Whenever we read any philosophical work dealing with the nature of qualities, the status of universals, or similar problems, we find continual references to colour; redness and blueness meet us on every page. Even Whitehead, whose obscurity is, at least in part, due to his avoidance of particular instances, condescends to cite colours as examples of “eternal objects” and other cases will occur at once to every reader.

The problem I shall discuss is What reason have we for believing that there are physical objects? My purpose is not either to raise or to dispel doubts as to the existence of physical objects; this doubt constitutes a medical rather than a philosophical problem. The point of asking the question is that, while there can be no reasonable difference of opinion as to whether there are physical objects, there can be and is reasonable difference of opinion as to how the notion of a physical object is to be analysed; and if we are clear as to what grounds there are for believing in physical objects, we shall also be clearer as to what sort of physical objects we have grounds for believing in. Also, it is worth while to inquire which other beliefs are logically connected with, and which are logically independent of, the belief in physical objects.

I offer reasons against reading Hume as a Pyrrhonian sceptic. I argue that Hume's scepticism is motivated differently, that his sceptical strategies are not analogous to Pyrrhonism's, and that it is profitable to read Hume as a critic of Pyrrhonism. I hold that the most informative point of comparison between Hume and Sextus Empiricus is a point of difference, namely, their stands on the connection between suspension of judgement (epochê) and tranquillity (ataraxia). For Sextus, tranquillity flows naturally from suspending judgement on all opinions. Hume, by contrast, consistently treats radical suspension of judgement as resulting in despair and social detachment. I take a firmer stance than past commentators on this issue by affirming that Hume and Sextus do not merely disagree on this issue, but that Hume's view is more plausible. Reading Hume's sceptical crisis, I propose, reveals an insightful criticism of Pyrrhonism, one that sheds light on human nature's response to radical doubt.

A common idea about assessing meaning in life is that one draws up a list of those various positive values that one has achieved and subtracts from it one's negative deeds in life. The resulting balance is the meaningfulness of one's existence. I call this the ledger theory. Drawing on the work of Raimond Gaita and Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending, I argue for a phenomenology of remorse that gives us reason to reject the ledger theory. Even those agents whose lives have been exceptionally meaningful in some respects may remain haunted by their past. Certain sorts of misdeeds – those that involve significant, irreparable damage – leave life marred in such a way that the negative remains, even in the face of all the meaningful deeds of life.

This paper aims first, to introduce and elaborate upon a certain principle about being (existence), roughly, that once something exists or has being, it cannot lose it: what is cannot, in this sense, unbe; and second, to apply this principle to a well-known issue in the philosophy of time, viz., that of whether future events, like past events, though of course not now occurring, nonetheless have being.

Wittgenstein wrote ‘While thinking philosophically we see problems in places where there are none. It is for philosophy to show that there are no problems’. He meant that the ‘problems’ philosophers grapple with are of their own making. In a related remark he said: ‘This is the essence of a philosophical problem. The question itself is the result of a muddle. And when the question is removed, this is not by answering it’. Even more explicitly he said: ‘All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols’. As he understood his job, it was not to produce or construct something; his job was entirely destructive. (He compared it to destroying houses of cards.) This is how Wittgenstein thought of philosophy when he thought about it in the abstract, and I share this view of philosophy. I believe that when we see how to dispose of all philosophical categories, our job is finished. For example, in epistemology our job is not to argue that it is possible to know such-and-such because so-and-so; rather, we undermine all those ideas that make it seem as though we could not know such-and-such. Undermining philosophical ideas takes the form: When we philosophise, we are tempted to think so-and-so, but if we consider that idea, and do so while remaining free of all philosophical jargon, we find that we cannot make sense of it.

The world we lost, and now barely understand, was one where everyone knew her place, and her attendant duties. Civilized groups were the likeliest to insist on a diversity of rôle and rule. Primitive societies are ones where there are rather fewer such distinctions. Slaves and merchants offered a way of being outside the orders, and from the older point of view, the life of slaves and merchants is exactly what the ‘liberal’ ideal entails. No one can count on her connections; everything is up for sale; no one is dishonoured by the acts of friends or family; only animal passions keep us all together. Even in societies that profess egalitarian theories, castes and classes re-emerge. If there is another option it may lie in drawing, as the ancients did, a clear division between selfhood and nature: even in a traditionally hierarchical society it is possible to recall the mere selves that play their various parts. In a would-be egalitarian society that hopes for something more than the hedonic or agonistic bonds that may bind small-scale communities together, recalling, and reconstructing, that distinction may be even more important.

Here are three sets of circumstances: (i) On 27 July 1656, at the age of 23, Spinoza was thrown out of his religious community–the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam. During the remaining 21 years of his life it would have been easy enough for him to have returned, in practical if not in personal terms, but he chose not to do so. Despite close association with members of various Protestant sects, he chose to live without affiliation to any religious group. At that time, this was rare.

The more elementary student used to be left with four main impressions of Locke. Firstly, he was an “empiricist”; secondly, he occupied an inconsistent intermediate position on the road to Berkeley and Hume; thirdly, he was pre-eminently the philosopher of common sense; fourthly, he committed the epistemological error of teaching that our only objects of knowledge were ideas in our mind which copied reality. All these dicta contain an important element of truth, but are misleading by reason of the excessive emphasis which has been placed upon them.

Just before the second world war, in a paper read to the British Association, Morris Ginsberg talked about the failure of social philosophy and the social sciences to work together in the universities ‘toward the rational ordering of society’. Some time after the war Alexander Macbeath complained to British sociologists of his own vain search for a social philosopher who could teach in a course on public administration. Then a few years later A. E. Teale told an inter-professional conference at Keele that people who teach and train teachers, those who train social workers of all kinds, were disappointed when philosophers professed themselves unable to help those who had to ‘equip students with the skill to change prevailing moral attitudes and standards’.

In an interesting work ‘The Ethical Animal’ Professor C. H. Waddington valiantly attempts to bridge the gap between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ without, it seems, succeeding in doing so. Notwithstanding his erudition, honesty of purpose and charm in exposition, the gulf remains unbridged. Indeed there are passages where it is difficult to be certain whether the author considers that he has bridged it or even what standpoint he finally adopts.