Life poses a threat to materialism. To understand the phenomena of animate nature, we make use of a teleological form of explanation that is peculiar to biology, of explanations in terms of what I call the ‘vital categories’ – and this holds even for accounts of underlying physico-chemical ‘mechanisms’. The materialist claims that this teleological form of explanation does not capture what is metaphysically fundamental, whereas her preferred physical form of explanation does. In this essay, I do three things. (1) I argue that the ‘vital categories’, such as life form and life-process, do not reduce to the ‘physical categories’ and show that there are no grounds for the materialist's metaphysically limiting claim; (2) I sketch a positive view on how vital and physical explanations can both apply to a given phenomenon, and on how they interrelate; and (3) I show that this view meshes nicely with evolutionary theory, despite being committed to a form of ‘biological essentialism’.

The great variousness and plurality of goodness has given comfort to general scepticism about values and a multitude of metaethical attitudes or predilections. But is this variousness and plurality really the hotch-potch it has appeared? The paper recapitulates and expands von Wright's typology of the varieties of goodness and looks to explain the order or system that underlies the phenomena by developing and extending a conjecture of Aristotle's, the so-called ‘focal hypothesis’, and combining therewith a suggestion of von Wright's, to the effect that the central case of something good is the faring well of a being. By means of focal hypothesis, one may account fairly well for medical, technical, instrumental, beneficial and utilitarian goodness. Other varieties such as hedonic and ethical goodness complicate the picture, as also do all cases where it seems that an antecedent kind of goodness impinges upon a being. These complications mirror in part the finding that the human scale of values is not a scale exclusively of human values.

It is generally acknowledged that Hobbes's radical scepticism is intimately connected with his nominalism, and that his nominalism in turn rests upon the doctrine of meaning and truth set out in its best-known version in Chapters 4 and 5 of Leviathan.

It is characteristic of realists to separate ontology from epistemology and of idealists to mix the two things up. By ‘idealists’ here I am mainly referring to the British neo-Hegelians (‘objective idealists’) but the charge of mixing up ontology and epistemology can be made against at least one ‘subjective idealist’, namely Bishop Berkeley, as his wellknown dictum ‘esse ispercipi’ testifies. The objective idealists rejected the correspondence theory of truth and on the whole accepted a coherence theory. The qualification is needed here because H. H. Joachim, in The Nature of Truth, found the coherence theory unable to deal with the problem of error.

Moral theories which, like those of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, give a central place to the virtues, tend to assume that as traits of character the virtues are mutually compatible so that it is possible for one and the same person to possess them all. This assumption—let us call it the compatibility thesis—does not deny the existence of painful moral dilemmas: it allows that the virtues may conflict in particular situations when considerations associated with different virtues favour incompatible courses of action, but holds that these conflicts occur only at the level of individual actions. Thus while it may not always be possible to do both what would be just and what would be kind or to act both loyally and honestly, it is possible to be both a kind and a just person and to have both the virtue of loyalty and the virtue of honesty.

Does Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics give one consistent answer to the question what life is best or two (at least) mutually inconsistent answers? In the First Book (E.N. I) he says that we can agree to say that the best life is eudaimonia or eupraxia (well-being or well-doing) but must go on to say in what eudaimonia consists (1097b22–24). By considering the specific nature of man as a thinking animal he reaches a conclusion: eudaimonia, the human good (agathon), is the activity of soul (psuchē) in accordance with virtue (aretē), and if there are more than one virtue in accordance with the best and most complete (teleia), and (since one swallow does not make a summer) in a complete life (1098a16–20). Aristotle states that his formula is no more than a sketch or outline (perigraphē), but that a good sketch is important since, if the outline is right, anyone can articulate it and supply details. He seems to be thinking here not just of the rest of his own treatise but of the work of pupils and successors; he speaks, as at the end of the Topics, of progress in a science.

An Important distinction between statements of fact and statements of value is widely recognised. Some philosophers are now saying that the distinction has been treated as more determinate than it is, but most philosophers would agree that the distinction is definite and important. The major contributions to Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy of this century have set out to illuminate the nature of this distinction. Ethical statements have been thevalue statements mainly at issue, but on the whole the aim has not been to show wherein they differ from other value statements, but to show what distinguishes them in common with other value statements from factual statements. The characterisations of ethical statements which have become famous areones which if they apply to ethical statements at all apply equally to many(or all) other value statements as well.

There is a long-standing tradition in Western thought that sees religion as a bolster for morality. In its vaguest version, the idea is that religious belief provides a kind of social cement, fostering an ‘ethos’ in which traditional moral values are respected.1 Religious observances are thus often prized by the ethical conservative, who fears secularization as subversive of the moral and social fabric. Religion, at the very least, serves to keep people in line: as Descartes put it, ‘since in this life the rewards offered to vice are often greater than the rewards of virtue, few people would prefer what is right to what is expedient if they did not fear God or have the expectation of an after life’.2

Few stage plays have much to do with analytic philosophy: Tom Stoppard has written two of them—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Jumpers. The contrast between these, especially in how they involve philosophy, could hardly be greater. Rosencrantz does not parade its philosophical content; but the philosophy is there all the same, and it is solid, serious and functional. In contrast with this, the philosophy which is flaunted throughout Jumpers is thin and uninteresting, and it serves the play only in a decorative and marginal way. Its main effect has been to induce timidity in reviewers who could not see the relevance to the play of the large stretches of academic philosophy which it contains. Since the relevance doesn't exist, the timidity was misplaced, and so the kid gloves need not have been used. Without doubting that I would have enjoyed the work as performed on the London stage, aided by the talent of Michael Hordern and the charm of Diana Rigg, I don't doubt either that Jumpers is a poor effort which doesn't deserve its current success. I shan't argue for that, however. I want only to explain why Jumpers is not a significantly philosophical play, before turning to the more important and congenial task of showing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is one.

Music may be used to express emotion, to heighten a drama, to emphasize the meaning of a ceremony; but it is nevertheless an abstract art, with no power to represent the world. Representation, as I understand it, is a property that does not belong to music.

The subject of my lecture is an appropriate one for several reasons. The first is purely chronological. Hume's first and greatest work, the Treatise of Human Nature, was published in 1739, two hundred years ago. Its illustrious author was then quite unknown in the world, and as he tells us himself the book “fell dead-born from the press.” But by the end of the eighteenth century its reputation was securely established, and it has long been regarded as one of the masterpieces of European thought, and as the classical statement of the Empiricist Philosophy. It is true that, like other classics, it has had its ups and downs. During the Absolute Idealist period, which ended early in the present century, Hume was the great bogey-man, and the duty of all self-respecting philosophers was to refute him. In our own day things are different. Empiricism, despite many obituary notices, is very much alive again. And this time it is in close alliance with Natural Science, and has equipped itself with all the technique of modern Symbolic Logic; it is more vigorous in construction and more formidable in criticism than it has ever been before. Consequently Hume is no longer the bogey-man. People now read the Treatise not as an awful warning, but as a source of stimulus and illumination. Incidentally, we can now enjoy his admirable style without any qualms. It is no longer thought that if a philosopher writes in clear and entertaining English, what he writes must therefore be either superficial or false. We regard obscurity and turgidity as demerits, not as signs of profound thinking. Moreover, we have learned to appreciate the eighteenth century, of which Hume was one of the most characteristic products.

If someone abstains from meat-eating for reasons of taste or personal economics, no moral or philosophical question arises. But when a vegetarian attempts to persuade others that they, too, should adopt his diet, then what he says requires philosophical attention. While a vegetarian might argue in any number of ways, this essay will be concerned only with the argument for a vegetarian diet resting on a moral objection to the rearing and killing of animals for the human table. The vegetarian, in this laense, does not merely require us to change or justify our eating habits, but to reconsider our attitudes and behaviour towards members of other species across a wide range of practices.

There are many versions of naturalism. In contemporary Anglophone philosophy, the dominant versions are forms of scientific naturalism. After discussing three forms of scientific naturalism – eliminative, reductive, and nonreductive naturalism – I turn to the idea of nature that scientific naturalism presupposes, and I argue that the presupposed idea of nature is inadequate: It does not include everything in nature. I shall argue that all forms of naturalism – even so-called liberal naturalism, a nonscientific version – suffer from presupposed and unargued-for closure principles that limit the scope of reality. Finally, I'll briefly discuss my own view that I call ‘near-naturalism’.

Recently, Kit Fine's (1994) view that modal truths are true in virtue of, grounded in, or explained by essentialist truths has been under attack. In what follows we offer two responses to the wave of criticism against his view. While the first response is pretty straightforward, the second is based on the distinction between, what we call, Reductive Finean Essentialism and Non-Reductive Finean Essentialism. Engaging the work of Bob Hale on Non-Reductive Finean Essentialism, we aim to show that the arguments against Fine's view are unconvincing, while we acknowledge the presence of a deep standoff between the two views.

In some recent papers I have been arguing that the concept ‘good-for’ is prior to the concept of ‘good’ (in the sense in which final ends are good), and exploring the implications of that claim. One of those implications is that everything that is good is good for someone. That implication seems to fall afoul of our intuitions about certain cases, such as the intuition that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases, so that there is no one for whom the second world is better. Such cases tempt people to think that there must be impersonal goods, and that what it means to say that something is good for you is that you are the one who ‘has’ some impersonal good. In this paper, I argue that if we approach things in this way, it is impossible to say what the ‘having’ consists of, what relation it names. This leads me to a discussion of various things we do mean by saying that something is good for someone, how they are related to each other, and what sorts of entities can ‘have a good’. Finally, I explain why we think that a world full of happy people and animals is better than a world full of miserable ones, even if the people and animals are different in the two cases.

To translate is one thing; to say how we do it, is another. The practice is familiar enough, and there are familiar theories of it. But when we try to look more closely, theory tends to obscure rather than explain, and the familiar practice—an ancient practice, without which Western civilisation is unthinkable—appears to be just baffling, its very possibility a mystery.

I Propose to re-explore here some aspects of a very shop-worn question: ‘Was Hobbes in any sense an atheist?’ Three centuries ago, Hobbes's personal security in part depended on the way his contemporaries answered this question; today, the validity of several current accounts of his philosophy are similarly bound up with it. These accounts vary extraordinarily, all the way from Polin's confident assertion that ‘pour qui sait lire entre les lignes, … c'est ľatheísme qui triomphe implicitement’, to Taylor's equally firm belief that ‘a certain kind of theism is necessary to make [Hobbes's] theory work.’1 And now the latest of the Taylorians, Prof. Howard Warrender, has published his book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, in which Hobbes's statements regarding the place of God are again treated as an essential part of his theory; and the charge explicitly made, that there are no sound grounds for regarding them as ‘the product of confusion or pretence on Hobbes's part’.

There have in recent years been at least two important attempts to get to grips with Aristotle's conception of dialectic. I have in mind those by Martha C. Nussbaum in ‘Saving Aristotle's appearances’, which is chapter 8 of her The Fragility of Goodness, and by Terence H. Irwin in his important, though in my opinion somewhat misguided, book Aristotle's First Principles. There is a sense in which both of these writers are reacting to the work of G. E. L. Owen on cognate matters, particularly his well-known paper ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’. Owen himself was in part reacting to what I suppose is the traditional view of how Aristotle regarded dialectic, as revealed in Topics I. 1. On that view dialectic is for Aristotle a lesser way of proceeding than is demonstration, the method of science. For demonstration proceeds from premises which are accepted as true in themselves (that is to say that they are essentially and thus in some sense necessarily true) and moves from them to conclusions which follow necessarily from those premises; and the middle term of such a demonstrative syllogism then provides the ‘reason why’ for the truth of the conclusion. Dialectic proceeds from premises which are accepted on a lesser basis ‘by everyone or by the majority or by the wise, i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them’ (Topics I.1, 100b21–3), and proceeds deductively from them to further conclusions.

Some of the most interesting questions about Kant, and more particularly about his moral philosophy, arise when he is placed alongside the giants of antiquity. Where does he come together with Plato? Where with Aristotle? Where does he diverge from each?

He comes together with Plato in a shared conception of Ideas. When he first outlines how he is using the term ‘Idea’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, he insists that he is using it in none other than its original Platonic sense; and he explains away certain discrepancies with the comment:

It is by no means unusual… to find that we understand [an author] better than he has understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken… in opposition to his own intention.