It was news verging on sensational when A. J. Ayer came back from four minutes of heart death with a report of what he saw. Especially since the philosopher, who publicized his near-death experience [NDE] in 1988, in the Telegraph and the Spectator, was known for his lifelong rejection of religion and the supernatural. But, as will be seen, Ayer's beliefs on that head were substantially unchanged, if more ambivalently expressed, and the interest of his NDE lies elsewhere— in what it reveals about his philosophy.

In Charles Renouvier we have one of the lone, stern, and indefatigable workers in philosophy in the nineteenth century. His powerful mind, moral earnestness, and intellectual vigour command respect and attention and place him high in the ranks of the philosophical thinkers of his century. He differed profoundly from his English contemporary Spencer and his German contemporary Lotze, both of whom have received more attention than Renouvier. His long and immensely active life fell into periods which coincide with, and partly reflect, the political and intellectual fortunes of his country from the Battle of Waterloo, through the Revolution of 1830, the Second Republic of 1848, the Second Empire, the War and the Commune of 1871, into the Third Republic, with its Dreyfus struggles and its Educational and Disestablishment problems in the early years of the present century.

The phrase, ‘political obligation’, is far more popular in English than in other European languages. Whether this may be due to historical circumstances, or to a peculiar bent of the English mind, is a fascinating question; but it is not the one which I propose to discuss here today. I am mentioning it only to explain the choice of my subject, a subject which would probably sound rather uncommon to an Italian audience, but which, I am sure, has a familiar ring to English ears. My subject, I would like to emphasise, is the nature of political obligation; my approach will be analytical rather than historical; and indeed, let me say at once that this lecture is a kind of examen de conscience in which I am myself involved, since I feel personally responsible for having introduced the phrase into my own native language, and for having used it during a life-time as if its meaning were self-evident, without ever raising the questions which I want to raise today.

What force has the Argument from Design—the attempt to argue to Design, and hence to God, from various alleged signs of it in Nature?

Some preliminary points. First: To establish the reality of God need not be to prove that there exists an actual person meriting that name. Many theologians, for example P. Tillich, have denied that God is any manner of existent. On a fairly simple and attractive interpretation, their view is that ‘God’ names the principle that ethical requirements are creatively powerful. In previous papers I tried to make sense of this principle: there is much that can be said for it. So when talking of ‘design’ I am not presupposing anything as specific as an actual designer.

It is one of the objects of what is sometimes called “general theory of value” to study all sorts of value judgments or (what would be a better name for them) evaluational judgments. But what the sorts of evaluational judgment are is a question that has so far by no means been settled. There are only two kinds of evaluational judgment that are universally recognized and that have well–established names, the ethical or moral, and the aesthetic. Another pair that have sometimes been mentioned are the prudential and the economic. The object of this paper is to direct attention to still another, quite distinct, sort of evaluational judgment which we commonly make, to give judgments of this sort a name, and to characterize them in a provisional way.

That Plato was in some sense a poet is a fact which most of us are prepared to recognize without much hesitation. What is not always clear is how far any of his Dialogues, in whole or in part, may be justly described as poetry, and to what extent his “poeticalness” must affect our critical approach to, and hence our evaluation of, his philosophy as a whole. And this, in effect, is the problem to which I propose to address myself in this paper. Before, however, I attempt to discuss what is an exceptionally complicated issue, a few remarks of a more general nature will not perhaps be out of place-for the need of caution in any approach to Plato is obvious from the start.

The Purpose of this paper is to ask how far Locke can be said to have anticipated modern theories of number, particularly the intuitionist theory of Brouwer and Heyting. It has in mind Mr Edward E. Dawson's statement that Locke's account of number was not merely ‘a good effort in his own day’ but that ‘what Locke had to say really was quite fundamental, and a good deal of modern mathematics assumes his position, either explicitly or implicitly’. Mr Dawson thinks that some of the central notions of the intuitionist theory are already present in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, xvi, ‘Of Number’. We should like to examine the view.

For a long time Hume's philosophical achievement was judged almost entirely by Book I of the Treatise. A major contribution of Kemp Smith's work on Hume was the insistence that the epistemological doctrines of Book I were essentially related to the ethical theory of Book III. Recent moral philosophy has found Book III to be of considerable intrinsic interest and relevance to current problems. It is now becoming apparent, however, that Hume's ethical theory is intimately bound up with the philosophy of mind in Book II. This new emphasis upon the significance of Book II for Hume's ethics derives from Dr Pall S. Árdal's book Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise. In view of Árdal's influence on continuing study in this field—witness the recent book by Philip Mercer—it becomes important to point out what I take to be a major error in one part of Árdal's analysis of the relationship between Hume's philosophy of mind and his moral theory.

The relationship of word-meaning to speaker's-meaning has not been examined thoroughly enough. Some philosophical problems are solved and others made plainer if the full consequences of a proper relationship between these two is worked out.

The present paper is an attempt to show that Kolakowski's contention is fundamentally correct. But Part I begins by distinguishing, as here he does not, two very different senses of ‘freedom’. In one freedom is a possible but not a necessary condition and objective of human activity: it is a condition which may or may not obtain on particular occasions; and an objective which particular people may or may not choose to pursue. In the other freedom is indeed inescapably ‘rooted in the very quality of being human’. So the remainder of Part I is devoted to the elucidation of this second sense, and to showing that any study of human behaviour which is to deserve the diploma description ‘science’ must start by recognizing rather than denying this definitive fact of our nature. It is argued that no one would be able even to understand such a denial unless they were equipped with premises sufficient for a demonstration of its falsity. Part II goes on to make an example of a widely read work by a leading behavioural scientist. The author starts by insisting, contrary to the contentions of Part I, that any true science of human psychology must presuppose the truth of that denial. He then proceeds to make it clear that, in consequence, he himself places no value upon freedom in the first sense.

Biological theories about the nature and origin of ethics are important, j both because they may be largely true, and because distorted versions are sometimes effective in moulding people's ethical beliefs in curious i ways. The pernicious effects (real and supposed) which sometimes follow the application of biology to ethics stem from an assortment of misinterpretations, while, correctly interpreted, even the most extreme biological determinism need not be supposed to diminish the worth of conscious individuals, nor be incompatible with genuinely ethical behaviour.

1. The appearance of Islam upon the stage of international politics hasbeen greeted by some commentators as a return to the Middle Ages. Preciselywhat they mean by this is not very clear, to themselves no less than their readers perhaps. In part, no doubt, they refer to the kinds of punishment Islamic law requires, which have a brutality associated in the common mind with medieval Europe. In part too there is the feeling that the phenomena of religion in politics, inquisitions, holy wars, government by clergy, are things of the past and that the undesirability of theocracy is a question long since settled.