A tendency towards diffuse and piecemeal linguistic analysis threatens to overwhelm Anglo-Saxon philosophy to-day. Stringent linguistic analysis can indeed be valuable, but much that has been written recently, for instance, in Mind, the stronghold of linguistic analysis, shows no trace of clearly grasped method and well understood aims. The result is meandering discursiveness, the collection of trivial anecdotes and the random mixing of linguistic, psychological and sociological reflections leading to no clear conclusions.

Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements which are just as complicated as the knots.1 A claim to know can be contradicted in various ways. Which of them does the sceptic have in mind when he denies that we can know—for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow? Does he mean, perhaps, that the proposition is false—that the sun will not rise tomorrow? The sceptic is in no position to make such a claim. Does he mean that no one can feel certain of the proposition? No; the fact that people feel certain of it is not in dispute. The sceptic's argument is essentially about justification. He claims that we do not have the right to feel certain, nor, therefore, to claim to know. But how can he arrive at this conclusion?

According to David Hume our idea of a necessary connection between what we call cause and effect is produced when repeated observation of the conjunction of two events determines the mind to consider one upon the appearance of the other. No matter how we interpret Hume's theory of causation this explanation of the genesis of the idea of necessity is fraught with difficulty. I hope to show, looking at the three major interpretations of Hume's causal theory, that his account is contradictory, plainly wrong, or (at best) inherently impossible to verify.

There is a wide gap, at any rate in the English-speaking world, between the people whose business it is to talk about the nature of poetry and those who are concerned with the critical analysis of language. Although both subjects are legitimate topics for philosophical discussion, there are few philosophers who combine a deep and effective interest in aesthetics with a concern in the problems of linguistic analysis. The analytical philosopher is only too ready to relegate poetry to the field of “emotive” meaning; and, although “emotive” is a convenient term for marking off aspects of meaning with which the scientist (for example) is not concerned, it is also a means for keeping questions closed which ought to be opened. For it conceals the enormous differences which exist between various nonscientific uses of language. It does this behind an implicit suggestion that, since “emotions” are the province of the psychologist, any sort of inquiry into these uses of language will be merely a psychological inquiry. Poetry, of course, falls into this category of non-scientific uses of language, and a few psycho-analysts have accepted the commitment to discuss it; but on the whole its discussion is left to a very small band of aestheticians and a very large fraternity of literary critics.

This article must open with a Warning. In face of the positive information which the sciences supply, the philosophical contribution to this problem will seem disappointingly negative, or at least mine will do so. For I shall insist, and I think we can only rightly insist, that the philosopher is not yet in a position to produce a satisfactory positive theory of the relation between mind and body. And I shall annoy many of you further by insisting that the old-fashioned “dualism” has not really been disproved. However, even if you do not agree with me, it is at any rate a good general piece of advice that, when we are confronted with a philosophical view which has maintained its ground for a very long time but seems to ourselves or to our generation very unreasonable, we should look specially carefully to find the positive grounds which have made so apparently unplausible a doctrine seem true to so many competent thinkers.

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.

Modern ethics has been chiefly concerned with the analysis of the conditions and principles of morality; and, in particular, one of its most important achievements has been the further elucidation of the Kantian dictum that “I ought” implies that I can. On the face of it Kant's contention seems perfectly straightforward, but, on examination, it becomes apparent that the simple word “can” covers a somewhat complicated ambiguity. When it is said that I ought to do act A, it may rightly be taken that I can do act A; but the question arises whether or not this in turn involves that I am aware that I can do act A. There is clearly some significance in the assertion that I can do many acts which, however, never occur to me, either because I am ignorant of certain facts or because I have a mistaken opinion about the facts. On the other hand, it may quite properly be said that I cannot perform any act of the possibility of which I am unaware. The problem then is to determine and examine the sense of the word “can” which is a pre-condition of moral obligation.

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.

In ‘Scientific Research and Moral Rectitude’ Robert Hoffman defends the scientific community against critics who maintain that ‘the researcher's claim to freedom of inquiry should be upheld only if his discovery does not adversely affect mankind….’ He uses two arguments in his defence, both of which purport to show that this sort of criticism is logically misconceived.

Contemporary philosophical activity in India is influenced not only by India's traditional philosophy but also by Western Philosophy. One of the results of the introduction, by Macaulay, of the Western system of education into India is the popularization of the study of Western Philosophy, and Indians took to it quite enthusiastically. Sanscrit philosophical texts were at first regarded as sacred, and Europeans could have no access to them. But in time, the prejudice abated, and Sanscrit texts began to be translated into English. At the beginning, the motives behind Western interest in Indian Philosophy were mainly of two kinds: the rulers wanted to understand the culture and religions of the ruled in order to govern them without hurting their religious sentiments, and thus with the least friction; and secondly. Christian missionaries wanted converts and studied the religions and philosophies of the latter in order to find out defects in them and uphold the superiority of Christianity. But whatever be the motives and however biased the scholarship in the beginning, genuine academical interest in the philosophical literature of India came to be evinced, thanks to the work of men like Max Müller, Deussen, Rhys Davids, etc., and vast stores of Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina philosophical literature were unearthed not only in India but also outside. It should, however, be said that academical philosophers of the West did not take serious interest in Indian Philosophy as such; and not a single Indian philosophical concept has entered till now the discussions of Western technical philosophy, Schopenhauer was an exception: he made serious use of the concept of Maya.

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’.