‘Our passions are psychological instruments,’ Rousseau says, ‘with which nature has armed our hearts for the defence of our persons and of all that is necessary for our well-being. [But] the more we need external things, the more we are vulnerable to obstacles that can overwhelm us; and the more numerous and complex our passions become. They are naturally proportionate to our needs.’

The task of giving some sort of interpretation of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour is an extraordinarily difficult one. The book is exceptionally fragmentary. Many of the remarks seem to raise questions that are then left completely unanswered, or to invite us to imagine various circumstances that are then left without any further comment. Although nearly all the remarks are related in one way or another to the problem of colour, the range of topics that Wittgenstein touches on is extremely wide, and covers areas that are not normally mentioned in contemporary philosophical discussions of colour. For example, apart from the familiar ‘Why can't there be a transparent white?’ and ‘Why can't there be a reddish-green?’, he asks ‘Can a transparent piece of glass have the same colour as an opaque piece of paper?’, ‘Is white always the lightest colour?’, ‘Do I see blond hair in the black and white photograph of a blond youth?’, ‘Does it make sense to point to a colour in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and ask for the walls of my room to be painted the same colour?’, ‘Do the colour-blind have the same concept of colour-blindness as the normally sighted?’, ‘Can normal vision be described?’, and so on.

John Buridan's Sophismata contains some of the most interesting puzzles and paradoxes of any of the many surviving medieval informal logic manuals. Buridan's purpose is not only to illustrate and challenge Aristotelian syllogistic with difficulties of interpretation, but also in part to lay logical philosophical foundations for a radically nominalistic ontology in the tradition of William of Ockham.

My thesis is that ‘rational’ is an absolute concept like ‘flat’ and ‘clean’. Absolute concepts are best defined as absences. In the case of flatness, the absence of bumps, curves, and irregularities. In the case of cleanliness, the absence of dirt. Rationality, then, is the absence of irrationalities such as bias, circularity, dogmatism, and inconsistency.

Of course there's every difference in the world between my merely saying something and its being so. My claim that I have a toothache is a far cry from the toothache itself. Words are not things: I neither sit in the word ‘chair’ nor eat the word ‘food.’

In its central object of attachment—the figure of Christ Incarnate—the Christian religion could be said to embrace what would ordinarily be taken to be an impossible object of belief. That is, the logic of the Incarnation demands close scrutiny: and in response, the question may be begged, given such an analysis of that life, may not any belief which does take this figure to be a central object of faith, be then held to be sui generis, a logically extraordinary form of belief?

We spent a wonderful morning in the van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam. Of course we knew all the paintings, we had seen them all in reproduction, and the building was more like a bank vault than a setting for art. But what art! At first sight how small and uniform the paintings were in reality: yet every blade of grass, every flower in a field, every olive tree, every vibration in the sky, every patch of colour, every brush stroke, testified to life and to a life vibrating beneath the surface form. In a true sense, an artist inspired, an artist breaking convention, artistic and social, but nevertheless an artist transforming life with a vision of the enhancement of life, a vision inviting each one of us to look again at the natural forms around us, to feel the spirit or the gods dwelling in them, a vision of enchantment and of humanity in a disenchanted world. Art—painting—can, then, be a source of spiritual nourishment as Kant and Schiller and Ruskin in their different ways thought it should be.

According to David Hume our idea of a necessary connection between what we call cause and effect is produced when repeated observation of the conjunction of two events determines the mind to consider one upon the appearance of the other. No matter how we interpret Hume's theory of causation this explanation of the genesis of the idea of necessity is fraught with difficulty. I hope to show, looking at the three major interpretations of Hume's causal theory, that his account is contradictory, plainly wrong, or (at best) inherently impossible to verify.

In his recent paper on Aristotelian dialectic, Professor Hamlyn claims that ‘what may be important for Aristotle's purposes is not the truth but the acceptance of the truth’ (p. 474). Dialectic is protreptic, and not strictly philosophical, spadework: ‘[t]he appeal to endoxa is, as it were, a setting of the scene, providing the context for argument out of which, it is hoped, will emerge the insights from which demonstration and thus further understanding can follow’ (p. 475).

In ‘Concerning the Absurdity of Life’ Quentin Smith accuses us of contradicting ourselves in our argument against Thomas Nagel. On the one hand we said that Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 is not ‘insignificant’ compared with cosmic radiation. On the other we said that the life of a man of integrity or humanity could be lived without a formal claim to Value, so that there was nothing for Nagel's external perspective to negate. But where is the contradiction? We put ‘emotional value’, used of Mozart's concerto, in scare quotes, to show that we disapproved of the phrase, and we also called the emotional value ‘so-called’ with the same intention. What we said about the life of the man of integrity, as we characterized it, was that no formal claim about Value was made for it—note the capital V. ‘Formal’ was meant to make the same point. We meant neither to assert nor to deny that Value was objectively present in the concerto. If we had asserted it, that would have meant that the concerto was no good. If we had denied it, that would have committed us to a styptic view of what it would be for it to be false that it was no good. Also not wanted was to understand how music has a value, for example in education. Smith did not see that we were gunning for just the kind of analysis he gives of integrity and humanity. Hence that capital V in our reference to ‘Value’. It was meant ironically. Is a man's integrity ‘living by his values’, as Smith says, or is ‘humanity’, as we used it, ‘respecting the value of other human beings’? Integrity is surely, as the OED says, more a certain kind of unbrokenness or wholeness, being uncorrupted, even sinless, or innocent. The OED rightly makes no mention of values. Nor does it mention them under ‘humanity’: kindness, benevolence, humaneness, ‘traits or touches of human nature or feeling; points that appeal to man’. It is not true, let alone analytically true, as Smith says, that the notions of integrity and humanity involve value.