Kant's short essay is a reflection on the contemporary structure of academic studies; he examines this structure in terms of the functions of the State and of the Universities which form part of it. His analysis links the empirical facts with conceptual distinctions, in ways that are familiar from his more general and abstract philosophy. His main aim is to ground a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate ways in which different Faculties of the University may approach intellectual issues that are of common interest to them. I then consider to what extent and how a Kantian analysis might be applied to our contemporary University situation. Despite the societal and intellectual differences between Kant's environment and ours, I argue that significant parallels exist between the two cases and that Kant's proposals and strictures for his own time have application for us today.

Waismann's Wittgenstein-influenced ‘How I see Philosophy’ presents a radical vision of philosophy. But its two most general themes—its stress on freedom and vision, and its emphasis on describing the grammar of our language—seem hard to reconcile. This paper elaborates four interrelated themes: 1) Waismann offers his conception of philosophy, not a delineation of the nature of philosophy. 2) His method is radically therapeutic. 3) He offers a diagnosis of the source of philosophical problems: unconscious analogies or conceptions. 4) He advocates a particular form of therapy: offering alternative analogies or conceptions to individuals. Against this background the apparent paradox can be dissolved.

The question what makes us human is often treated as a question of fact. However, the term ‘human’ is not primarily used to refer to a particular kind of entity, but as a ‘nomen dignitatis’ – a dignity-conferring name. It implies a particular moral status. That is what spawns endless debates about such issues as when human life begins and ends and whether human-animal chimeras are “partly human”. Definitions of the human are inevitably “persuasive”. They tell us about what is important and how we should live our lives as humans, and thus help us to make sense of what we are.

Nagel has argued that the ‘mind-body’ problem, as traditionally conceived, is insoluble. His challenge to philosophers is to devise a metaphysical scheme that incorporates materialist concepts in describing first person experience and mentalistic concepts in describing third person experience, such that the internal relations between the concepts thereby constructed are necessary. Nagel's own suggestion, a scheme not unlike the ‘underlying process’ schemes of the physical sciences, seems to lead him towards a covert materialism. Progress can be made in meeting the challenge by tackling the problem first by taking the units in each ‘sphere’ to be brains and persons. I show that a metaphysics based on the metaphor of person defined tasks and materially defined tools does satisfy both Nagel's challenge conditions. To devise a scheme for qualia and brain-states I turn back to Locke's presentation of the primary/secondary quality distinction. This depends on the concept of a causal power, grounded in material states of the world. While this scheme is inadequate, a variation, based on Gibson's concept of an affordance, and drawing on Bohr's resolution of the seeming incompatibility between wave and particle ontologies for physics, is promising. The world, whatever it is, affords material states to our perceptual apparatus, and mental states to our proprioceptual apparatus. The mental states/brain states duality is not a duality of types of states, which might stand in causal relations to one another, but is a duality of means of access to two classes of affordances of whatever the world is. There is no mind-body problem in the traditional sense, namely ‘How could a material state cause or be caused by a mental state?’

This paper is an elaboration of my previous paper published in Philosophy, ‘Making Sense of retributivism,’ which was a criticism of John Rawls' attempt in ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ to develop a rule utilitarian theory of punishment wherein utilitarianism is best construed as a justificatory basis for the institution of punishment and retributivism is best construed as serving as a justificatory basis for particular forms of punishment. I challenge this claim, arguing that retributivism must and can provide a justification both for the institution of punishment and for particular forms of punishment. In the end, I develop an analysis of the nature of desert as responsibility and proportionality. This notion of desert makes the best sense of retributivism.

The failures of a philosophic system (like the failures and set-backs in the life and career of a person) are often a good deal more revealing than its successes, for such failures (like those in real life) test its strength and mark the limits of its endurance. Yet if these failures disclose any uniform pattern they are not only revealing but instructive and can be turned to good account.

In this paper, I am trying to show that antithetic political positions appear to imply different moral attitudes not only accidentally but essentially, yet in a peculiar, limited and ambiguous fashion; and that political relativism or pluralism is far from implying moral relativism or pluralism in a corresponding and co-extensive sense. In other words, the gist of my contention is that men may be agreed about the basic universal laws of morality and none the less (or, indeed, all the more significantly) differ in their response to various moral requirements and points of view as emerging in specified contexts of human practice. Political positions are not as such derived from moral demands, nor consequent upon moral errors; nor do they, as such, determine the moral convictions of those who hold them; but they tend to be associated with distinct kinds of dominant moral emphases rather than simply to respect or to disregard morality.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889, son of parents of Jewish extraction but not Jewish religion. Asked how his family came by the name ‘Wittgenstein’ Ludwig said they had been court Jews to the princely family and so had taken the name when Jews were required by law to have European-style names. The father, Karl, was a Protestant, the mother a Catholic. The Jewish blood was sufficient to bring the family later on into danger under Hitler's Nuremberg Laws. They did not think of themselves as Jews or belong to the Jewish community in Vienna. The children were brought up sort-of Catholic though so far as I know only the eldest, Hermine, towards the end of her life, took this seriously and made a profession of faith before friends and household. At 9 years of age Ludwig and Paul, a year or two older than Ludwig, talked together and decided that their religion was all nonsense. Paul became a pianist of some fame, but soon after his debut in Vienna he became a wounded prisoner on the Russian front and his arm was lopped off by a surgeon who did not know he was a pianist.

There are two main questions which it is possible to ask about war. The first is, whether it is inevitable; the second, whether it is desirable. The former question is one of fact, the latter one of value. In the discussions of ordinary conversation the two are frequently-confused and obscured; arguments to prove war desirable may be heard based upon the supposed fact of its inevitability, and conversely. It is worth while considering how the two are related.

During the period roughly of the 1950s Oxford was generally regarded as the most important center of philosophy in the world, the one where the most interesting philosophical activity was going on. It was indeed so distinctive that the very name ‘Oxford Philosophy’ meant not just the philosophy that happened to be practiced in Oxford but a special kind of philosophy that gave a central importance to the study of language as the major topic of philosophical investigation. It is not an exaggeration to describe this period as a golden age of Oxford Philosophy. Quite by coincidence, my initial stay in Oxford from 1952–1959 happened to be during the high watermark of Oxford Philosophy.

Last night I had a desire for a glass of wine. Luckily I had a bottle in the fridge and could satisfy my desire. Earlier in the day I had a desire to run on the heath and I satisfied this desire too. And today, tired of reading yet more stuff on desire, I satisfied my desire to start writing. So desires can be satisfied. Not that they are guaranteed to be satisfied – the bottle in my fridge might have failed to materialize, and something might have prevented me from going for a run or getting down to writing – but that they can be satisfied. Witness C.S. Lewis:

A small minority of biologists, psychologists and philosophers have recently tried to show, in various ways, that evolutionary psychology is of relevance to politics and to policy makers. Two widely accepted arguments still suffice (with only a little tweaking) to dismiss such attempts to forge a link between evolution and policy. The first denies the link between adaptation and fixity, the second denies that ‘adaptive thinking’ is of strong heuristic benefit. Finally, the silence of many evolutionary explanations with respect to developmental mechanisms should also make us suspicious of the relevance of evolutionary psychology to matters of policy.

Hume and Smith advance different answers to the question of whether sympathy can ever be the foundation of the moral order. They hold contradictory views of sympathy, called here ‘the Fellow-Feeling Paradox’. For Hume, fellow-feeling tends to reverberate in society, leading to the socialization of the individual and even mob (collective) psychology. Hence, sympathy cannot be the foundation of the moral order. In contrast, for Smith, fellow-feeling develops into critical judgment of the emotions/actions, leading to individual moral autonomy even self-command. Hence, sympathy can be the foundation of the moral order. This paper provides a resolution of the two answers.

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus recommends scornful defiance in the face of our absurd, meaningless existence. Although Nagel agrees that human life possesses an absurd dimension, he objects to Camus’ existentialist ‘dramatics’. For Nagel, absurdity arises from the irreducible tension between our subjective and objective perspectives on life. In this paper I do two things: (i) critically reconstruct Camus’ and Nagel's positions, and (ii) develop Nagel's critique of Camus in order to argue that humour is an appropriate response to absurdity.

Donald Davidson's argument that non-linguistic creatures lack beliefs rests on two premises: (1) to be a believer, one must have the concept of belief, and (2) to have the concept of belief, one must interpret the utterances of others. However, Davidson's defense of these premises is overly compressed and unconvincing. In a recent issue of Philosophy, Roger Fellows provides new arguments for these premises. In this paper, I explain why I'm not persuaded by Fellows' attempt to bolster Davidson's line of reasoning and cast doubt on Davidson's and Fellows' overall strategy of attaching special significance to the concept of belief.

Traditionally Hume is seen as offering an ‘empiricist’ critique of ‘rationalism’. This view is often illustrated – or rejected – by comparing Hume's views with those of Descartes'. However the textual evidence shows that Hume's most sustained engagement with a canonical ‘rationalist’ is with Nicolas Malebranche. The author shows that the fundamental differences (among the many similarities) between the two on the self and causal power do indeed rest on a principled distinction between ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’, and that there is some truth in the traditional story. This, however, is very far from saying that Hume's general orientation is an attack on something called ‘rationalism’.

Philosophers who publish articles that make practical ethical recommendations are thereby offering advice. I consider what obligations they incur in advising. I analyse the giving of advice as a communicative act whose defining and characteristic aim is to secure acceptance of what is advised. Such advice need not be solicited or taken up. I distinguish advice from incitement and threats and specify the scope of the adviser's responsibility for others acting upon the advice. I explore how advice can be bad in how it is given and what is given. I consider, and criticise, various pleas for exemption from the responsibilities of philosophical advising: that advice was not meant; that it wouldn't make any difference anyway; and that the writing was not for those who might act on it. I examine the offering of philosophical advice to policy makers, comparing the views on this of Mary Warnock and Dan Brock. I conclude by asking practical normative philosophers to consider what they should do inasmuch as they are advising.

In an essay on pantheism Schopenhauer observes that his chief objection against it is that it says nothing, that it simply enriches language with a superfluous synonym of the word “world.” It can hardly be denied that by this remark the great pessimist, who was himself an atheist, scored a real point. For if a philosopher starts off with the physical world and proceeds to call it God, he has not added anything to the world except a label, a label which, if we take into account the ordinary significance of the word “God,” might well appear unnecessary and superfluous: one might just as pertinently say that the world is the world as that the world is God. Neither the Jew nor the Christian nor the Moslem understand by “God” the physical world, so that, if someone calls the physical world God, he cannot be taken to mean that the world is God according to the Jewish or Christian or Moslem understanding of God. Does he mean any more than that the physical world is ultimately self-explanatory, that no Cause external to the world, no transcendent Being is requisite or admissible, i.e. that there is no God? If that were all there is in pantheism, the latter would indeed be indistinguishable from atheism, and those who called Spinoza an atheist would be fully justified.