Discussion of the soul in this essay departs from the concept of the soul that for thousands of years has occupied the attention of philosophers and theologians and pervaded religious discourse. The author is concerned with what William James referred to as ‘the popular soul,’ the soul as it is invoked by expressions such as ‘an expansive soul,’ ‘a soulless person,’ ‘soul-mate,’ and ‘that melody touched my soul.’ Skepticism with regard to the existence of this soul is without warrant. How this soul comes into being and develops; what its essential features are; how the world, when the soul is engaged, is transformed; what its relationship is to one's conscience; its importance in a human life; its connections to purity and perfection, to silence; its survival upon death; and the perils posed today to its development and existence are the principal topics considered.

Much debate in contemporary metaphysics of time has centred on whether or not tense is essential to the understanding of a temporal reality. The rival positions in this debate are associated with two very different pictures of the relationship between time and existence. Those who argue for the dispensability of tense see the phenomenon of tense as an epistemological accretion which infects our perception of the world but is in no way essential to a complete description of reality. With respect to existence, things past and future are supposed to be on an equal footing with things present. Thus the Quinean ‘time slice’ ontology, which sees the world as a four-dimensional entity in space-time, repudiates any ontological significance to the differences between past, present and future. For the Quinean, what differences we see between past, present and future existents pertain to our limited mode of access to reality. In a perception which grasped the world as it really is tense differences would have no place. In this respect the Quinean position resembles Spinoza's claim in the Ethics that in so far as the mind conceives a thing under the dictates of reason it is affected equally, whether the idea be of a thing future, past or present.

The first aim of this paper is to try and determine what St. Anselm meant in his original argument in the Proslogion (ch. 2). This needs to be done because not only are the writers who expound his demonstration divided in their interpretations of it, and these interpretations quite different, but, very strangely, one does not find that they mention that there is any ambiguity and that other writers construe Anselm's words differently from themselves. Since there are in fact two arguments in the classical formulation of his proof, I want to try and disentangle them, decide which of them Anselm intendedand what is its connection with the demonstration in the third chapter of the Proslogion, and thus to offer an opinion on what exactly the ontological argument of St. Anselm is. Then on the basis of the clarification, I hope to show what it was that Gaunilo and St. Thomas attacked, to touch briefly on the relation of the 17th century ontological argument to Anselm's, and in general to indicate the curious round-aboutness of the historical criticism of Anselm. Anselm argued and Gaunilo and Thomas refuted something, though not, I think, precisely what Anselm meant, or, at any rate, not all that he meant. Actually it was Descartes that Thomas refuted by refuting half of Anselm. Kant refuted the other half of Anselm in an irrelevant criticism of Descartes. So that it could properly be said that Anselm's proof has been broken by philosophers who were either only partly aware of what he was maintaining, or who never had him in mind at all. Finally, because the important thing about the ontological argument, in my opinion, is not whether it is a demonstration of God's existence, but whether its refutation is a demonstration of the impossibility of God's existence, and because this question seems to arise most sharply in connexion with Anselm's position, I want to say something about that.

Because of the communicative function of propositions, Logic is a moral science about what ought to be said. The association with morality derives from the connection between Logic and Truth, and the social value of speaking the truth. Propositions are used rather than mentioned sentences, and so are not the platonically abstract objects they have often been taken to be. Instead they are social objects formed by a community's employment of language. So it is the public use of sentences that settles what they mean, and thereby their logic. The matter has a particular relevance to Graham Priest's non-classical views.

We would be very far from doubting the sincerity of the majority of our politicians or their integrity. People, in Britain at least, who actually meet politicians from all parties are often pleasantly surprised. They usually find ordinary and sometimes quite able people trying to do their best in difficult circumstances, rather than the monsters of sleaze, hypocrisy and self-centredness of the caricatures. Nor is it the place of Philosophy to criticize the policies of governments, particularly not those of democratic governments, popular in themselves and with popular mandates.

What, though, does seem a disturbing contemporary trend is for political leaders to present themselves as articulating the feelings of a whole people, particularly when this is over specific issues or events. Should a whole people have just one feeling? What happens to those within the society who do not share the feeling? Are they still part of the ‘people’? Do they have to hide and go underground? And should politics be driven by feeling, however sincere, however worthy, rather than by reason and dispassionate analysis? Whatever is the case with politics, philosophy involves reason and dispassionate analysis. It is at this point that the philosopher may find him or herself at odds with popular feeling, particularly with feelings of the synthetic sort political spinners are tempted to whip up. It is then that the philosopher may find him or herself a stranger in his or her own land, perhaps not for the first time this century.

Here are two widespread responses to Kant's categorical imperative. On one hand, one might note the absence of detailed rational derivation. On the other hand, even someone who maintains some skepticism is likely to have a sense that (nevertheless) there is something to Kant's central ideas.

The recommended solution is analysis of elements of the categorical imperative. Their appeal turns out to have different sources. One aspect of the first formulation rests on the logic of normative utterances. But others can be justified only in terms of their contributions to desirable functionings of a moral order.

Bertrand Russell is widely considered to be one of the founders of analytic philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Individuals have usually stressed his early philosophical contributions as seminal in this regards. But Russell also had another side–a naturalistic side–leading him towards a naturalistic epistemology and naturalistic philosophy of science of the type Quine later made famous. My goal is to provide an outline of Russell's naturalistic epistemology and the underlying philosophical motivations for such a move. After briefly presenting Russell's conception of the nature of philosophy, I sketch his theory of philosophical method, which is a version of the method of analysis. This provides the underpinnings for a discussion of his Naturalistic Epistemology, which led him to adopt a version of a behavioristic epistemology. Although Russell vacillated on the question of the adequacy of such an account, it provided a major element in his later philosophical views. I suggest that we must reevaluate our conception of the history of analytic philosophy and, in particular, our understanding of Russell's place in the history of 20th century philosophy.

In this paper I ask whether in Aristotle's metaphysical system the form of a non-living sensible substance, such as the form of this house, is or is not universal. I argue that his position as it stands is self-contradictory, and then try to give some account of the pressures that led to this central contradiction in Aristotle's metaphysical thought.

Roger Scruton's account of the nature of music and our experience of it foregrounds the imagination. It is a particularly interesting and promising ‘non-realist’ view in the aesthetics of music, in the sense that it does not postulate aesthetic properties of music that we represent in musical experience. In this paper I critically examine both Scruton's view and his main argument for it.

Notwithstanding the burgeoning literature on death, philosophers have tended to focus on the significance death has (or ought/ought not to have) for the one who dies. Thus, while the relevance one's own death has for others (and the significance others' deaths have for us) is often mentioned, it is rarely attributed any great importance to the purported real philosophical issues. This is a striking omission, not least because the deaths of others – and the anticipated effects our own death will have on those we leave behind – are normally of great importance outside the confines of academic philosophy. In this paper I want to do three things: (i) argue that philosophers' treatment of death tends to distort the issue (Sections I–III); (ii) outline some of the ways others' deaths figure in how we assess our own mortality (Sections IV–V); and (iii) raise some general questions about the value of ‘theorising’ death (Section VI).

The following is an attempted answer to the question: in what kind of world is learning from experience possible? The method is to build up imaginatively a world until what has in general outline been constructed is such as to permit the kind of learning by experience with which we are all familiar. We may hope that some interesting facts even now may emerge from a consideration of this trite subject. Not all that we know has been learnt from experience, though, no doubt, anything we know, if it has come to our notice, has done so in the course of experience. With this truth we are not concerned. Our subject is what is called “empirical science”; but by sometimes calling it by the homelier name appearing in the title of this paper, we may remind ourselves that we are not dealing with a specialist branch of knowledge or a technical subject, but with what is a necessary feature of even the most commonplace experience.

In the Platonic dialogue that bears his name Protagoras,1 in a myth (320c–324d) and in a logos (324d–328b) positively affirms the absolute character of universal moral values, such as force themselves upon all men; this makes one think that the famous man-measure dictum was subservient to the ends that the sophist had in view as a teacher of areté. Indeed, his condemnation in that dialogue of the sophists who, like Hippias, included in their teaching mathematical and naturalistic studies (318d-e), must be connected with the criticism of mathematics reported by an Aristotelian text.2 These studies, that is to say purely theoretic disciplines, were considered by Protagoras not only useless for the spiritual formation of men and citizens, but also void of any certitude and objectivity whatever.3 We feel therefore allowed to suggest that also the man-measure principle had to perform an office of the same kind: to show that natural philosophy (which then comprehended all theoretical knowledge) could not yield an objective knowledge of φ?σις which formed its object, because such knowledge is denied to man. Mistrust of the general conceptions of the cosmology of physiologists was widely spread at that time, and the authors of some medical treatises of the Hippocratean corpus used it to justify the construction of a discipline founded on the study of empirical materials interpreted rationally and not with the general hypotheses void of certainty