Few passages from the ancients scandalize modern readers as does Aristotle's Politics I, 2-5. Aristotle begins with a distinction he apparently finds obvious: [T]hat which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave.

Justice is a constant and perpetual will to give every man his due. The principles of law are these: to live virtuously, not to harm others, to give his due to everyone. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of divine and human things, the science of the just and the unjust. Law is the art of goodness and justice. By virtue of this [lawyers] may be called priests, for we cherish justice and profess knowledge or goodness and equity, separating right from wrong and legal from the illegal. (Ulpian in the Digest of the Roman book of law Corpus Juris, ca 200AD)

Daniel Putman thinks I am right to hold that for Aristotle a concern to appear before one's peers in a certain way is internal to virtue. He takes me to suppose that things are otherwise under a ‘modern concept of virtue’, and says that I am wrong about this. Putman rightly distinguishes between a desire to look good before one's peers which is a substitute for virtue, and a desire to look good to them because, acting virtuously, ‘we genuinely deserve to be viewed that way’. (He acknowledges that I recognize such a distinction in Aristotle.) Once this distinction is made, Putman thinks, we can appreciate that modern ethical understanding is as much dependent on ‘the communitarian foundation of character’ as is Aristotelian virtue. The only thing, says Putman, which gulls us into thinking otherwise is the sociological fact that Aristotle's political community was homogenous, while ours is heterogenous, so that more often virtuous people today will have to act in a way which goes against what many around them think.

The phrase ‘burden of proof’ or ‘onus probandi’ originally referred to something determined by a judge in a legal proceeding. Some claims would be accepted as true by the court, and other relevant claims would require proving. The burden of doing this proving could be assigned to one or another party by the judge. Success or failure to meet this burden could be determined by the judge or the jury, as could consequences of success or failure.

A sharp contrast had recently been drawn by one of our Cambridge Professors between Bertrand Russell and Broad1 in respect of their characters and their intellectual and moral careers. We have been told that Russell was several times in prison, married and divorced several times, had several mistresses, was frequently short of money, and very unstable in changing his philosophical views. As far as I know Broad was never in prison for anything. Again, so far from marrying several times, he tells us with some satisfaction in his Autobiography that there was ‘never any risk’ of his ‘catching his foot in the man-trap of matrimony.’ This was one of the reasons why, in contrast with Russell, he was never short of money. Other reasons were that his tastes were simple, and that like his West Country philosophical forerunner, John Locke, and evidently like his Director of Studies, McTaggart, he paid great attention to investment. He was determined to save and invest enough to make himself ‘as soon as possible independent of the vicissitudes of employment’.

A sign seen in the Philosophy Department of the University of Uppsala reads: A philosopher is one who will deliver a paper on the Hangman's Paradox at a conference on capital punishment. I might take as a supporting example of this tendency to focus on the irrelevant or the inappropriate a real paper to a medico-legal conference on organ transplants which argued that it would be morally justifiable to remove a heart from a healthy would-be heart donor. There are also many amusing and intelligent papers on the ‘survival lottery’—a hypothetical arrangement which would allow individuals to be seized and cannibalised for their organs. These articles are light-hearted exercises in argumentative ingenuity, harmless in themselves, but they are offered in a world in which street children in Brazil are snatched for their kidneys, Chinese political dissidents have their organs seized officially at their place of execution, and poor peasants in Turkey and India sell their own kidneys or those of their relatives, for money. At the same time, the most frequently cited paper on the fraught topic of abortion is one in which pregnancy is compared to the plight of one unwillingly or unintentionally connected to a violinist who temporarily needs the link in order to survive.

(i) Heraclitus wrote that human nature does not have right understanding, but divine nature does. The goddess of Parmenides tells us the Truth: that what exists is whole, single, undivided. We say (‘in our language’) that things are separably nameable and describable. That is incorrect. So ‘our’ use of language embodies error. In the Cratylus, Socrates says that the gods call things by names that are naturally right.

There is a venerable tradition according to which the concept of truth is totally independent of human beings, their actions and beliefs, because truth consists in the correspondence of mind-independentpropositions to a mind-independent reality. For want of arespect. One way of doing so is relativism, the idea that whether a belief is true or false depends on the point of view of individuals or communities. A closely related position is a consensus theory of truth, according to which a belief is true if it is held by a (suitably qualified) group of people. In a similar vein, the pragmatist theory maintains that a true belief is one which it is expedient for us to accept.

In 1929, doubtless to the discomfort of his logical positivist host Moritz Schlick, Wittgenstein remarked, ‘To be sure, I can understand what Heidegger means by Being and Angst’ (WVC, 68). I return to what Heidegger meant and Wittgenstein could understand later. I begin with that remark because it has had an instructive career. When the passage which it prefaced was first published in 1965, the editors left it out—presumably to protect a hero of ‘analytic’ philosophy from being compromised by an expression of sympathy for the arch-fiend of ‘continental’ philosophy. It was as if a diary of Churchill's had been discovered containing admiring references to Hitler. This was the period, after all, when Heidegger was, as Michael Dummett recalls, a ‘joke’ among Oxford philosophers, the paradigm of the sort of metaphysical nonsense Wittgenstein had dedicated himself to exposing.

Those who are interested in Freud and psychoanalysis will be familiar with questions such as ‘Is Freudian psychology pseudo-scientific?’ ‘Is Freudian psychology falsifiable?’ ’Is unfalsifiability an adequate criterion of pseudo-science?’, and they might naturally suppose that it is these questions of which Erwin has attempted a ‘final accounting’. Surprisingly, these questions hardly feature in Erwin's book. Though at the outset Peter Medawar's notorious judgment that psychoanalysis is ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century’ is cited, Erwin does not seem to think it is part of his final accounting to say either whether he thinks it justified or, if not, why someone of Medawar's distinction should nevertheless have thought so.

One of the most striking contributions of particularism to moral philosophy has been its emphasis on the relative opacity of the moral scene to the tools of rational analysis traditionally used by philosophers. Particularism changes the place of the philosopher in relation to the moral life, pointing up the limits to what philosophy can do here. The modern moral philosopher who takes particularism seriously no longer has the luxury, endemic in our tradition, of imagining that moral philosophy can be done with only passing illustrative reference to experience, or that the truth about the whole of our moral life may be read of a list of a priori moral principles, whose rationality is underwritten by the mechanistic account of what it is to follow a rule that pre-Wittgensteinian philosophers took for granted.