Chapter 5 of John Locke's Second Treatise, ‘Of Property,” is a text that undermines itself, stammering to an unresolved and irresolvable conclusion because the structure of conditions upon which most of its moral argument about private property is based cannot be stretched to encompass the sudden twist Locke tries to make at the end. The moral conditions by which Locke defines a virtuous private possession within God's gift of the world to all mankind in common resist being extended to include an economy of money and limitless, unequal possession. The text comes to an end in total uncertainty, pointing simultaneously in two opposite directions. This paper explores just how deeply and hopelessly these distortions affect the text.

In philosophical writings, the practice of punishment standardly features as a terrain over which comprehensive moral theories—in the main, versions of ‘consequentialism’ and ‘deontology’—have fought a prolonged and inconclusive battle. The grip of this top-down model of the relationship between philosophical theory and punitive practice is so tenacious that even the most seemingly innocent concern with the ‘consequences’ of punishment is often read, if not as an endorsement of consequentialism, then at least as the registering of a consequentialist point. But to suppose that repentance or crime prevention, for example, are goods that punishment characteristically aims to secure is hardly to endorse the maximization of some value or set of values as the fundamental criterion of moral rightness. Equally, an appeal to desert or rights in the justification of punishment does not commit one to the deontological claim that these norms have a basis independent of human interests. This suggests that the prevalence of the top-down model may owe more to the inertia of established usage, or the temptations of over-intellectualization, than one might initially have supposed.

The present article is an attempt to clarify the Kantian conception of duties to the self and to defend them against common objections. Kant’s thesis that all duty rests on duties to the self is shown to follow from the autonomy of the human will; and the allegation that they are impossible because the agent could always release himself from such a duty turns out to be question-begging. There is no attempt to prove that there are such duties, but they are revealed to be an indispensable part of morality. Traditional attributes of moral commands, such as ‘categoricity’ or ‘overridingness’ make no sense in a one-sidedly other-regarding or social conception of morality.

Contemporary philosophy’s antipathy to intuition can come to seem baffling. There is inadequate reason to move away from the intuitively attractive view that we have a faculty of intuition, in many ways akin to our faculties of perception and memory and introspection, that gives us reason for belief, and with it, often enough, gives us knowledge. The purpose here is to consider whether scepticism about intuition is more reasonable than a corresponding scepticism about other epistemic faculties. I am sceptical that it is.

I argue that Wittgenstein was no lifelong musical formalist. I further contend that the attribution of musical formalism obscures, while the break with it I propose explains, the role that music played in the development of his philosophy of language. What is more, I sketch a perspective on the later Wittgenstein’s remarks on the music and musical understanding that supports my claims. Throughout my discussion, rather than assimilating Hanslick’s and Wittgenstein’s views on music, I point to similarities and differences between them, suggesting that taking snapshots and putting them side by side sheds more light on how they are related to each other.

The overarching thesis of this essay is that despite the etymological relationship between the word ‘philosophy’ and wisdom—the word ‘philosophos’, in Greek, means ‘lover of wisdom’—and irrespective of the longstanding tradition of identifying philosophers with ‘wise men’—mainline philosophy, historically, has had little interest in wisdom and has been preoccupied primarily with knowledge. Philosophy, if we are speaking of the mainline tradition, has had and continues to have more in common with the natural and social sciences than it does with the humanities and liberal arts.

In advancing this thesis, I divide the history of philosophy into three competing traditions: the mainline tradition of philosophy and two philosophical ‘countercultures,’ one conservative the other radical. At issue between these rival traditions is precisely the relative significance of knowledge and wisdom and their respective places in inquiry. I also provide an account of the distinction between knowledge and wisdom—which I argue is greater than has perhaps been appreciated—and between the natural and applied sciences, on the one hand, and the humanities and liberal arts on the other.

In my article ‘Pains and Places’ (Philosophy 78 (2003)), I argue, first, that sensations, such as aches and pains, are generally in the places where we say they are; and second, that sensations are states or modes of the sensitive parts of the bodies of sentient animals. Here I reply to Trus Wyller’s criticism of my views, in his article ‘The Place of Pain in Life’ (Philosophy 80 (2005)), and I comment on Kant’s claim, in his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, that ‘I am as immediately in my finger-tip as I am in my head’.

Is it conceptually possible for one person to ‘remember’ the experiences of another person? Many philosophical discussions of personal identity suppose that this is possible. For example, some philosophers believe that our personal identity through time consists in the continuation of our mental lives, including the holding of memories over time. However, since a person’s memories are necessarily memories of her own experiences, a definition of personal identity in terms of memory risks circularity. To avoid this, we must invoke the concept of ‘quasi-memory’. From my quasi-memory of doing x, I cannot infer that I did x; but I can infer that somebody did x. It is then a further question as to whether the person who did x is me, the answer to which will depend upon what we believe personal identity to consist in. Quasi-memory, then, allows us to separate the concept of memory from the concept of personal identity.

An argument against the claim that moral realism cannot be sustained because moral beliefs, being affective-conative states, cannot themselves be true or false. In fact moral claims can fail both in terms of a failure of the standard it expresses to be realised by a given agent and also in terms of whatever it commends to be good or bad, right or wrong, in actual fact.

The literature on Heinrich Hertz’s influence on Wittgenstein goes back some way. Not all the main commentators discuss or even notice that influence, although it has been particularly emphasised by James Griffin, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, and by Leonard Goddard and Brenda Judge.

A quotation from Russell concedes that the immensity of real numbers (unending decimals) implied by the usual account of the continuum cannot mainly consist of ‘those whose digits procede according to some rule’. Russell concludes that the main body of real numbers ‘must be’ of the ‘lawless’ variety. The author scrutinises these so-called ‘lawless decimals’ and concludes that they are mythical. It follows that the totality of well-defined real numbers (existing and future) cannot be more than a countable whole. It is however clearly uncountable. An explanation is offered using the ‘greater lexicographic sequence’ (GLS).

To understand death, you need to dwell on the alternative. If you knew an immortal, then you could ask him to speak from experience.

There is a rather striking video currently used in police training. A firearms officer is caught on video shooting an armed suspect. The officer then gives his account of what happened, and there is no suggestion that he is tying to fabricate evidence. He says that he shot the suspect once; his partner says that he fired two shots. On the video we see four shots being deliberately fired. Memory, it seems, is an unreliable witness in situations of stress (which appears to be the point of using the video).

John Preston’s useful comments on some of the details of my discussion of one of the possible sources for the Tractatus focuses on my claim that Wittgenstein’s project could be seen as a generalisation of Hertz’s philosophy of physics to a scheme for all possible empirical discourses. To suggest an influence is not to claim an identity. However, there had better not be too great a disparity between Hertz’s views and those expressed in the Tractatus.

1.I begin with terminology. I am going to talk about two kinds of things that ordinary language and thought recognize as filling the role of what can be predicated monadically of objects. These things I call respectively properties and qualities.