1. ‘How do we know the material world?’, ‘What is it to know the material world?’, ‘In what ways is knowledge of the material world like and in what ways is it unlike other sorts of knowledge?’

We know how we know the material world and what it is to know the material world and in what ways such knowledge is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge. But a man who knows what poetry is like and how it is like and unlike prose may ask ‘What is poetry?’, and a mathematician who knows what it is like to do mathematics may ask ‘What is mathematics?’ It is in a rather like way that we ask ‘What is knowledge of the material world?’ The ways in which knowledge of the material world is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge are familiar to us but we wish for a still better grasp of these likenesses and unlikenesses.

Do I ever directly raise my arm? Before dealing with this question we must make clear that the corresponding affirmation is to be taken as a way of rejecting one interpretation of the question, ‘In doing or by doing what do I raise my arm?’ On the interpretation of the question I have in mind the appropriate reply, if the question were not rejected, would be, ‘I raise my arm in or by doing something internal’. The way we are employing the phrase ‘doing something internal’ will, I think, become clear when we consider candidates for the description ‘doing something internal’. But it is important to remember that to affirm that I directly raise my arm is to reject the question, ‘In doing or by doing what do I raise my arm?’ on our interpretation of the question.

Philosophers have taken some salutary exercise in recent years—notably in this journal—on the question of the rights of non-human animals and the obligations of human to non-human individuals and species. In so contentious an area there has been striking unanimity on two aspects. One of these is that, irrespective of the merits of the arguments on specific issues, this is a matter which is bound to affect the conduct of our lives. The other is that, other things being equal, it is prima facie wrong to be cruel to animals.

On A number of occasions in the Principles, Berkeley defends himself against the possible objection that

‘by the foregoing principles, all that is real and substantial in nature is banished out of the world; and instead thereof a chimerical scheme of ideas takes place. All things that exist, exist only in the mind.… What therefore becomes of the sun, moon, and stars? … Are all these but so many chimeras and illusions on the fancy ?’

(I) Whenever we speak with someone in everyday life, when we write a letter or read a novel, we are said to use natural language. We have a historically given language like English or French; we consider familiar things and events; and we use the language more or less as most members of the same community use it.

In her paper ‘Is it True What They Say About Tarski?’, Susan Haack argues that Popper is wrong to regard Tarski's theory of truth as a correspondence theory of truth. For, she says:

… Tarksi does not present his theory as a correspondence theory. In fact Tarski explicitly comments that the correspondence theory cannot be considered a satisfactory definition of truth. And later he observes that he was ‘by no means surprised’ to learn that, in a survey carried out by Naess, only 15 per cent agreed that truth is correspondence with reality, while 90 per cent agreed that ‘It is snowing’ is true if and only if it is snowing (p. 324).

John S. Dunne says that in its most general form the ‘problem of death’ is this: ‘If I must some day die, what can I do to satisfy my desire to live?’ His aim is to ‘discover what[men] have done or tried to do to make themselves immortal’ —or at any rate to prolong their lives indefinitely, a rather different matter. His book charts the adoption and subsequent rejection of a succession of historical ‘solutions’ to this problem: ‘surrogates’of one or another kind for everlasting life, as he calls them. The surrogates he examines are many and varied: the shared experience of life and death; the appropriation of the dead by the living; immortal fame; immortal status; autonomous life and autonomous death; and others still.

Utilitarianism has been attacked many times and from many points of view. Among other objections has been the charge that it cannot account for the moral phenomena connected with justice; we are interested, it is said, not only in producing as much good as possible, but also in distributing it in a certain way. The Utilitarian usually replies that these phenomena either can be deduced from Utilitarianism or are illusory, but a natural reluctance to go against the data of our moral experience usually inclines him to the first alternative. One of the most interesting of the Utilitarians from this point of view is Sidgwick, because he makes Utilitarianism his philosophical basis, but at the same time he has a set of maxims (ME 3.13)2 part of whose purpose is to cover the common-sense views on justice. In this article I shall consider the relations between these maxims and Utilitarianism, and shall try to show by means of an example that some of them do go beyond Utilitarianism, and that in so far, at any rate, as these maxims do represent the common-sense view, it and Utilitarianism are not in all cases strictly reconcilable.