We hear a lot these days about distance learning, about tutorials by e-mail and about universities on the internet. The idea in each case is that the student works at his or her computer and does not have to travel to a university or actually meet real tutors and professors in the flesh. There may be tutors and professors involved, but they will be transmitted in electronic form, through lectures beamed up and downloaded, and through tutorials wafting back and forth in cyber-space.

To some extent these ideas may be a response to problems arising from the over-expansion of existing (physical) universities. There are too many students and too few good staff. So sharing staff around via the internet would give more students access to good lectures and tutorials, while at the same time (possibly) giving dons more time for their own scholarship.

An initial reaction to such a prospect might be that internet contact between philosophers and students is better than no contact at all. But there would still be a feeling among many that it would be at best a substitute for the real thing. Is this feeling right, though?

After all, it might be said, philosophy is above all discussion of abstract ideas in the abstract. Might philosophy not lend itself particularly to discussion which is not just abstract, but disembodies too? In philosophy at least, virtual tutorials need not be just a substitute for real tutorials. They might actually be better. For they would be conducted without any of the distractions of physical reality and appearance and sheer contingency which in the real world interfere with the unhindered development of pure thought.

This, though, overlooks the importance in any genuine education of encounters between real teachers and real students. We have all had the experience of reading something in a book, and being initially convince by it, only to dissuade from its truth when we have actually had to expound or defend it in person. Part of what is involved in what Leavis used to call the ‘collaborative-creative process’ of university level discussion, a process at once critical and constructive, is personal identification with what one is saying or thinking, and the testing of this identification against other people equally personally involved in the dialogue. It is I who am identifying myself with this view, and staking myself on it, I, the whole person, and not some disembodied phantasm involved in an irresponsible simulacrum of communication and with some other equally disembodied phantasm, we know not where. We do not need to reflect on the conundra of the Chinese room here; the all too well-known inconveniences and fantasizing of chat rooms should be enough to warn us off the idea of a purely ‘virtual’ tutorial. We forget, at our peril that a thinker, at least the sort of thinker we might hope emerges from a philosophical education, is and has to be a person, with all that that involves in terms of integrity, consistency and development of character.

Postal and e-mail tutorials may be better than none at all, but they are at best substitutes for real meetings between real students and real tutors. Some may find it moot whether it might not be better to have an internet lecture or e-mail tutorial from some charismatic and telegenic star of the screen than to meet dull old Dr Smith of The University of the Balls Pond Road, but assuming that Smith has any knowledge or life in him at all, once the initial excitement is over, there is really no comparison at all. Even if a student receives as detailed a set of comments on an essay as could be imagined (a big if, one imagines, in most cases), written comments are only the start of a real tutorial. The student needs to be able to discuss these comments in the light of his or her actual understanding, and the tutor needs to be able to expand and qualify what he or she has written in the light of the student's living reactions. Nor, for similar reasons is there any substitute for a student building up a real relation with a real tutor, which is all but impossible without real and frequent contact.

And apart from formal encounters with one's teachers, a crucial part of a university education is one's informal encounters with one's peers. In such encounters young people discuss with each other all manner of questions, philosophical, cultural, scientific, political, moral and personal, related and unrelated to their formal studies. Those who talk of virtual universities forget that education, if it is real education, is education of the whole person, in which the whole person is engaged both inside and outside formal sessions. It is vital to remember this above all in the case of philosophical education, where the abstractness of the subject can too easily lead us to forget its ultimate point.

Religious toleration first became legally enshrined in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Religious toleration led to the practice of more general inter-subjective recognition of members of democratic states which took precedence over differences of conviction and practice. After considering the extent to which a democracy may defend itself against the enemies of democracy and to which it should be prepared to tolerate civil disobedience, the article analyses the contemporary dialectic between the notion of civil inclusion and multiculturalism. Religious toleration is seen as the pacemaker for modern multiculturalism, in which the claims of minorities to civic inclusion are recognized so long as members of all groups understand themselves to be citizens of one and the same political community.

Popper famously claimed that he had solved the problem of induction, but few agree. This paper explains what Popper's solution was, and defends it. The problem is posed by Hume's argument that any evidence-transcending belief is unreasonable because (1) induction is invalid and (2) it is only reasonable to believe what you can justify. Popper avoids Hume's shocking conclusion by rejecting (2), while accepting (1). The most common objection is that Popper must smuggle in induction somewhere. But this objection smuggles in precisely the justificationist assumption (2) that Popper, as here undestood, rejects.

The paper assumes for its starting point the basic correctness of the so-called “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a reading first developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant. The main part of the paper concerns the consequences this interpretation will have for our understanding of Wittgenstein's well-known remark in a letter to a prospective publisher that the point or aim of his book was an ethical one. I first give a sketch of what, given the committments of the resolute reading, the ethical point of the book will be, and then argue that given these committments and Wittgenstein's own philosophical biases at the time he wrote the Tractatus, the book cannot serve the ethical purpose for which it was written.

Ownership is a relation with characteristics that force society to function more effectively and that make property a target of much hostility. Among the intellectual enemies of property, Locke is arguably the most influential. His “enough and as good left for others” condition, that he believed to be easily satisfied, was a failed attempt morally to justify property. Instead, it succeeded in undermining its legitimacy. Hume identified the existence of a convention,—in today's language, a Nash-equilibrium—which, being wholly voluntary and ageless, has attractive moral qualities besides ensuring the “stability of possession”. A recent attack against the “myth of property” by Murphy and Nagel is guided by an erroneous understanding of the nature of conventions.

(i) It is propositions, not sentences, that are true or false. It is true ‘Dogs bark’ does not make sense. It is true that dogs bark does. (ii) and (iii) Davidson wrong about ‘that’. (iv) The difference between ‘implies’ and ‘if ... then ...’. (v), (vi), (vii) and (viii) Russell, not Quine, right about the subject matter of logic. (ix) The objectual and substitutional interpretations of quantifiers compatible. (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv) and (xvi) Implications for well-known theories of truth; truth correspondence. (xvii), (xviii) and (xix) and (xx) Implications for the principle of bivalence, the law of excluded middle, and the principle of non-contradiction. (xxi) Recapitulation. (xxii) ‘That’ and entailment. (xxiii) Propositions not entities, subsistent or otherwise.

The imperviousness of mathematical truth to anti-objectivist attacks has always heartened those who defend objectivism in other areas, such as ethics. It is argued that the parallel between mathematics and ethics is close and does support objectivist theories of ethics. The parallel depends on the foundational role of equality in both disciplines. Despite obvious differences in their subject matter, mathematics and ethics share a status as pure forms of knowledge, distinct from empirical sciences. A pure understanding of principles is possible because of the simplicity of the notion of equality, despite the different origins of our understanding of equality of objects in general and of the equality of the ethical worth of persons.

This theory regards intentions as mental states, e.g., attitudes, which, typically, have causal power. But we do not speak of our intentions as having such powers. Instead, we speak of a person's resolve, determination, or his anxiety, eagerness, and so forth, as the ‘powers’ that move us. Of course, one desires for various reasons to carry out his various intentions but that desire is not a component of the intentions. An intention is, roughly, the course of action that one has adopted, so it has no such components.

There are other characteristics of intentions which the mental state idea of intentions does not share. Intentions do not have the temporal characteristics that mental states have, or share the curious context dependency that intentions have. And since, according to the theory, mental states operate causally, it would not be possible for a person to commit himself to a course of action as we ordinarily do when we make a promise or sign an agreement or contract.