The contemporary explosion of information makes intellectual responsibility more needed than ever. The uncritical tend to believe too much that is unsubstantiated; the overcritical tend to believe too little that is true. A central problem for this paper is to formulate standards to guide an intellectually rigorous search for a mean between excessive credulity and indiscriminate skepticism. A related problem is to distinguish intellectual responsibility for what we believe from moral responsibility for what we do. A third problem is how to square intellectual responsibility in retaining our views with the realization that peers we respect disagree with us. Much of the paper is directed to articulating principles for dealing with such disagreements.

In this paper I shall do three things. Firstly, I shall distinguish between three senses of “imagine”: one in which (the context makes clear that) the word is used to report the occurrence of mental imagery; a second in which “imagined” is used as substantially equivalent to “thought”; and a third in which “imagine” is used as substantially equivalent to “suppose.” (And I shall argue that in neither of the two latter senses does imagining necessarily involve imagery.) Secondly, I shall discuss Hume's thesis about imagination: both because, although this is set out as a plausible (but mistaken) generalization about psychology, it nevertheless seems to me that Hume dealt with a central philosophical problem concerning imagination—the relation of descriptions to imagery—in a way that is suggestive and fruitful; and—the main reason for mentioning Hume—because a study of the relation between imagining (when this is imaging) and imagining (when this is supposing) will help us to reinterpret his thesis from a mistaken one about psychology into a correct one about logic and language. Thirdly, I shall give thecentral arguments and the conclusion of the chapter on Imagination in The Concept of Mind, and comment on them.

Professor Peter Bodunrin's paper ‘The Question of African Philosophy’ (Philosophy 55 (1981) 161–179) has, as it were, become the first question for most African scholars, teachers or students, starting a course in African philosophy. In most of the discussions, the controversy over what constitutes an African philosophy tends to dominate, sometimes so much that it forms almost the entire content of the course.

Ad hominem arguments are generally dismissed on the grounds that they are not attempts to engage in rational discourse, but are rather aimed at undermining argument by diverting attention from claims made to assessments of character of persons making claims. The manner of this dismissal however is based upon an unlikely paradigm of rationality: it is based upon the presumption that our intellectual capacities are not as limited as in fact they are, and do not vary as much as they do between rational people. When we understand rationality in terms of intellectual virtues, however, which recognize these limitations and provide for the complexity of our thinking, ad hominem considerations can sometimes be relevant to assessing arguments.

The word ought is often used to express moral judgments. It is used to express moral laws, as in “We ought to honour our parents”; and it is used to express singular moral judgments, as in “You ought not to have spoken to your mother like that”". Some singular moral judgments are clearly deductions from some moral law, as is “You ought not to have spoken to your mother like that”. Others, however, are not clearly so, e.g. “You ought not to have done that”. Where both the agent and the action are indicated merely by a contextual reference, no underlying moral law is suggested by the words alone. Even when the singular judgment characterizes both the agent and the action, as “You, being a strong man, ought to have gone to his aid”, it may still be quite obscure what, if any, moral law implies this judgment. Clearly there is no moral law that “Every strong man ought always to go to everybody's aid”.

Self-realizationist theories are among the classical attempts to develop a comprehensive normative ethical theory. Plato and Aristotle, in giving classical statements of such theories, argue that a man's distinctive happiness, a man's distinctive flourishing, will only be realized when he realizes himself, i.e. when he achieves to the fullest possible degree his distinctive function. And to achieve one's function is to develop to the full those capacities which are distinctive of the human animal. In doing this we are being most truly ourselves and in doing this we are doing what it is our own nature to do. Men who cultivate to the fullest that which men and only men have will be the happiest men and in so acting they will realize themselves most fully; they will achieve their maximum potential or their fullest distinctively human growth. To so realize oneself is the final end of all moral activity. It defines what is to constitute ‘the good life’ and what is to count as ‘a good man’.

Absolutely no one still believes that every physical interactionconsists of material bodies bumping into each other. Those who have tried to work out a completely mechanistic physics have been unable to explain common phenomena like liquidity, gravitation and magnetism. In fact, there is great reason to doubt that such a physics could ever account for attractive forces in general.

One of the roots of anti-science is an implausible account of experiments which opens up a seemingly unbridgeable gap between what it would be rational to believe on the basis of an empirical research programme and what scientists do believe. Post-modernists and others of a similar persuasion, for example Goodman, Rorty, Latour and Gergen, have marched into this alleged gap, insisting that experiments do not probe an independent reality, but create worlds to which they are perfectly tailored. In response I argue that if experiments are understood as working models of parts of Nature, Nature domesticated, then there is no epistemic gap to fill. There are complexities with this thesis that can be resolved by developing a Bohrian account of the experiment as involving an indissoluble union of apparatus and Nature, giving us access, not to occurrent properties of the world but to affordances.

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form.

In this paper I wish first of all to argue against two possible views about colour qualities, which I shall label the Objectivist and Subjectivist views respectively. I find these views to be prevalent among philosophers of my acquaintance, though sometimes they are hidden by a veneer of post-Wittgensteinian sophistication. Part of my argument will depend on modern scientific theories of colour vision. In the second part of the paper I shall argue for a different view of my own.

The contribution starts with the observation that Kant mentioned Human Dignity in his main works with great variety in emphasis. In the ‘Grundlegung’ from 1785 we find a significant treatment and again in the ‘Tugendlehre’ from 1798 but none in the ‘Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft’ from 1788 and in the ‘Rechtslehre’ from 1797. This needs an explanation. In the ‘Grundlegung’ human dignity is not attached to the second formula of the categorical imperative, the formula of self-purposefulness, as it is often assumed, but to the third formula of a kingdom of ends. It is there explained as self-legislation. This placement needs also an explanation, which is attempted by the article. In the ‘Tugendlehre’ human dignity is then explained as self-purposefulness. So Kant changed his understanding of human dignity from the ‘Grundlegung’ to the ‘Tugendlehre’. But the question is: why?

This article reflects upon the debate, initiated by Bernard Williams in 1973, concerning the desirability of immortality, where the latter expression is taken to mean endless bodily life as a human or humanoid being. Williams contends that it cannot be desirable; others have disputed this contention. I discuss a recent response from Timothy Chappell and attempt to pinpoint the central disagreement between Chappell and Williams. I propose that neither side in the debate has firm grounds for its claims, and then proceed to consider four reasons for suspecting that the whole debate has yet to be placed on a conceptually coherent footing.

Modern virtue ethics is commonly presented as an alternative to Kantian and utilitarian views—to ethics focused on action and obligations—and it invokes Aristotle as a predecessor. This paper argues that the Nichomachean Ethics does not represent virtue ethics thus conceived, because the discussion of the virtues of character there serves a quasi-Platonic psychology: it is an account of how to tame the unruly (non-rational) elements of the human soul so that they can be ruled by reason and the laws it imposes. This is explicitly stated in Book X, where it is also affirmed that the question of which laws reason should impose is addressed in The Politics. The Ethics and Politics can therefore be seen as a unity—as Aristotle's version of Plato's Republic—and it is the failure to recognize this that explains Aristotle's misappropriation by the modern virtue ethicists.

I have a very particular reason to be grateful to Stewart Sutherland, our late President, which is connected to some of the themes of this lecture, so want to begin by recalling a long conversation I had with him on these topics.

How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of substance as an outmoded relic of prescientific metaphysics—as the notion of some kind of basic and perhaps ineffable stuff—then the suggestion that the self (or indeed anything) is a substance may appear derisory. Even what we ordinarily call ‘stuffs’—gold and water and butter and the like—are, it seems, more properly conceived of as aggregates of molecules or atoms, while the latter are not appropriately to be thought of as being ‘made’ of any kind of ‘stuff’ at all. But this only goes to show that we need to think in terms of a more sophisticated notion of substance—one which may ultimately be traced back to Aristotle's conception of a ‘primary substance’ in the Categories, and whose heir in modern times is W. E. Johnson's notion of the ‘continuant’. It is the notion, that is, of a concrete individual capable of persisting identically through qualitative change, a subject of alterable predicates that is not itself predicable of any further subject.

An old Arab proverb runs as follows:

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child; teach him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him.

But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a sage; follow him.

Equality in the present age has become an idol, in much the same way as property was in the age of Locke. Many people worship it, and think that it provides the key to the proper understanding of politics, and that on it alone can a genuinely just society be reconstructed. This is a mistake. Although, like property, it is a useful concept, and although, like property, there are occasions when we want to have it in practice, it is not a fundamental concept any more than property is, nor can having it vouchsafe to us the good life. In an earlier paper I argued against equality by showing that the concept of equality was confused and that many of the arguments i egalitarians adduced were either invalid or else supported conclusions I which were not really egalitarian at all. Many egalitarians, however, have complained that my arguments were not fair, because I had failed to elucidate the concept adequately, or because the position I attacked was not one that any egalitarian really wished to maintain, or because I had overlooked other arguments which were effective in establishing egalitarian conclusions, or because the positive counter-arguments of my own I put forward more as a matter of taste than of serious political commitment. In this paper, therefore, I want to elucidate the concept more fully, concede what I should to my critics, point out that, even so, their conclusions do not follow, and give further reasons not only for supposing that egalitarian arguments are invalid but for discerning positive merits in some forms of inequality.

Moral theories which, like those of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, give a central place to the virtues, tend to assume that as traits of character the virtues are mutually compatible so that it is possible for one and the same person to possess them all. This assumption—let us call it the compatibility thesis—does not deny the existence of painful moral dilemmas: it allows that the virtues may conflict in particular situations when considerations associated with different virtues favour incompatible courses of action, but holds that these conflicts occur only at the level of individual actions. Thus while it may not always be possible to do both what would be just and what would be kind or to act both loyally and honestly, it is possible to be both a kind and a just person and to have both the virtue of loyalty and the virtue of honesty.