This demonstration of self-esteem by A. D. Godley would be provocative if it were not unmistakably ironical. Those who are not dons know better. They remember and endorse Hilaire Belloc's onslaught on the remote and ineffectual don who dared attack his Chesterton. Dons live in ivory towers, untouched by time's revenges, the law's delays and the insolence of office. They are innocent of all the guile of the real world of politics and commerce, telegrams and anger.

I shall (stipulatively) define a free action as one a man is able to do. Various things limit a man's freedom. The most unpopular is the government, or other people who have the power of preventing us from doing what we want. But our freedom is also circumscribed by lack of physical and mental strength or skill, including that of knowing how to manage other human beings. Other factors limiting our freedom are our ignorance, our passions and our habits. Some men say they value their freedom from these things, especially their freedom from passion, so much that they would prefer to be in prison or on the rack rather than be a slave to them, but one suspects they exaggerate.

Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons is a long, difficult and fascinating book, inside which three shorter, clearer and better books are struggling to get out. The third of these shorter but better books deals with the problem of Future Generations, and that is the book I want to discuss. In it Parfit tries, but fails, to find a theory—Theory X, he calls it—which will deal with various problems and issues which he develops, and in particular the issue which I will call the Parfit Population Problem, the problem of how many people there ought to be. In this paper I offer not so much a theory as a suggestion as to what the solution(s) might be.

‘Reference’ was the term Max Black and I chose to render Frege's term ‘Bedeutung’ when we published English translations of some selections from his works. We preferred ‘stand for’ as a translation of the verb ‘bedeuten’; but from ‘stand for’ we could not form a general term to render the corresponding German noun. Our renderings were chosen because, like the German words, they were in themselves colourless and untechnical, and on that very account could take on in context whatever special import Frege's way of thinking might give them. Black ! and I could not foresee how the English language was going to develop. T Like another familiar English word, the word ‘gay’, ‘reference’ has S become the badge or slogan of a certain set of people; those who do not belong to the set but go on using the word as they always have done may find themselves on occasion seriously misunderstood.

It is just over eighty years since G. E. Moore published Principia Ethica, thereby changing English-speaking moral philosophy for the rest of the century. Just why and how was that book so important?

1. Nowadays, I am told, many popular novels have anti-heroes not heroes. So perhaps it accords with the spirit of the times for my sermon to have not a text but an anti-text. This is taken from the first chapter of Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell. It reads: ‘All the questions which have what is called a human interest—such, for example, as the question of a future life—belong, at least in theory, to special sciences and are capable, at least in theory, of being decided by empirical evidence … a genuinely scientific philosophy cannot hope to appeal to any except those who have the wish to understand, to escape from intellectual bewilderment … it does not offer, or attempt to offer, a solution to the problem of human destiny, or of the destiny of the Universe’..

For as long as there has been anything worthy of the name of science, there have been those who have criticized its claim to superior knowledge. With the birth and prodigious growth of modern science, the corresponding growthof critical opinion led, in the eighteenth century, to a divorce of the sciences from the humanities around which our educational institutions, and our universities in particular, have been built. It is this divorce which renders problematic the status of the social or human sciences. For the extent to which Man can be an object of scientific knowledge will be questioned by those insisting on an opposition between human knowledge and values as embodied in the humanities, and the dehumanized objective knowledge proclaimed within the natural sciences.

Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements which are just as complicated as the knots.1 A claim to know can be contradicted in various ways. Which of them does the sceptic have in mind when he denies that we can know—for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow? Does he mean, perhaps, that the proposition is false—that the sun will not rise tomorrow? The sceptic is in no position to make such a claim. Does he mean that no one can feel certain of the proposition? No; the fact that people feel certain of it is not in dispute. The sceptic's argument is essentially about justification. He claims that we do not have the right to feel certain, nor, therefore, to claim to know. But how can he arrive at this conclusion?

There is a tradition of philosophy—a conception we can easily under-stand as a limit of a tendency of our own thinking—that philosophy consists only of argument. The rest of the (admittedly) vast prepon-derance of words in philosophical texts is simply embroidery. ‘Naturally’, it will be conceded, actual philosophy books contain more or less of verbal pictures, words and phrases whose purpose is to evoke images, and many stories—examples, hard cases for definitions, and 4 anecdotes. These, it will be said, ‘are only the embellishments, the relief from work, the appetizers or the post-prandial delicacies.’

Wittgenstein's genius, John Wisdom has suggested, was uniquely revealed in his ability to formulate such questions as ‘Could one play chess without the queen? Would it still be chess?’ The central questions raised by Richard Rorty's work may be cast in a parallel form: ‘Could one do philosophy without the notion of truth as “correspondence with the Real”? Would it still be philosophy?’ Both pairs of questions, Wittgenstein' and Rorty's, are quintessentially anti-essentialist. The scope and ingenuity of Rorty's ‘philosophy without mirrors’ has challenged philosophers to reconf ront basic questions about the nature and purposes of philosophical inquiry.

Various proponents of animal rights—for example, H. J. McCloskey— maintain that while brute animals (henceforth ‘animals’) cannot have; moral rights they can have legal rights. Indeed, McCloskey himself goes so far as to maintain that even inanimate objects are able to have legal rights.1 And why should not inanimate objects be able to? After f all, for there to be a legal right is anything more required than that whatever agency is empowered to issue legal rights simply legislate or proclaim that so-and-so has that legal right?

In connection with the special theory of relativity, Einstein made use of a now familiar thought experiment1 involving two lightning flashes, a railway train, and an embankment. Whether he used it merely to help explain the theory to others or whether it played a role in the theory's very generation as well is perhaps a matter of conjecture. However, physicist Richard Feynman, for one, believes that Einstein first conceived his theories in the visualizations of thought experiments and developed their mathematical formulations afterwards. According to a recent magazine essay, ‘Einstein came to an understanding about relativity by imagining people going up in elevators and beaming light back and forth between rocket ships.

The idea of doing something for its own sake interests me for two reasons. First, I should like to understand better two opposing reactions that I have felt on coming across the phrase ‘for its own sake’ used in earnest. When told that knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake and that this is what the study of science at a university ought to be like—not an adjunct to commercially motivated research in a product I design and development team funded by local industry—I, and others, feel that something pure and noble, holy, good and true is being said. On the other hand, I recognize that to some, who would probably describe themselves as more realistic than myself, the claim that knowledge should be, and is being, pursued for its own sake has a hollow ring. Nowadays, academics themselves feel uneasy when they hear this sort of thing being said in public in mixed company. But they do continue to say such things to each other, at least occasionally in private, among consenting adults. Furthermore, I do attach impor- tance to the thought that to do the right thing for its own sake is a shining example of moral goodness. At the same time I acknowledge that the idea of a good deed done for its own sake is less than crystal clear I and that, to many, the person who claims to be doing something for its own sake sounds like someone who smiles at himself in the mirror in the morning in order to find one approving face before setting out to commit his next crime against humanity. I should like to know whether this phrase ‘for its own sake’ will bear the weight I want to place on it or whether a more sceptical attitude is called for.