There is a strong case for university freedom. Universities are about illumination, about fostering illumination and about passing it on, in the deepest and broadest questions in the humanities and the sciences. To pursue this, their proper goal, they must be free from outside control in the people they appoint, in the subjects they study and in the pupils they admit.

It may be unrealistic to expect a modern state to fund universities and to respect their freedoms, though a state which does not have free universities within its borders will lack the illumination universities can provide. And this will be to the detriment of society as a whole and of those young people who might pass through their gates.

In Britain the hope of free state universities is certainly unrealistic at the moment. Recent government policy sees universities in terms of wealth creation and links with business; and it wants degree courses to be judged in terms of ‘aims’, ‘objectives' and learning outcomes’, criteria appropriate to training, perhaps, but not to education. And it also wants universities to admit many more students from what it calls lower socio-economic backgrounds, as an end in itself.

To this latter end, it is instituting an office called The Access Regulator. This person will allow universities to charge its better-off students higher fees and so partially compensate for a 36% drop in government funding per student over the last decade, providing that they admit more students from poor schools and whose parents earn little and who have had little formal education. To this end new applications forms are being devised, on which these factors will show up. And university admissions tutors are going to have to go on special courses to understand how to operate these new admissions policies.

There would be a strong argument for university fees—providing that they freed universities from extraneous interference. And there can be no objection to admissions tutors looking for academic potential in their candidates. They could do this by talking to them, and assessing their native wit; or they could get them to write about something of general interest; or they could ask their teachers for their opinions, or see how they have progressed over a given period. Best of all, they could look at the most reliable guide to future potential: a candidate's actual knowledge and achievements so far.

But what are not signs of potential in any sense are parental poverty and a candidate's poor schooling (the latter of which is the government's responsibility in any case, and because of which universities are being forced to distort their admissions policies, and ultimately their courses, to cater for these new types of students). People would be outraged if university places were given on the basis of parental wealth and the mere fact of having attended a good school. And rightly so. What is currently being proposed is simply the obverse of admitting a candidate because he or she was born with a silver spoon, and is just as objectionable. What we are currently seeing in Britain is what happens when universities are treated not as institutions of illumination, but simply in terms of training for wealth creation and of egalitarian social engineering. The result is the worst of both worlds, irksome fees, combined with massive and ever-more intrusive interference by the state. But, by a perverse incentive, the introduction of larger fees for students may also give an opportunity for those who wish to set up universities which are truly independent, particularly in subjects without huge capital overheads, in philosophy perhaps.

Waismann's Wittgenstein-influenced ‘How I see Philosophy’ presents a radical vision of philosophy. But its two most general themes—its stress on freedom and vision, and its emphasis on describing the grammar of our language—seem hard to reconcile. This paper elaborates four interrelated themes: 1) Waismann offers his conception of philosophy, not a delineation of the nature of philosophy. 2) His method is radically therapeutic. 3) He offers a diagnosis of the source of philosophical problems: unconscious analogies or conceptions. 4) He advocates a particular form of therapy: offering alternative analogies or conceptions to individuals. Against this background the apparent paradox can be dissolved.

Transcendental epistemology is an inquiry into conditions of human knowledge which reflect the structure of the human cognitive apparatus. The dependence thesis is the thesis that a proper investigation of such conditions must lean in important respects on the deliverances of science. I argue that Kant is right to object to the dependence thesis, but that the best objections to this thesis lead to the conclusion that the conditions of knowledge which Kant identifies are not, in any interesting sense, a relection of the structure of the human cognitive apparatus.

This article queries Winch's view that moral issues are particular, subjective, context-dependent and not open to generalizations. Drawing on examples from film and literature, Winch believes he can prove first, that the universalisability principle is idle and second, that morality is wrongly conceived as a guide to moral conduct. Yet, neither example proves his point. Quite the contrary, they show that we face moral dilemmas only when moral theory fails to provide an answer to moral problems. Therfore, it is not the case, as Winch suggests, that moral issues have a force independent of moral theory.

The article questions a general trend in contemporary moral theory that argues that abstract principles are inconsistent with the actual way we live our lives.

It is central to virtue ethics both that morally sound action follows from virtuous character, and that virtuous character is itself the product of habitual right judgement and choice: that, in short, we choose our moral characters. However, any such view may appear to encounter difficulty in those cases of moral conflict where an agent cannot simultaneously act (say) both honestly and sympathetically, and in which the choices of agents seem to favour the construction of different moral characters. This paper argues, against possible counter-arguments, for a view of virtue ethics which embraces the diversity of moral character.

Architectural theory arises from building, when the mind considers its symbolic relations to its own constructions. The intent of this essay is to discuss the intellectual causes that precede building and precede theory. It considers certain fundamental dualities in our thinking about architecture—such as image and word; type and model; imitation and invention—and the role they play in its making, its perfection as an art, and the eventual elaboration of its tenets into a theory. At a time when theories of architecture proliferate as expressions of ‘personal philosophies,’ a careful and incisive philosophical approach to if, how, and when does theory become formative of building, may ensure that architecture remain faithful to its intrinsic purposes.

Although there is a significant number of books and essays in which Aquinas's thought is examined in some detail, there are still many aspects of his writings that remain unknown to those outside the field of Thomistic studies; or which are generally misunderstood. An example is Aquinas's account of the origins of individual human life. This is the subject of a chapter in a recent book by Robert Pasnau on Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge: CUP, 2001). Since there will be readers whose only knowledge of the issues in question will come from Pasnau's account, and since that account is contentious in substance, and advanced in advocacy of a particular moral interest, it is necessary to provide another, and, we believe, more credible account of the issue of when human life begins, as this may be determined on the basis of known empirical facts and Aquinas's metaphysics, and a more accurate representation of how (and how extensively) this matter has been treated hitherto. The morality of abortion turns on two important sets of issues: the first metaphysical, concerning the beginnings of human life and the specific status of the embryo; the second, ethical, having to do with the nature and scope of value and associated moral requirements. Besides engaging in exegesis we address both issues in philosophical terms.

This paper is an elaboration of my previous paper published in Philosophy, ‘Making Sense of retributivism,’ which was a criticism of John Rawls' attempt in ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ to develop a rule utilitarian theory of punishment wherein utilitarianism is best construed as a justificatory basis for the institution of punishment and retributivism is best construed as serving as a justificatory basis for particular forms of punishment. I challenge this claim, arguing that retributivism must and can provide a justification both for the institution of punishment and for particular forms of punishment. In the end, I develop an analysis of the nature of desert as responsibility and proportionality. This notion of desert makes the best sense of retributivism.