What makes us responsive, however occasionally, to moral demands? Why do people sometimes own up, go off to fight unwillingly in what they consider to be just wars, refrain from stealing a march on friends, and so on, even when they could by doing otherwise reap advantages far outweighing, in the scales of ordinary prudential rationality, any consequent disadvantage? Why has morality such a hold over us?

Thomas Nagel recognizes that it is commonly believed that people can neither be held morally responsible nor morally assessed for what is beyond their control. Yet he is convinced that although such a belief may be intuitively plausible, upon reflection we find that we do make moral assessments of persons in a large number of cases in which such assessments depend on factors not under their control. Of such factors he says: ‘Wherea significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, itcan be called moral luck’ (p. 26).

What is systematic in philosophy is its description of the world we inhabit. ‘Philosophers boast’, said Whitehead, ‘that they uphold no system. They are then a prey to the delusive clarities of detached expressions whichit is the very purpose of their science to surmount’. We need not accept Whitehead's comparison of ‘speculative philosophy’ with the systemof naturalsciences to take his point. The philosophical description of the world issystematic since ‘detached expressions’ may delude us; ‘detached’, that is, in lying outside ‘a coherent, logical, necessary system of generalideas’; we lack a conviction that they have an application to any element of our experience, which the members of a system possess, according to Whitehead, in characterizing every element. What is the nature of this system of description?

There were 180 applications from prospective contestants of the StawellGift in 1978. The race limit, imposed in the interests of safety, is just 60 runners. Of the 60 acceptances Richard Roe was the hotfavourite, but healong with six others fell victim to the great oyster poisoning, and had towithdraw on the day of the race, along with five of the others; the sixth died of the poisoning just as the race was run. In the event the winner was John Doe, the second favourite according to the bookmakers.

A puzzle has been presented in the recent past in Northern Ireland: what is the correct description of the person who dies as a result of a hungerstrike? For many the simple answer is that such a person commits suicide, in that his is surely a case of ‘self-inflicted death’. Where then is the puzzle? It is that a number of people do not see such deaths as suicides. I am not here referring to political propagandists or paramilitaries, for whom the correct description of such deaths is ‘murder by Mrs Thatcher’ or ‘killed by British intransigence’ (to quote advertisements in the Belfast nationalist press at the time of Bobby Sands' death). I am rather thinking of some theologians who, despite being opposed to the hunger-strike and indeed publicly condemning the whole campaign, refused to describe what the hunger-strikers did as suicide.

Does non-representational art itself constitute a refutation of any theory of art based upon mimesis or imitation? Our intuitions regarding this question seem to support an affirmative answer: it appears impossible to account for abstract and non-representational art in terms of imitation, because, to put the problem simply, if nothing is copied in a work of art then there can be nothing essentially imitative about it. The very notion of abstract imitative art seems self-contradictory.

Professor D. Z. Phillips in ‘Bad Faith and Sartre's Waiter’ (Philosophy56, 1981) assigns to Sartre the view that ‘waiters are necessarily in bad faith’, i.e. the profession of waiting as such is in bad faith. What could this mean in the context of Sartre's philosophy? That waiters as a class seek to flee their freedom by adopting that vocation? It must mean something on those lines since, for Sartre, to engage in bad faith is (in a certain mode) to deny one's freedom. The question then arises: could Sartre have heldsuch a view ? And, if he could not have, how does Phillips manage tothink he did ?

Of this batch of books1 the one I found most compelling reading was Sarah Waterlow's Nature, Change and Agency. This work is an intense meditative commentary on the most important portions of the Physics; it probes beneath the text of Aristotle's loosely organized treatise to exhibit its deep structure. Waterlow attempts to show how Aristotle's apparently independent and self-contained discussions in Books I, II, III-IV and VIII all rest on a single notion, viz. that the world consists of natural substances, understood as things engaged each in a unitary pattern of change whose source and determining plan is within themselves.