The most important, or at least the most central, part of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics is found in the first six chaptersof Part Two. Here, Saussure formulates one of the basic principles of Structuralism. Yet the text is in some ways oddly impenetrable. It is dear enough on a quick reading, but closer attention discovers doubtful meanings, ambiguity, the beginnings even of contradictions. These defects may, of course, be inevitable in a reconstructed text. Or they may testify to some profound erroneousness in the thought, to a theory whose natal difficulties are symptoms, not of the elusiveness of truth, but of a miscarriage. It is mypurpose here to argue the latter.

To the Socratic injunction ‘Know Thyself’ one wonders how to respond. Presumably Socrates is asking us to attempt a project at which we are supposed to have some chance of success and this leads one to ask ‘Can I know myself?’ One is led to ask it, but the question can seem rhetorical. Many would reply that of course one can do this because there is nothing easier for me to know than my own self. I do, therefore I can. I know it simply by being myself. Not only this, one might regard knowledge of oneself as unavoidable so that the answer to the question ‘Can I know myself?’ is ‘Yes’ and the answer to the question ‘Can I avoid knowing myself?’ is ‘No’. Now if we cannot avoid knowing ourselves, if Socrates is asking us to do somethingwhich we inevitably do anyway, then he has certainly earned his reputation for irony.

For a period in the middle of the present century moral philosophy was dominated by the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists. Prescriptivists proclaimed a gap between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, between facts and values, and cheerfully accepted the sceptical consequence that morals, and values generally, could not be objects of knowledge.

There were 180 applications from prospective contestants of the StawellGift in 1978. The race limit, imposed in the interests of safety, is just 60 runners. Of the 60 acceptances Richard Roe was the hotfavourite, but healong with six others fell victim to the great oyster poisoning, and had towithdraw on the day of the race, along with five of the others; the sixth died of the poisoning just as the race was run. In the event the winner was John Doe, the second favourite according to the bookmakers.

In his Christian Theology and Natural Science, E. L. Mascall refers to a criticism by Elizabeth Anscombe of C. S. Lewis's well-known argument against determinism that appears in his Miracles. Both Lewis's argument and Anscombe's response appeared originally as papers delivered in the 40s to the Oxford Socratic Club. A certain historical interest attaches to that exchange in that Lewis seems to have been ‘deeply disturbed’ by it.2 I think he need not have been. But, more importantly, the sequence of Lewis's article followed by Anscombe's reply and then Mascall's comments on both, provides a suggestive presentation and examination of a certain kind of argument against determinism. Essentially it is a negative rebuttal of a retortive kind, such as Aristotle uses against the sceptic in the Metaphysics. But its treatment by these three writers indicates a metaphysical insight that could possibly furnish a positive refutation of any kind of radical determinism.

Philosophical traditions often bear the seeds of their own destruction.Their seminal insights are achieved in part by ignoring or distorting certain aspects of human experience. Insights and mistakes grow from the same roots. In transitional periods, this dialectic leads to strange reversals in allegiance and to unexpected and even unnoticed shifts in philosophical doctrine. Classical empiricism presents an example of this when one shifts attention from its treatment of epistemological questions to problems of humanaction, or to the relation of knowledge and action. The empiricist analysisof knowledge in terms of the succession and conjoining of ideas and impressions in the mind leaves the mind itself a passive spectator that undergoes its contents. On this view, the human subject lacks any distinctive spontaneity or power of initiative. The mind's internal processes are conceived ofon analogy with Newtonian mechanics and are distinguished by their law-likeregularity. The subject is not, and cannot conceive itself as being, a kindof agency. Historically, the consequences of this are evident in Berkeley's difficulties regarding ‘active spirit’, of which we have ‘notions’ but not perceptions, and in the often remarked upon disparities between Parts I and III of Hume's Treatise.

A puzzle has been presented in the recent past in Northern Ireland: what is the correct description of the person who dies as a result of a hungerstrike? For many the simple answer is that such a person commits suicide, in that his is surely a case of ‘self-inflicted death’. Where then is the puzzle? It is that a number of people do not see such deaths as suicides. I am not here referring to political propagandists or paramilitaries, for whom the correct description of such deaths is ‘murder by Mrs Thatcher’ or ‘killed by British intransigence’ (to quote advertisements in the Belfast nationalist press at the time of Bobby Sands' death). I am rather thinking of some theologians who, despite being opposed to the hunger-strike and indeed publicly condemning the whole campaign, refused to describe what the hunger-strikers did as suicide.

Suppose I have a friend (whose good sense on most matters I respect) who takes seriously the possibility that some at least of the miracle storiesassociated with the origin of the Christian religion are substantially true. He does not say that he knows them to be true, but given his belief in the existence of an almighty, all loving creator-god, he sees no reason to think it impossible that they are, and considerable reason for thinking one or two of them highly probable. He regards those who claim that (say) the resurrection of Jesus could not have happened as being unreasonably dogmatic, and as displaying an attitude of mind more appropriate to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than the latter half of the twentieth century. To rule out the very possibility of the truth of such stories on a priori grounds seems to him to manifest a simplistic philosophical faith which is at least as naive and arbitrary, and perhaps considerably more arrogant,than his own religious faith. Could he be right?

In this paper I wish to take my earlier analysis of the relationship between facts and preferences further to cast light on how some types of preference claims might be assessed. I have argued that both Hume's Rule and the doctrine of the autonomy of values must be rejected on grounds of elementary logic. To take a well worn example:

Re-arranging gives:

At first sight the activities of professional accountants might seem tooffer little that could interest philosophers. Accountants, it is widely believed, report in various ways on what is the case, where what is the case is unambiguously and objectively ascertainable by reference to determinate facts. It is not clear what interest a philosopher might have in that activity.

I. On the morning of 28 November 1979 flight TE-901, a DC-10 operated by Air New Zealand Limited, took off from Auckland, New Zealand, on a sightseeing passenger flight over a portion of Antarctica. The pilot in command was Captain Collins. The following are paragraphs from the official Report of the Royal Commission that inquired into the events surrounding that flight.

Does non-representational art itself constitute a refutation of any theory of art based upon mimesis or imitation? Our intuitions regarding this question seem to support an affirmative answer: it appears impossible to account for abstract and non-representational art in terms of imitation, because, to put the problem simply, if nothing is copied in a work of art then there can be nothing essentially imitative about it. The very notion of abstract imitative art seems self-contradictory.