When I first came across Robert Nozick′s Philosophical Explanations I was struck by the purity of his justification of punishment. Most latter-day retributivists are crypto-utilitarians, claiming to find some sort of benefit in penalties, even if it is only symbolic. Nozick too sees punishment as symbolic, but not as having any necessary utility. Paradoxically, perhaps, he is one of the few retributivists who insists that it matters what the offender makes of his penalty. Even more interesting is the importance he attaches to the analogy between retribution and revenge. Most retributivists are at pains to distance themselves from vengeance: but not Nozick.

Few would disagree that depth is an admirable, highly desirable, and yet rare quality. One would expect to find, therefore, that much has been written on the subject. But this is not so. Perhaps the topic appears forbidding, because the nature of depth is itself a deep and difficult question, since it forces those who ask it to decide what is ultimately worth caring about. Be that as it may, I shall venture on to this rarely explored ground. My strategy is to begin with some introductory remarks about depth in general and about moral depth as a particular form of it; then discuss Sophocles' dramatic treatment of the development of Oedipus toward, as I shall interpret it, greater depth; and then go on to formulate a more discursive account based on Sophocles' poetic intimations.

Few passages from the ancients scandalize modern readers as does Aristotle's Politics I, 2-5. Aristotle begins with a distinction he apparently finds obvious: [T]hat which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave.

Is The Prelude a philosophical poem? It is, of course, many things besides: it is an autobiography; it contains profound reflections on psychology, education and politics; and there are passages of an almost purely lyrical character. Does it also contain philosophical poetry?

On this question, the critics of Wordsworth are divided. Coleridge and Raleigh answer Yes; Arnold, Bradley, Dr. Leaves, from their different points of view, agree in answering No. I believe that the first answer is right, although it has usually been supported by the wrong reasons. I believe the second answer to be wrong, although many of the arguments that are supposed to lead to it are in themselves sound enough. Those who say that The Prelude is not a philosophical poem, usually mean that it does not offer a coherent system of philosophy—that it expresses an original outlook and a personal wisdom, but that the only systematic philosophy in it comes at second-hand from Hartley or Coleridge and contributes not at all to the poem. And this is largely true. But the mistake is, to identify philosophy with system, philosophizing with “a philosophy.” This is a mistake that has been repudiated again and again by many of the greatest philosophers, from Socrates and Plato to Locke and Kant and others.

I shall argue that The Prelude achieves philosophical poetry, because in it Wordsworth grapples with philosophical problems—problems which arise out of the story of his own early life—which are actually forced upon him by the poem itself; and because he tries to answer these problems in a way which would be possible only in poetry.

The phrase philosophia perennis is said to have been first used by Leibniz. It has been adopted and freely employed by the Catholic Neo-Thomists, for whom it means a development of the Aristotelianism, modified by strong Neoplatonic elements, which Arabian scholars transmitted to the first Renaissance in the West. It claims also to be a return to the early Christian philosophy of religion, a fusion of Hellenistic and Jewish thought, the latter itself a syncretistic religion with many Persian and other borrowings. The controversy, directed against various modern philosophies, has been conducted with great ability by such writers as Gilson, Maritain, Sheen, Watkin, Dawson and D'Arcy, whose books would perhaps have received more attention from independent thinkers, but for the suspicion which surrounds apparent attempts to revive the methods and inhibitions of the medieval schoolmen.

There has been a parallel movement in the Orthodox Eastern Church, represented in Russian by Frank, Bardyaeff, Solovioff and Lossky. These writers are more Platonic and more fearlessly mystical than the Thomists. Origen in the East has more weight than Augustine.

These remarks on following a rule are especially concerned with what Peter Winch has had to say on the matter, and with the flawed logic of his reasoning; but they are also intended to cast some light on the logical character of metaphysical reasoning generally. In The Idea of a Social Science, one of Winch's main aims is to show that what he calls meaningful behaviour must involve some kind of understanding or reflection. His strategy appears to consist in trying to show, first, that all such behaviour, or perhaps behaviour as a whole, is rule-governed and, secondly, that following a rule necessarily involves ‘matters for reflection’. It will be my contention that the method employed in this argument, like the method employed throughout his book, is essentially metaphysical and incapable of yielding anything other than vacuous conclusions.

A major part of the mind–body problem is to explain why a given set of physical processes should give rise to perceptual qualities of one sort rather than another. Colour hues are the usual example considered here, and there is a lively debate as to whether the results of colour vision science can provide convincing explanations of why colours actually look the way they do. The internal phenomenological structure of colours is considered here in some detail, and a comparison is drawn with sounds and their synthesis. This paper examines the type of explanation that is needed, and it is concluded that it does not have to be reductive to be effective. What needs to be explained more than anything is why inverted hue scenarios are more intuitive than other sensory inversions: and the issue of physicalism versus dualism is argued to be of only marginal relevance.

Hume Regards it as a mere “Verbal Dispute” whether or not various “natural abilities” should be regarded as moral virtues. In his Treatise he complains that “good sense and judgment”, “parts and understanding” are classed in all systems of ethics of the day with bodily endowments and ascribed no “merit or moral worth”. Yet if compared with the received virtues, they fell short in no material respect, both sets being “mental qualities” and each equally tending to procure “the love and esteem of mankind’.

There is now a well-established distinction recognized in the ways simplicity considerations enter into science. Laws of nature (and theories built out of laws of nature) may be graded either with regard to their simplicity of form or with regard to the fewness of the concepts employed to express them. I shall distinguish these as formal simplicity and conceptual simplicity respectively. Dr. J. O. Wisdom suggests that it should be fewness of non-instantial concepts that serves as the guide for making judgements of relative simplicity; a “non-instantial” concept being a concept which is constructed for the purpose of theory, its meaning not being derived simply from experience. Hence non-instantial concepts are, from a logical point of view, to be contrasted with the concepts used to express and record observations directly, that is with instantial concepts representing observables. This seems to be too narrow a restriction on the reduction of concepts. Clearly an advance towards simplicity has been made not only when e.g. a non-instantial concept like “force of gravity” is eliminated from our technical language, but also when the number of instantial concepts is reduced by redefinition, in terms of a smaller number of observables. For example a great simplification was surely made when space-traversed, time taken and mass were chosen as the dynamic “simples”, for the multiplicity of kinds of motion were found to be expressible as functions of these concepts. “Motion” is not non-instantial in the same way as “force of gravity” or “kinetic energy” is non-instantial. However, once this extension to instantial concepts is made there is no need to quarrel with the form/concept distinction as marking a pritma facie difference in criteria of some methodological importance; for a choice say to concentrate on using the fewest concepts does, and one would be inclined to think must, lead to a “decrease” in the formal simplicity of the laws of nature.

Colin Turnbull's book The Mountain People has aroused much non-academic as well as much academic interest. The success of The Ik, Peter Brook's recent stage adaptation of the book, shows how widespread this interest is. The interest centres on Turnbull's anthropological descriptions of his life with the Ik people. The Ik society is one in which the weak, the old and the children are left to fend for themselves and die. Help proffered to the needy is frowned upon. Food is snatched from the mouths of the old, medicine stolen from the sick, and children left to feed and house themselves at about the age of three. Sexual codes no longer exist, cruelty is thought amusing, and the weak and dying are exploited. Turnbull believes that he has discovered a people without morality; a society that previously possessed a moral code, but which lost it.

The sexual domain is unified only by the phenomenal quality of the occurrence of the desires, activities, and pleasures it includes. There is no conceptual restriction on the range of intentional objects those desires, activities, and pleasures can take. Neither is there good conceptual reason to privilege any class of them as paradigmatic. Since the quality unifying the sexual is not morally significant, the morality of sexuality is no different from morality in general. The view that participant consent is morally sufficient in the sexual domain therefore requires the more controversial view that it is morally sufficient in general.

The literature on Heinrich Hertz’s influence on Wittgenstein goes back some way. Not all the main commentators discuss or even notice that influence, although it has been particularly emphasised by James Griffin, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and by Leonard Goddard and Brenda Judge.

Certain paradoxes set us reeling endlessly. In surprise examination paradoxes, pupils' reasonings lead them to reel between expecting an examination and expecting none. With Newcomb's puzzle, choosers reel between reasoning in favour of choosing just one box and choosing two. The paradoxes demand an answer to what it is rational to believe or do. Highlighting other reelings and puzzles, this paper shows that the paradoxes should come as no surprise. The paradoxes demand an end to our reasoning when the conditions they set ensure no end. They equivocate between, so to speak, reasoning in heaven and reasoning on earth; and, on the conditions set, not even an infinite god could reach a conclusion.

Berkeley claims idealism provides a novel argument for the existence of God. But familiar interpretations of his argument fail to support the conclusion that there is a single omnipotent spirit. A satisfying reconstruction should explain the way Berkeley moves between first person singular and plural, as well as providing a powerful argument, once idealism is accepted. The new interpretation offered here represents the argument as an inference to the best explanation of a shared reality. Consequently, his use of the first person must be taken as ‘exemplary’ rather than ‘Cartesian’. This explains the freedom of movement in the text between singular and plural. However, it also reveals Berkeley as side-stepping sceptical doubt.

After (1) a brief introduction I (2) compare accounts of what it is to say something I find in Plato, Frege and Grice, and I distinguish linguistic from practical meaning and words that signify things from ‘syncategorematic’ or ‘grammatical’ words. I then (3) argue that the relation between a signifying word and what it signifies must be understood in terms of two complementary acts, already recognised in antiquity, quantifying and predicating. Discussing quantification (4), I show how problems about universals can be avoided by accepting Aristotle's distinction between possible and actual existence. Discussing predication (5), I defend Aristotle's view that there are more forms of predication than one, and consider this issue in connection with non-mathematical discourse.

My aim in this article is to make accessible to non-mathematicians the groundwork of the theory of effective methods and unsolvable problems. The beauty of the theory is that it needs hardly any hard work to get very quickly from simple intuitive ideas to some extraordinarily interesting and surprising results.

In a recent essay Robert Sugden sets out his view that two foundational institutions of the social order, the convention and the social contract (at least in one variant of the latter) are compatible and that therefore it is not self-contradictory to be a Humean and a contractarian at the same time.1 The proposition, despite appearances, has greater practical importance than most other doctrinal ones tend to do for if widely conceded, it would render current political thought even more woolly than it is already. If so, a critical scrutiny might be of some use.

“Ich liebe dich 3” the swains in mountain valleys of Austria inscribe on their presents to those to whom they plight their troth. The pun is a rare one in German. Only in remote valleys does the word for ‘three’ rhyme with joy; and the word for ‘true’ is usually ‘wahr’ not ‘treu’ ‘Wahr’ is more propositional, less evaluative than our ‘true’. So too in Latin and the romance languages ‘verum’, ‘Vrai’ ‘vera’ ‘verdadero’ carry a lighter load of feeling. Only the Hebrews resembled us in giving their word for ‘true’ strong moral overtones, and using the same or some cognate word to praise him who had used no deceitfulness to his neighbour as to recommend some statement as being meet to be believed.