This paper considers the sorts of evaluations that underlie the emotion of embarrassment, by questioning what unifies the various kinds of situations in which this emotion typically arises. It examines the difference between embarrassment and shame, and then addresses problems with the accounts of embarrassment proposed by previous authors, in particular Solomon, Taylor and Goffman. It proposes a new model, on which the emotion involves viewing an interpersonal situation, in which you are involved, as containing an exposure to which you are averse. This may either be your own exposure to others, or others' exposure to yourself. The emotion thus reflects the value we attach to placing limits on the sorts of interactions and contact we have with other people.

I consider the argument, thought to clinch the moral case for use of a human embryo solely as a means, that (i) only a human individual can be a person, (ii) because it can happen at any time before formation of the primitive streak that an embryo splits into monozygotic twins, no embryo in which the primitive streak has not formed is a human individual, and therefore (iii) no embryo in which the primitive streak has not formed is a person. I explore the following proffered arguments for (ii): (a) indivisibility is a necessary condition of individuality, (b) nonidentity of an embryo with successor twins impugns the embryo’s individuality, and (c) totipotency of an embryo’s constituents is inconsistent with the embryo’s being a human individual. These arguments are tested and found wanting; so too is an alternative to (a), the argument that indivisibility is intrinsic to personhood. Whereupon (ii) is unsustained. In search of ways to rehabilitate the nonindividuation argument, I canvass alternative metaphysical views and inquire further into biological individuality, but find that the argument cannot be saved. I conclude by analyzing where this leaves matters concerning the morality of embryo use.

It is accepted that first-person thoughts are immune to error through misidentification. I argue that there is also immunity to error through misascription, failure to recognise which has resulted in mistaken claims that first-person thoughts involving the self-ascription of bodily states are, at best, circumstantially immune to error through misidentification relative to ‘I’ and, at worst, subject to error. Central to my thesis is that, first, ‘I’ is immune to error through misidentification absolutely, and that if there is any problem with first-person thoughts this cannot be with the self-identification component, but only with the self-ascriptive component. Secondly, the ‘know who’, or ‘know what’, or ‘know which’ requirement is appropriately relevant to considerations of different self-ascriptive properties, and thus its inapproriateness in self-identification does not entail that ‘I’ may fail to refer and identify.

Despite the efforts of Bosanquet, Muirhead, Basch, and many others, it is still frequently stated or implied, in both popular and scholarly literature, that Hegel (a) constructed his philosophy of the State with an eye to pleasing the reactionary and conservative rulers of Prussia in his day, and (b) condoned, supported, and, through his teaching, became partly responsible for some of the most criticized features in “Prussianism” and even of present-day National-Socialism.5 Ijn this article I propose to give reasons for denying (i) that Hegel the man is justly accused of servility to the Prussian Government, and (ii) that there is any warrant in the text of his Philosophie des Rechts for the charge that Hegel the philosopher was an exponent of “Prussianism” and “ frightfulness.”

Piety is not a theme that normally attracts the modern mind. In our own age rebellion has a more prominent position and the theme of impiety strikes a more sympathetic note. We are led to examine Plato's Euthyphro as much for the hints we find on the subject of impiety as for whatever it might contain on the seemingly drab subject of the holy. The Euthyphro is also a dialogue concerned with justice, a recurrent theme in the Platonic corpus, and it questions the accepted relationship of justice to piety and orthodoxy. The secular implications of the argument, which seem to be the more important to Socrates, himself, are as relevant to modern politics and religion as they were to the life of ancient Athens.

Wittgenstein's Ph.D. viva, held in June 1929, was a charade, for the dissertation presented by Wittgenstein was his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which had achieved the status of a classic in the seven years since its publication and was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. The viva was treated by all participants as something of a joke, and the doctorate was duly awarded. But suppose that the viva had been properly conducted, and Wittgenstein had been subjected to searching criticism of the content of his dissertation, and the examiners had looked carefully at the question of how original were the ideas... ? I here present, in the form of a drama, that counterfactual viva.

Most definitions of radical emergentism characterize it epistemologically. This leads to misunderstandings and makes it hard to assess the doctrine's metaphysical worth. This paper puts forward purely metaphysical characterizations of emergentism and property emergence. It explores the nature of the necessitation relation between base and emergent and argues that emergentism entails a Humean account of causation and related relations. Then it presents arguments against emergentism, both as a wider metaphysic and as an account of consciousness. These maintain that emergentism makes implausible claims about how the world works. The paper also stresses the doctrine's contemporary relevance: most current property dualists endorse views effectively identical to classical emergentism less its historical commitment to novel emergent forces.

At first sight the activities of professional accountants might seem tooffer little that could interest philosophers. Accountants, it is widely believed, report in various ways on what is the case, where what is the case is unambiguously and objectively ascertainable by reference to determinate facts. It is not clear what interest a philosopher might have in that activity.

Sacred music expresses and evokes emotional attitudes of distinctive kinds. Even people who are irreligious in their beliefs can find themselves moved by it in these ways. It has been suggested that for an unbeliever to cherish the experience of sacred music may actually constitute a form of sentimentality. This paper considers just what the appeal of this sort of music is, to believers as well as to unbelievers. There are non-religious musical works that have similar emotional content Everyday life prevents many important emotions from being experienced as consummately as they could be. Art can allow this to happen, can be a vehicle for emotion of the last instance. Indeed, a religious belief system is in part a similar vehicle. In art, where there is no gesture at belief, the risk of sentimentality is, if anything, less.

The general thesis which I should wish to sustain on this topic is by no means new. It is, briefly, that even in the Republic, where the views on art which Plato propounds are notoriously unsatisfactory to the modern mind, this unsatisfactoriness is not due to any lack of aesthetic sympathy on Plato's part, but on the contrary to what is almost an excess of it. The position as far as I can understand it is this: the true artist (at least for the period of Platonic thought of which the Republic marks the culmination) is the philosopher, and true artistic insight is episteme. The work of art par excellence is primarily the philosopher's own life-that is, the philosopher himself.

Although his subject matter is far from abstract and his arguments comparatively free from obscurity, Bernard Mandeville has generally been acknowledged a difficult philosopher. It is not hard to see why. First, Mandeville deliberately sets out to generate paradoxes. Secondly, he is not a systematic writer. His views are expounded and developed in a number of works of which The Fable of the Bees is only the best known. Thirdly, and most important, he is not solely a philosopher, but also a satirist. His satire is intertwined with his purely philosophical theories and his style is often highly ironic. Any interpretation of Mandeville must consider his philosophical and his satirical intentions.

There is no right to blackmail. So says the law and so say most moral observers. A few libertarian voices have been raised in defence of blackmail (e.g. Mack) but such a defence is liable to be treated as a reductio of the defender's own free market philosophy. However, it is surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong with blackmail.

Is belief in God reasonable? Richard Dawkins is right to say that traditional arguments for the existence of God are flawed; but so is his own disproof of the existence of God, and there are gaps in neo-Darwinian explanations of the origin of language, of life, and of the universe. The rational response is neither theism nor atheism but agnosticism. Faith in a creed is no virtue, but mere belief in God may be reasonable even if false.

This paper has two parts. In the first, I try to show that Russell's arguments against the thesis of Kant's first antinomy are unsatisfactory; in the second, I argue that the Universe, if transcendentally real, must be finite in both space and time.

There are two main claims that Bradley makes concerning negative judgment in the Principles of Logic:

(i) Negative judgment ‘stands at a different level of reflection’ from affirmative judgment.

(ii) Negative judgment ‘presupposes a positive ground’.

I will consider what Bradley means by these claims, and draw comparisons with Wittgenstein's views on negation as they developed between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Remarks.

The word moral and its derivatives are showing signs of strain. Like a small carpet, designed to fit a room which has been enlarged, they are wrenched this way and that to cover the bare spaces. Perhaps in the end we shall be forced to abandon them altogether, as Nietzsche suggested. But this would be wasteful, and it seems a good idea to examine first the various spaces they can cover, and try to fix them to the one where they are needed most. I shall approach this problem by making very full quotations. It is not an isolated verbal puzzle which can be settled by showing that a particular usage exists; we need to know as well just what it is doing. There are real muddles here, within common-sense, about the relation of thought to life. There is no simple plain-man's usage prepared for us to follow. Anyone who uses moral in anything beyond the Daily Mirror sense is no longer a quite plain man anyway, and we had better follow careful writers than casual ones, real ones than imaginary ones. Philosophers, unlike the Erewhonians, do not have to study a hypothetical language. I am sure both that quotations are necessary and that mine are inadequate; I hope other people will supplement them. As for my choice, I can only say that I have tried very hard not to be tendentious. Certainly I have quoted authors who are capable of being silly and perverse, but as far as I can see the remarks I have taken from them are sober and normal. Anyone may disagree with them, but not, I hope, think them oddly worded. My point affects all the derivatives of moral and to some extent those of ethical too, so I have drawn my illustrations from all of them.

My general theme is the extent to which philosophers and others must be taken literally when they have written about angels, or anything else which is no longer generally believed in. However, since the title may perhaps have aroused expectations of angels dancing on points of needles, I shall take as my point of departure the question of whether or not the scholastics ever discussed how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. The answer would in fact seem to be in the negative, the closest parallel being found in the anonymous fourteenth-century mystical treatise Swester Katrei, which refers to a thousand souls in heaven sitting on the point of a needle.