After (1) a brief introduction I (2) compare accounts of what it is to say something I find in Plato, Frege and Grice, and I distinguish linguistic from practical meaning and words that signify things from ‘syncategorematic’ or ‘grammatical’ words. I then (3) argue that the relation between a signifying word and what it signifies must be understood in terms of two complementary acts, already recognised in antiquity, quantifying and predicating. Discussing quantification (4), I show how problems about universals can be avoided by accepting Aristotle's distinction between possible and actual existence. Discussing predication (5), I defend Aristotle's view that there are more forms of predication than one, and consider this issue in connection with non-mathematical discourse.

This paper starts by examining the language used in some well known scriptural passages where the importance of mercy or compassion is stressed. Such passages underline the ethical importance of a direct, physically and emotionally involved response. This leads on to a critique of the shortcomings of approaches to ethics which advocate the impersonal promotion of welfare; our lives as ethical beings depend intimately on the immediate responses arising from our encounters with others in our day-to-day lives. The paper then further explores the special status of loving kindness and mercy in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and argues that secular ethical systems, whether grounded in human nature or in the supposed requirements of rationality, are unlikely to be able to underwrite this kind of status. The final section reflects further on the ‘cosmic’ significance of love in a theistic worldview.

Challenged by Lord Kelvin's claims that earth and sun were too young to give evolution sufficient time to do its work, especially in the human case, where care for the weak blunts the edge of natural selection, Darwin leaned on Lamarckian thoughts to accelerate the process. The mental and moral traits crowning human distinctiveness, he urged, arose through sexual selection. But promiscuity, infanticide, early betrothals, and female drudgery undermined these effects in “savage races.” In the inevitable decline and ultimate extinction of the “melanin races” Darwin believed he could observe human evolution underway before his eyes.

First, I offer a solution to the metaphysical problem of the mind–body relation, drawing on the fact of its distinctness in kind. Secondly, I demonstrate how, contrary to what is denied, Descartes’ metaphysical commitments allow for the intellect's clear and distinct conception of the mind–body union. Central to my two-fold defence is a novel account of the metaphysics of Descartes’ Causal Principle: its neutrality, and the unanalysable, fundamental nature of causality. Without the presupposition, and uniqueness of the mind-body union there can be no mind-body interaction; this throws new light on current concerns in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.

Although one can find a robust philosophical tradition supporting asceticism in the West, from ancient Greece to at least early modernity, very little attention has been paid to what motivated this broad support. Instead, following criticism from figures such as Hume, Voltaire, Bentham, and Nietzsche, asceticism has been largely disregarded as either eccentric or uniquely religious. In this paper, I provide what I take to be the core moral argument that motivated many philosophical ascetics. In brief, acts of deliberate self-denial are practice in an important part of acting ethically and are thus practically rational as a means to acquiring virtue. And if this argument has been a core motivation for asceticism in the West then arguably philosophical ascetics have been on to something, especially given contemporary empirical research on self-control.

Just war theory − as advanced by Michael Walzer, among others − fails to take war seriously enough. This is because it proposes that we regulate war with systematic rules that are comparable to those of a game. Three types of claims are advanced. The first is phenomenological: that the theory's abstract nature interferes with our judgment of what is, and should be, going on. The second is meta-ethical: that the theory's rules are not, in fact, systematic after all, there being inherent contradictions between them. And the third is practical: that by getting people to view war as like a game, the theory promotes its ‘aestheticization’ (play being a central mode of the aesthetic) such that those who fight are encouraged to act in dangerous ways. And war, it goes without saying, is already dangerous enough.