‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ It is with this seminal sentence that Leszek Kolakowski begins his great work on The Main Currents of Marxism: its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Both the two terms in the predicate expression are crucial. It is most illuminating to think of Marx as originally a philosopher, even though nothing in his vastly voluminous works makes any significant contribution to philosophy in any academic understanding of that term. It is also essential to recognize that for both Marx and Engels philosophy was always primarily, indeed almost exclusively, what they and their successors called classical German philosophy. This was a tradition seen as achieving its climactic fulfilment in the work of Hegel, and one which they themselves identified as a main stimulus to their own thinking. Thus Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, claimed that ‘The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’.

Russell said that physics drove him to a position not unlike that of Berkeley —by which he meant subjectivism or solipsism. ‘As regards metaphysics’, he tells us in his Autobiography, ‘when, under the influence of Moore, I first threw off the belief in German idealism, I experienced the delight of believing that the sensible world is real. Bit by bit, chiefly under the influence of physics, this delight has faded, and I have been driven to a position not unlike that of Berkeley, without his God and his Anglican complacency’.

Richard Price argued for democratic institutions on the ground that each individual has a moral responsibility for the good government of his community. This assumption that political responsibilities are moral responsibilities was in turn derived from the belief that each individual has a continuous duty to create in his own personality and in his relations with his fellow men the conditions of the virtuous life. Popular political responsibility was thus defended by the extension of a rigorous moral athleticism into the sphere of social arrangements. The dominating feature of this demand for comprehensive reform and reconstruction is the attempt to construe the moral life as a process in which the individual struggles to recreate himself in the light of his most mature conceptions. These conceptions, Price maintained, are determined rationally, and that they are so is presented in two different ways. Either as in the case of the principles of moral judgment they are held to be the objects of a rational intuition; or as in the defence of democratic institutions they are derived from an abstract construction of the demands of moral personality.

The distinction between mental illness and bodily illness would seem to presuppose some sort of distinction between mind and body. But dualist theories that the mind is a substance separable from the body, or that mental events could occur without any bodily events, raise ancient conceptual problems, which I do not propose to review here. What I want to do is to examine the psychiatric implications of materialist theories, which hold that the mind is the brain, or a function of the brain. If all character has a basis in chemistry, can we still attribute some mental distress to character and some to chemistry, as if the two categories were different?

Evoluvation is one of the badly over worked words, like “ force,” “ instinct,” and “ value.” It means a process of Becoming. but it is applied to various orders of facts which have very little in common, either as regards the material evolving or in the way in which the evolution comes about. We hear of the evolution of a solar system, the evolution of matter, the evolution of religion, the evolution of the chemical elements, the evolution of man, the evolution of language, the evolution of scenery, the evolution of the horse, the evolution of mind, the evolution of plants, the evolution of sex, the evolution of society, the evolution of species, the evolution of evolution theories, and so on. When processes that are different are called by the same name, there is bound to be confusion; and it is more than verbal. We venture to make some simple suggestions which, if accepted, would lessen the confusion.

This paper is a defence of the combination of three theses. First, selfknowledge is a requirement of good lives, but it must include knowledge of our limitations. Second, these limitations are set by certain unavoidable conventions whose observance is another requirement of good lives. Third, Sophocles's Oedipus the King is a moral text of the highest significance, for it contains a profound account of why self-knowledge must include knowledge of unavoidable conventions limiting human aspirations.

I argue that a careful consideration of the internal relation between the expression of an emotion, ‘I am angry’, and the description of the object of that emotion, ‘That was wrong’, illuminates the sense in which emotions are intentional, and perhaps also rational, as brought out in cognitive accounts of emotion. It also throws light on the moral and interpersonal aspects of our emotional life, which I instantiate through a discussion of the different perspectives on what has happened between the parties in a quarrel and the kinds of failures of understanding that may take place in such cases.