Whether one is reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus or his later writings, one must be struck by his insistence that he is not putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses; or by his suggestion that it cannot be done, that it is only through some confusion one is in about what one is doing that one could take oneself to be putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses at all. I think that there is almost nothing in Wittgenstein which is of value and which can be grasped if it is pulled away from that view of philosophy. But that view of philosophy is itself something that has to be seen first in the Tractatus if it is to be understood in its later forms, and in the Tractatus it is inseparable from what is central there, the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown.

What is a natural kind ? As we shall see, the concept of a natural kind has a long history. Many of the interesting doctrines can be detected in Aristotle, were revived by Locke and Leibniz, and have again become fashionable in recent years. Equally there has been agreement about certain paradigm examples: the kinds oak, stickleback and gold are natural kinds, and the kinds table, nation and banknote are not. Sadly agreement does not extend much further. It is impossible to discover a single consistent doctrine in the literature, and different discussions focus on different doctrines without writers or readers being aware of the fact. In this paper I shall attempt to find a defensible distinction between natural and non-natural kinds.

The Liar Paradox is a philosophical bogyman. It refuses to die, despite everything that philosophers have done to kill it. Sometimes the attacks on it seem little more than expressions of positivist petulance, as when the Liar sentence is said to be nonsense or meaningless. Sometimes the attacks are based on administering to the Liar sentence arbitrary if not unfair tests for admitting of truth or falsity that seem designed expressly to keep it from qualifying. Some philosophers have despaired of ever beating the Liar; so concerned have they been about the threat posed by the Liar that they have introduced legislation to exclude the Liar sentence and anything like it.

Utilitarianism tells us that actions are morally right and good if and to the extent that they add to human happiness or diminish human unhappiness. And—or, perhaps, therefore—it also tells us that the best action a person can perform is that which of all the possible actions open to him is the one which makes the greatest positive difference to human happiness. Moreover, as everyone will also remember, utilitarianism further tries to tell us, perhaps intending it as a corollary of that first, main claim, that the motive for an action has nothing to do with its moral rightness or goodness. (This, of course, is just a philosopher's excessive and incorrect way of making the platitudinous point that one may do the wrong thing for the right reason and the right thing for the wrong reason.) But even if, as utilitarians, we accepted the dubious corollary, it would not follow, as many have thought, that utilitarians have no moral interest in motives. For unless, absurdly, a utilitarian believed either that there was never more than a fortuitous connection between on the one hand what we intended to do and on the other what we did and the consequences of what we did, or that, if there were such connections, we could not know of them, he must believe, as a moralist, that the best motive a person can have for performing an action is likely to be the desire to produce the happiest result. Indeed, utilitarians ought to be morally committed, it would seem, to trying to find out as much as they can about the consequences of our actions, e.g. what connections exist, if any, between how we raise children and what sort of adults they grow up to be.

I will offer a defence of Anselm's Ontological Argument, building on some suggestions made by Prior. The defence offered avoids one of the objections commonly levelled against the Ontological Argument. I will not consider whether the use of this objection (that ‘existence is not a predicate’) involves a misinterpretation of the argument as put forward by Anselm. It might, for example, be held that the argument of Proslogion 2 is programmatic, and points forward to Prosiogion 3, and arguments given by Anselm in his Reply to Gaunilo. In particular it might be denied that Anselm holds that what is greater about what exists in reality is just that it exists in reality. While what I have to say will start from points made by Prior, I do not intend to suggest that Prior holds that there is a defence possible for Anselm's argument such as I will offer. What I have to say involves emphasizing modal notions, and treating Anselm's argument as a modal argument. Thus it comes down to defending Anselm's argument in Proslogion 3 in preference to the Proslogion 2 argument.

Epicurus, though popularly and indeed nominally associated with a doctrine advocating the procurement of rather expensive pleasure, lived very simply in his garden with a circle of friends. The 14th of his Sovran Maxims or Cardinal Tenets (kuriai doxai), as collected by Diogenes Laertius, reads: ‘When tolerable security against our fellowmen is attained, then on a basis of power sufficient to afford support and of material prosperity arises in most genuine form the security of a quiet private life withdrawn from the multitude’ R. D. Hicks, the translator, gives, as an alternative to ‘power sufficient to afford support’, ‘power to expel’, but on either reading, we are to think of Epicurus's garden, both the real place and the conceptualized, or tropologized, topos of wisdom and earthly felicity, as enclosed and exclusive. This enclosure, exclusivity, and—what is also implied—abstention of its inmates from participation in the affairs of state are given apophthegmatic expression in ‘Live hidden!’ We contemplate this adage, or slogan, from an enormous cultural distance and, for most of us, ‘Live hidden!’ is much more likely to trigger secondary reflections about the relations between ethics and politics, private and public, perfection of self and improvement of the world, than it is to constitute an actual, or potential, piece of advice we might think about whether, and how, to follow.