In ‘Wittgenstein on Language and Rules’, Professor N. Malcolm took us to task for misinterpreting Wittgenstein's arguments on the relationship between the concept of following a rule and the concept of community agreement on what counts as following a given rule. Not that we denied that there are any grammatical connections between these concepts. On the contrary, we emphasized that a rule and an act in accord with it make contact in language. Moreover we argued that agreement in judgments and in definitions is indeed necessary for a shared language. But we denied that the concept of a language is so tightly interwoven with the concept of a community of speakers (and hence with actual agreement) as to preclude its applicabilty to someone whose use of signs is not shared by others. Malcolm holds that ‘This is an unwitting reduction of Wittgenstein's originality. That human agreement is necessary for “shared” language is not so striking a thought as that it is essential for language simpliciter.’ Though less striking, we believe that it has the merit of being a true thought. We shall once more try to show both that it is correct, and that it is a correct account of Wittgenstein's arguments.

Some of the most interesting questions about Kant, and more particularly about his moral philosophy, arise when he is placed alongside the giants of antiquity. Where does he come together with Plato? Where with Aristotle? Where does he diverge from each?

He comes together with Plato in a shared conception of Ideas. When he first outlines how he is using the term ‘Idea’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, he insists that he is using it in none other than its original Platonic sense; and he explains away certain discrepancies with the comment:

It is by no means unusual… to find that we understand [an author] better than he has understood himself. As he has not sufficiently determined his concept, he has sometimes spoken… in opposition to his own intention.

When one visits Thailand, one is struck by the enormous number of temples in the urban Bangkok area, many of which are conspicuously absent from the more cherished art historical works on the art and architecture of south-east Asia. The Wat Po complex and Wat Reitmit, one discovers, whatever their virtues for the Western tourist, are not among the temples and archaeological sites mentioned in the text of such an authority as Benjamin Rowland. Nor are these temples—when cited at all—discussed in the same vein as, for example, the Konarak temples of Orissa (India), where at least some veneration is paid to the plasticity of the carving in its depiction of sexual variety, even if the depictions themselves were at one time held to possess little or no intrinsic merit as pieces of sculpture.

The performance which follows, like Caesar's Gaul, falls into three parts. Part I consists in a sympathetic and reconstructive criticism of Sir Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). Part II offers a somewhat less sympathetic critique of the critique of Popper offered in E. H. Carr's Trevelyan Lectures What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961; and since Pelicanned). Finally, in a shorter Part III, there will be some conclusions concerning what sociologists and historians can and cannot hope to discover about necessities and impossibilities in human affairs.

‘Every education teaches a philosophy; if not by dogma then by suggestion, by implication, by atmosphere. Every part of that education has a connection with every other part. If it does not all combine to convey some general view of life it is not education at all’ (Chesterton).

In an essay written for the thirtieth volume of the British Journal of Educational Studies, R. F. Dearden surveyed philosophy of education during the period 1952–82. As might be imagined he was largely concerned with the emergence in and development through these years of analytical philosophy of education, as the influence of linguistic or conceptual analysis spread beyond the somewhat ill-defined boundaries of core philosophy and was taken up by those interested in the theoretical presuppositions of educational practice. After charting the course of this development, and having reached the point at which certain worries arose about the limits of conceptual analysis as a method, Dearden turned to consider what if any alternatives might be available. The first possibility which he mentions in expectation of its having received explicit articulation is Catholic philosophy of education. However, as he notes, nothing meeting this description was developed during the period in question—in effect, since the war. The one book which he mentions, viz. Jacques Maritain's Education at the Crossroads, is barely known of in professional philosophy of education and in style and content is quite out of the mainstream.

There have in recent years been at least two important attempts to get to grips with Aristotle's conception of dialectic. I have in mind those by Martha C. Nussbaum in ‘Saving Aristotle's appearances’, which is chapter 8 of her The Fragility of Goodness, and by Terence H. Irwin in his important, though in my opinion somewhat misguided, book Aristotle's First Principles. There is a sense in which both of these writers are reacting to the work of G. E. L. Owen on cognate matters, particularly his well-known paper ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’. Owen himself was in part reacting to what I suppose is the traditional view of how Aristotle regarded dialectic, as revealed in Topics I. 1. On that view dialectic is for Aristotle a lesser way of proceeding than is demonstration, the method of science. For demonstration proceeds from premises which are accepted as true in themselves (that is to say that they are essentially and thus in some sense necessarily true) and moves from them to conclusions which follow necessarily from those premises; and the middle term of such a demonstrative syllogism then provides the ‘reason why’ for the truth of the conclusion. Dialectic proceeds from premises which are accepted on a lesser basis ‘by everyone or by the majority or by the wise, i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them’ (Topics I.1, 100b21–3), and proceeds deductively from them to further conclusions.

The little boy who announced to a shocked court that the emperor was dressed in nothing but his birthday suit was no mean philosopher in the Wittgensteinian mode. Immune from bewitchment by language he followed blindly, figuratively speaking, the rule of ‘look and see’; any explanation being superfluous since everything lay exposed to view, he described what he saw in everyday words stripped of metaphysical gloss and used in a language-game they could happily call home. Such impeccable philosophical credentials and his fearless pursuit of the truth encourage me to follow his example, though I feel a certain trepidation at the enormity of what I am about to suggest: To my ingenuous gaze the body corporate of Wittgensteinian scholarship displays some startlingly naughty bits that really ought to be decently covered.

Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music appeared in 1910. Schoenberg, in his copy of the little book, wrote critical marginal comments which crystallize two opposed outlooks in musical aesthetics. Busoni writes:

Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model…

…What the composer's inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own…

Thomas Nagel believes, with some existentialists, that life is absurd. We shall criticize his belief, as well as the anodyne he offers.

Let me first explain what I am not attacking in this paper. I am not attacking, for instance, the right of free speech or any of the other specific rights listed in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights or the United Nations' Charter. I am, rather, attacking any specific right's being called a ‘human right’. I mean to show that any such designation is not only fraudulent but, in case anyone might want to say that there can be noble lies, grossly wicked, amounting indeed to genocide.

It has been argued by several writers that practical reasoning is capable of a kind of validity that is unlike the validity which theoretical reasoning can possess. One can gain an initial impression of this view's appeal, as well as of its content, by seeing how it could issue from analytical reflection upon the idea that actions, decisions and intentions all can be, and frequently are, reasonable. An inviting first step in such reflection is to say that for a certain intention, say, to be reasonable on a certain occasion is, roughly, for it to be true that a person could come to have that intention as a result of reasoning well about what to do. One might then add the further thought that, so far as regards what it is for a piece of reasoning to be well done, reasoning falls into at least two basic kinds: reasoning about what to do differs generically from reasoning about what is the case. The view which I mentioned at the outset can now be seen as a specific proposal regarding where this difference lies: reasoning about what to do has distinctive validity-conditions not shared by reasoning about what is the case.

In Book II, Chapter 1 of the Physics Aristotle attempts to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. He begins by stating that a natural object ‘has in itself a source of change and staying unchanged, whether in respect of place, or growth and decay, or alteration’. But this is not sufficient to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. As he points out later, a wooden bed, for example, can rot or burn, and this is surely a change whose source is, in part, internal to the bed. To make his distinction, Aristotle writes that in a natural object the internal ‘source of change and remaining unchanged’ belongs to it ‘primarily and of itself, that is, not by virtue of concurrence’. The bed rots because it happens to be made of wood: the change is due to its material, not due to its essence, namely that it is a bed. A natural object, however, changes because of its essence, that is, because it is the natural object that it is.

In The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel develops a theory of practical reasoning which attempts to give the personal, or subjective, point of view its due2 while still insisting on the objectivity of ethics.

On the objective side, Nagel affirms that there are truths about values and reasons for action which are independent of the ways in which reasons and values appear to us, independent of our own particular beliefs and inclinations (p. 144). The objective foundation for these truths consists in a certain distinctive process of understanding. Objective understanding is explicated in terms of an objective standpoint, a standpoint defined as impersonal, that is, as detached from the subjective point of view. The objective standpoint is structured by a conception ‘of the world as centerless—as containing ourselves and other beings with particular points of view’ (p. 140). As with scientific reasoning, ‘we begin from our position inside the world and try to transcend it by regarding what we find here as a sample of the whole’ (p. 141).

In ‘Minds, Machines and Gödel’, 1961, J. R. Lucas proposed that Godel's theorem made possible a refutation of mechanism—the thesis that mind is wholly comprehensible as a consistent, rule-governed machine. A sympathetic reading of Lucas's argument might run something as follows: ‘If I am a machine then it will be possible in principle to give a specification of the consistent formal system, L, that represents me. If this formal system were handed to me, I would be able to prove a Gödel sentence, G, which L could not generate—that is, L could not model my proving G. But since I have proved G, L is inadequate as a model of my cognitive process.’