Donald Davidson notoriously rejected ‘metaphorical meaning’ and denied the existence of linguistic mechanisms by which metaphorical significance is conveyed. He contended that the meanings metaphorical sentences have are just their literal meanings, though metaphorical utterances may brute-causally have important cognitive effects. Contrastingly, John Searle offers a Gricean account of metaphor as an elaborated kind of implicature, and defends metaphorical meaning as speaker-meaning. Each of those positions is subject to very telling objections from the other's point of view. This paper proposes a synthesis that combines the respective virtues of Davidson's and Searle's accounts and avoids all the objections to each.

It has often been claimed that Locke's agnostic remarks in the Essay represent his suspension of philosophical judgment on crucial ontological issues or his hesitation over which metaphysical stance to adopt. Against this often-raised criticism, I argue that Locke actually held a clear position – a type of functionalism about thingness in general, whether macro or micro, or whether mental or physical. What Locke refers to as a ‘nominal essence’, I further argue, represents a set of functional roles that a thing plays in order to be classified as of a kind to which it belongs. Our empirical knowledge about things – confined to their nominal essences – can only tell us about their functional roles but not their intrinsic properties that realize those roles. One remains therefore incurably ignorant about the intrinsic property of things in themselves. I explore the historical and philosophical significance of Locke's functional approach.

It is notorious that great philosophers are apt to be misunderstood. Controversy rages about their work, and sometimes they are credited with completely contradictory views. Consider the sharply contrasted opinions of Plato's political thought by Sir Karl Popper, on the one hand, and G. C. Field and H. B. Acton on the other.

Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion1 closes with an endorsement of the very position which it has consistently attacked, namely belief in an orderer. Hume's willingness to oppose arguments supporting a position in which he believes means that, despite mounting severe criticisms, he can consistently support a designer as the optimum hypothesis for order in the world. He produced numerous statements of order in the world and then, in Part 12 of the DNR, alleged that persons of understanding would find that belief in a designer follows.

Our world is mobile. People move, either within the state or from one state to another, to access opportunities, to improve their living conditions, or to start afresh. Yet, we usually assume that migration is an exceptional activity that leads to permanent settlement. In this paper, I invite us to reconsider this assumption. First, I analyse several ways in which people experience mobility in contemporary societies. Then, I turn to migration, as a specific form of mobility. I distinguish between a legal/administrative, a social, and a self-identification-based approach to migration, demonstrating that they lead to divergent definitions of who is a migrant. I proceed by introducing the concept of mobile migration and by developing a typology of mobile migrants. I conclude that, in order to devise migration policies that treat migrants fairly, a careful consideration of the claims and interests of the different types of mobile migrants is necessary.

The distinction between mental illness and bodily illness would seem to presuppose some sort of distinction between mind and body. But dualist theories that the mind is a substance separable from the body, or that mental events could occur without any bodily events, raise ancient conceptual problems, which I do not propose to review here. What I want to do is to examine the psychiatric implications of materialist theories, which hold that the mind is the brain, or a function of the brain. If all character has a basis in chemistry, can we still attribute some mental distress to character and some to chemistry, as if the two categories were different?

In his discussion note ‘J. J. C. Smart, Materialism and Occam's Razor’ Peter Glassen argues that it was inconsistent of me both to assert that realism is true and that Occam's razor (or any other principle for that matter) is a reason for the materialist thesis. Glassen says that Occam's razor ‘is not a physical thing, state or process at all’. A little further down on the same page he uses the phrase ‘material or physical thing, state, or process’. It is possible, therefore, that Glassen regards the distinction between ‘material’ and ‘physical’ as unimportant in the present context. I think however that one way of replying to Glassen turns on this distinction.

A newcomer to the writing of this survey quickly learns (though not quite quickly enough for his first venture) that they do not serve who only sit and wait. The expectation, in other words, that the year's major books of French philosophy will arrive unsolicited, is not fulfilled. Instead one is faced with a miscellaneous set of publications covering such varied topics as Jewish mysticism, cybernetics and a translation from Spanish of a primer of political economy. I must therefore beg readers to be indulgent enough to pay for my first lesson, promising them that henceforth I shall bestir myself and forage.

I would like to develop a few critical observations on some substantive moral ideas propounded in Professor R. M. Hare's Freedom and Reason a work where formal and substantive moral arguments are blended in an attractive and plausible, though at times somewhat exasperating, mixture. Hare's formal doctrines, the celebrated theses of prescriptivity and universalizability, will not as such interest me here, though I shall have to take notice of at least one of them, viz. universalizability, in so far as it has a bearing on what I take to be Hare's substantive position. The arguments in Freedom and Reason are compounded of Kantian and utilitarian elements, and culminate in Hare's conceptualization of two antithetical types of person, whom he calls respectively the ‘liberal’ and the ‘fanatic’. This distinction itself is based on a rigid and uncompromising dichotomy of ‘interest’ and ‘ideal’, and it is on this dichotomy that Hare's substantive moral doctrine hinges. Hare's argument is that the morally good person is one who subordinates his ideal to a moral principle that takes interests into account, in contradistinction to the fanatic who allows interests to be overridden by his ideal. There is much to recommend in this doctrine, and distinctions of this nature can and ought to be drawn. But the way in which it is done in Hare's work opens up fresh doubts and fails to solve some fundamental problems. As I do not think that his distinction between ‘interest’ and ‘ideal’ is tenable, I cannot agree wholly to the predominantly formal manner in which Hare deals with the important question of distinguishing between liberalism and fanaticism. The upshot of my arguments is that this distinction can only be made intelligible in substantive terms. Although I cannot here offer a positive alternative to Hare beyond some oblique hints at the end, my critical remarks on Hare's doctrine ought at least to go some way in establishing the need for such an alternative.

Richard Price argued for democratic institutions on the ground that each individual has a moral responsibility for the good government of his community. This assumption that political responsibilities are moral responsibilities was in turn derived from the belief that each individual has a continuous duty to create in his own personality and in his relations with his fellow men the conditions of the virtuous life. Popular political responsibility was thus defended by the extension of a rigorous moral athleticism into the sphere of social arrangements. The dominating feature of this demand for comprehensive reform and reconstruction is the attempt to construe the moral life as a process in which the individual struggles to recreate himself in the light of his most mature conceptions. These conceptions, Price maintained, are determined rationally, and that they are so is presented in two different ways. Either as in the case of the principles of moral judgment they are held to be the objects of a rational intuition; or as in the defence of democratic institutions they are derived from an abstract construction of the demands of moral personality.

Sachverhalt and Gegenstand are dead. Wittgenstein announces their passing in Philosophische Untersuchungen and he of all people should know when the brainchildren of his youth were no more. But it is surprising that he does not accord them more generous obsequies than a fragmented, offhand obituary. Their existence was a logical necessity in his erstwhile scheme of things, not a dispensable phenomenon of the contingent world:

Even if the world is infinitely complex, so that every fact consists of infinitely many Sachverhalte and every Sachverhalt is composed of infinitely many Gegenstände, even then there would have to be Gegenstände and Sachverhalte (T 4.2211)