In the twenty-five years since philosophers began to bemoan ‘the dreariness of aesthetics’, students in Wittgenstein's wake have done a great deal to eliminate the grounds of the complaint. Unfruitful essentialist theories have been largely displaced by the vigorous, if somewhat uncontrolled, growth of an enterprise which attempts to characterize and explicate aesthetic phenomena outside the desert of definition. The resulting view portrays typically aesthetic concepts as being indivisibly characterizing and evaluative, relativistic in application, necessarily linked to human attitudes, irreducible to non-aesthetic concepts, and yet as having social conditions which make them capable of intersubjective comparison and test. These characteristics are usefully summarized in saying that aesthetic concepts are concepts of appraisal. The theory of aesthetic appraisal discussed here is clearly incompatible with views which postulate dichotomies between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and value, and it is quite analogous to ‘descriptivist’ theories in ethics which reject these absolute distinctions. Moral examples are thus often useful for explicating the notion of aesthetic appraisal and the theory embodying that notion likewise has an important bearing on contemporary controversies in ethics.

It is the purpose of the following pages to reconsider the basic problem of induction. According to Hume the concomitance of A with B on one or more occasions gives no valid presumption that A will be accompanied by B on any other occasion. The data of experience may give rise to an association of ideas or set up mental habits, but they provide no reasonable grounds for expecting similar concomitances or sequences in future. If this is correct, we have no starting point for the formation of any valid opinions about matters of fact; we remain ice-bound in a region of total scepticism.

Philosophy is commonly referred to as a “spirit” of inquiry, a general attitude toward things, rather than a body of conclusions; but as every spirit in this world must have a body, so philosophy must have a method. The expression, “philosophical method,” is used with somewhat varying meanings, but it is the question of how philosophical conclusions are attained that we have in mind in the present article.

Professor Charles S. Chihara has criticized the views on the subject of inconsistency which Wittgenstein put forward in his recently published 1939 lectures. Chihara notes that these views are not peculiar to the 1939 lectures, and in fact they are to be found in all Wittgenstein's later writings on mathematics (e.g. WWK pp. 173ff., PR p. 189, PG pp. 303ff., RFM pp. 100ff.). So these ideas about inconsistency appear not to be just a momentary aberration on Wittgenstein's part. One would therefore expect that he had some good reasons for holding them. But Chihara justly complains that the kind of strong argumentation one would hope for is not forthcoming in these lectures. Instead Wittgenstein's usual procedure is to try to defend his views by producing series of rather unconvincing examples.

It is commonly believed that there are, in the world, large numbers of objects which occupy three-dimensional space. It is also commonly believed that at least a large part of people's experience is of the surfaces of these material objects. Nevertheless, arguments have been adduced in favour of the view that we are never aware of such surfaces but only of distinct items called ‘sense-data’. It has also been suggested that if we couple the view that experience is limited to sense-data with an empiricist thesis to the effect that knowledge is limited by experience then we are forced to the conclusion that we cannot have any knowledge of material objects. There have been many attempts to reconcile the sense-data thesis with common beliefs about material objects. Among them have been representative realism and phenomenalism. However, a view which may have found favour recently is the Quinean one that ‘the myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience’.1

There can be little doubt, I think, that the quality and texture of recent scientific and philosophical thought mark a greater break with the past than any innovations such as were introduced by a Gallileo or a Newton, a Descartes or a Kant. The switch over from the logicality and essential rationality of these men to the irrationalisms, the anti-intellectualisms, and the new logics of the moderns, is not at all on the same footing as that deepening of our concepts of knowledge and reality which we associate with the masters of thought, more particularly with the critical philosophy of Kant. Strong and significant as these earlier changes were, they marked but the onward strides of an art of thinking which remained in its essence the same in spite of them. But the thinkers in the public eye to-day are exploring in unknown regions, and it may turn out that they have got beyond their depth. Whatever their fate, it seems undeniable that the experiments that they have made and are making constitute, at points at least, and for the time being, a veritable revolution.

Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics was poorly received by the critics when it was first published, and only a few sympathetic commentators have made much of it since then. The book has not had a great success, because the majority of people interested in the philosophy of mathematics these days have a quite different approach to the subject from Wittgenstein. But not only that, they have a quite different logic from Wittgenstein. I believe one of the main sources of the antipathy felt towards the Remarks lies in the foreignness of the logic Wittgenstein develops there. I hope, in what follows, to make that logic more understandable, and with it the philosophy of mathematics it supports.

The traditional business of Aesthetics has been the study of the aesthetic experience and activity of mankind, in order to show what it is and how it can be distinguished from other experiences and activities. The assumption commonly made is that we ourselves, like others before us, have had a specifically aesthetic experience in the enjoyment of art or the beauty of nature, or have been engaged in the making of something unquestionably artistic. This basic assumption has been challenged recently by I. A. Richards, who calls aesthetic experience “a phantom.” His view is shared by other contemporary philosophers, who also maintain that there is no appreciable difference between an aesthetic reaction and any other frame of mind, or between artistic behaviour and other forms of creative work. We can certainly appeal to experience for the support of a postulate usually taken for granted and say that most artists, authors, and ordinary people in fact regard their aesthetic experience as something entirely distinct from what they do or feel at other times. Analysis will show whether this common-sense opinion is illusory.

Professor J. W. N. Watkins argues in his Hobbes' System of Ideas that Hobbes' theory of moral predicates must be interpreted in terms of Austinian performatives. In this paper I shall argue two points. First, that Watkins' thesis is false. Second, that Hobbes' own doctrine, which asserts that things are made good or just by being declared to be so by the sovereign, is inconsistent.

Watkins begins with brief exposition of Hobbes' theory of moral language as stated in the Leviathan.

But whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is if, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill; And of his Contempt, Vile and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the Person of the man (where there is no Common-wealth;) or, (in a Common-wealth,) from the Person that representeth it; or from an Arbitrator or Judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the Rule thereof.