Once again great play is being made of the possibility that chimpanzees are capable of learning human language. Apparently, if supplied with a specially designed computer keyboard similar to that supplied to severely retarded human infants, Panbanisha and Kanzi, two bonobo pigmy chimpanzees are able to communicate with their trainers. According to Professor Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the chief experimenter, the chimps are now beginning to produce real sentences. This is being taken to show that they have a sense of self and of tense.

Editorial: Scholarly Class

‘It follows from the laws of the order of rank that scholars, in so far as they belong to the spiritual middle class, can never catch sight of the really great problems and question marks; moreover their courage and their eyes simply do not reach that far—and above all, the needs which led them to become scholars in the first place ... come to rest and are satisfied too soon.’

Thus Nietzsche (in The Gay Science 373). Nietzsche goes on to castigate those scientifically minded philosophers who would divest existence of its rich ambiguity. A scientific interpretation of the world might be the stupidest one, the poorest in meaning, an essentially mechanical world being an essentially meaningless one. It would tell us no more of the value of the world than would a scientific account of a piece of music tells us about music.

Many, particularly perhaps readers of Philosophy, may warm to Nietzsche's words. It is also true that in courses of philosophy we hear far more about science and philosophy disguised as science than we do about music. It may, indeed, be possible to do a degree in philosophy without learning anything about the values of music at all; strange, given that for most young people, including many students of philosophy, a particularly mechanical form of music is both narcotic and more meaningful than language.

But, let us go back to ‘scholars’. Nietzsche himself might avoid the tu quoque. Certainly he wasn't an institutional scholar. Nietzsche's weapons, though, have a habit of being two-edged in the hands of his followers, doing as much damage to those who wield them, as to those at whom they are waved. In any case, if scholars are members of the spiritual middle class, their critics are not, just because they are critics, members of the upper class. Their courage and their insight can be as limited and derivative as those they criticize. This is the real problem posed by scholars of the middle class.

Stoicism is once more fashionable, or about to be. So we learn from Tom Wolfe, that infallible barometer of fashion. In A Man in Full, Wolfe's latest despatch from the Zeitgeist's front line, the main character ends up directing his life by the sayings of Epictetus. There is even talk of A Stoic's Hour on nationwide television.

Is it a contradiction in terms for the thoughts of the former slave to be bandied about the salons of Manhattan and Mayfair? No more, one suspects, that it is for Hollywood, that other great source of contemporary maya, to be obsessed by Buddhism.

The ultimate in chic is to enjoy your cake, while convincing yourself and those around you that you do not really need it. It is those who are possessed of body, rank and estate who assent most easily to their insignificance. Stoic self-examination (in strict moderation, of course) would be the perfect accessory to the health farms, cosmetic surgery and exercise bicycles of to-day's gilded middle aged.

Arthur: ‘I have felt him to possess a philosophical intelligence of an intoxicatingly high order. He could not touch anything without at the same time touching the very boundaries of thought, at the very least thought about art.’

Andy: ‘I've never been touched by a painting. I don't want to think. The world outside would be easier to live in if we were all machines.’

Arthur: ‘He brought artistic practice to a level of philosophical self-consciousness never before attained.’

Andy: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.’

Arthur: ‘He was the nearest to a philosophical genius that twentieth century art had brought forth.’

Andy: ‘I don't think many people are going to believe in my philosophy because the other ones are better.’

Arthur: ‘I want first to explain what makes Empire finally so philosophical a film. Nothing in the film relevantly changes at all, in fact, although since the film was taken over an eight hour stretch, something could have changed irrelevantly. What was left was pure film. In Empire, narrative time and real time are one. The time in and the time of the film are the same. There is, as with Brillo Box and the cartons of Brillo, no interesting perceptual difference between the two. With Empire we become aware of the material properties of the film, of the scratches, the grain, the accidental luminosities, and above all the passing before our eyes of the monotonous band. I think Warhol had an almost mystical attitude to the world: everything in it had equal weight, it was all equally interesting.’

Andy: ‘The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again. That's more or less what happened to me.’

Arthur: ‘A man sees what looks like an ordinary soap-pad carton in a shop window, and needing to ship some books, asks the shopkeeper if he can have it. The shop turns out to be an art gallery and the shopkeeper a dealer who says: “That is a work of art, just now worth thirty thousand dollars.”’

Andy: ‘My work won't last anyway. I was using cheap paint.’

Arthur: ‘He turned the world we share into art, and he turned himself into part of that world, and because we are the images we hold in common with everyone else, he became part of us.’

Emile (on Andy's behalf): ‘He loved to see other people dying, This is what the Factory was about: Andy was the Angel of Death's Apprentice as these people went through their shabby lives with drugs and weird sex and group sex and mass sex. Andy looked and Andy as voyeur par excellence was the devil, because he got bored just looking.’

Imagine first the case of J (who might be anybody, jemand). J used to inhabit a social order, or rather an area within a social order, where socially approved roles were unusually well-defined. Responsibilities were allocated to each such role and each sphere of role-structured activity was clearly demarcated. These allocations and demarcations were embodied in and partly constituted by the expectations that others had learned to have of those who occupied each such role. For those who occupied those roles to disappoint those expectations by failing to discharge their assigned responsibilities was to invite severe disapproval and other sanctions. To refuse to find one's place within the hierarchies of approved roles, or to have been refused a place, because judged unfit for any such role, was to be classified as socially deviant and irresponsible.

The key moral concepts that education had inculcated into J were concepts of duty and responsibility. His fundamental moral beliefs were that each of us owes it to others to perform her or his assigned duties and to discharge her or his assigned responsibilities. A good human being performs those duties, discharges those responsibilities, and does not trespass into areas that are not her or his concern. A philosopher who comes across the likes of J will understand his attitudes as cultural parodies, in part of Plato (conceiving of justice as requiring ‘that each do her or his own work and not meddle with many things’ Republic 433a) and in part of Kant (doing one's duty just because it is one's duty and not for the sake of any further end), authors who had influenced J's school teachers. A sociologist will entertain the suspicion that in certain types of social order it may be only in the form of parodies that some types of concept can continue to find expression. But for the moment let us put this thought on one side and return to J.

Most laws are ceteris paribus (cp) laws: they say not that all Fs are G but only that All Fs are G all else being equal. Most philosophical accounts of laws, however, have focused on strict laws. This paper considers how some of the standard philosophical problems about laws change when we switch attention from strict to cp laws and what special problems these laws raise. It is argued that some cp laws do not simply reflect the complexity of the world and the limitations of our minds. Correctly interpreted, they reveal the simplicity that underlies the complexity, a simplicity that it is without our cognitive powers to grasp.

The gist of these objections to the possible world account of necessity is that, for it to be true, ‘possible’ would have to be a name for an attribute. But to say that something is possible is not to describe it, but to say that there could be such a thing. And possibilities are not classes of entities. Possible worlds have been described as ways, but a way of getting to London from Cambridge is not an entity, and that there is a way is entailed by facts such as that if you travel south along the M3, you will get there.

I argue that the distinction between first-person present and other-directed contexts of justification throws new light on epistemology. In particular, it has implications for the relations between justification, knowledge and truth, the debate between externalism and internalism, and the prospects for reflective equilibrium. I suggest that to focus on the third-person questions about knowledge or justification is to risk missing the main point of epistemology, namely to help us make reflective judgments about what to believe.

Consciousness and its relation to the unconscious mind have long been debated in philosophy. I develop the thesis that consciousness and its contents reflect the highest elaboration of a set of abilities to respond to the environment realized in more primitive organisms and brain circuits. The contents of the states lesser than consciousness are, however, intrinsically dubious and indeterminate as it is the role of the discursive skills we use to construct conscious contents that lends articulation and clarity to the mental acts which cumulatively make up our mental lives. I lay out a tripartite structure for the formation of mind in which the ongoing interaction between brain and world, the formative effect of socio-cultural context and the self production of a relatively coherent narrative all play an important part in making a mind. The latter two influences clearly transcend biological science and suggest that human minds have features which broadly align with certain Freudian insights but do not support the reification of the causally structured unconscious that Freud envisaged.

Wittgenstein's Ph.D. viva, held in June 1929, was a charade, for the dissertation presented by Wittgenstein was his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which had achieved the status of a classic in the seven years since its publication and was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. The viva was treated by all participants as something of a joke, and the doctorate was duly awarded. But suppose that the viva had been properly conducted, and Wittgenstein had been subjected to searching criticism of the content of his dissertation, and the examiners had looked carefully at the question of how original were the ideas... ? I here present, in the form of a drama, that counterfactual viva.

A popular view is that the great discovery of Pythagoras was that there are irrational numbers, e.g., the positive square root of two. Against this it is argued that mathematics and geometry, together with their applications, do not show that there are irrational numbers or compel assent to that proposition.

Analytic philosophy's characteristic downgrading of literature's putative concern with truth, and envisaging of its interest to philosophy merely in terms of material for logical analysis, was prefigured by Frege. The initial plausibility of this approach was in part a function of certain preferred models of philosophy as analysis which were themselves deeply flawed. An exploration of their weaknesses in the light of more adequate theories of language, truth and logic enables us to give proper weight both to rhetorical and imaginative aspects of philosophical discourse, and to the capacity of works of literature to bear on issues of truth—and thereby contribute to philosophical understanding.

This article is a sequel to ‘The Experience of Perceptual Familiarity’, published in Philosophy in January 1996. There it was argued that the experience of familiarity of appearance consists in awareness of ease of perception. A successful prediction of this hypothesis was that this experience will be absent if the familiar stimulus is perceptually simple. The new paper examines a series of experiments on recognition-memory for colours, often thought to confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language influences fundamental cognitive and perceptual abilities. I argue that the hypothesis of Perceptual Familiarity provides a more plausible, non-Whorfian explanation of the results. Language is not influencing non-linguistic perception here, since, as the hypothesis is able to explain, recognition-memory for colours is itself invariably mediated by language.

This paper raises complication for the standard interpretive view of Liebniz's mature metaphysical system as idealist. Body-realist affirmations are found in his writings up to his death, in bulk and diversity very difficult to accommodate to phenomenalist or idealist construal. Claims of Leibnizian inconsistency and indecisiveness do not seem adequately to account for them. The view that body is real for Liebniz, though not a substance, is explored. Alternative non-idealist interpretations of the system are considered, the most plausible argued to be a variety of dualism. At the same time, dialectical features of Leibnizian philosophy make it a matter of proper caution not to settle emphatically on a decided conclusion of the issue.

McTaggart's famous argument that the A-series is contradictory is vitiated by an unsatisfactory conceptualization of tenses which can be corrected by making explicit their relational structure. This leads into a much sharper formulation of his apparent contradiction, and defusing this apparent contradiction requires a careful distinction between tensed and tenseless descriptions of thoughts. As a result the ‘unreality’ of tense turns out to rest on the fact that tensed descriptions of temporal facts do not capture their identity. This ‘metaphysical’ priority of tenseless over tensed descriptions of time is, however, counterbalanced by an ‘epistemological’ priority of tensed thoughts over tenseless thoughts: a conception of tense which requires a form of self-consciousness turns out to be an essential ingredient of rational thought.

Talk about time travel is puzzling even if it isn't obviously contradictory. Philosophers however are divided about whether time travel involves empirical paradox or some deeper metaphysical incoherence. It is suggested that time travel requires a Parmenidean four-dimensionalist metaphysical conception of the world in time. The possibility of time travel is addressed (mainly) from within a Parmenidean metaphysical framework, which is accepted by David Lewis in his defence of the coherence of time travel. It is argued that time travel raises formidable difficulties which are not satisfactorily resolved by Lewis's ingenious defence of time travel. Objections to time travel considered include: (1) travel to other times is impossible because there is nowhere (or “nowhen”) to go to; (2) the problem that upon setting out on a journey to the past a time machine will collide with itself; (3) time travel generates a mysterious temporal dualism between experiential time and physical time; (4) travel to the past permits reverse causation, raising the possibility of causal loops and attendant problems arising, for example, from the prospect of empirical contradiction and the possibility of someone being one of their ancestors.