Some hold that perceptual contents are an unresolvable mixture of what is received from the world and the contributions of our own conceptual resources. This is a broadly Kantian outlook. On some versions, such as that of John McDowell, it is offered as a defense of direct realism. My counterclaims are, first, that the defense works only by underestimating the force of the particular antirealist challenge; second, that we must take more seriously the fact that we share perceptual faculties with other creatures to whom we are unwilling to accord similar conceptual faculties; third, if we dispense with certain unwarranted assumptions associated with notions of the ‘Given’, that the predicament from which Kantianism is supposed to save us needn't arise; and, finally, once we are clear on these matters, and how we may be viewed as selective and selected detectors of scenes, stubborn challenges to direct realism from this quarter should dissipate.

This paper shows how the last twenty-five years of vocal human Darwinism (human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) directly rejects the ‘selfish gene’ theory it is supposedly based upon. ‘Evangelistic sociobiology’, as Dawkins has called it, argues that humans evolved to be ‘the altruistic ape’. Using selfish gene theory this paper shows that we are born just another selfish ape. Given the ‘gross immorality’ (George Williams) of natural selection, one implication is that modern genetics has yet to face up to our true genetic code. The ultimate conclusion of this paper is that culture makes civilisation possible because it overwrites, or ‘manipulates’, our genetic heritage. We are born ape, but made human.

In the past thirty years or so, the doctrine that actions are events has become an essential, and sometimes unargued, part of the received view in the philosophy of action, despite the efforts of a few philosophers to undermine the consensus. For example, the entry for Agency in a recently published reference guide to the philosophy of mind begins with the following sentence:

A central task in the philosophy of action is that of spelling out the differences between events in general and those events that fall squarely into the category of human action.

There is no consensus about what events are. But it is generally agreed that, whatever events may prove to be, actions are a species or a class of events. We believe that the received view is mistaken: actions are not events. We concede that for most purposes, the kind of categorial refinement which is involved in either affirming or denying that actions are events is frankly otiose. Our common idiom does not stress the difference between actions and events, at least not in general terms, because it has no need to. Perhaps it sounds a little odd to say that some events are performed; but if we balked at describing, say, the abdication of Edward VIII as one of the politically significant events in Britain in 1936, it could not be for metaphysical reasons. And since actions, like events, are datable — though often, as we shall see, only imprecisely — actions are said to take place and to occur. But an important class of actions consist in moving something; indeed, according to many philosophers, every action consists in moving something. And when we consider actions of this sort from a theoretical point of view it becomes imperative to distinguish between actions and events. Or so we shall argue.

1. What's in a Name?

Can philosophy of language do without the concept of intentionality? To approach this important question it may be useful to begin with the minimal explanatory requirements for a theory of reference that tries to explain the naming of objects as the simplest linguistic act. The limitations of trying to understand meaning without intentionality are therefore best illustrated by considering what is generally acknowledged to be the most thorough-going attempt to dispense altogether with intentional concepts in Frege's reputedly purely extensionalist semantics of proper names. I shall argue that despite his avowed anti-psychologism, Frege paradoxically needs to include psychological elements alongside his famous distinction between sense and reference in order to preserve the universal intersubstitutability of singular referring expressions salva veritate as an adequate extensional criterion of coreferentiality. In so doing, a revisionary Fregean semantics introduces the first instalment of intentionality at the foundations of naming, by which intentionality pervades the philosophy of language.

No one doubts that philosophers have discussed at length ‘the problem of induction’, but it would also be generally recognized that there would be disagreement as to precisely what that problem is. Rather than tackle the formulation problem, I will borrow from a popular text:

Our existence as well as science itself is based on the principle of induction that tells us to reason from past frequencies to future likelihoods, from the limited known of the past and present to the unknown of the past, present, and future ... But though inductive probability is psychologically inescapable, we have trouble providing a rational justification for it.

We might say, then, that there is such a practice as induction, and a problem associated with it is that of justifying engaging in it. We engage in reasoning from things we know about the past and present to conclusions about the past, present and future. We can't resist doing this but we have trouble finding a rational justification for doing so. This problem suggests a generalization. We engage in reasoning, reaching new conclusions. It would be hard to resist engaging in this practice. How do we provide a rational justification for it?

Aristotle's ethical theory is often alleged to be inherently morally conservative — not only in the sense that it reflects the mores of a particular parochial form of society, but also in the sense that it lacks the resources to critically reflect upon the presuppositions of that form of society. Aristotle's ethical theory is thus charged with leaving no room for something upon which “we moderns” have learned to place a preeminent value: namely, the need to subject any merely inherited scheme of values to a process of rational criticism. This paper identifies two of the more compelling versions of this charge and, with respect to each, demonstrates that the charge turns on a misreading of Aristotle's text. The first misreading is shown to derive from a failure to appreciate Aristotle's distinction between virtue of character and practical wisdom. The second misreading is shown to derive from a failure to appreciate the differences between Aristotle's dialectical method and “The Method of Common Sense”. The discussion of these two misreadings occupies the first two sections of the paper. The third and final section tries to show that, far from being insensitive to the need for rational criticism, Aristotle, in fact, assigns to such criticism a fully adequate place in his ethical theory.

Martha Nussbaum has claimed that it is possible for a moral agent to be confronted, through no fault of his own, with an irresolvable conflict between his moral duties; and cites Kant as someone who takes the opposing view. Kant did indeed take the view that conflict between duties was inconceivable, but Nussbaum has failed to grasp his main reason for doing so, namely the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. When that principle is properly understood it can be seen that a Kantian account, or one drawing upon Kantian resources, can make more sense of our being confronted, seemingly, by incompatible duties than the account Nussbaum herself offers.

1. Belief and mental states

Davidson holds that intentional verbs occurring in the form ‘A Vs that p’ signify propositional attitudes. These are, he claims, (i) mental states (MS 160; KOM passim), and (ii) dispositions (FPA 103). Davidson does not conceive of himself as introducing a special technical sense of the common intentional verbs. He insists that ‘the mental states in question are beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on, as ordinarily conceived' (KOM 51f.). Consequently he contends that believing that p is a mental state, disposition or dispositional state. These ontological claims about the nature of belief inform his account of the logical form of belief sentences. I shall address the question of whether believing that p can justly be deemed a mental state, a disposition or dispositional state. Subsequently I shall examine Davidson's account of the logical form of belief sentences.

Our concept of a mental state, like so many of the concepts which philosophers treat as categorial, is none too sharply defined. It has a respectable use, which can be described. But, like other such general psychological terms, e.g. ‘mental process’, ‘mental activity’, far from being the ‘hardest of the hard’ - a sharply circumscribed categorial term akin to a variable in a well-constructed formal system — it has blurred boundaries and is elastic. Like all our ordinary psychological concepts, it evolved in order to meet everyday needs. As Wittgenstein observed, ‘The concepts of psychology are just everyday concepts. They are not concepts newly fashioned by science for its own purposes, as are the concepts of physics and chemistry.’

Although our ordinary concepts can be replaced by technical ones for specialized purposes, they cannot be abused without generating conceptual confusion and incoherence. If the expression ‘mental state’ is being employed in its ordinary sense, then it is wrong to hold that believing that p is to be in any mental state. If it is being employed in a special technical sense, then those who employ it thus owe us an account of what it means and how it is to be used. This Davidson and the many other philosophers who subscribe to the view that believing is a mental state have not done. Until such an account is forthcoming, one may presume that they think of themselves as deploying our ordinary concept of a mental state. And if so, I shall argue, they are misusing it.

The writings of John Grote (1813–1866) are a valuable resource for both historians and those continuing to explore and utilize modern Cambridge philosophy. Grote was the inheritor of the mantle of Cambridge philosophy when appointed to the Knightbridge Chair in 1855 and he transformed and professionalized philosophical studies there. In the Grote Society, and the reform of the syllabus, reading and tutoring of the Moral Sciences, he influenced the next generation of Cambridge philosophers, especially Henry Sidgwick, John Venn, W. K. Clifford and James Ward. Like his successors, Sidgwick, Moore and Broad, he rejected both identification with schools of philosophy and the internecine warfare in and between them, in favour of careful linguistic analysis, boundary commissioning and eclecticism. His patient and respectful analysis of phenomenalism, materialism, positivism, common sense, idealism, utilitarianism, and philology, are typical of an approach, style, method, and way of conducting philosophical conversation, that is characteristic of modern Cambridge philosophy. Claims for connections with the latter work of the above, and Sorley, Russell, McTaggart, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, are explored and supported. That Grote was the younger brother of the Greek historian, agnostic, phenomenalist and Philosophical Radical, George Grote, goes further to make him an interesting, as well as a stimulating philosopher, to engage.

The prestigious French publisher Presses Universitaires de France has recently brought out (November 1995) a new French edition of Elie Halévy's well known book The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, first published in France in three volumes as La formation du radicalisme philosophique (1901–1904) and translated into English in 1926. The prevailing opinion on this book is that it gives an excellent account of English utilitarianism. Thus, in the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Talcott Parsons speaks of it as the ‘virtually definitive analysis of utilitarianism’ More recently Donald Winch, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, describes Halévy's book as: ‘Still the best study of the ideas and activities of the school taken as a whole’.

In this short essay I express a very different opinion. I show that Halévy, who qualifies utilitarianism (with obvious disgust) as ‘a plebeian or rather bourgeois morality’, as ‘much too simple’, completely misunderstood the writings of the English and Scottish utilitarian philosophers.

Halévy's understanding of Utilitarianism and the Principle of Utility

There is no clear or precise definition of utilitarianism in Halévy's book, but he obviously understood it to be a descriptive theory, and took the ‘principle of utility’ for a psychological law explaining human behaviour: ‘the fundamental principle of the doctrine is that pleasure is the natural end of human actions’, ‘The principle of utility [...] meant that all men naturally incline towards pleasure and flee from pain’.

Introduction

There is an enormous amount of confusion about what relativism is. In this paper I aim to take a step toward clarifying what it is by discussing some things that it is not — that is, by distinguishing it from some other views with which it is often confused or conflated, such as nihilism and scepticism. I do this primarily because I think that the question of the character of relativism is interesting in itself. A clearer characterization of relativism would also be important instrumentally, however, as before we can accurately assess relativism we must have a clear idea of what it is. The secondary aim of this paper, then, is to function as a prolegomenon to an assessment of relativism. The tertiary aim of the paper is to make a few observations about the view which most clearly stands opposed to relativism, the view which I will call ‘objectivism.’ Because relativism is often confused with views like fallibilism and pluralism, objectivism often finds itself unjustly associated with views like infallibilism and political authoritarianism. (If this paper had a subtitle, it would be: ‘And What Objectivism Isn't.’) Although it is not the point of this paper to criticize relativism, I should make it clear that it began as a part of an anti-relativistic project, and, although anti-relativism is not necessarily objectivism, I should perhaps make it clear that I am more than a little sympathetic to the latter type of view.

Metaphysicians often declare that there are large ontological differences (properties versus individuals, universals versus particulars) correlated with the linguistic distinction between names and verbs. Gaskin argues against all such declarations on the grounds that we may quantify with equal ease over the referents of both types of expression. However, his argument must be wrong, given the massive differences between first- and second-order qualification. Its only grain of truth is that these differences show up only in the logic of relations, and not also in monadic logic.

Quine may be taken to use the phrase ‘Plato's Beard’ to denote a solution to the following problem: How is it possible to speak of that which does not exist, of non-being or as Read has it, to denote a solution to the problem: ‘How can a sentence with empty names have meaning?’.

Quine writes:

Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor.

To expand. If nonbeing in no sense is, then we cannot ever assert that it is not; yet if it in some sense is, then how can it remain nonbeing? Let us fill out with an example (coined from Quine). If Pegasus in no sense exists, then how can we ever assert that Pegasus does not exist?—yet we may clearly want to assert that Pegasus does not exist and affirm the proposition that it is false that Pegasus exists. If, on the other hand, Pegasus in some sense exists, how may we affirm that he does not? We shall be contradicting ourselves or be guilty of equivocation.

The trouble with Kant, according to Anthony Quinton (Philosophy 72 [1997], 5–18), is that he does not take empirical experience to have any significant role to play in our knowledge of the world. The world we know is constituted through the imposition of a priori forms — space, time, substance and cause — on a ‘wholly passive sensory raw material’ This sensory material does not guide the manner in which the a priori forms are imposed in any way, so that the imposition is ‘entirely arbitrary’. Thus, Kant's ‘account of the matter allows for an indefinitely large number of orders in which our successive manifolds of sensation could be arranged. None of these ways of distinguishing what there is and occurs from what I merely think is and occurs has any priority or superiority to any of the others’ (Quinton, 17–8).

We wish to defend Jonathan Westphal's view that colour is complex against a recent ‘phenomenological’ criticism of Eric Rubenstein. There is often thought to be a conflict between two kinds of determinants of colour, physical and phenomenal. On the one hand there are the complex physical facts about colour, such as the determination of a surface colour by an absorption spectrum. There is also, however, the fact that the apparently simple phenomenological quality of what is seen is a function of the physiological and psychological state of the viewing subject. Should the physical trump the phenomenal, or is it the other way round?

Much of the phenomenal variation of colour, however, is explained by physical facts. There is a physics and a psychophysics of colour. Colours appear, to the colour scientists at least, to be in some sense objective, a sense not explained by the view that they are purely phenomenal. Taking physics and psychophysics into account will mean rejecting the claim that the content of what our concepts of colours are concepts of is exhausted by the purely phenomenal, or that we can determine these concepts simply by gazing at a colour. Taking account of physics will lead, as Westphal argued, instead to a view about white and the other colour terms like Putnam's account of gold. Necessary truths about colours cannot be explained without reference to the logic of the compossibility of what is given in reflection and absorption spectra, the analogue of H2O.

In his article ‘Names, Verbs and Quantification’ Nicholas Denyer argues that a previous attempt of mine, on behalf of realism, to play down the ontological importance of the distinction between grammatical names and verbs ignores some striking logical differences between them. I concede the differences Denyer alludes to, but argue that they do not assist the orthodox nominalist, since if anything they point to a position according to which relations, but not monadic properties, are unreal. But this position is, I claim, as implausible as nominalism itself is.

The Macmillan Reference Company and Prentice Hall International recently released a volume entitled ‘Supplement of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy’. As the editor-in-chief of the original eight-volume Encyclopedia I wish to explain why I must disassociate from this Supplement.

The Supplement does contain many valuable articles by recognized philosophers, but it violates the spirit of the original work in one important respect. An article in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy accurately describes the Encyclopedia as a ‘massive Enlightenment work’ and similar descriptions were offered in a front-page review in the Times Literary Supplement of London (September 14, 1967) by Anthony (now Lord) Quinton. My associates and I edited the Encyclopedia in the spirit of Voltaire and Diderot, of Hume and Bertrand Russell. We tried to be fair to religious and metaphysical philosophers, but a good deal of space was devoted to radical thinkers and movements that had been frequently neglected or mishandled in earlier reference works. Furthermore, philosophers whom we regarded as obscurantists, while their ideas were never misrepresented, received the kind of critical treatment we thought appropriate. This spirit has not been preserved in the Supplement. There are some interesting and balanced articles on religious topics, but the highly significant biological research, reported in the writings of Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, which undermines one major form of the design argument, is not even mentioned. The ‘big bang’ is briefly mentioned (p. 143), but there is no reference to the work of Adolf Grünbaum, Steven Weinberg and other scientists and philosophers showing that neither the big bang nor any other cosmological theory of modern physics support a First Cause. More seriously, a number of contemporary writers, mostly German and French, who are regarded with suspicion if not outright contempt by most analytic philosophers are given extensive and even enthusiastic coverage. In alphabetical order they are Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur (five articles on Ricoeur). It may be argued that, whatever the defect of their work, these figures have achieved such prominence that articles about them are warranted. Perhaps so, but what we get are totally uncritical pieces.

In a recent Discussion in this journal, Quentin Smith seeks to advance the debate between theistic and atheistic accounts of a universal big-bang singularity (BBS) by suggesting a novel hypothesis that explains why the Universe began with a singularity. The hypothesis he proposes is a ‘new law of nature’, which he calls ‘the Law of the Simplest Beginning’ (LSB) and which says that ‘the simplest possible thing [SPT] comes into being in the simplest possible way’ (128; Smith's italics). To make his case, Smith argues that a BBS is the simplest possible thing and that it did come into being in the simplest possible way. (He also argues (129) that a BBS, as the SPT, is unique; but, since I shall not be concerned here with that claim, I use an indefinite article to refer to a BBS.) A BBS is the simplest possible thing, Smith avers, because it has no positive, essential properties (apart from being the simplest possible thing): It has no spatial extension (a BBS is a geometrical point), no temporal duration, no mass, and is governed by no laws (apart from LSB) (128-9). Moreover, Smith says, a BBS comes into existence in the simplest possible way because ‘it has no positive relations to any grounds for coming into existence’ (129): ‘The simplest possible way [for the Universe] to come into existence is to come to exist from nothing (from no previously existing material, no material cause), to come to exist by nothing (by no efficient cause) and to come to exist for nothing (for no purpose or final cause)’ (129).