In the 1990s ‘conflict resolution’ was a good phrase. With the ending of what had then seemed the conflict, the really big conflict, all the little conflicts could be resolved by the techniques of conflict resolution. (Never mind that in the last days of the Soviet empire far more people were being killed in little conflicts than by the big one.) All that was to be needed for the ‘new world order was a modicum of goodwill, some international peace-keepers and negotiators trained in ‘conflict resolution’. The fact that it would have been hard to point to a single conflict which had actually been solved by the methods of conflict resolution (and certainly the big one had not been) was taken to be carping and beside the point.

Conflicts are sometimes resolved, sometimes by force, sometimes by old believers dying out, sometimes by the parties getting richer and less interested in conflict, sometimes just by the parties getting tired or even forgetting whatever it was they had actually been fighting about, and sometimes by the onset of a grudging respect for enemies one never really hated and with whom one finds one can, after all, live. Sometimes they just stop for no ostensible reason at all.

But that there is a technique for conflict resolution looks like a rationalist mirage, a characteristic piece of the third-wayism of which it was a small but significant element. For what underlies such a belief is the premise that parties to a conflict typically share enough beliefs and principles to enable them to lay down their arms and agree among themselves by the application of appeals to reason and mutual self-interest. This surely is to misunderstand the nature of conflict, for most of the cases of conflict in the modern world which readily come to mind are cases where the protagonists have fundamental disagreements of principle or claim, and where violence has been resorted to precisely because there are feelings of great strength on both sides and no common ground of principle. Being lectured to by professional conciliators is hardly likely to do the trick, particularly where the conciliators are from a background which finds it hard to conceive of real differences of principle among reasonable people.

Well, maybe the protagonists in life and death conflict or in a battle between rival faiths are not, in that sense, reasonable. But it is patronising and, in the end, dangerous to have so attenuated a sense reasonableness that one is unable to envisage people willing to die—and kill—for their beliefs, without thereby being insane.

There is an argument often deployed by those who object to the rapid advances in technology, whether in agriculture and animal husbandry or in medicine, that some procedure is ‘unnatural’, and therefore should not be actually prohibited. An attempt is made to analyse and appraise the moral force, if any, of the dichotomy ‘natural’/‘unnatural’, especially in the area of assisted conception. The emotional resonances of the concept of Nature are partially explored, and found to be deep-seated and various, but not of themselves the source of moral imperatives.

Timothy Williamson has recently put forward a proof that every object exists necessarily. I show where the proof fails. My diagnosis also exposes the fallacy in A. N. Prior's argument in favour of his modal logic, Q.

Timothy Williamson offers a proof of the counterintuitive claim that, if an object exists, then it exists necessarily. David Wiggins argues that this result reveals the philosophical disadvantage of a first level (or ‘ticking over’) view of the very ‘exists’ and the advantage of the second level account offered by Frege and Russell. The author seeks to show how, using an idea of G. Evans but without the use of the resources of ‘free logic’, all occurrences of ‘exist’, including its occurrence in true, negative existential, singular statements, can be accommodated to the Frege–Russell view and accorded the intuitively required modal status.

A small minority of biologists, psychologists and philosophers have recently tried to show, in various ways, that evolutionary psychology is of relevance to politics and to policy makers. Two widely accepted arguments still suffice (with only a little tweaking) to dismiss such attempts to forge a link between evolution and policy. The first denies the link between adaptation and fixity, the second denies that ‘adaptive thinking’ is of strong heuristic benefit. Finally, the silence of many evolutionary explanations with respect to developmental mechanisms should also make us suspicious of the relevance of evolutionary psychology to matters of policy.

Equivocation is often described as a fallacy. In this short note I argue that it is not a logical concept but an epistemic one. The argument of one who equivocates is not logically flawed, but it is unpersuasive in a very distinctive way.

In a recent book, I attempt to use the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas to defend a moderate view regarding abortion: that an abortion at any time during a pregnancy should be considered a grave loss, but that it should be considered murder only after roughly the middle of the second trimester. John Haldane and Patrick Lee contend that I have misunderstood the implications of Aquinas's view, and that in fact his metaphysics supports the conclusion that a human being comes into existence at the moment of conception. In this paper, I make a brief reply.

The present essay takes up matters discussed by Robert Pasnau in his response (published in the same issue of Philosophy) to our previous criticism of his account of Aquinas's view of when a foetus acquires a human soul. We are mainly concerned with metaphysical and biological issues and argue that the kind of organization required for ensoulment is that sufficient for the full development of a human being, and that this is present from conception. We contend that in his criticisms of our account Pasnau fails clearly to distinguish first, between a passive potentiality and an active capacity; second, between having a power intrinsically and being an instrumental agent of that which has it intrinsically; third, between per accidens and per se causal series; and fourth, between sense cognition and conceptual thought. We conclude that philosophy and embryology support the position that human beings exist from the point of conception.

This is an essay review of Ted Honderich's recently published autobiography. Treating the work as both a study of philosophical and political culture in the second half of the twentieth century and as an exercise in self-evaluation, the reviewer discusses the problems of truth and explanation in narrative and the issues of professional and sexual morality raised by the narrative. Honderich's account is assessed as credible, illuminating, and well-written, even as questions are raised concerning the consistency of his political beliefs.