Sartre's experimentation in February 1935 with the drug mescalin has been well documented by Simone de Beauvoir in her book The Prime of Life.1 She recalls that Sartre experienced under the influence of the drug not exactly hallucinations, ‘but the objects he looked at changed their appearance in the most horrifying manner:’ [POL 209]. The residual effects of this nightmarish experience left Sartre, not only for several days ‘in a state of deep depression’ [POL 210], but also produced moods that ‘recalled those that had been induced by mescalin.’

Mark Nelson claims that Russell's remarks—in his History of Western Philosophy—about Aquinas are ‘breathtakingly supercilious and unfair’ and ‘sniffy’. I argue that Nelson completely misrepresents Russell's criticisms of Aquinas. In particular, I argue that the silly epistemological doctrine which Nelson attributes to Russell plays no role at all in the criticism which Russell actually makes of Aquinas. Since—as Nelson himself concedes—there is no other reason to think that Russell commits himself to the epistemological doctrine in question, either in the passages under discussion or elsewhere, I conclude that there is equal justice in the claim that it is Nelson's dismissal of Russell which is ‘unfair’ and ‘sniffy’.

In this paper I argue that there is a significant but often overlooked metaphysical distinction to be made between contextualism and contrastivism. The orthodox view is that contrastivism is merely a form of contextualism. This is a mistake. The contextualist view is incompatible with certain naturalist claims about the metaphysical nature of concepts within whichever domain is being investigated, while the contrastivist view is compatible with these claims. So, choosing one view over the other will involve choosing to affirm or deny a significant metaphysical claim. As such, a demarcation ought to be put in place between contextualism and contrastivism.

Moral exemplars are often held up as objects to be admired. Such admiration is thought beneficial to the admirer, inducing him or her to emulate virtuous conduct, and deemed flattering to the admired. This paper offers a critical examination of admiration from a broadly Kantian perspective, arguing that admiration – even of genuine moral exemplars – violates the duty of self-respect. It also provides an explanation for the fact that moral exemplars themselves typically shun admiration. Lastly, it questions the assumption that admiration leads to emulation on the basis of scientific findings that indicate that admiration induces passivity in the admirer rather than an incentive to self-improvement.

The main claims are the following. (1) If we keep before us the distinction between the justification of punishment and its aims, we see that retribution is not an aim of punishment, and that there is a central place for retributivist considerations in the justification of punishment. (2) Justifications based upon aims or consequentialist considerations suffer from a serious epistemic vulnerability not shared by retributivism. (3) There are ethically sound sentiments that underwrite retributivist justification, and it would be a mistake to redeploy those sentiments. (4) The ethical authority of those sentiments justifies punitive sanction. (5) Retributivist justification is compatible with consequentialist aims.

In this paper I demonstrate how certain contemporary atheists have problematically conflated atheism with agnosticism (knowingly or unknowingly). The first type of conflation is semantic fusion, where the lack of belief in God is combined with the outright denial of God, under the single label of ‘atheism’. The second is morphological fission which involves the separation of atheism into two subcategories where lack of belief in God is labelled as negative atheism and outright denial of God as positive atheism – and while here they are more explicitly demarcated, they are still positioned under the broad notion of atheism. I argue in this paper that atheism should be better used as the propositional denial of God and that uncertainty and unknowability about God should be reserved to characterise agnosticism. Conflating these positions under the single term ‘atheism’ mischaracterises agnostics and inflates the territory of atheists. In clarifying these terms, I review how the nuances in the prefix a- in atheism have potentially contributed towards these misnomers. I also suggest the use of the categories ‘local atheism’ and ‘global atheism’ to clarify on whom the burden of proof lies within the discourse.

The writings of John Grote (1813–1866) are a valuable resource for both historians and those continuing to explore and utilize modern Cambridge philosophy. Grote was the inheritor of the mantle of Cambridge philosophy when appointed to the Knightbridge Chair in 1855 and he transformed and professionalized philosophical studies there. In the Grote Society, and the reform of the syllabus, reading and tutoring of the Moral Sciences, he influenced the next generation of Cambridge philosophers, especially Henry Sidgwick, John Venn, W. K. Clifford and James Ward. Like his successors, Sidgwick, Moore and Broad, he rejected both identification with schools of philosophy and the internecine warfare in and between them, in favour of careful linguistic analysis, boundary commissioning and eclecticism. His patient and respectful analysis of phenomenalism, materialism, positivism, common sense, idealism, utilitarianism, and philology, are typical of an approach, style, method, and way of conducting philosophical conversation, that is characteristic of modern Cambridge philosophy. Claims for connections with the latter work of the above, and Sorley, Russell, McTaggart, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, are explored and supported. That Grote was the younger brother of the Greek historian, agnostic, phenomenalist and Philosophical Radical, George Grote, goes further to make him an interesting, as well as a stimulating philosopher, to engage.

The role of hypothetical acts, as opposed to actual acts, has been neglected in understanding the nature of what is required by the Respect for Persons formulation of the Categorical Imperative in concrete moral relations between persons. This had led to a failure to understand fully the way and the extent to which the Categorical Imperative may be present in all such relations with others as encapsulated in an appropriate attitude towards others that may refer to hypothetical acts, as well as actual acts. The result is an underestimation of the direct relevance and moral efficacy of the Categorical Imperative.

Our world seems fine tuned in life-permitting ways. If the cosmos contains many universes, only the appropriately tuned ones can be seen by living beings. An alternative is that God acted as Fine Tuner. We might account for God in terms of an eternally powerful ethical requirement that God exists, rejecting J. L. Mackie's judgment that absolute ethical requirements are incredibly queer. Mackie viewed such requirements as logically possible, so if they were absent then this would seem a matter of synthetic necessity. Again, if they existed then their creative effectiveness would, Mackie thought, be logically possible. Their actual ineffectiveness would thus involve a further synthetic necessity. Theists could maintain that the synthetic necessities were instead ones making ethical requirements real and creatively powerful. Yet why, then, would there exist anything but divine knowledge of everything worth knowing? A spinozistic answer is that such knowledge is all that exists.

This paper introduces a conjecture that laws of nature may be of different kinds, in particular that there may, in addition to laws which constrain outcomes (C-laws), be laws which empower systems to direct or select outcomes (E-laws) and laws which guide systems in such selections (G-laws). The paper defends this conjecture by suggesting that it is not excluded by anything we know, is plausible, and is potentially of great explanatory power.

In claiming to draw out an inconsistency between Wittgenstein's declarations on method and his actual practice, John Cook argues that Wittgenstein retained a radical distinction between material things (bricks) and immaterial things (spooks). I argue that on the contrary Wittgenstein showed in detail how this dichotomy is to be rejected in favour of a spectrum of more or less ‘minded' beings, at one pole of which are persons as animated bodies. Discussing the grammar of ‘know', Cook claims that Wittgenstein depended on philosophers' distinctions rather than a surview of vernacular uses. I argue that it was the expression/description distinction that Wittgenstein used to make sense of the grammar of ‘know'.

David Pugmire has argued that secularists can genuinely appreciate religious music because of our imaginative powers combined with the ‘Platonic’ nature of the emotions expressed in such music. I argue that Pugmire is wrong on both counts. Religious music is ‘Platonic’ not because it is subject to levels of imagination but because it has a definite object which makes imaginative readings inferior. Moreover, since religious music does have a clear object taken by the believer as real, a gap exists that cannot be bridged by the imagination of the secularist, even imagination of the emotional ‘last instance’.

I argue that Wittgenstein was no lifelong musical formalist. I further contend that the attribution of musical formalism obscures, while the break with it I propose explains, the role that music played in the development of his philosophy of language. What is more, I sketch a perspective on the later Wittgenstein’s remarks on the music and musical understanding that supports my claims. Throughout my discussion, rather than assimilating Hanslick’s and Wittgenstein’s views on music, I point to similarities and differences between them, suggesting that taking snapshots and putting them side by side sheds more light on how they are related to each other.