Most recent discussions of truth ignore the fact that a few philosophers, past and present, have flirted with and sometimes openly subscribed to an identity theory, according to which a proposition's being true consists in its identity with the reality it is supposedly about. This neglect is probably due to the theory's counter-intuitiveness: it faces obvious and fundamental objections. The aim of this paper is to consider these objections and decide if there is a version of the theory which can escape them, thereby becoming an at least initially plausible candidate for an account of truth. In this way the metaphysical price exacted by commitment to an identity theory can be assessed.

The main claims are the following. (1) If we keep before us the distinction between the justification of punishment and its aims, we see that retribution is not an aim of punishment, and that there is a central place for retributivist considerations in the justification of punishment. (2) Justifications based upon aims or consequentialist considerations suffer from a serious epistemic vulnerability not shared by retributivism. (3) There are ethically sound sentiments that underwrite retributivist justification, and it would be a mistake to redeploy those sentiments. (4) The ethical authority of those sentiments justifies punitive sanction. (5) Retributivist justification is compatible with consequentialist aims.

How should we think about the interrelationships that obtain among Philosophy, Education, and Culture? In this paper I explore the contours of one such interrelationship: namely, the way in which educational and (other) philosophical ideals transcend individual cultures. I do so by considering the contemporary educational and philosophical commitment to multiculturalism. Consideration of multiculturalism, I argue, reveals important aspects of the character of both educational and philosophical ideals.

Specifically, I advance the following claims:

i) We are obliged to embrace the moral and political directives of multiculturalism.

ii) This obligation is a moral one: that is, multiculturalism is justified on moral grounds.

iii) Far from entailing any philosophically problematic form of cultural relativism, multiculturalism is itself a ‘universal’ or ‘transcultural’ ideal.

iv) Moreover, the advocacy of multiculturalism presupposes another kind of universality, dubbed below ‘transcultural normative reach.’

v) Consequently, multiculturalism should not be understood as entailing the demise of ‘universalistic’ dimensions of either philosophy or education.

This paper claims as erroneous the current widespread representation of the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) as primarily condemning as intrinsically bad actions involving intentional harm. The DDE's Four Conditions are in fact used solely for justifying certain intrinsically good actions with both intended good and unintended bad effects. Though contemporary writers assign a minor justificatory role to the DDE this is incompatible with their attribution to it of a primary prohibitive role. Not only is the conduct cited by these writers as justifiable under the DDE so morally innocuous as to require no justification, but any attempt to justify it by appeal to the DDE leads to incoherence. We finally suggest reasons for this misinterpretation in current concerns with the structure of deontological moral theories.

From Colin Radford we have inherited the ‘fiction paradox’: How can we be moved by creatures of fiction? Answers recently offered by aestheticians presuppose a false theory of emotion and are inconsistent with emotional phenomenology as well as facts about human evolution, physiology, and anatomy. I argue that Kendall Walton's ‘Charles’ can genuinely fear the slime and yet avow that he does not consider it dangerous—all without being irrational. The solutions offered by Morreall, Moran, Hyslop, Boruah, Lamarque, and Neill are rejected as inadequate. Knowledge of how we can be moved probably lies outside philosophy altogether—in cognitive neuroscience.

There is a dichotomy in the Humean thought that morality is more properly felt than judged of. The idea of a moral sensibility with an epistemic and rational content is grounded in the experience of the state of nature, and a distinction made between a defensive and a constructive morality, constituted by a set of motivations, against the law of the strongest, and protective of the relationships of education and creative work, exclusion from which undermines the conditions for a constructive morality. Aesthetic education is a means of overcoming the sectarianism of defensive morality.

The altruistic emotions of pity and compassion are discussed in the context of Aristotle's treatment of the former in the Rhetoric, and Nussbaum's reconstruction of that treatment in a recent account of the latter. Aristotle's account of pity does not represent it as a virtue, the context of the Rhetoric rather rendering his account one of a peculiarly self-centred emotion. Nussbaum's reconstruction builds on the cognitive ingredients of Aristotle's account, and attempts to place the emotion of compassion more squarely in the moral sphere. It is argued that Nussbaum's reconstruction nevertheless falls short of capturing the altruism which is central to the virtue of compassion, and which therefore explains its role as a ‘basic social emotion’.

The logic of Leviathan is formally made to derive commonwealth and the rights of sovereignty (the obligations of subjects, read the other way around) from an elaborate process beginning in the physiology of human perception and passions, through language and reason, into the state of nature (the war of all against all) and, finally, under the direction of the laws of nature, to a collective and formal resignation of all their natural rights to create an absolute sovereign. This process of ‘instituting’ the sovereignty stamps the resulting sovereign with legitimacy. Early in the Second Part of Leviathan, however, Hobbes moves to attach all the rights and legitimacy of that instituted sovereignty onto what he calls ‘Despotical Dominion’, the power created when a conqueror exacts a promise from the conquered on pain of immediate death. The result is to translate all that Hobbes has said about sovereignty in general into a defence of the legitimacy of this crude force and violence. The whole of Leviathan's political argument is coloured, then, by this strategy and the best reading of it turns out to be the oldest one—that it is a defence of tyrannical power.

This article is a defence of the Fact-Value distinction against considerations brought up by Ruth Anna Putnam in three articles in Philosophy, especially her ‘Perceiving Facts and Values’ January 1998. I defend metaphysical realism about facts and anti-realism about values against Putnam' intermediate position about both and I relate the matter to the logic of imperatives. The motivations of scientists or historians to select fields of investigation are irrelevant to the objectivity of their hypotheses, and so is the goodness or badness of the social consequences of their work though these may affect their motivations.

Nagel has argued that the ‘mind-body’ problem, as traditionally conceived, is insoluble. His challenge to philosophers is to devise a metaphysical scheme that incorporates materialist concepts in describing first person experience and mentalistic concepts in describing third person experience, such that the internal relations between the concepts thereby constructed are necessary. Nagel's own suggestion, a scheme not unlike the ‘underlying process’ schemes of the physical sciences, seems to lead him towards a covert materialism. Progress can be made in meeting the challenge by tackling the problem first by taking the units in each ‘sphere’ to be brains and persons. I show that a metaphysics based on the metaphor of person defined tasks and materially defined tools does satisfy both Nagel's challenge conditions. To devise a scheme for qualia and brain-states I turn back to Locke's presentation of the primary/secondary quality distinction. This depends on the concept of a causal power, grounded in material states of the world. While this scheme is inadequate, a variation, based on Gibson's concept of an affordance, and drawing on Bohr's resolution of the seeming incompatibility between wave and particle ontologies for physics, is promising. The world, whatever it is, affords material states to our perceptual apparatus, and mental states to our proprioceptual apparatus. The mental states/brain states duality is not a duality of types of states, which might stand in causal relations to one another, but is a duality of means of access to two classes of affordances of whatever the world is. There is no mind-body problem in the traditional sense, namely ‘How could a material state cause or be caused by a mental state?’

Philosophers have traditionally responded to the question, ‘why does the universe exist?’, in one of two ways. One response is that ‘the universe exists because God created it’ and the other response is that ‘the universe exists for no reason—its existence is a brute fact’. Both these responses are inadequate, since a third response is possible, namely, that the reason the universe exists is that it caused itself to exist. There are at least three ways the universe can cause itself to exist, by (1) a closed, simultaneous causal loop at the first instant of time, (2) beginning with a continuum of instantaneous states in a first half-open second, with each state being caused by earlier states, and (3) being caused to exist by backward causation, where a later event causes the big bang to occur. This suggests that the principle, ‘if the universe begins to exist, it has a cause’ does not support theism (as traditionally has been thought) but instead supports atheism.

This paper attempts to summarise the philosophical career of Bertrand Russell, concentrating in particular on his contributions to logic and the philosophy of mathematics. It takes as its starting point Russell's conception of philosophy as the search for foundations upon which certain knowledge might be built, a search which Russell, at the end of his career, declared to be fruitless. In pursuing this search, however, Russell was led to develop lines of thought and techniques of analysis that have had a profound and lasting influence on the philosophy of the twentieth century.

There are enormous differences between quantifying name-variables only, quantifying verb-variables only, and quantifying both. These differences are found only in the logic of polyadic predication; and this presumably is why Richard Gaskin thinks that they distinguish names from transitive verbs only, and not from verbs generally. But that thought is mistaken: these differences also distinguish names from intransitive verbs. They thus vindicate the common idea that on the difference between names and verbs we may base grandiose metaphysical distinctions, and undermine Gaskin's idea that both names and verbs may be said to designate objects.

A reply to Fransisco Vergara's attack on Halévy's interpretation of Bentham in Philosophy, January, 1998. Vergara had argued that Halévy was mistaken in interpreting Bentham's principle of utility as a psychological law as well as the ethical greatest happiness principle. Mongin and Sigot show that Halévy correctly interpreted Bentham's texts and that the psychological law is necessary to Bentham's legal theory, economics and politics; they also argue that it is incorrect to confuse the principle of utility with a theory of universal selfishness, and that this misunderstanding underlies Vergara's mistaken picture of both Halévy and Bentham.

Anthony Quinton's ‘The Trouble with Kant’ (Philosophy, Vol. 72, no. 279, January, 1997, pp. 5–18) claims to expose radical faults in Kant's epistemology which are not pointed out ‘in the many commentators (he) has studied’ (p. 17). The faults are, initially, that Kant is a ‘wild and intellectually irresponsible arguer’ (p. 5), and finally that Kant's account of a priori intuitions and concepts is erroneous (p. 16). Quinton suggests that his objections are new, but the truth is that they, and the supposedly Kantian views against which they are directed, have formed a frequent response in commentators from Hegel to Strawson. The ‘wild and irresponsible arguer’ charge is, after all, a commonplace among the ‘fighting Kant tooth and nail’ commentators, though it remains to be shown that Kant is markedly worse than other philosophers of the same period. And the central claim against which Quinton directs his assault, that we impose a spatio-temporal-categorial framework on the manifold of sensation (pp. 5 and 7), has provoked fierce and extensive hostility. Throughout his article Quinton assumes an interpretation of Kant's claim in which his task is to show how our minds construct a common, objective, reality from a spatio-temporal-categorial synthesis ‘by applying a piece of mental apparatus ... to ... a manifold of sensation’ (p. 5). The familiar objections to a ‘coloured spectacles’ interpretation of Kant's account of space and time, and Strawson's initial rejection of the ‘imaginary subject of transcendental psychology’ (Bounds of Sense (London; Methuen, 1966) p. 32) belong to the same tradition.

A play's text is nearly all talk, and in the performance of a play the physical activity is sparse and exceedingly limited. Used of a play, the term ‘action’ does not mean what it normally means. Its true meaning is illuminated by reference to J. L. Austin and his doctrine of speech-acts. Dramatic action is, for the most part, speech-action. And a skilful manipulation of speech-acts enables the gifted dramatist not only to tell a story but to communicate what is going on below the surface.

As we reported in the April issue of Philosophy, Renford Bambrough, the editor of Philosophy from 1972 to 1994, died on January 17th, 1999. During the memorial service at St John's College, Cambridge, on the 24th of April, 1999, the following extract from Renford Bambrough's Sermon at the Commemoration of Benefactors, 1968, was read:

I know that you know all this, or you would not be here. But I also know, from some things that some of you and some others have said and written, that some of you need to be reminded of what you know.

Professor Cottingham's article ‘Varieties of Retribution’ in the Philosophical Quarterly, 1979, 29, 238ff. is discussed, and new varieties of retributivism are outlined and criticised, particularly those proposed by Richard Burgh, Michael Moore and Robert Nozick. The ‘Kantian gap’ between moral censure and the obligation to punish is emphasised. Distinctions are drawn between theories which make punishment a duty and those which make it a right, and also between those based on the notion of a rule and those based on the expression of blame.