Most of us are more or less dissatisfied with some aspect of our present self and want to change it to a better future self. This makes us divided beings. The beliefs, emotions, and motives of our present self prompt us to act in one way and our desired future and better self often prompts us to act in another way. This makes us ambivalent. One of the shibboleths of the present age is that the key to overcoming our ambivalence is to cultivate autonomy. This Kantian ideal is defended, developed, and somewhat revised by Christine Korsgaard, who constructs an ideal theory of self-constitution. This theory is untenable. Its very nature makes it incapable of addressing the concrete problems ambivalence presents to us in our very different individual circumstances. It unreasonably claims that either we meet arbitrary, unrealistic, and mind-bogglingly complex requirements, or disqualify ourselves from being rational and moral agents. And it optimistically assumes that by becoming more autonomous, we become more rational and moral, rather than merely continue to act in the ways we have been acting before. The failure of this latest ideal theory does not show that there is something wrong with autonomy. It shows that the extravagant claims Korsgaard makes for autonomy are groundless. The way to cope with our ambivalence is not to follow a theory, but to think better and harder about what we – individuals in individual circumstances – are, and want to be.

Freedom of belief is one of the entrenched values in modern society. Interpreted as the right not to be coerced into believing something, it is surely correct. But most people take it to mean that there is a right to false belief, a right to be wrong. People think that freedom of thought is a good thing, and this must include the freedom to make mistakes. It is also often thought that making mistakes is a life-enhancing and essential part of personal development. I argue that these ideas are false. Beginning with an examination of the basic good of truth, and making comparisons with other goods like health and friendship, I argue that there is a duty to believe only the truth, which thus logically excludes the right also to believe falsehood. I distinguish between the strict wrongness of false belief and the fact that, because of our epistemic limitations, we are not always to be blamed for our false beliefs. Even in the case of those beliefs which are involuntary, there is no right to have them if they are false, even though we are not to be blamed for having them. The right to be wrong, I conclude, is a modern myth.

Karl Popper identified Xenophanes of Colophon (570–478 BCE) as the originator of the method of conjectures and refutations. This essay explores this claim, and the methods of both philosophers (section 1). Disparagement (ancient and modern) of Xenophanes has been misguided (section 2). Xenophanes, a critical rationalist and realist, pioneered philosophy of religion (section 3) and epistemology (section 4), but his method was not confined to falsificationism, and appears compatible with inductivism and abductionism (section 5). The method employed by Popper in interpreting Herodotus in support of his conjectures about Xenophanes is typical of the multiple-strand reasoning characteristic of the humanities, and is as much inductivist or abductionist as refutationist (section 6). Popper's theories about Xenophanes are convincing; but even if Popperians would claim that Popper's refutationism largely fits the natural sciences, his application of it to history is implausible, and conflicts with own practice (section 7). An appendix reflects on Popper's interest in cultured refugees.

Are or should the assumptions, methods, and aims of philosophy be scientific or humanistic? I take Quine to represent the view that if philosophy is done as it should be, it is scientific. A contrary view is that philosophy rightly pursued is humanistic. I consider Williams' defense of it. My aim in this paper is to show that each view is partly right and partly wrong and to propose an alternative that includes what I take to be right and excludes what I take to be wrong in both views.

In his ‘pains and Places’ (Philosophy 78, 2003), John Hyman is right that pains are not located in their causes or effects but in the hurting limbs. However, his position may be consonant with Wittgensteinian expressivism or the view that consciousness is the locus of pain: In producing its own parts, a living organism ‘autopoietically’ sustains itself as an activity functionally present in its limbs. It thus supplies the biological basis for pain consciousness as something wholly present in organs that hurt.

This paper attempts to summarise the philosophical career of Bertrand Russell, concentrating in particular on his contributions to logic and the philosophy of mathematics. It takes as its starting point Russell's conception of philosophy as the search for foundations upon which certain knowledge might be built, a search which Russell, at the end of his career, declared to be fruitless. In pursuing this search, however, Russell was led to develop lines of thought and techniques of analysis that have had a profound and lasting influence on the philosophy of the twentieth century.

More than twenty years ago the late Bernard Williams published a paper under the oxymoronic title of ‘Moral Luck’, which claimed that chance shapes moral standing, and that moral standing, like social or professional standing, has its winners and losers, successes and failures. Williams’ final book, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, offered as a ‘fiction’ a sociobiological genealogy of moral standing, and worked to free some of the virtues associated with it—such as integrity, Accuracy, and Sincerity—from the taint of these presumed primitive origins. Whatever the proceeds of this exercise in saving reductionism from itself, it seemed that ‘moral luck’—the earlier category—had come through it essentially undamaged.

The gist of these objections to the possible world account of necessity is that, for it to be true, ‘possible’ would have to be a name for an attribute. But to say that something is possible is not to describe it, but to say that there could be such a thing. And possibilities are not classes of entities. Possible worlds have been described as ways, but a way of getting to London from Cambridge is not an entity, and that there is a way is entailed by facts such as that if you travel south along the M3, you will get there.

A famous section of 1 Corinthians and some influential passages in the work of Iris Murdoch seem to suppose a significant connection between the higher human love of agape and moral knowledge: that, perhaps, the former may provide access to the latter. Following some sceptical attention to this possibility, this paper turns to a more modest suggestion of Plato's Symposium that the ‘lower’ human love of eros might be a transitional stage to higher moral love or knowledge of the good. Still, while conceding that this may be so, the present paper argues that any moral transformations of such loves would need to be informed by moral wisdom or knowledge rather than vice versa. However, the paper concludes that there are ultimately deep and perhaps irreconcilable tensions between the epistemic and agapeic dimensions of moral life.

There is a dichotomy in the Humean thought that morality is more properly felt than judged of. The idea of a moral sensibility with an epistemic and rational content is grounded in the experience of the state of nature, and a distinction made between a defensive and a constructive morality, constituted by a set of motivations, against the law of the strongest, and protective of the relationships of education and creative work, exclusion from which undermines the conditions for a constructive morality. Aesthetic education is a means of overcoming the sectarianism of defensive morality.