There are, it seems, 30 or more philosophical societies in Britain. Some, such as the Aristotelian Society or the Mind Association, are mostly for professional philosophers, but of all stripes. Others, such as the Royal Institute of Philosophy, are for anyone interested in philosophy, whether professional or, in the best sense, amateur—that is, not paid for their philosophy. Then there are those smaller, but by no means unworthy bodies, which cater for interest in some special branch of philosophy, such as phenomenology or philosophy of religion or of science. There are societies for European philosophy, for the history of philosophy, for applied philosophy, for women in philosophy, and for much else besides.

If not exactly chaos, it all testifies to a real and possibly fruitful diversity in the British philosophical world. But in the last year or so, leading figures in many of the societies have been meeting to discuss forming an umbrella organization to encompass the whole lot. Whether this umbrella is to provide shelter for philosophers from squalls raining down on us from above, or whether it is for some other purpose, is not entirely clear.

That there are squalls, at least for those teaching the subject in universities and elsewhere is clear. Teachers everywhere, from universities to primary schools, suffer from a deluge of managerial irrelevance, much of it apparently predicated on the latest managerial nostrum. According to the Government's own guru of ‘delivery’, managers no longer need to ‘win hearts and minds’, but should rather push through short term measures for long term gains, come what may. We have little idea what this means, but it sounds unpleasant. There may well be a case for an Association to speak with one voice on behalf of a profession which needs a degree of freedom from management in which to teach and to think, and which is increasingly called on to respond as a profession to managerial initiatives.

But not, we would hope, to speak with one voice on anything else. A one voice philosophy is a contradiction in terms, even were there only one philosopher. Nor does philosophy need a slate of people to speak to the media and the general public. It would be too much like a list of officially licensed authorities where there should be no authority. And it will not work anyway. Good producers and editors will continue to consult the philosophers they know and like, just as they always have.

Here are two widespread responses to Kant's categorical imperative. On one hand, one might note the absence of detailed rational derivation. On the other hand, even someone who maintains some skepticism is likely to have a sense that (nevertheless) there is something to Kant's central ideas.

The recommended solution is analysis of elements of the categorical imperative. Their appeal turns out to have different sources. One aspect of the first formulation rests on the logic of normative utterances. But others can be justified only in terms of their contributions to desirable functionings of a moral order.

In an influential paper, Peter Singer claims that affluent people have a strong obligation to relieve famine. If they fail, they allow others to die, and makes them murderers. In responding to this outrageous claim, which has given uneasy conscience to many, I show that Singer is engaged in indefensible moralizing that substitutes bullying for reasoned argument and gives a bad name to morality.

A significant ontological commitment is required to sustain metaphysical realism—the view that there is a single, objective way the world is—in order to defend it from common sense objections. This involves presupposing the existence of properties (or tropes, or universals) and relations between them which define the objective structure of the world. This paper explores the grounds for accepting this ontological assumption and examines a sceptical argument which questions whether, having assumed the world is objectively divided into fundamental properties, we could ever know which properties these are. It then assesses the responses available to the metaphysical realist, arguing that the sceptical difficulty cannot merely be dismissed by means of another assumption in the manner of radical scepticism, as David Lewis suggests, but that the sceptic's argument might be defused by the non-question-begging success of some form of strong scientific realism which links the predicates of our scientific theories directly to the fundamental properties the world contains. It remains unclear however whether this widely accepted metaphysical theory can find principled philosophical support.

The argument is currently made that hunting seriously compromises the welfare of the hunted animal, in a way that is morally unacceptable. The paper presents a theory of animal minds, and a theory of our duties of care towards members of other species. It goes on to examine what is meant by compromising welfare, discusses the crucial concept of stress as this concept features in animal welfare science, and explores the conditions under which stress becomes distress. The argument moves towards the conclusion that there are conditions under which distress inflicted by a human being is morally unacceptable, but that these conditions are not met by the normal methods of hunting with hounds, even though they are frequently met by shooting and trapping.

Modern virtue ethics is commonly presented as an alternative to Kantian and utilitarian views—to ethics focused on action and obligations—and it invokes Aristotle as a predecessor. This paper argues that the Nichomachean Ethics does not represent virtue ethics thus conceived, because the discussion of the virtues of character there serves a quasi-Platonic psychology: it is an account of how to tame the unruly (non-rational) elements of the human soul so that they can be ruled by reason and the laws it imposes. This is explicitly stated in Book X, where it is also affirmed that the question of which laws reason should impose is addressed in The Politics. The Ethics and Politics can therefore be seen as a unity—as Aristotle's version of Plato's Republic—and it is the failure to recognize this that explains Aristotle's misappropriation by the modern virtue ethicists.

There is a class of speech-acts employing expressions such as ‘can't, ‘must’, and ‘meant to’, which have a paradigm role in stating the rules that govern a practice. Elizabeth Anscombe called such expressions stopping (or forcing) modals. Although “You can't phi”, etc., are not implicit hypothetical imperatives, it nevertheless makes prima facie sense to ask of a given practice why we go in for it, what the point of it is. Various questions are discussed in connection with these facts, e.g. What distinguishes a rule's applying to someone from its having force (for that person)? Where the practice at issue is a ‘language-game’, does the question “Why do we do this?” still makes sense?

The winning entry in David Stove's Competition to Find the Worst Argument in the World was: “We can know things only as they are related to us/insofar as they fall under our conceptual schemes, etc., so, we cannot know things as they are in themselves.” That argument underpins many recent relativisms, including postmodernism, post-Kuhnian sociological philosophy of science, cultural relativism, sociobiological versions of ethical relativism, and so on. All such arguments have the same form as ‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’, and are equally invalid.