Here are some kinds of reasons for taking an action to have been morally right.

(1) It was done out of a good intention or a pure good will on the part of the agent, or was owed to a virtue of hers.

(2) It issued from the agent's moral perception or intuition with respect to a situation, not from the application of a general principle or from calculation of the consequences of possible actions.

(3) Although it would give rise to distress or worse, the action was one of integrity, autonomy, or self-concern, perhaps in accord with the agent's aversion to killing by her own hand, or true to her life-hope to achieve a success on her own.

In order to by-pass immaterial historical bickering I shall stipulatively mean by ‘Radical Millianism’ just this much more than what Katz in his recent article in The Philosophical Review, ‘Names without Bearers’ (for short, NWB), means by the unqualified term, ‘Millianism’; namely, whereas Katz means by ‘Millianism’ that theory of proper names (proper nouns) which holds that proper names (nouns) ‘have no linguistic meaning,’

If one thinks of intentions as entities of some sort, states or dispositions, for example, it should eventually strike him that there are peculiar difficulties with the idea. For example, he will have trouble counting his intentions. In a particular situation, we ask someone, ‘What are you going to do about that? And this?’ And his answer might be, ‘My intention is to pay that, and, as for this, my intention is to ignore it.’ But of course he may have said, ‘My intention is to pay this and ignore that.’ For this reason and, as we will see, others, there is no such thing as a complete list of intentions that a person has. If someone told us, ‘I have just eight intentions at present’, we would think he was joking, even though he intends to do eight things—grade papers, meet a class at nine, and so on. And if we ask; ‘What are you going to do today?’, he may answer that he has a class at nine, office hours at two, and lunch already scheduled. But even though he has more to do today than yesterday, he would hardly tell us, ‘I am afraid I have more intentions today than I did yesterday.’

My ultimate concern is with how it can be that the past, and in particular my past, matters, in broadly non-causal ways, to the present, and in particular my present. How can it matter to me to have done things, and to remember having done them? However, I take some time to get to this concern, for I believe it should not be there at all, or at any rate take the form it does. So this needs explaining first.

Recently the attempt has been made to demonstrate Heidegger's relevance to the concerns of analytic philosophers. A focus for this effort has been the criticism in his early work of Cartesian ontology. While a number of important works have mapped out this area of Heidegger's thought, a crucial task has not been carried out, namely that of assessing how Heidegger can accommodate those phenomena which motivate the Cartesian to adopt his highly counter-intuitive ontology. As long as we fail to examine how Heidegger's early ontology copes with the possibilities of error and of hallucination, the suspicion will remain that Heidegger is simply insensitive to those phenomena on which the Cartesian focuses. Neither Heidegger nor the Cartesian have been done any favours by commentators showing little inclination to bring the opponents into closer combat. This paper attempts to correct that omission.

John Wisdom studied ‘moral sciences’ in Cambridge under G. E. Moore and C. D. Broad. His first post as a teacher of philosophy was at St Andrew's University under F. G. Stout (1929-34). His early books Interpretation and Analysis (1931) and Problems of Mind and Matter (1934) and a series of articles on ‘Logical Constructions’ in Mind 1931-33, later published as a book (1969), belong to this time.