This article discusses Elizabeth Anscombe's faith and her concept of faith, and the bearing of this on what it is for belief to be reasonable. Reasonableness requires that we make a rough distinction between what can and cannot be taken seriously. At the margin we will rightly be influenced by thinkers such as Anscombe who were well able to appreciate the philosophical consensus but were also prepared to disturb it. She disturbed it in a particular way: by asserting Christian teachings robustly inimical to peace of mind. However she rejected many traditional defences of these teachings as presupposing a faulty understanding of rationality. The article attempts to assess what a more adequate understanding might be.

By the lights of a central logical positivist thesis in modal epistemology, for every necessary truth that we know, we know it a priori and for every contingent truth that we know, we know it a posteriori. Kripke attacks on both flanks, arguing that we know necessary a posteriori truths and that we probably know contingent a priori truths. In a reflection of Kripke's confidence in his own arguments, the first of these Kripkean claims is far more widely accepted than the second. Contrary to received opinion, the paper argues, the considerations Kripke adduces concerning truths purported to be necessary a posteriori do not disprove the logical positivist thesis that necessary truth and a priori truth are co-extensive.

South. So we have agreed to bury intuitionism. Well, I dare say it is right. But we ought to bury some of the grave-diggers too. Some of the things that Ross said are no doubt wrong, or at least misleading: but they are a lot less wrong than most of the things said since the war.

Perhaps no other aspect of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode has generated more controversy and caustic criticism than his attempt to defend the role of ‘prejudice’ (Vorurteil) in human understanding. Gadamer's goal in challenging what he calls ‘the Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice’ is not to defend irresponsible, idiosyncratic, parochial or otherwise self-willed understanding in the human sciences, but to argue that all human cognition is ‘finite’ and ‘limited’ in the sense that it always involves, to borrow Polanyi's phrase, a ‘tacit dimension’ of implicit judgments, concerns, or commitments which shape definitively our grasp of the subject matter in ways we cannot anticipate or control. This implies a ‘finite’ or ‘limited’ view of human understanding in at least two ways. First, Gadamer seems to use the word ‘finite’ in conscious opposition to Hegel's notion of an ‘infinite’ intellect. For Hegel the ‘infinite’ was the ‘unconditioned’ and ‘self-determining’. An ‘infinite’ intellect would be its own master, an autonomous, spontaneous source of all its essential activities and contents.

A psychoanalyst is said to provide the real explanation of a person's behaviour; an explanation which the person has arrived at with the help of a psychoanalyst. The person was not aware of the real character of his behaviour. It may have exhibited unconscious thoughts, beliefs, motives, intentions and emotions. In his paper ‘The Unconscious’, in Mind 1959, Ilham Dilman says, ‘What those who talked of “Freud's discovery of the unconscious” had in mind is a group of innovations which “the founder of psycho-analysis” brought to bear on the study of the human mind’ (p.446). I have ten questions concerning the relation of this ‘group of innovations’ to human behaviour.

Does it follow from Wittgenstein's views about indeterminism that irregularities of nature could take place? Did he believe that chairs could simply disappear and reappear, that water could behave differently than it has, and that a man throwing a fair die might throw ones for a week? Or are these things only imaginable? Is his view simply that if we adopted an indeterministic point of view (and language) we would no longer look for causes, or would not always look for causes, because we would no longer assume that there must be a cause of each event?

History has become a real and urgent problem. It harasses us in a double form, theoretical and practical, corresponding to the double meaning of the term “history” as either “a sequence of events in time” or “our knowledge of past events”. The first concerns our attitude to human history. We somehow suffer from “historical indigestion”. We may have mastered Nature, but we have certainly not yet mastered History. Therefore it threatens to dominate us. The mass of past events is too much for us and for our memory, too many dates, too many facts, too many interesting or indifferent happenings. We cannot even keep pace with, or realize, all the important events which fill our own times, like world-wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions, inflation and deflation, with all the misery they imply. Consciously or unconsciously we feel ashamed of the human record, of the amount of cruelty, destruction, murder, and martyrdom inflicted on innocent beings. In spite of all this we cannot escape History. All the great events affect every human being. Moreover, historical knowledge permeates our education and is disturbingly growing from year to year, more in detail and in specialization than as a co-ordinated whole. We may react to this situation in one of three ways: (1) by filling our brain with this unco-ordinated mass of historical knowledge, and submerging our personality in it, (2) by becoming specialists and disregarding problems other than our own, (3) by ignoring the past altogether, and falling back into the state of nature and barbarism. We have witnessed all these solutions and their disquieting results.

The final persistence of democracy depends upon whether its right decisions outweigh the wrong ones in number and value, though conceivably one really bad decision might ruin the structure built on all the right ones. It is passing from the stage where a few reasoning leaders govern the masses through their emotions, to the next perilous stage in which every man's thoughts matter. Right decisions depend upon access to relevant facts and doing the right thinking about them. It is of the essence of Nazi philosophy that general liberty of thought is self-destructive, the common man not being rational; it is of the essence of Nazi practice to flatter the many by the pretence that their thinking does matter, but to control and modify the whole supply of factual material upon which they must reason. One declared to me once that he favoured freedom of thought and was not afraid of it, for if he was allowed to supply the “facts” any ordinary rational mind could come to only one conclusion, viz. the one he intended. And in the process the ordinary man might remain proud of his reasoning power, so long as he could be sheltered from seeing the falsity of his conclusions. Control of facts must be perpetual, and cats must never be allowed to get out of bags. But in a democracy, where facts are all born free (and much too equal), it is the thinking about them that really matters.

The great philosophers have generally held that there was some kind of interdependence between philosophy and practice. An unexamined life, they have maintained, is not worth living; and if there is to be anything to examine, life must first be lived, i.e. a practical experience is a propaedeutic to philosophy. But although Plato, for instance, thought that the task of government could be well performed only by the philosopher, he does not seem to have thought that fifteen years’ practical experience had any beneficial influence on the philosopher’s subsequent work of philosophic contemplation. Aristotle explicitly prefers the theoretical to the practical life, and the resultant divorce of theory and practice leads to quietism and so to ethical scepticism.

It is not the purpose of a Survey to give a detailed analysis of certain books like a single review, but rather to draw the attention of the reader to works of some importance and use to him, and to indicate, if possible, some general trends of thought of to-day. Whereas our last survey was devoted to Philosophy of History, we take under review to-day some books on the Philosophy of Nature, that is philosophy of physics, chemistry, and biology, and we finish with some historical books on the subject.

Few philosophical controversies have been waged with greater acrimony than the controversy between the libertarians and the determinists; the vigour with which both sides of the question have been espoused is due not only to the metaphysical importance of the issue—which is indeed considerable—but more especially to its moral and religious implications. No other philosophical issues, with the exception of those pertaining to God and the immortality of the soul, are of greater ethical and theological moment. So thoroughly has the question been debated that further consideration of it may seem futile. Has not the evidence been so completely canvassed on both sides of the controversy that further discussion will be a fruitless reiteration of long familiar arguments? The free-will problem is considered by many contemporary thinkers an admittedly unsolved but completely outmoded problem to which they respond with impatience or complete indifference. This attitude toward the problem is quite indefensible since the question of the freedom of the will is one of those perennially significant philosophical issues which takes on new meaning in every age and is particularly significant in the context of contemporary science and philosophy. Recent psychology, in large measure through the influence of Freud, has achieved a more penetrating analysis of human motivation by bringing to the fore certain hitherto obscure factors which are operative in volition. The psychology of the subconscious by filling in apparent gaps in the psychological causation of volition has furthered the case for determinism.