Dorothea, an idealistic young lady, is the central figure of George Eliot's Middlemarch. She longs to devote her life to something valuable, looking up to people like St Teresa as her ideal. Contrary to all expectations, she decides to marry Casaubon, an elderly clergyman. For years, Casaubon has been preparing his magnum opus called ‘Key to All Religions’. In the milieu where Dorothea is living—a quiet English parish in the 1830s—Casaubon's scholarly project appears to her as the right object of her devotion. She would lighten the burden of his solitary labour; share his life of wisdom and pursuit of truth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. Hilary Putnam's conception of ethics is not best understood as a form of ‘moral realism’, but as a position consequent upon the pragmatist understanding of the relation between truth and rational acceptability – ideas that Putnam argues are not confined to laboratory science. Just as our conception of the visible world is founded in reason as informed by sense perception, why cannot our moral notions appear to reason itself as that is shaped or informed by our situation and our nature, our vital needs and our capacity to respond to those needs through the invention and refinement of ethical notions? In following out this proposal, I try to show how well Putnam's conception of rational acceptability can consist and cohere with the constraint upon enquiry that C. S. Peirce calls ‘secondness’. 2. Putnam writes ‘we invent moral words for morally relevant features of situations, which lead to further refinements of our moral notions’. Enlarging on this claim, the paper reconstructs some of the ways in which human beings can arrive through a practical reason of the unforsakeable at an ethos – a shared way of living – and at what Putnam calls ‘a moral image of the world’. 3. The paper then sets out some of Putnam's conclusions concerning agreement and disagreement, the supposed dichotomy of fact and value, the supposed problem of the perception of value, and the implausibility of Lionel Robbins's claim that economics and ethics can have no closer relation than mere juxtaposition. 4. In conclusion, the paper touches upon the merits or demerits of the very idea of a ‘moral reality’.

There is good reason to think that moral responsibility as accountability is tied to the violation of moral demands. This lends intuitive support to Type-Symmetry in the collective realm: A type of responsibility entails the violation or unfulfillment of the same type of all-things-considered duty. For example, collective responsibility necessarily entails the violation of a collective duty. But Type-Symmetry is false. In this paper I argue that a non-agential group can be collectively responsible without thereby violating a collective duty. To show this I distinguish between four types of responsibility and duty in collective contexts: corporate, distributed, collective, shared. I set out two cases: one involves a non-reductive collective action that constitutes irreducible wrongdoing, the other involves a non-divisible consequence. I show that the violation of individual or shared duties both can lead to irreducible wrongdoing for which only the group is responsible. Finally, I explain why this conclusion does not upset any work on individual responsibility.

Philosophers of earlier ages have usually spent time in considering thenature of marital, and in general familial, duty. Paley devotes an entire book to those ‘relative duties which result from the constitution of the sexes’,1 a book notable on the one hand for its humanity and on the other for Paley‘s strange refusal to acknowledge that the evils for which he condemns any breach of pure monogamy are in large part the result of the fact that such breaches are generally condemned. In a society where an unmarried mother is ruined no decent male should put a woman in such danger: but why precisely should social feeling be so severe? Marriage, the monogamist would say, must be defended at all costs, for it is a centrally important institution of our society. Political community was, in the past, understood as emerging from or imposed upon families, or similar associations. The struggle to establish the state was a struggle against families, clans and clubs; the state, once established, rested upon the social institutions to which it gave legal backing.

The general moral decline widely perceived to be in process in both the UK and the USA is no doubt the effect of many causes. The present paper attends to only one, the de-moralization more or less unintentionally encouraged by the working of the machinery of the welfare state, and then further encouraged by a deliberate and systematic de-moralization of that machinery. It attempts to undermine a main assumption supporting that de-moralization, and thus contribute to the campaign for re-moralization waged in recent years by, among others, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU) in London and like-minded think-tanks in the USA.

In his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision Berkeley argues that it is only a happy accident that we are aware of space and objects in space by means of vision, and that the logically primary way in which we are aware of space is by touch. Berkeley's argument is that all connections between the visual and the spatial properties of things are contingent. Thus we may judge an object's distance from us by noting the number and size of intervening objects (3), by the sensations arising when we turn our eyes to it (16), from the confused appearance of the object (21), or from the straining of our eyes (27); but in each case there is only a contingent connection between the method used and the distance of the object from the observer (e.g. 3, 17, 20, 23). Similar considerations apply to the judgements we make by sight of magnitude (see 64) and situation (see 93–95). If this is so then clearly we must have some other way of making spatial judgements, for how else could we establish the various contingent links between what we see and space? This other method must, of course, be by touch, but then touch cannot be merely contingently related to space, for then we would need a third method and so on. Berkeley is therefore led to maintain that there are necessary connections between touch and space. For Berkeley, then, it is impossible for us to make spatial judgements, judgements of the distances between objects and of the magnitudes and positions of objects, by means of sight alone, whereas it is possible to make such judgements on the basis of information obtainable from touch alone. It is this joint claim that I wish to consider.

1. ‘“But aren't you saying that all that happens is that he moans, and that there is nothing behind it?” I am saying that there is nothing behind the moaning’ (‘Notes for Lectures on “Private Experience” and “Sense Data”’, The Philosophical Review, July 1968, 302). This passage seems to me to epitomize a conception of the mind and its relation to the body found in the later work of Wittgenstein. It will be convenient to write as if this is his view of the mind. He suggests elsewhere that he is not advancing philosophical theses in his later work; so maybe this view is not a philosophical thesis in some relevant sense; or maybe Wittgenstein is not wholly consistent; or maybe he puts it forward only dialectically, and in other philosophical contexts would have espoused other views of the mind as much as he espouses this one. In any case, what does this one amount to? ‘There is nothing behind the moaning.’ What does this mean?

Do the most celebrated works of Rousseau—more particularly his Discourse on Inequality, émile, and Control Social—present on the whole a coherent answer to the problems of Education and Society? My impression is that Rousseau has here been very much calumniated, owing to the incredible haste and superficiality with which his writings have generally been studied. Even sympathetic inquirers, like M. Schinz in his thorough and attractive work La Pensée de J. J. Rousseau, seem to be too easily discouraged in the quest for unity.

Mr. Hanink objects to my ‘Survival Lottery’ which would save Y and Z, who need new organs, by choosing and killing A at random to provide them. He believes the relevant difference between killing A and not saving Y and Z ‘might well be this: Y and Z can not have A killed without intentionally seeking A's death. But a physician can “not save” Y and Z without intentionally seeking their deaths’.

While it is generally accepted that we need to use our intelligence (toreason) in order to get what we want, it is thought to be a cardinal error to imagine that by reasoning we can discover what we ought to want. Reason can in no way constrain the choice of ends, it can only constrain the choice of means once an end has been (non-rationally) adopted. In Plato's philosophy we find a view strongly opposed to this (Humean) attitude towards reason. It is widely held, however, that to arrive at a position which is plainly opposed to (Humean) common sense, Plato must have grossly confused reasoning about means with reasoning about ends. Evidence of this confusion is found in Plato's use of analogies between statecraft and navigation, and between virtue and skill. But the diagnosis of confusion rests on a misunderstanding of how Plato wanted to use the word translated ‘skill’, i.e. ‘technē’, and this misunderstanding is shared even by those who see Plato as rejecting the virtue/skill analogy.

In Chapters 6 and 7 of Language, Truth and Poetry I attempted to solve the ancient problem of fictional reference by claiming that a fictional construct (such as ‘Pickwick’ or ‘centaur’) ‘points’ or refers to certain features of reality in rather the same way as an abstraction like ‘gravitation’ or ‘cruelty’ does. I now believe that this theory of mine is unsatisfactory; and I should like to propose a new solution to the problem.

At the end of the opening chapter of his Second Treatise of Government, Locke describes political power in the following terms: ‘Political Power then I take to be a Right of making Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property, and of employing the force of the Community, in the Execution of such Laws, and in the defence of the Common-wealth from Foreign Injury, and all this only for the Publick Good.’

Recent results in kinematics, obtained by myself and those working with me, have convinced me that the philosophical status of physics, as it has come down to us from Renaissance days, requires reconsideration. The reason can be stated in a couple of sentences: it has been found possible to establish certain laws of physics—laws of motion, the law of gravitation, the laws known under the name of the Lorentz transformation, and some others—purely deductively, without specific assumptions, and without empirical appeals save only to the empirical awareness of something we call “the passage of time.” Yet physicists have claimed ad nauseam that the ultimate sanction for “laws of nature” is observation and experiment, that this is what distinguishes physics from other branches of exact inquiry. The contrast in these two conceptions of natural law needs no emphasis. It is the purpose of this article to attempt to clarify this confused situation.