The problem with which I wish to deal in this paper is the problem of singular reasons in the humanities, whether they exist, or rather, whether they can exist: for it would seem that the word “reason” carried with it some idea of generality, so that the phrase “singular reason” was a contradiction in terms, a specification which could never be fulfilled. But humanists are always sensing the singularity of their studies: and the philosopher wondering about the nature of humane thinking either must conclude that it is really only inadequate science, its singularity being the mark of the fact that we never really have an adequate basis for any of our generalizations, an unfortunate reminder that the whole structure is built on the shakiest of inductive foundations; or, if he is unwilling to allow that humanists are just bad, or at least amateur, scientists, he is tempted to vindicate the rationality of their reasoning by inventing a special faculty of particular ratiocination which is able to perceive particular truths—the intuition of the moralists or the insight of the Collingwoodian mode.

I use the word Moralist, somewhat after the French fashion, in the sense of a commentator on the human scene. I apologize for Contemporary, but there was another Camus, way back in the seventeenth century, who is being resuscitated now and who, according to the new Encyclopaedia of Literature, “wrote besides theological works some fifty novels which make him a pioneer of religious edification through popular fiction.” Our Camus is very much of our century and is still a comparatively young man. And he is contemporary not only in the accidental sense that he happens to be alive and writing in our generation. He has suffered in his own flesh with our generation. He is both of us and with us. Born to a working-class French Colonial family in 1913 he knew none of the douceurs de la vie which held the memory in the first World War; while in the second he took an active part in the French Resistance movement and after the liberation edited the periodical Combat. His novels-L'Étranger (1942) and La Peste (1947)-are not so much works of imaginative creation as fictional records of the events of our time. His plays-Le Malentendu (1943), Caligula (1945), L'État de siège (1948), Les justes (1950) -are studies or allegories of moral and political collapse in its various and varying moods. Like Actuelles, a collection of his current writing from 1944 to 1948, both novels and plays are testimonies of the anxieties through which our generation has passed.

Some years ago a Belfast funeral undertaker was on holiday in County Down. One sunny evening he climbed to the highest point in the Ards Peninsula. The visibility was good and the view magnificent. On one side lay Strangford Lough with Slieve Croob and the Mourne Mountains in the background. On the other was the Irish Sea with the Isle of Man, the Cumberland Hills and the southern Scottish uplands in the distance.

Many of us have lately been reading, hearing or listening in to the present Master of Trinity's Presidential Address to the British Association's meeting at Oxford; and perhaps some reflexions suggested thereby may not be out of place in this number of Philosophy.

In the Philosophical Review of April, 1953 (pp. 167 ff.), Professor Ryle has drawn an interesting analogy between the use of words and the use of instruments or implements. He holds that this analogy helps us in two ways. Firstly, by asking ‘What is the use of that word?’ rather than ‘What is its meaning?’ we are not lead to suppose that for every word there is a correlate entity which is its meaning. Secondly, if we regard using words as exercising a technique, we admit that words can be misused as well as properly used; and part, at least, of a philosopher’'s task, on Ryle’s view, is to give an account of these proper uses.

In the course of his life a man surrounds himself with questions, much as he surrounds himself with furniture, books or pictures. Personality is expressed not only by the selection of a Chippendale chair, the amassing of early colour-plate books, or the purchase of a Renoir, but also by the kind of questions which a man “collects”-raises, without necessarily solving. Some questions, like some books, are to be brooded over and studied; some are introduced only to be contemplated from time to time, like fine bindings; and some occur so casually as hardly to rouse any attention at all. There is an obvious difference between a man who bids carefully at a book auction or forces himself on to his knees to identify a dust-covered quarto in a slum bookshop, and a man whose library is inherited from parents or grandparents; acceptances and not choices will distinguish the casual possessor from the bookman. Similarly, there are many questions which sit lightly on a man's mind, which are as little the object of sustained wondering or bafflement as his ancestors” well bound volumes of theology or game-shooting are the reflection of his own tastes or interests. These may be questions of any sort: they may be factual questions, important or trivial, or they may be theoretical questions, philosophical perhaps, or religious or scientific. A student of literature, for instance, has been known to congratulate himself on his ignorance of modern science, ignorance so deliberate that any scientific question raised in his presence fails even to make him wonder. For any person, however, there are ranges of questions which barely touch his mind: he may be aware that he does not know how to derive answers to them for himself, but his inability will not cause him concern. The memory, the practical or the reasoning skill of the kind that would be required are perhaps so much out of proportion to what he possesses that to bemoan the lack of them is unrealistic -as it is often idle and merely conventional for one who is tone-deaf to say how much he wishes he could sing an aria. Other questions altogether, important or trivial, he takes seriously and troubles to answer, because they touch his own special interests directly: he may pride himself on never neglecting a newspaper problem in bridge or chess, or he may never fail to answer correctly a question about the construction of some instrument or machine. The same person, however, will also get the length of raising many questions which remain mere questions. He may be troubled and puzzled about certain political or social question which circumstances do not compel him to answer: but he will not be hypocritical in professing an interest in them. Some of these questions, of course, may become solved after a fashion, if he listens to the voice of politician, statistician, priest or psychologist and is lucky enough to get an answer which satisfies him. But many will survive with just enough recurrences of wondering about them to make them, as you might say, chronic. This is the intermediate class of questions.

Theories of beauty are often divided into the objective and the subjective. I am doubtful whether a rigid distinction between the two can be maintained. It is difficult for an objective theory to assert that the impression of beauty is received quite passively, without any reaction or co-operation on the part of the subject, which is likely to be similar in the various cases.

The phrase ‘evaluative inference’ was used by Toulmin (Reason in Ethics, p. 38) for ‘that form of inference by which we pass from factual reasons to an ethical conclusion’; and the phrase has been attacked by Hare in his review of Toulmin (Philosophical Quarterly, 1951) and in his book (The Language of Morals, pp. 45 ff.). I shall try to dig out some of the questions at issue in that discussion, but to do so without the help of this technical term, or of any other that I can avoid.

Thus Pascal sets forth the romanticist thesis that reason has nothing to do with the deep intimations of the worshipping soul. Religion is an affair of the heart, and the productive Source of all things cannot be comprehended by the exercise of the finite intellect. This doctrine foreshadows the Kantian dichotomy between phenomena and noumena: the understanding can legitimately operate only within the sphere of space, time and natural causality, as it knows nothing of the transcendental postulates of the moral life. In Kant's case, however, the opposition is worked out by means of a sustained and systematic analysis of man's faculties of cognition, and the intuitions of moral feeling are not without a rationality of their own. One might say that in Kant's view there is a logic of ethical sentiment as well as a logic of the scientific understanding, the former being practical, the latter theoretical. In the practical domain of morality the categories of the scientific understanding do not apply: the individual who acts from a sense of duty is free and immortal, besides being destined to receive rewards from the hand of God according to his deserts. The practice of the moral life therefore creates a sort of categoreal vacuum, the individual becoming a noumenon, emancipated from the shackles of the sensible world; from an empirical point of view, morality means self-transcendence.

One of the most influential logicians of the day has assembled and in part rewritten a number of his essays on important questions of logical theory.1 The result is a most impressive book, at once powerful and graceful, and breathing a certain intellectual hauteurr which accords well with its conspicuous property of being intellectually first rate. These are not humble analytical gropings, undertaken by the dim light of an author’s sense of the sensible; but a series of campaigns in abstract metaphysics, directed from the firm ground of mastery of a rigorous and exacting technique. “Those of us who have a taste for desert landscapes” is a phrase of the author’s. With a Roman ruthlessness he makes a solitude in which he can quantify peacefully over lumps of rock.

MISS MACDONALD, in an article in the October 1953 issue of Philosophy under the title “Linguistic Philosophy and Perception,” discusses the relationship between this philosophical school and others, by contrasting its treatment of the problem of perception with typical Realist, Dualist and Phenomenalist solutions. Her main point is that the branch of Linguistic philosophy which she represents, which she proposes to call Metaphilosophy, does not take sides on this issue, nor propound a new theory of its own, but stands back and tries to help us to understand the differences separating the various schools by a careful analysis of the language they use.

Nowadays the word “conscience” has an old-fashioned, obsolete air. I shall try to guess at the reasons, and then I shall consider whether they are good reasons.

ALTHOUGH Sartre peremptorily rejects the Freudian concept of the unconscious as a ‘mere postulate’ which is refuted by the (for him) obvious truth that the ‘psychic factor is co-extensive with consciousness,’ the frequency with which Freud's name recurs in L'Être et le Néant and the important role assigned to ‘existential psychoanalysis’ inevitably suggest that the impact of Freud's doctrines on Sartre may be much greater than he admits or is even aware. The purpose of this paper, however, is not to review the general question of the relations of Sartre and Freud or to undertake a detailed examination of the more specific problem created by Sartre's rejection of the unconscious, but rather to discuss this latter point mainly in its bearing upon limited aspects of Sartre's treatment of ‘being-for-others.’ I hope, however, that this more precise enquiry will lead to certain general conclusions concerning the validity of the two attitudes considered, not simply as attempts to illustrate a priori principles, but as efforts to throw light on definite though complex psychological phenomena. In this way the merits of each viewpoint will be tested by its capacity to clarify concrete problems.

The traditional business of aestheticians has been to supply an answer to the question, “What is art?” A single question is put, and apparently it is assumed—though recently the assumption has been fairly widely challenged—that there is a single answer to be supplied; that there is one definition or one essence of art from which all its properties can be shown to derive. However the problem is also quite frequently reformulated: some theorists prefer to ask, “What is aesthetic experience?” Here we find a second assumption: it seems to be taken for granted that it is appropriate to put either one question or the other, but not both; aesthetic experience having been characterized, art can be denned in terms of it, or vice versa. And it is assumed here, as before, that there is one essential answer to give. It is supposed, that is to say, that all aesthetic experience— the experience of reading War and Peace or Herrick’s two lines Of Julia, Weeping, the experience of looking at York Minster or the pattern on the carpet, if by good fortune the carpet is well designed— has some one distinguishing characteristic in all instances, in virtue of which alone they are to be called aesthetic.

The scientific developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have traditionally been associated with the revival of Platonism. The natural philosophers who invented the methods of classical physics have usually been depicted as men who repudiated the principles of Aristotle and embraced conceptions provided by the writings of Plato and his school. The characteristic feature derived from Platonism was the emphasis on mathematics and it is with the application of mathematics to experience, under specially devised conditions, that modern science arose. In this sense, it is the Piatonism of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, which forms the distinctive quality of the scientific revolution that culminates in the work of Newton.

His “practical purpose” was first to express the popular notion of responsibility and then to relate it to the philosophical theories of “freewill and necessity.” For he could not approve the suggestion that to understand popular comments on morality was a worthless occupation; indeed, while he respected the Westminster Reviewers for the blunt declaration that vulgar responsibility was a “horrid figment of the imagination,” he plainly considered it his business as a philosopher to examine ordinary morality and to reconcile it, if possible, with philosophical theory.

In the recent article Poetry, Language and Communication by Bernard Mayo, the author, intending to establish new distinctions between poetry and other uses of language, has overshot the mark, and arrived at a completely obscurantist view of poetry.

1. It is proposed to examine selected data concerning mental processes and to confront them with certain observations relating to the phenomena of language in an attempt to trace the functional relationship between these two groups of events.

The most interesting feature about Mr. Richardson's criticism of my paper (PHILOSOPHY, October 1954) is that it reveals the typical attitude of the traditional intelligence tester which I set out to criticize. He accepts the view (1) that intelligence deals mainly with the grasping of relationships, (2) that intelligence thus defined is an innate ability, (3) that it may be relatively isolated by the use of suitably designed tests and treated independently of other abilities.

Mill's Utilitarianism is widely used to introduce elementary students to Moral Philosophy. One reason for this, I trust, is a recognition that Mill's doctrines and interests have an immediate attraction for most people. But certainly another reason is the belief that Mill's arguments contain a number of obvious fallacies, which an elementary student can be led to detect, thereby learning to practise critical philosophy.