The latest in psychotherapy appears to be philosophical counselling. Is this on the principle that where nothing can be shown to work, anything is as good as anything else? Reading Plato might also have incidental advantages not available to those who are treated with pills, behavioural therapy or non-directive counselling. (As well as curing you, it might make you think.) Or is it that psychotherapists have rediscovered the classical ideal of philosophy as therapy? Can we expect a resurgence of the ancient Stoic virtues or of ataraxia or even of Spinozistic rationality among the psychologically afflicted?

Later philosophers have not always provided such positive precedents. Would it really be a good idea to give Kierkegaard to the obsessively religious, or Nietzsche to the paranoid, or the early Wittgenstein to those who have difficulty in coping with everyday normality? Nor is it easy to see how Sartre would help couples sort out their relationships, or Russell someone pathologically insensitive to the feelings of others.

On reflection, it might be better to keep the pills after all.

Ruth Anna Putnam

Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College, Editor of The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge University Press, 1977), and author of articles on James and ethical theory.

Richard Gaskin

His main areas of research are metaphysics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. He has published on the nature of predication and reference, the problem of future contingency, the scope of divine power and knowledge, fiction and truth, and Wittgenstein.

Iddo Landau

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Israel. His article ‘What's Old in Derrida?‘ was published in Philosophy in July 1994.

Dale Jacquette

Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Philosophy of Mind, Meinongian Logic: The Semantics of Existence and Nonexistence, and Wittgenstein's Thought in Transition. His articles ‘Buridan's Bridge’ and ‘A Turing Test Conversation’ were published in Philosophy in 1991 and 1993.

P. M. S. Hacker

Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. His most recent books are Gravure and Grace: the engravings of Roger Vieillard (1993), Wittgenstein: Mind and Will (1966), and Wittgenstein's Place in the Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (1966).

Francisco Vergara

Research Fellow at GRESE (Group de Recherches Epistemologiques et Socio-Economiques) at Paris I University, Panthéon-Sorbonne and also author of Introduction aux fondements philosophiques du libéralisme (éditions La découverte, Paris, 1992), a book on classical liberalism which has been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.

Michael Durrant

Reader in Philosophy, University of Wales, Cardiff. He has published articles on ancient philosophy, philosophical logic, epistemology and the philosophy of religion.

Paul Edwards

Professor of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Brooklyn College, Emeritus.

In a memorable passage near the beginning of ‘The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life,’ William James asks us to imagine a world in which all our dearest social utopias are realized, and then to imagine that this world is offered to us at the price of one lost soul at the farthest edge of the universe suffering eternal, intense, lonely pain. Then he asks, ‘what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’

I find this passage enormously interesting for a variety of reasons. We would have an impulse to grasp the utopian world, and that impulse is not inexplicable: we would be happier in such a world than we are now. The impulse is even morally defensible: James tells us later in the essay that, ‘[t]here is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest universe of good that we can see.’ (ibid., p. 158) Moreover, he acknowledges that our best ideals cannot be realized in this poor world without trampling some other ideals under foot. The realization of the values of good and sensitive people entails the frustration of the desires and goals of cruel and brutal people. Worse, institutions that are on the whole beneficial will have innocent victims; James mentions monogamous marriage as an example of such an institution. In a functioning democracy, these are frustrations that everyone must take in stride sometimes. So, should we then not grasp that utopia, that world without unemployment, without homelessness, where everyone has access to medical care, where racism and other forms of prejudice and oppression are known only from the history books, etc., etc.? Those commentators who read James as a kind of Utilitarian, must surely believe that James would advocate our grasping that ideal, that he would speak not merely of an impulse to clutch that happiness but of an obligation. But James is not a Utilitarian, and the passage under discussion occurs when James wants to distance himself from the Utilitarians. We have, he says, a capacity for quite specific emotions, capacities that cannot be explained in any simple way as the result of evolutionary selection for the survival of either the individual or the species. He does not mean the capacity for sympathy, though that too would come into play here. Sympathy enables us to vividly imagine the suffering of the lost tortured soul, to feel for it and, indeed, with it. But James means something else; he means a revulsion, an apprehension that to do a certain thing would be ‘hideous.’ To do what? To opt for the utopia? That is not what he says. To enjoy the utopia? Again, that is not what he says. There is nothing wrong with opting for or enjoying utopia if it can be had at no cost, or at a cost clearly bearable by those who are obliged to bear it, or if one is non-culpably ignorant of the price. What is hideous is ‘enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’

The problem of the unity of the sentence is to explain how a sentence manages to say something, to ‘make a move in the language-game’. In the particular case of the declarative sentence, which is characterized essentially by its ability to say something true or false (cf. Aristotle De Int. ch. 4), the challenge is to explain how the sentence as a whole manages to attract this property, given that its components do not have it. In his book Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Thought, Nicholas Denyer implicitly commits himself to two conflicting accounts of what this unity consists in. The conflict is illuminating because it can be seen as giving expression to two attractive but apparently opposed thoughts on the nature of the sentence: the thought that all significant components of a sentence must have reference, or semantic role (a position which in the writings of Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett is truistic), and the thought that the semantically significant components of the sentence cannot all be names, since then the sentence would lose its peculiar unity — its ability to say something (true or false) — and degenerate into a mere list. In this paper I shall try, using Denyer's text as my point of departure, to resolve the conflict by suggesting how a unified sentence can, after all, be composed of names.

The first account which Denyer gives of the unity of the sentence is not offered as such, but it emerges from his discussion of the differences between three primitive kinds of language, which he calls Agglomerative (A), Orthographic (O) and Sentential (S). The three languages have in common that their basic ‘sentences’ all consist of linear strings of unambiguous names of primary elements, themselves arranged linearly. Thereafter they diverge in the following respects. In A and O, these basic ‘sentences’ are, according to Denyer, only by courtesy so called, for they are really complex names; but whereas in A the order in which the names are listed is insignificant, in O it is significant. Thus ‘ab’, for example, would in A merely designate a complex object composed of the simple objects designated by ‘a’ and ‘b’, and is not semantically distinguishable from ‘ba’; in O, on the other hand, these two composite names additionally signify two different ways in which the complex consisting of a and b may be composed, for example, that a is to the left of b, and that b is to the left of a, respectively. In S, by contrast with both A and O, the basic ‘sentences’ are said to be genuine sentences: they are not merely lists of names, but are suitable for the making of assertions. In S, a symbol such as ‘ab’ says that (for example) a is to the left of b.

Francis Bacon has received much attention from feminist philosophers of science. Many of their discussions revolve around his use of sexist, or supposedly sexist, metaphors. According to Sandra Harding, for example, ‘Bacon appealed to rape metaphors to persuade his audience that the experimental method is a good thing.’ Moreover, she claims that ‘when we realize that the mechanistic metaphors that organized early modern science themselves carried sexual meanings, it is clear that these meanings are central to the ways scientists conceptualize both the methods of inquiry and the models of nature’ (ibid.). Carolyn Merchant asserts that witch trials ‘influenced Bacon's philosophy and literary style’. And according to Evelyn Fox Keller, Bacon's explanation of the means by which science will endow humans with power ‘is given metaphorically — through his frequent and graphic use of sexual imagery.’ Fox Keller concludes that Bacon's theory is sexist, but in a more troubled and ambivalent way than Merchant and Harding believe it to be. Thus, she writes that ‘behind the overt insistence on the virility and masculinity of the scientific mind lies a covert assumption and acknowledgment of the dialectical, even hermaphroditic, nature of the “marriage between Mind and Nature.”‘ (p. 40; emphasis added). Likewise, ‘the aggressively male stance of Bacon's scientist could, and perhaps now should, be seen as driven by the need to deny what all scientists, including Bacon, privately have known, namely, that the scientific mind must be, on some level, a hermaphroditic mind.’ (p. 42).

1. What's in a Name?

Can philosophy of language do without the concept of intentionality? To approach this important question it may be useful to begin with the minimal explanatory requirements for a theory of reference that tries to explain the naming of objects as the simplest linguistic act. The limitations of trying to understand meaning without intentionality are therefore best illustrated by considering what is generally acknowledged to be the most thorough-going attempt to dispense altogether with intentional concepts in Frege's reputedly purely extensionalist semantics of proper names. I shall argue that despite his avowed anti-psychologism, Frege paradoxically needs to include psychological elements alongside his famous distinction between sense and reference in order to preserve the universal intersubstitutability of singular referring expressions salva veritate as an adequate extensional criterion of coreferentiality. In so doing, a revisionary Fregean semantics introduces the first instalment of intentionality at the foundations of naming, by which intentionality pervades the philosophy of language.

1. Belief and mental states

Davidson holds that intentional verbs occurring in the form ‘A Vs that p’ signify propositional attitudes. These are, he claims, (i) mental states (MS 160; KOM passim), and (ii) dispositions (FPA 103). Davidson does not conceive of himself as introducing a special technical sense of the common intentional verbs. He insists that ‘the mental states in question are beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on, as ordinarily conceived' (KOM 51f.). Consequently he contends that believing that p is a mental state, disposition or dispositional state. These ontological claims about the nature of belief inform his account of the logical form of belief sentences. I shall address the question of whether believing that p can justly be deemed a mental state, a disposition or dispositional state. Subsequently I shall examine Davidson's account of the logical form of belief sentences.

Our concept of a mental state, like so many of the concepts which philosophers treat as categorial, is none too sharply defined. It has a respectable use, which can be described. But, like other such general psychological terms, e.g. ‘mental process’, ‘mental activity’, far from being the ‘hardest of the hard’ - a sharply circumscribed categorial term akin to a variable in a well-constructed formal system — it has blurred boundaries and is elastic. Like all our ordinary psychological concepts, it evolved in order to meet everyday needs. As Wittgenstein observed, ‘The concepts of psychology are just everyday concepts. They are not concepts newly fashioned by science for its own purposes, as are the concepts of physics and chemistry.’

Although our ordinary concepts can be replaced by technical ones for specialized purposes, they cannot be abused without generating conceptual confusion and incoherence. If the expression ‘mental state’ is being employed in its ordinary sense, then it is wrong to hold that believing that p is to be in any mental state. If it is being employed in a special technical sense, then those who employ it thus owe us an account of what it means and how it is to be used. This Davidson and the many other philosophers who subscribe to the view that believing is a mental state have not done. Until such an account is forthcoming, one may presume that they think of themselves as deploying our ordinary concept of a mental state. And if so, I shall argue, they are misusing it.

The prestigious French publisher Presses Universitaires de France has recently brought out (November 1995) a new French edition of Elie Halévy's well known book The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, first published in France in three volumes as La formation du radicalisme philosophique (1901–1904) and translated into English in 1926. The prevailing opinion on this book is that it gives an excellent account of English utilitarianism. Thus, in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Talcott Parsons speaks of it as the ‘virtually definitive analysis of utilitarianism’ More recently Donald Winch, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, describes Halévy's book as: ‘Still the best study of the ideas and activities of the school taken as a whole’.

In this short essay I express a very different opinion. I show that Halévy, who qualifies utilitarianism (with obvious disgust) as ‘a plebeian or rather bourgeois morality’, as ‘much too simple’, completely misunderstood the writings of the English and Scottish utilitarian philosophers.

Halévy's understanding of Utilitarianism and the Principle of Utility

There is no clear or precise definition of utilitarianism in Halévy's book, but he obviously understood it to be a descriptive theory, and took the ‘principle of utility’ for a psychological law explaining human behaviour: ‘the fundamental principle of the doctrine is that pleasure is the natural end of human actions’, ‘The principle of utility [...] meant that all men naturally incline towards pleasure and flee from pain’.

Quine may be taken to use the phrase ‘Plato's Beard’ to denote a solution to the following problem: How is it possible to speak of that which does not exist, of non-being or as Read has it, to denote a solution to the problem: ‘How can a sentence with empty names have meaning?’.

Quine writes:

Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.

To expand. If nonbeing in no sense is, then we cannot ever assert that it is not; yet if it in some sense is, then how can it remain nonbeing? Let us fill out with an example (coined from Quine). If Pegasus in no sense exists, then how can we ever assert that Pegasus does not exist?—yet we may clearly want to assert that Pegasus does not exist and affirm the proposition that it is false that Pegasus exists. If, on the other hand, Pegasus in some sense exists, how may we affirm that he does not? We shall be contradicting ourselves or be guilty of equivocation.

The Macmillan Reference Company and Prentice Hall International recently released a volume entitled ‘Supplement of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy’. As the editor-in-chief of the original eight-volume Encyclopedia I wish to explain why I must disassociate from this Supplement.

The Supplement does contain many valuable articles by recognized philosophers, but it violates the spirit of the original work in one important respect. An article in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy accurately describes the Encyclopedia as a ‘massive Enlightenment work’ and similar descriptions were offered in a front-page review in the Times Literary Supplement of London (September 14, 1967) by Anthony (now Lord) Quinton. My associates and I edited the Encyclopedia in the spirit of Voltaire and Diderot, of Hume and Bertrand Russell. We tried to be fair to religious and metaphysical philosophers, but a good deal of space was devoted to radical thinkers and movements that had been frequently neglected or mishandled in earlier reference works. Furthermore, philosophers whom we regarded as obscurantists, while their ideas were never misrepresented, received the kind of critical treatment we thought appropriate. This spirit has not been preserved in the Supplement. There are some interesting and balanced articles on religious topics, but the highly significant biological research, reported in the writings of Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, which undermines one major form of the design argument, is not even mentioned. The ‘big bang’ is briefly mentioned (p. 143), but there is no reference to the work of Adolf Grünbaum, Steven Weinberg and other scientists and philosophers showing that neither the big bang nor any other cosmological theory of modern physics support a First Cause. More seriously, a number of contemporary writers, mostly German and French, who are regarded with suspicion if not outright contempt by most analytic philosophers are given extensive and even enthusiastic coverage. In alphabetical order they are Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur (five articles on Ricoeur). It may be argued that, whatever the defect of their work, these figures have achieved such prominence that articles about them are warranted. Perhaps so, but what we get are totally uncritical pieces.

A few years ago a posthumous collection of essays by F. R. Leavis appeared with the title The Critic as Anti-Philosopher. The idea seemed to be that because in his approach to literature Leavis rejected theory and the deduction of conclusions from principles, there was something un- or anti-philosophical about him. If so, Edmund Burke is also an anti-philosopher.

It would, though, be a shame if it was thought that, as a result, Burke's works are unworthy of philosophical attention, particularly these days when what is called particularism is an emerging trend in ethics and politics. Jim McCue's Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (Claridge Press, 1997), nicely coinciding with the bi-centenary of Burke's death, might be a good place to start a philosophical exhumation of Burke's political thought.

Not everyone will agree with McCue's judgements related to our present discontents or even with his extrapolation to them of Burkean themes. Nonetheless, there is plenty of philosophical meat in what he draws out of Burke. How, for example, is it possible for Burke consistently to oppose the French Revolution, while having argued strongly in favour of the American Revolution (and incidentally against Warren Hastings' adventures in India)? Was Burke not just an opportunist, a career Whig who jumped ship at an opportune moment, and thereby securing for himself a posthumous reputation as a seminal Tory thinker? McCue convincingly shows that on the key issue of sovereignty, Burke's apparent shifting of position conceals a deeper consistency. Burke's underlying insight is that in matters of sovereignty the consent of the governed is far more important than democracy in any formal sense or, indeed, any abstract notion of authority, such as the divine right of kings. In working out this thought in an actual case far more weight would be accorded local facts, manners and attitudes than abstract principle. The danger with constitutional arrangements based on abstractions, however good they sound to philosophical analysis, is that by wiping away the very traditions and balances which have in practice restrained rulers and executives they will be ‘powerful to usurp, impotent to restore’.

Against their professed aims top-down constitutions are likely to be ‘strong only to destroy the rights of men’, by, for example, handing power over to an elected but unrepresentative assembly or, even worse, to an unelected and unrepresentative bureaucracy. Burke would clearly have hated the European Commission. He would have defended the hereditary principle in the House of Lords (because of what it does, not because of any abstract justification). What, though, would he have said of Scottish devolution, if, as we have to believe, the Scots just do not want to be treated as a branch of a London-based executive? Is there any analogy here with the ‘habits of soreness, jealousy and distrust’ Burke discerned in the American colonists subjected to a Parliamentary tax they found both burdensome and unjustified?

Alanen, Lilli, Sara Heinämaa, and Thomas Wallgren. (Eds). Commonality and Particularity in Ethics. Macmillan. 1997. Pp. x and 493. £47.50. Allen, Prudence. The Concept of Woman. Second Edition. Eerdmans Publishing. 1997. Pp. xxiv and 583. £22.99 or $35. Almeder, Robert. Blind Realism. Rowman & Littlefield. 1997. Pp. xiii and 247. £41, £19.95. Anderson, Pamela Sue. A Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Blackwell. 1997. Pp. xvi and 287. £45, £13.99. Armitage, David. (Ed.) Bolingbroke: Political Writings. Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xliv and 305. £50, £16.95 or $64.95, $24.95. Bader, Veit. (Ed.) Citizenship and Exclusion. Macmillan. 1997. Pp. xi and 208. £42.50. Baron, Marcia W., Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote. (Eds). Three Methods of Ethics. Blackwell. 1997. Pp. vi and 285. No price given. Beaney, Michael. (Ed.) The Frege Reader. Blackwell. 1997. Pp. xv and 409. £14.95 or $21.95. Bélanger, André J. The Ethics of Catholicism and the Consecration of the Intellectual. Liverpool University Press. 1997. Pp. viii and 242. £25. Bencivenga, Ermanno. A Theory of Language and Mind. University of California Press. 1997. Pp. 103. £16.95 or $22. Bencivenga, Ermanno. Freedom: A Dialogue. Hackett. 1997. Pp. viii and 107. £29.95, £9.95. Berger, Harry Jr., (Introduction by Peter Erickson, Ed.) Making Trifles of Terrors. Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xxxviii and 487. £40, £14.95 or $59.50, $19.95. Bloor, David. Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions. Routledge. 1997. Pp. xvi and 173. £40. Boas, George. Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages. Johns Hopkins University Press. 1997. Pp. xii and 227. No price given. Bolotin, David. An Approach to Aristotle's Physics. State University of New York Press. 1997. Pp. vii and 156. $14.95. Boucher, David. (Ed.) The British Empiricists. Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xlvi and 304. £45, £15.95 or $64.95, $24.95. Brook, Andrew. Kant and the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xii and 327. £45, £14.95 or $74.95, $18.95. Bunzl, Martin. Real History. Routledge. 1997. Pp. viii and 152. No price given.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Bursaries

The Royal Institute of Philosophy proposes to make available annually four bursaries of £1,000 each, to be awarded to students who are already on courses of postgraduate study (e.g. MA, MPhil, PhD, DPhil, BPhil) in British Universities.

The aim of the scheme is to assist students of promise and of proven postgraduate ability to continue or complete their courses of study or dissertations. Each Bursary will last for one year and will not be renewable, although successful candidates from one year will be able to re-apply for a second bursary in a succeeding year (to a maximum of two bursaries in toto).

In order to apply, a candidate must submit a CV, a 1-2 page account of his or her future research and/or programme of study and the names of two academic referees from the institution at which he or she is currently studying. At the end of their tenure of a bursary, successful candidates will be expected to make a report to the Royal Institute of Philosophy on their academic progress.

Candidates will not normally be called for interview. In making the awards, the Royal Institute of Philosophy will attempt to select one candidate annually from each of the following subdivisions of philosophy:

1. Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science

2. Philosophical Logic, Philosophies of Mind and Language

3. Moral and Political Philosophy

4. Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion, Law and History

(These areas may be treated by reference to the History of Philosophy).

The bursaries will run from the beginning to the end of the academic year and will begin in September 1998. Those who wish to apply for the 1998-99 awards should submit their applications by 1 May, 1998 to the Secretary, Royal Institute of Philosophy, 14, Gordon Square, London WC1H 0AG. Those applying will be notified of the decision of the Royal Institute of Philosophy in July, 1998.