Some wag (was it Mark Twain?) reported the following story: Scholars have recently established that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not, after all, written by Homer. They were actually written by another author, of the same name.

The majority of current theories of naming and reference, including ones as divergent in other respects as those of Russell and Searle, would rule this story impossible. They would do so on roughly these grounds: the sense and reference (one or the other, or one through the other, depending on the theory) of the name ‘Homer’ is determined, given the absence of other reliable testimony, by the sole description: ‘Author of the Iliad and the Odyssey’. ‘Homer is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey’ is therefore known a priori, hence necessarily true. There could not be another author of that name and claim to fame.

In lectures delivered at Princeton in the Winter of 1970, Saul Kripke offered a lucid alternative to such theories (which I shall lump together under the term ‘descriptivism’).

I wish here to consider a certain type of argument often produced as a refutation of ethical egoism. Such an argument asks us to consider a situation in which the interests of two people conflict. It is then pointed out that the consequence of applying both ethical egoism and some widely accepted conceptual truth concerning the moral words to this situation is in some way ‘absurd’. Ethical egoism is therefore to be rejected. My strategy, in trying to show that this kind of argument is unsound, is this: I will first produce a simple refutation of ethical egoism of my own; I will show why it is unsound; I will try to show that these other arguments fail in the same way.

I shall argue that the central doctrines of Locke's politics have a theological basis, a doctrine of Creation similar to the Thomist one. Locke does not elaborate this doctrine; he presupposes it. It is not a hidden, esoteric element in his thought; it is there on the surface, but in a scattered and fragmentary form.

I shall proceed in this fashion: First, I shall set out this doctrine of Creation and show its connexion with Locke's moral theory by way of an examination of his doctrines of property and power. I shall then show that Locke extends this doctrine of Creation to human productive activity with crippling results for his political theory.

In “A Short Refutation of Ethical Egoism,” Richmond Campbell purports to refute “the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what benefits him the most in a given situation.” This is the theory which is “sometimes called impersonal ethical egoism (IEE)” [249). Campbell takes the following proposition as fundamental to his refutation of IEE.

Granted proposition I, Campbell's refutation would require only:

In his paper “Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Datum Theory?” A. J. Ayer contends that the argument from illusion calls attention to perspectival distortion, perceptual misidentification and elusive perceptual belief only in order to establish the possibility of perceptual error. Pointing to our occasional perceptual failures reminds us that perceptual error is always logically possible—that any particular perceptual belief to the effect that one is perceiving a physical surface could be mistaken. This in turn is thought by Ayer to show that the ordinary belief that we perceive physical surfaces requires qualification—along lines urged by sense-datum philosophers—to the effect that even in those situations properly described for non-philosophical purposes as perceptions of physical surfaces it cannot be physical surfaces that are literally present to one's senses. Ayer believes that this can be established, for any given case, by the possibility of perceptual error alone.

In ‘Can and Might’ (this Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, September, 1971, pp. 87–92), Professor K. W. Rankin has presented three arguments that purport to refute the equivalence (E), ‘A (an action) is causally possible for P (a person) if and only if A is within P's power’. The first two arguments are attributed to Richard Taylor (Action and Purpose, Prentice-Hall, 1966, pp. 53–59), and the third is Professor Rankin's own. I will argue that none of these three arguments effectively refutes the above equivalence. My arguments are not to be construed as simply a rebuttal of Professor Rankin's paper since (a) he also appears to have some doubts about Taylor's arguments and (b) I refrain from comment on other aspects of his paper except these three arguments. I conclude with some general remarks on (E).

Although philosophy has undergone a number of revolutions since the turn of the century, the existence of universals is still debated largely in the terms employed by Moore and Russell around 1910. A recent article by Alan Donagan illustrates this nicely, for Donagan expounds and defends what he takes to be the principal argument for universals given by Russell in The Problems of Philosophy. I shall comment critically on the case Donagan makes for Russell's metaphysical realism, but my main concern is to establish a point of more general interest—namely, that the most plausible strategy for defending a commitment to universals actually raises more problems than it promises to solve.

Quine's essay, “Ontological Relativity” [2] has brought about not a little confusion and disagreement. What is Quine's doctrine, and what are his arguments for it? The following paragraphs search for an answer. First a word about my aims. I will avoid adding to the already extensive discussion of Quine's older thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. Instead, where connections between the old and new doctrines become apparent, I will focus on the connections themselves and their repercussions for ontological relativity.