In the near universal dismay among ‘thinking’ Europeans at the re-election of President George W. Bush there has been one un-thinking notion which has reached cliché status so often has it been repeated.

It is that what we saw in America on November 2nd was a manifestation, among 60 million Americans or so, of pre-Enlightened irrationality. Bush, this view has it, was elected by the religious right which, by definition, is anti-science. Ruling the roost in the world's only remaining super-power it is, almost by definition, dangerous. It is dangerously dogmatic in its opposition in principle to the progress made in moral matters by secularism over the past century or two, and dangerous in that it is a view which now has so much power behind it.

Among the most elementary of moral truisms is the principle of universality: we apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, more stringent ones if we are serious. A near-universal principle of intellectual culture is the rejection of this truism, sometimes explicitly. Rejection of this and similar moral truisms has severe human consequences, and yields what are regarded as “hard problems”—hard in no small measure because truisms are rejected. Illustrations range from establishment of “norms” for international behavior to practice and doctrine with regard.

It is often asserted that even our own past is a foreign country: the ideas of past thinkers are, in some ways, alien to us today. For the European historian of non-European philosophy, not only is the past held to be a different country, but it is also the past of a different country. This is both convenient and problematic all at once. The ‘Western’ historian of non-European philosophy faces a double separation from his/her subject matter; she is both a foreigner and an alien. In this paper, I approach questions of how this historian should orientate herself towards her subject, and why she (and we) should care about it at all.

One evolutionary advantage is that, because of sensory and perceptual relativity (acknowledged as an empirical fact), the tracking of portions of the real relevant to the living creature can be enhanced if updating from species-member to species-member can take place. In human perception, the structure is therefore in the form of a triangulation (Davidson's metaphor) in which continual mutual correction can be performed. Language, that which distinguishes human beings from other animals, capitalizes on that structure. The means by which updating of adaptiveness takes place in the human species is shown to involve a covert hypothesis of singularity in co-reference, a structure that brings the idea of mutual faith and its character to the fore.

The argument of J. M. E. McTaggart in ‘The Unreality of Time’ (Mind 1908) fails logically. There is no A series as such, but there is a shifting past-present-future arrangement within and consistent with the earlier-later B series, past being always earlier, future always later, present always a position earlier or later. An exactly similar logical structure is constructible within the number series, by making each number as one goes up it in turn (it does not matter what ‘it’, or ‘present’, means, ontologically). The subsequent argument that past-present-future time falls into contradiction then fails also, and proves to be equivocal.

In this paper I develop a critique of Kantian ethics, and more precisely a critique of a particular conception of moral reasoning. The fundamental assumption that underlies the conception that I am targeting is that to justify (morally or otherwise) an action is (perhaps with an ‘all things being equal’ clause) to settle its value, in such a way that all rational participants would have to acknowledge that value. As an alternative to the Kantian conception, I propose a conception in which the basic unit of moral reasoning is not an action but rather what I call an ‘ethical position’—where an ethical position is where, at any given moment and with respect to the matter at hand, you stand, and where moral reasoning consists in the articulation of ethical positions.

Both the Correspondence Theory of Truth and the Redundancy/Performative Theory of Truth appear to be unquestionably correct and yet each seems to be inconsistent with the other. As a result we have a puzzle.

The way out of this dilemma is to be found by taking a closer look at the role that ‘Is’ and its cognates play in the structure of the standard statement. Once this is done it can be seen that both theories are compatible with one another.

Michael Dummett claims that the classical model of time as a continuum of instants has to be rejected. In his view, “it allows as possibilities what reason rules out, and leaves it to the contingent laws of physics to rule out what a good model of physical reality would not even be able to describe.” This paper argues otherwise.

Ulrich Meyer's objections to Dummett's arguments on the time continuum fail because he takes Dummett to endorse Hume's atomistic doctrine that events are ‘loose and separate’, In fact, Dummett rejects this doctrine. He used it in his original article only to indicate that certain implications which are conceptually possible fom the point of view of the classical model of time are not actually conceptually possible.