In his speech of welcome to the members of the Classical Joint Meeting at Cambridge in August, 1958, the Master of Peterhouse praised classical scholars for the detachment and pertinacity with which they continue their pursuits while the world is on the edge of the abyss. The remark might be taken to have one more edge than the abyss. At a time when it can no longer be assumed that a knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics is part of the learning of any man who has any learning at all, there are two opposite temptations which beset those whose profession is the study and teaching of the ancient classics. The first is the sentimentality which goes on singing dithyrambs to the Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome, on the assumption that the relevance of ancient texts to modern perplexities is too nearly self-evident to need explaining.

I hope that it will become clear in the course of this paper what I mean by calling some elements of science unaccountable. Let me now say only that I shall speak of the contributions made to scientific thought by acts of personal judgment which cannot be replaced by the operation of explicit reasoning. I shall try to show that such tacit operations play a decisive part not only in the discovery, but in the very holding of scientific knowledge. I shall outline the structure of these acts and indicate to what extent this structure offers a justification for relying on such acts.

At the beginning of The Principles of Literary Criticism I. A. Richards complained of the chaos of critical theories—a complaint that we hear pretty often, generally from theorists about to add to it, each making his small contribution. Richards' own contribution was a plan for reckoning the merit of poetry in terms of the more or less organised psychological state that it serves to induce in its readers: for poetry, he held, organises our ‘attitudes’—a term that may be taken in different ways. The theoretical picture that Richards connects with it, a vivid enough picture in its way, is of a kind of stock exchange of neural impulses; but perhaps in his practical criticism the word reverts to its ordinary sense. And surely the practical criticism, not the neurological speculation, is what has served to keep Richards' work alive. This is the aspect, at least, to which I shall confine my attention here; my concern is with the use of these and similar concepts in the practical business of criticism. For here we have critical approach, a technique and an orientation, that has in point of fact increasingly established itself. And the fact is one, surely, that aesthetics cannot ignore; a general theory should take notice of practice. But if this is only to add still more to the notorious chaos, I cannot see any alternative course short of abandoning the subject altogether; and that alternative, at least for those who are instinctive theorists and generalisers, is an impossible one.

In this paper I want to examine the notion of desert, which seems to have been neglected by contemporary philosophers. Apartfrom its interest in its own right, it is important to be clear about the meaning of the word if there is to be any understanding of the idea of punishment. And that we are confused over the whole issue of punishment is obvious both from the remarks of professional philosophers and from the comments of the ‘man in the street’. Because of this confusion, the discussion of any actual punishment seems to take place between two parties who never get to grips with the arguments of the other, as in the whole debate over the death penalty. To one set of people, it is obvious that the retention of hanging depends to a large extent on the question of its effectiveness in deterring murderers; to another it is equally obvious that the murderer ‘deserves’ to hang, and that there is no more to be said about the matter. Capital punishment is not a good starting-point for a discussion of punishment in general, for death is clearly unique among penalties; in addition, the topic gives rise inevitably to much sentimentality and resulting muddle-headedness.

To translate is one thing; to say how we do it, is another. The practice is familiar enough, and there are familiar theories of it. But when we try to look more closely, theory tends to obscure rather than explain, and the familiar practice—an ancient practice, without which Western civilisation is unthinkable—appears to be just baffling, its very possibility a mystery.

Locke, in writing about ‘Trifling Propositions’ which bring no increase to our knowledge, remarked ‘When we affirm the said truth of itself, it shows us nothing but what we must certainly know before. What is this more than trifling with words? It is but like a monkey shifting his oyster from one hand to the other, and had he but words might no doubt have said “Oyster in right hand is subject and oyster in left hand is predicate”, and so might have made a selfevident proposition of oyster, i.e. oyster is oyster’.

WHAT do we mean by saying that a being, God for example, is omniscient? One way of answering this question is to translate ‘God is omniscient’ into some slightly more formalised language than colloquial English, e.g. one with variables of a number of different types, including variables replaceable by statements, and quantifiers binding thes.

Many contemporary philosophers writing on punishment seek to show that much of the dispute between retributionists and utilitarians springs from a failure on the part of both parties to elucidate the concept of punishment. The writers are usually utilitarians who seek to show that what is true in the retributive theory is simply a point about the concept of punishment, and that for the rest, the morality of punishment is to be explained in terms of the utilitarian theory. Those who attempt to destroy the retributive theory by reducing its element of truth to a mere conceptual point about the concept of punishment, seek to argue that the notion of being guilty of an offence is part of the concept of punishment. Against this kind of approach, I wish to consider whether a general theory of punishment is possible, and if so, what are its basic concepts—punishment, deserving of punishment, deserved, or justifiable punishment—and how they are to be elucidated. I shall be concerned to argue that much contemporary writing on punishment commits the Platonic fallacy of assuming that there is a single, core, paradigm use of ‘punishment’ which is to be found by elucidating the concept of legal punishment.

The failures of a philosophic system (like the failures and set-backs in the life and career of a person) are often a good deal more revealing than its successes, for such failures (like those in real life) test its strength and mark the limits of its endurance. Yet if these failures disclose any uniform pattern they are not only revealing but instructive and can be turned to good account.

We are accustomed to thinking of space and time as particulars or individuals—even if we should hesitate to describe them as things or objects or substances. We say ‘space has three dimensions’, ‘material things occupy space’, ‘the debris has disappeared into space’ and we talk in a comparable fashion about time. Not only do we think of space and time as individuals but, in many connections at any rate, we think of them as unique individuals. When we talk about spaces and times in the plural, when we say ‘fill up the spaces on the form’, ‘it could go in the space between the lamp and the door’, ‘there were peaceful times in the early years of their marriage’ we think of these multiple spaces and times as parts of the unique allencompassing space and the unique all-encompassing time. Kant believed that we could not help thinking of them in this way. We do, at any rate, in fact think like this and it is this conviction that I want to examine.

Perhaps no word has received such varied treatment from philosophers as the word ‘good’. No doubt this is largely due to the fact that it is a word with an unusually wide range of use. Aristotle, for example, realised that it is a term that can be applied to substances, qualities, relations, actions, passivities, times and places, and we may notice that he was of the opinion that the term must have different meanings when applied in these different categories. Many of the usages which are distinguishable in everyday speech have given rise to corresponding theories about the nature of goodness. Indeed if we survey the history of philosophical speculation about goodness, we find that there are just about as many theories about goodness as there are distinct uses of the word ‘good’. For example, goodness has been variously described as an unique quality, as a consequential property, as a relational property, etc., and the word ‘good’ has been described as a term of commendation or approval, and its attributive, predicative and instrumental senses, to name a few, have been distinguished.

Heidegger's thought has recently been made more available to English readers by the publication of two books: one a translation of one of Heidegger's works, the other, by Thomas Langan, an American scholar, described as a critical study of Heidegger. Heidegger's philosophy has had little or no influence in England; and this seems a good opportunity for considering whether this neglect is merited, or whether some defence can be offered of Heidegger's curious manipulations of the German and Greek tongues. Since An Introduction to Metaphysics philosophises on a basis of Greek, though it purports to be philosophy, not history of philosophy, most of this article will be concerned with Heidegger's use and abuse of that language. I shall suggest, however, that the same conclusions hold good of Heidegger's use of German.

Although philosophising about given languages had been going on ever since the time of Plato's Kratylos, the idea of an artificial philosophical language or system of signs began to take shape in the seventeenth century. Both Descartes and Mersenne explored the ground for the foundations of a system of expressions which could meet all the requirements of logical thought; but the merit of presenting the first elaborate plans goes to the British authors George Dalgarno and John Wilkins.1 Leibniz followed soon after with his characteristica universalis.

I Propose to re-explore here some aspects of a very shop-worn question: ‘Was Hobbes in any sense an atheist?’ Three centuries ago, Hobbes's personal security in part depended on the way his contemporaries answered this question; today, the validity of several current accounts of his philosophy are similarly bound up with it. These accounts vary extraordinarily, all the way from Polin's confident assertion that ‘pour qui sait lire entre les lignes, … c'est ľatheísme qui triomphe implicitement’, to Taylor's equally firm belief that ‘a certain kind of theism is necessary to make [Hobbes's] theory work.’1 And now the latest of the Taylorians, Prof. Howard Warrender, has published his book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, in which Hobbes's statements regarding the place of God are again treated as an essential part of his theory; and the charge explicitly made, that there are no sound grounds for regarding them as ‘the product of confusion or pretence on Hobbes's part’.

It would be interesting to speculate why particular lines of enquiry flourish and fade. The study of ‘character’ is a case in point. In the '20s and early '30s the study of ‘character’ was quite a flourishing branch of psychology. It then came to an abrupt halt and, until recent times, there has been almost nothing in the literature on the subject. Perhaps it was the notorious Hartshorne and May Character Education Enquiry, and the inferences that were mistakenly drawn from it, that killed it; perhaps it was the pre-occupation with something more general and amorphous called ‘personality’; perhaps it was the mixture of metaphysics and methodological neurosis centred around the rat. Who knows? Anyway, the study of character is very much with us again as is revealed not merely by Riesman's Lonely Crowd but also by the recent study by Peck and Havighurst called The Psychology of Character Development. The British Journal of Educational Psychology has also, for some time, been running a symposium on The Development of Moral Values in Children.

Was Hume here claiming or implying that propositions about what men ought to do are radically different from purely factual propositions, and that they cannot ever be entailed by any purely factual propositions? No, despite Mr Hare, Professor Nowell-Smith, Professor Ayer, Miss Murdoch, Professor Flew, Mr Basson, and The Observer's Brief Guide to philosophy.

Mr Ninian Smart distinguishes what he calls the Utopia Thesis from the Compatibility Thesis. The latter he formulates as the contention: ‘that causal determinism (i.e. the claim that all human actions are the results of prior causes) is compatible with free will.’ The former is ‘the assertion that God could have created men wholly good’. Smart clearly has his doubts about the truth of this Compatibility Thesis. But his sole aim in ‘Omnipotence, Evil and Supermen’ is to try to show ‘that the Utopia Thesis does not follow from the Compatibility Thesis, despite appearances.’

In this paper I shall be principally concerned with three points arising from Professor Austin's British Academy Lecture on ‘Ifs and Cans’.1 These points only concern that use of ‘can’ where it is used in the general sense of ‘to be able’ and applied to human beings in respect of actual or possible actions.2 To some extent, of course, the basic problem is simply what sense of ‘can’ it is which is involved when we talk of possible but not actual human actions, i.e. when we say that a person could do or could have done what he does not or did not do (this was Moore's original problem).