Preoccupation with language is a notable feature of modern philosophy. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the influence of language on thought, and particularly its influence on philosophical thought, is a leading topic of philosophical discussion in this century. Every philosopher of any note, no matter what his general interests may be, has found it necessary to define his attitude to this problem. The attitude usually adopted consists of an admission that language does have a great influence on thought, and on philosophical thought in particular. More accurately, it is claimed that the structure and grammatical categories, and perhaps the vocabulary, natural to a particular language, determine the lines of thought and speculation open to any thinker who uses that language (Note 1).This determination is unimportant in many cases, because the results of our thinking are usually subject to check by appeal to empirical facts. In philosophical thinking, however, no such check is available by the very nature of the case. Accordingly, we cannot tell if the difficulty or apparent insolubility of a philosophical problem is due to the problem itself, or simply due to inadequacies in our language. In a different language, so it is suggested, the problem which is difficult for us might very easily be solved. Indeed, there might not then be any such problem, or its solution might be self-evident in this other language. This is the moderate attitude to the language difficulty in philosophy, and it is fair to say that it is almost universally adopted at the present day. In some circles it has acquired the prestige of an indisputable dogma.

At the seventh international congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, held at Salzburg in 1983, I was talking with John Searle when I glanced at my watch and exclaimed, I must run. I'm due to solve the problem of induction at 2.15. ‘Yes,’ he replied, I must go too; I'm due to solve the mind-body problem. I don't know how seriously he meant his remark, but I did actually believe that I had cracked this old problem in the Epilogue of my Science and Scepticism,1 the manuscript of which was then with the publisher. In that book I drew a sharp distinction between the problem which faces a theoretical scientist trying to select, out of several competing theories, the one that best fulfils the aim of science, and the pragmatic problem which faces an applied scientist or practical decision-maker trying to select, out of several competing hypotheses, the one that offers the best guidance. I had what I still regard as a viable solution to the theoreticians problem. It aid that theoreticians should prefer that theory, if there is one, that is the best corroborated; for on a certain non-trivial but uncontroversial assumption about what kinds of test have been made, the best corroborated theory will best satisfy what I claimed to be the optimum aim for science: it will be deeper and wider than its rivals and, moreover, possibly true, given all the reported outcomes of tests in its field. For present purposes we can forget the explications I offered for ‘deeper’ and ‘wider’. As to ‘possibly true’: this reflects the abandonment of hopes (still nursed as recently as 1918 by Moritz Schlick, for example) that science can arrive at theories that are certainly true, or at least have a high probability of being true, or at the very least have had their probability raised by the experimental evidence.

In a recent edition of the journal Philosophy, Sophie Botros asserts that modern ethical theorists have badly misunderstood the role of the Doctrine of Double Effect, turning it into a device by which to prohibit actions which are deemed impermissible; whereas the true function of the Doctrine is rather one of justifying actions. In my reply, I argue that Dr Botros has misunderstood the Doctrine: that its ‘prohibitive’ and its ‘justificatory’ roles are merely two sides of the same coin, since its function is to decide for a given action whether it is permissible or impermissible. Furthermore, Dr Botros has misconstrued the essential contribution of the DDE is not the balancing of good results against bad ones, but the quite different position that the crucial moral distinction is between intended and merely foreseen results.

Kant, in his third Critique, confronts the issue of how rule-governed objective judgement is possible. He argues that it requires a particular kind of aesthetic response to one's experience. I dub this response ‘the Feeling of Unity’, and I raise the question whether it is a type of inexpressible knowledge. Using David Bell's account of these matters as a touchstone, I argue that it is.

What is the relationship between mental states and items of material culture, like notebooks, maps or lists? The extended mind thesis (ExM) offers an influential and controversial answer to this question. According to ExM, items of material culture can form part of the material basis for our mental states. Although ExM offers a radical view of the location of mental states, it fits comfortably with a traditional, representationalist account of the nature of those states. I argue that proponents of ExM would do better to adopt a fictionalist approach to mental states. In so doing, I suggest, they could retain the important insights underlying the extended mind thesis, while avoiding its more problematic consequences.

In 1948, at about the time of the founding of the United Nations, Michael Oakeshott wrote in an essay appropriately entitled ‘The Tower of Babel’ that ‘in a world dizzy with moral ideals we know less about how to behave in public and private than ever before’. In 2003 we have still the United Nations, itself the fruit of a dizzying moral ideal, and we also have a dizzying array of ideals.

Over the recent Iraq war, both the United Nations and moral dizziness were prominent; to those without certainty in advance of the action neither contributed to clarity about how we should behave. There were indeed those who sincerely and thoughtfully demonstrated against the war in various Western capitals who then, equally sincerely and thoughtfully changed their minds during or after the action; and perhaps, if this was so, in those of whom it were true, it demonstrated a degree of humility before the facts greater than was evident in some of those who were always adamant on one side or another.

And what did philosophers have to contribute? Opinions, to be sure, and philosophers are rarely short of opinions. But to what extent were these opinions the fruit of specifically philosophical reflection? To what extent should they have been? Should we expect philosophy to provide recipes for the solution of complicated and contested public questions? But if we don't expect this, and if we can give philosophical reasons for not expecting this, then philosophers have no more standing in these matters than any other segment of society.

In so far as philosophy did play a part in public discussion of the war, and it surely did and not just among professional philosophers, it tended to be a rehearsal of the just war doctrine of Aquinas and Suarez. We had the interesting spectacle of figures for whom scholastic views on usury or sexuality or divine retribution would be little more than medieval barbarism earnestly discussing the minutiae of the conditions for jus ad bellum and jus in bello as if they had been pronounced by Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, or had the sanctity of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

More to the point philosophically is the question as to whether a doctrine developed in the context of wars fought with medieval weapons and by comparatively small professional armies can have straightforward application in the context of modern weaponry, modern terrorism and the democratic assumption of a whole people being at war. Nor in the just war doctrine is there any conception of a war fought for humanitarian reasons. In discussing these questions philosophers surely would have a proper role to play, as philosophers, but it has been a discussion conspicuous by its reticence.

It may be as well to begin from the locus classicus, Engels to Mehring, July 14th, 1893: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process”.

Vladimir JankéLéVitch, who teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne, is one of the most highly individual philosophical writers in France today. He has been publishing books for some quarter of a century on both philosophy and music, of which the most recent, entitled La Rhapsodie: Verve et improvisation musicale, unites his two specialities. It is with his philosophical work that I want to deal here.

In Germany the claim is sometimes made that National Socialism incorporates the best of Plato’s political theory. In this country, too, Bertrand Russell and Mr. R. H. Crossman have emphasized, but with a different intention, the fascist elements in Plato's thought. It has to be admitted that whereas it would be merely laughable to claim that Jesus or Kant were exponents of the fascist philosophy, there is no such glaring incongruity with regard to Plato. It may be of some interest, therefore, to examine anew the alleged likeness between the basic principles of fascism and the thought of Plato. No one would deny a strong likeness between some details of Plato’s

Professor Karl Popper has had a great deal to endure: “expositions” of his ideas which were mere travesties, “refutations” which he had already answered, by anticipation, or which entirely missed the point at issue. One can easily understand why, when he came to publish an English translation of his Logik der Forschung, he decided to keep to the original text; it should at last be clear exactly what he had—and had not—said in 1934. Yet his thinking had by no means stood still since that time; quite naturally, too, he wished to emphasize as much.

Philosophical theories of perception are generally admitted to be responses to certain problems or puzzles allied to the ancient dichotomy between Appearance and Reality. For they have been mainly provoked by the incompatibility of the common–sense assumption that an external, physical world exists and is revealed to the senses with the well–known facts of perceptual variation and error. If only what is real were perceived just as if only what is right were done it is possible that many of those questions would never have been asked which lead to moral philosophy and a metaphysics of the external world. But sense perceptions of the same object vary so that it appears to have contradictory qualities and are sometimes completely deceptive. Nor do illusory differ internally from veridical perceptions. Moreover, perceptual variation and error can be unmasked only by such procedures as looking more carefully, listening harder, trying to touch, asking others, in short by more sense experience. So the senses are, as it were, both accused and judge in these disputes and why should a venal judge be trusted more than the criminal he tries? Such “correction” of one experience by another of the same kind seems no more reliable than the original “error.” Philosophers have found all this very puzzling.

Sir arthur edington's brilliantly phrased article, “Physics and Philosophy,” which appeared in the January 1933 issue of Philosophy, seems to me to contain a number of things which are calculated to be provocative to the mere philosopher. And I propose in this article to discuss what appears to be one of the most important of these provocative things, namely, Sir Arthur's view of the status of the physical world.

In discussing Disembodied Persons we need to confront two problems:

A. Under what conditions would we consider that a person was present in the absence of the normal bodily cues?

B. Could such circumstances arise?

The first question may be regarded as epistemic and the second as metaphysical.