The latest in psychotherapy appears to be philosophical counselling. Is this on the principle that where nothing can be shown to work, anything is as good as anything else? Reading Plato might also have incidental advantages not available to those who are treated with pills, behavioural therapy or non-directive counselling. (As well as curing you, it might make you think.) Or is it that psychotherapists have rediscovered the classical ideal of philosophy as therapy? Can we expect a resurgence of the ancient Stoic virtues or of ataraxia or even of Spinozistic rationality among the psychologically afflicted?

Later philosophers have not always provided such positive precedents. Would it really be a good idea to give Kierkegaard to the obsessively religious, or Nietzsche to the paranoid, or the early Wittgenstein to those who have difficulty in coping with everyday normality? Nor is it easy to see how Sartre would help couples sort out their relationships, or Russell someone pathologically insensitive to the feelings of others.

On reflection, it might be better to keep the pills after all.

Well, maybe not. It all depends on your philosophy, and perhaps a bit on heaven and earth too. Nothing, though, enrages the average philosopher these days more than the obdurate, even pig-headed refusal of the general public to abandon its belief in ESP and the paranormal. Most philosophers, even in Britain, do not read the London Daily Mail. So their breakfast-time composure will not have been ruffled by the report of its science correspondent on November 26th, 1997, that a survey of 6,238 mainly intelligent and mature Britons showed that 59% believed in ESP. Worse, those who believed were generally speaking no worse judges of the probability of coincidences than those sceptical of the claims of psychics, clairvoyants and the like. Furthermore, it appears that belief in the paranormal has not diminished over time to any great extent. Dr Susan Blackmore, who was responsible for the research for the survey commented that all this goes to show that science education ‘hasn't made any difference’.

Editorial: Elegy for Iris

For many philosophers, Iris Murdoch is a guiding light. In 1961, her essay ‘Against Dryness’ (Encounter, January 1961) sounded a clarion call against the conventional wisdom of the age. According to that wisdom, in her words, ‘We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity.’

Those who followed Iris Murdoch through her subsequent philosophical writings, in which she developed another wisdom, will have felt themselves to be on a voyage of discovery. The final destination of the voyage, if final destination there was, would remain as elusive as the need to undertake it was compelling.

As many will know, Dame Iris is now suffering from Alzheimer's disease. In his ‘Elegy for Iris: Scenes from an Indomitable Marriage’ (New Yorker, 25 July 1998), John Bayley writes that his wife ‘is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over and, under the dark escort of Alzheimer's, she has arrived somewhere.’ Alzheimer's disease is a cruel and frightening condition, the apparent disintegration of all we are and hope. Bayley describes all of that, with unbearable poignancy, interspersing the collapse of the present with memories of their younger days together. But he also tells us how, in Iris Murdoch's case, Alzheimer's, ‘which can accentuate personality traits to the point of demonic parody, seems only to accentuate the natural goodness in her… she seems to become the presence found in an icon.’ In her philosophy and her novels Iris Murdoch taught us to go beyond the clichés of academic thought. In her declining days she may yet lead us to reconsider other clichés.

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.

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

Professor of the History of Ideas at Brandeis University. Besides Mind in Action (Beacon, 1998). She has published numerous articles on the history of moral psychology.

Roger Wertheimer

Author of The Significance of Sense (awarded Harvard University's Carrier Prize) and frequently anthologized essays in theoretical and applied ethics, and formerly a Guggenheim Fellow and professor at a dozen universities has not found employment for several years.

Karen Green

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the author of The Woman of Reason: Feminism, Humanism and Political Thought and teaches feminism and philosophy of language.

John Bigelow

Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne. He is author of the Reality of Numbers and (jointly with Robert Pargetter) Science and Necessity and teaches history of philosophy.

Maria Alvarez

Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Reading.

John Hyman

Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy, The Queen's College, Oxford.

James Cargile

Professor in the Corcoran Department of Philosophy at the University of Virginia and is a previous contributor to Philosophy.

William Max Knorpp, Jr

Assistant Professor at James Madison University in Virginia.

Russell Wahl

Professor of Philosophy at Idaho State University.

Jonathan Westphal

Professor of Philosophy at Idaho State University.

Thomas Nagel

Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Among his books are The View From Nowhere, Equality and Partiality, and most recently, The Last Word.

Rom Harré

Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College Oxford and Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. His published work includes studies in the philosophy of the physical sciences, such as Varieties of Realism (1986) and in the philosophy of psychology, such as The Singular Self (1998).

Clifford Williams

Teaches philosophy at Trinity College in Illinois. Recent articles on time have appeared in The Philosophical Quarterly, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy.

Gerald Vision

Professor of Philosophy, Temple University. His most recent book is Problems of Vision: Rethinking the Causal Theory of Perception.

Lisa Van Alstyne

Graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.

John R. Gibbins

Principal Lecturer at the University of Teeside and a member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has degrees from London, Durham and Newcastle Universities. He publishes in the fields of Victorian Philosophy and postmodernism.

Ruth Anna Putnam

Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College, Editor of The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge University Press, 1977), and author of articles on James and ethical theory.

Richard Gaskin

His main areas of research are metaphysics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. He has published on the nature of predication and reference, the problem of future contingency, the scope of divine power and knowledge, fiction and truth, and Wittgenstein.

Iddo Landau

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Israel. His article ‘What's Old in Derrida?‘ was published in Philosophy in July 1994.

Dale Jacquette

Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Philosophy of Mind, Meinongian Logic: The Semantics of Existence and Nonexistence, and Wittgenstein's Thought in Transition. His articles ‘Buridan's Bridge’ and ‘A Turing Test Conversation’ were published in Philosophy in 1991 and 1993.

P. M. S. Hacker

Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. His most recent books are Gravure and Grace: the engravings of Roger Vieillard (1993), Wittgenstein: Mind and Will (1966), and Wittgenstein's Place in the Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (1966).

Francisco Vergara

Research Fellow at GRESE (Group de Recherches Epistemologiques et Socio-Economiques) at Paris I University, Panthéon-Sorbonne and also author of Introduction aux fondements philosophiques du libéralisme (éditions La découverte, Paris, 1992), a book on classical liberalism which has been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.

Michael Durrant

Reader in Philosophy, University of Wales, Cardiff. He has published articles on ancient philosophy, philosophical logic, epistemology and the philosophy of religion.

Paul Edwards

Professor of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Brooklyn College, Emeritus.

Davidson has attempted to integrate externalism into his account of meaning and understanding. He contends that what words mean is fixed in part by the circumstances in which they were learnt, in which the basic connection between words and things is established. This connection is allegedly established by causal interaction between people and the world. Words and sentences derive their meanings from the objects and circumstances in which they were learnt, which ‘anchor’ language to the world.

Against this it is argued that there is no ‘semantic connection’ between words and things, that words derive their meanings from explanations of meaning, which are rules for their use, and that the manner of concept acquisition is irrelevant to determination of meaning, understanding and speaker's meaning.

In a memorable passage near the beginning of ‘The Moral Philosopher and The Moral Life,’ William James asks us to imagine a world in which all our dearest social utopias are realized, and then to imagine that this world is offered to us at the price of one lost soul at the farthest edge of the universe suffering eternal, intense, lonely pain. Then he asks, ‘what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’

I find this passage enormously interesting for a variety of reasons. We would have an impulse to grasp the utopian world, and that impulse is not inexplicable: we would be happier in such a world than we are now. The impulse is even morally defensible: James tells us later in the essay that, ‘[t]here is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest universe of good that we can see.’ (ibid., p. 158) Moreover, he acknowledges that our best ideals cannot be realized in this poor world without trampling some other ideals under foot. The realization of the values of good and sensitive people entails the frustration of the desires and goals of cruel and brutal people. Worse, institutions that are on the whole beneficial will have innocent victims; James mentions monogamous marriage as an example of such an institution. In a functioning democracy, these are frustrations that everyone must take in stride sometimes. So, should we then not grasp that utopia, that world without unemployment, without homelessness, where everyone has access to medical care, where racism and other forms of prejudice and oppression are known only from the history books, etc., etc.? Those commentators who read James as a kind of Utilitarian, must surely believe that James would advocate our grasping that ideal, that he would speak not merely of an impulse to clutch that happiness but of an obligation. But James is not a Utilitarian, and the passage under discussion occurs when James wants to distance himself from the Utilitarians. We have, he says, a capacity for quite specific emotions, capacities that cannot be explained in any simple way as the result of evolutionary selection for the survival of either the individual or the species. He does not mean the capacity for sympathy, though that too would come into play here. Sympathy enables us to vividly imagine the suffering of the lost tortured soul, to feel for it and, indeed, with it. But James means something else; he means a revulsion, an apprehension that to do a certain thing would be ‘hideous.’ To do what? To opt for the utopia? That is not what he says. To enjoy the utopia? Again, that is not what he says. There is nothing wrong with opting for or enjoying utopia if it can be had at no cost, or at a cost clearly bearable by those who are obliged to bear it, or if one is non-culpably ignorant of the price. What is hideous is ‘enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain.’

Plato's dialogues can be read as a carefully staged exhibition and investigation of paideia, education in the broadest sense, including all that affects the formation of character and mind. The twentieth century textbook Plato — the Plato of the Myth of the Cave and the Divided Line, the ascent to the Good through Forms and Ideas — is but one of his elusive multiple authorial personae, each taking a different perspective on his investigations. As its focused problems differ, each Platonic dialogue exhibits a somewhat different model for learning; each adds a distinctive dimension to Plato's fully considered counsel for education. Setting aside the important difficult questions about the chronological sequence in which the dialogues were written and revised, we can trace the argumentative rationale of Plato's fully considered views on paideia, on who should be educated by whom for what, on the stages and presuppositions of different kinds of learning. Those views are inextricably connected with his views about the structure of the soul, about the virtues and the politeia that can sustain a good life; and about cosmology and metaphysics.

Hegesias (3d c.BC), as hedonist, held that the sage will kill himself. For: One should pursue pleasure and avoid pain. But life is virtually certain to contain more pain than pleasure. Therefore death, which is neither pleasurable nor painful, is better than life.

The flaw in the argument lies in the underlying game-theoretical model of life as a game in which play and payoff are distinct. Hegesias's conclusion, that life is not ‘worth living,’ is inescapable by any philosophy so based, including John Rawls's. Why shouldn't his rational persons behind the veil of ignorance opt for prenatal suicide?

The apparent conceivability of a zombie — a physically indistinguishable duplicate of a conscious person that nevertheless lacks consciousness — seems to show that the relation between brain processes and conscious experience is contingent. But this is probably an illusion of contingency, due to the limitations of our current concepts and tricks of the first-person imagination. The mental is at present conceptually irreducible to the physical, but the strict supervenience of the former on the latter suggests the presence of a concealed necessary connection, which could become transparent to us only through a third type of concept that we would have to create — as part of a theory that yields the necessary connection between the mental and the physical as a logical consequence. Such conceptual creations have been important elsewhere in the development of science.

Greece is Hellas and Greeks are Hellenes. Azure is cobalt and everything (coloured) azure is (coloured) cobalt. Pre-Fregeans would call all these statements of identity. Frege taught us to distinguish between

Conaming [Name] [Name]. Ngh: Greece is Hellas g=h. Nac: Azure is cobalt a=c

Copredicating [Predicate] [Predicate]. PGH: Greeks are Hellenes (x)(Gx≡Hx). PAC: Everything azure is cobalt (x)(Ax≡Cx)

Singular Predication [Name] [Predicate]. PcA: Como is azure Ac. PaC: Azure is a colour Ca. PaL: Azure is like indigo Lai. PgD: Greece defeated Persia Dgp.

With Frege the contrasts became marked but misconceived.

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.

The problem of the unity of the sentence is to explain how a sentence manages to say something, to ‘make a move in the language-game’. In the particular case of the declarative sentence, which is characterized essentially by its ability to say something true or false (cf. Aristotle De Int. ch. 4), the challenge is to explain how the sentence as a whole manages to attract this property, given that its components do not have it. In his book Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Thought, Nicholas Denyer implicitly commits himself to two conflicting accounts of what this unity consists in. The conflict is illuminating because it can be seen as giving expression to two attractive but apparently opposed thoughts on the nature of the sentence: the thought that all significant components of a sentence must have reference, or semantic role (a position which in the writings of Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett is truistic), and the thought that the semantically significant components of the sentence cannot all be names, since then the sentence would lose its peculiar unity — its ability to say something (true or false) — and degenerate into a mere list. In this paper I shall try, using Denyer's text as my point of departure, to resolve the conflict by suggesting how a unified sentence can, after all, be composed of names.

The first account which Denyer gives of the unity of the sentence is not offered as such, but it emerges from his discussion of the differences between three primitive kinds of language, which he calls Agglomerative (A), Orthographic (O) and Sentential (S). The three languages have in common that their basic ‘sentences’ all consist of linear strings of unambiguous names of primary elements, themselves arranged linearly. Thereafter they diverge in the following respects. In A and O, these basic ‘sentences’ are, according to Denyer, only by courtesy so called, for they are really complex names; but whereas in A the order in which the names are listed is insignificant, in O it is significant. Thus ‘ab’, for example, would in A merely designate a complex object composed of the simple objects designated by ‘a’ and ‘b’, and is not semantically distinguishable from ‘ba’; in O, on the other hand, these two composite names additionally signify two different ways in which the complex consisting of a and b may be composed, for example, that a is to the left of b, and that b is to the left of a, respectively. In S, by contrast with both A and O, the basic ‘sentences’ are said to be genuine sentences: they are not merely lists of names, but are suitable for the making of assertions. In S, a symbol such as ‘ab’ says that (for example) a is to the left of b.

In this paper it is argued that Frankfurt's and Strawson's defenses of compatibilism are insufficient due to neglected features of the role of alternate possibilities in assigning moral responsibility. An attempt is made to locate more adequately the genuine source of tension between free will and determinism, in a crowding phenomenon in the view of an action which our concept of responsibility has not grown up coping with. Finally, an argument is made that due to the nature of belief we can believe the thesis of determinism only if it is false, lending support to incompatibilism.

Debate between the A- and B-theories has rested on the supposition that there is a clear difference between A- and B-time. I argue that this supposition is mistaken for two reasons. (1) We cannot distinguish the two conceptions of time by means of Bergsonian intuition. (2) Unless we can do so, we cannot distinguish them at all. I defend (1) by imagining various ways to intuit the two kinds of time, and maintaining that none of them works. I defend (2) by showing that the issue is an experiential one, unlike metaphysical issues that are less connected to experience. My conclusion is that no progress will be made in the debate between the two theories until it becomes clear what the difference is between the two kinds of time.

The paper is adressed to Michael Levin's recent Philosophy article ‘Natural Submission, Aristotle on.’ Levin argues that rule by the naturally dominant is for the best and that the naturally submissive ought to accept it as just and even inevitable. I point out some confusions in his attempt to link merit-conferring traits in individuals with social and political dominance and question his conceptions of human welfare, inferiority, and criminality. Certain combinations of competence and forcefulness arise in real-world settings, and they produce a range of outcomes not all of which are either inevitable or desirable.

Francis Bacon has received much attention from feminist philosophers of science. Many of their discussions revolve around his use of sexist, or supposedly sexist, metaphors. According to Sandra Harding, for example, ‘Bacon appealed to rape metaphors to persuade his audience that the experimental method is a good thing.’ Moreover, she claims that ‘when we realize that the mechanistic metaphors that organized early modern science themselves carried sexual meanings, it is clear that these meanings are central to the ways scientists conceptualize both the methods of inquiry and the models of nature’ (ibid.). Carolyn Merchant asserts that witch trials ‘influenced Bacon's philosophy and literary style’. And according to Evelyn Fox Keller, Bacon's explanation of the means by which science will endow humans with power ‘is given metaphorically — through his frequent and graphic use of sexual imagery.’ Fox Keller concludes that Bacon's theory is sexist, but in a more troubled and ambivalent way than Merchant and Harding believe it to be. Thus, she writes that ‘behind the overt insistence on the virility and masculinity of the scientific mind lies a covert assumption and acknowledgment of the dialectical, even hermaphroditic, nature of the “marriage between Mind and Nature.”‘ (p. 40; emphasis added). Likewise, ‘the aggressively male stance of Bacon's scientist could, and perhaps now should, be seen as driven by the need to deny what all scientists, including Bacon, privately have known, namely, that the scientific mind must be, on some level, a hermaphroditic mind.’ (p. 42).

I. Logic, rationality and ideology

Herbert Marcuse once claimed that the ‘“rational” is a mode of thought and action which is geared to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression.’ He echoed a widespread folk belief that a world in which people were rational would be a better world. This could be taken as an optimistic empirical conjecture: if people were more rational then probably the world would be a better place (a trust that ‘virtue will be rewarded’, so to speak). However, it is also worth considering a stronger hypothesis: that if something did not reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality, and oppression then it would not constitute rationality. On this view there is no mere correlation between rationality and a propensity toward reduction in ignorance and the rest, it is the propensity to reduce ignorance, destruction, brutality and oppression which in part constitutes rationality. Call this a broad conception of rationality, because it expands beyond the epistemic goal of reducing ignorance, and reaches out to moral concerns like oppression.