It was, we suppose, inevitable. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full ends with The Stoic's Hour on American network television. (See Philosophy, April 1999.) Fiction, of course, but Philosophy, a Guide to Happiness, presented by the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life is real and over here and on British television. Professional philosophers are reported to be snooty at what they see as shameless opportunism (or is it just they are annoyed that they didnÕt have the idea for themselves?).

Notes on Contributors

Gilbert Ryle (1900–76)

Taught at Christ Church, Oxford from 1924–45 and was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford University from 1945–68. His Concept of Mind (1949) is one of the classics of twentieth century philosophy.

Jennifer Nagel

Teaches philosophy at the University of New Mexico and the University of Toronto.

Philip Kitcher

Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He has written books and articles on a variety of topics in the philosophy of science.

Achille Varzi

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. His most recent works are An Essay in Universal Semantics and Parts and Places (with Roberto Casati).

Neil Cooper

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Dundee. He is author of The Diversity of Moral Thinking. His contributions to Philosophy include ‘Two Concepts of Morality’ (January 1996) and ‘The Art of Philosophy’ (April 1991).

Stephen R. L. Clark

Professor of Philosophy, University of Liverpool. His most recent book is Biology and Christian Ethics (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

D. Goldstick

Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto. His earlier contributions to Philosophy include ‘The Welfare of the Dead’ (January 1988).

Colin Radford

Formerly Research Professor of Philosophy, University of Kent. Now Emeritus (since 1996).

Phil Dowe

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He works on causation, time and chance. He has published a book on causation, Physical Causation (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and is currently working on a book on time travel called ‘Backwards Causation’.

We falter and stammer when trying to describe our own mental acts. Many mental acts, including thinking, are what the author calls ‘chain-undertakings’, that is, courses of action with some over-arching purpose governing the moment-by-moment sub-acts of which we are introspectively aware. Hence the intermittency and sporadicness of the passage of mental activity which constitutes thinking about something.

Does a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience require us to give up any claim to non-trivial a priori knowledge? One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge — if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as a memory or daydream. What is surprising is that we can find elements of this essentially Kantian line about experience even in the work of empiricists such as Locke and Bas van Fraassen.

The cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words vastly underestimates the expressive power of many pictures and diagrams. In this note we show that even a simple map such as the outline of Manhattan Island, accompanied by a pointer marking North, implies a vast infinity of true statements.

The division between “erklaren” and “verstehen” is not as sharp as the conventional wisdom maintains, for all understanding, including the understanding of people, consists in the connecting, ordering and appraising of things encountered, believed or known. The understanding of people is a distinctive kind of cognitive understanding which has a practical side, involving the emotions. The education of the emotions, needed for us to understand ourselves and others, can be achieved both by the observation of real life and importantly by the study of realistic fiction and of biography.

There is both theoretical and experimental reason to suppose that no-one could ever have learned to speak without an environment of language-users. How then did the first language-users learn? Animal communication systems provide no help, since human languages aren't constituted as a natural system of signs, and are essentially recursive and syntactic. Such languages aren't demanded by evolution, since most creatures, even intelligent creatures, manage very well without them. I propose that representations, and even public representations like sculptures, precede full languages, which were devised by the first human children as secret tongues to create fantasy realms inaccessible to their proto-human parents. Language, in brief, is not required for truth-telling or for the convenience of hunters. It is a peculiar modification of public representation, which permits us to construct new public worlds.

An exploratory discussion. Call a desire “finitisic” if some conceivable eventuality would fulfil it completely (so that no conceivable eventuality would fulfil it more). That flexibility of behaviour distinguishing the animate from the mindless is accounted for fundamentally by supposing ultimate motivation all infinitistic and outweighable. Decision-making by the counterpoise of such motivation contrasts with algorithmic thinking; and this suggests a non-computational view of mentation, a compatibilist understanding of creative imagination, and (with some additional conceptions) a possible definitional avenue for breaking the circle of intentionality.

Glen Hartz argues, that neuroscience reveals that persons moved or frightened by fictional characters believe that they are real, so such behaviour is not irrational.

But these beliefs, if they exist, are not rational and, in any case inconsistent with our conscious rational beliefs that fictional characters are not real. So his argument fails to establish that we are not irrational or incoherent when moved or frightened by such characters. It powerfully reinforces the contrary view.

This idea of time travel has long given philosophers difficulties. Most recently, in his paper ‘Troubles with Time Travel’ William Grey presents a number of objections to time travel, some well known in the philosophical literature, others quite novel. In particular Grey's ‘no destinations’ and ‘double occupation’ objections I take to be original, while what I will call the ‘times paradox’ and the ‘possibility restriction argument’ are versions of well known objections. I show how each of these can be answered, thereby defending the plausibility of time travel.

Notebook

Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture Series, 2000–2001

Logic, Thought and Language

2000

13 October Mark Sainsbury What Logic Should We Think With?

20 October Gregory McCulloch Mental Representation

27 October Julia Tanney Self-Knowledge, Normativity, and Construction

3 November Barry Smith Thought and Language

10 November Alan Millar The Normativity of Intention and Meaning

17 November Gabriel Segal tba

24 November David Wiggins tba

1 December Crispin Wright Relativism and Classical Logic

8 December Jennifer Hornsby Communication

2001

19 January Christopher Peacocke tba

26 January M. G. F. Martin Language

2 February A. W. Moore What Are These familiar Words Doing Here?

9 February Scott Surgeon The Conditionality of Thought

16 February Timothy Williamson Possible Beings

23 February S. G. Williams Ambiguity

2 March Bob Hale Logical Knowledge

9 March Charles Travis Rethinking Psychologism

16 March Paul Boghossian Rational Belief

All Lectures to be given at 14 Gordon Square, London WC1 on Fridays at 5.45 pm. Admission is free.