In post-war France we have witnessed an upsurge in philosophical and quasi-philosophical literature, much of it nonsense and all of it radically politicised. What is the explanation of this? I advance the thesis that the post-1968 literary scene expresses a bid for a new kind of social membership, and that it is the hunger for membership that explains not only the intellectual structure of this literature but also its world-wide influence. I also suggest that there survives in this literature both an intellectual agenda and a historical memory, in which the war-time experience of France is all-important. In the course of my argument I try to explain the radical difference between analytical philosophy, which permits its practitioners to have unorthodox (i.e. non-left-wing) political views, and a particular post-war French intellectual tradition, which has until recently allowed no such deviation from its tacit norms.

Russell's book The Problems of Philosophy was first published a hundred years ago.1 A remarkable feature of this enduring text is the glint of Platonism it presents on a dark empiricist sea: while our knowledge of physical objects is entirely mediated by direct awareness of sense data, we can also have direct awareness of certain universals, Russell claims.2 This is questionable, even if one has no empiricist inclination. Universals are abstract, hence causally inert. How, then, can we have any knowledge of them, direct or indirect? This paper is about Russell's answer to that question. I will argue that given some modification and elaboration of Russell's views, his claim that some universals are knowable by acquaintance is plausible.

It is widely believed that the philosophical concept of ‘tabula rasa’ originates with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and refers to a state in which a child is as formless as a blank slate. Given that both these beliefs are entirely false, this article will examine why they have endured from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the history of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and feminist scholarship it will be shown how the image of the tabula rasa has been used to signify an originary state of formlessness, against which discourses on the true nature of the human being can differentiate their position. The tabula rasa has operated less as a substantive position than as a whipping post. However, it will be noted that innovations in psychological theory over the past decade have begun to undermine such narratives by rendering unintelligible the idea of an ‘originary’ state of human nature.

In this paper I raise a difficulty for Joseph LaPorte's account of chemical kind terms. LaPorte has argued against Putnam that H2O content is neither necessary nor sufficient to fix the reference of the kind term ‘water’ and that we did not discover that water is H2O. To this purpose, he revisits Putnam's Twin Earth story with the fictional scenario of Deuterium Earth, whose ocean consists of ‘dwater’, to conclude that we did not discover that deuterium oxide is (a kind of) water (usually called ‘heavy water’). Instead, according to LaPorte, by including deuterium oxide in the extension of the term ‘water’, we simply refined our vague use of the term ‘water’. But we could have decided to exclude deuterium oxide from the extension of the term ‘water’. Let us call this the thesis of semantic stipulation.

I raise two problems for LaPorte's Deuterium Earth story. First, I show that ‘dwater’ (i.e. deuterium oxide not as a kind of water) does not have the same scientific credibility of ‘heavy water’ (i.e. deuterium oxide as a kind of water). Second, I argue that for the thesis of semantic stipulation to go through one would need to show that ‘dwater’ is semantically on a par with ‘heavy water’. Namely, one would need to show that ‘dwater’ is a projectible kind term, capable of supporting inductive inferences. But, in fact, it is not, because the term is vulnerable to an unwelcome Goodmanian scenario, unless one surreptitiously reintroduces some Putnamian assumptions about D2O content being necessary and sufficient to fix the reference of the term.

This paper analyses J.S. Mill's theory on the relationships between individual autonomy and State powers. It will be argued that there is a significant discrepancy between Mill's general liberal statements aimed to secure individual largest possible autonomy and the specific examples which provide the government with quite wide latitude for interference in the public and private spheres. The paper outlines the boundaries of government interference in the Millian theory. Subsequently it describes Mill's elastic paternalism designed to prevent people from inflicting harm upon others as well as upon themselves, from soft paternalism on issues like compulsory education to hard paternalism on very private matters such as marriage, having children, and divorce by consent.

In his influential paper ‘The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn’, Jonathan Bennett suggests that Huck's failure to turn in the runaway slave Jim as his conscience – a conscience distorted by racism – tells him he ought to is not merely right but also praiseworthy. James Montmarquet however argues against what he sees here as Bennett's ‘anti-intellectualism’ in moral psychology that insofar as Huck lacks and so fails to act on the moral belief that he should help Jim his action is not praiseworthy. In this paper I suggest that we should reject Montmarquet's claim here; that the case of Huck Finn indicates rather how many of our everyday moral responses to others do not and need not depend on any particular moral beliefs we hold about them or their situation.