and tries to make plausible, the argument that justice requires people be treated as equals because they are individuals. Thus the paper offers some support for the view that the proper foundation of egalitarianism is individualism.

In his recent ‘A Prolegomenon to an Identity Theory of Truth’ (Vol. 74, 1999) Stewart Candlish discusses the so called identity theory of truth. His aim in the article is to clear away initial difficulties that apparently stand in the way of developing the budding theory. There is one difficulty, however, that, by Candlish's lights, cannot be overcome—at least not easily. My aim in this paper is to help the identity theory by showing that, pace Candlish, the given difficulty is merely apparent. I do not ‘solve’ the alleged problem; I dissolve it. Dissolution, however, is solution enough.