In the Metaphysics (IV. 8), Aristotle examines the various meanings of concludes that its proper and primary meaning is “that which has predicates and is not predicated of anything else.” My aim in this paper is to accept this as an account of the notion of “substance,” and to free it from confusion with other notions, and then to consider whether when it is thus freed any “problem of substance” remains. I shall illustrate from the classical treatments of the subject both the confusions and the development of a clearer view because it has seemed to me that exposition and criticism of those authorities sometimes show the same obscurities as the authorities themselves.

The subject of this paper is the relation of Logical Positivism to Theology. By “Logical Positivism” I mean the doctrine originated by Dr. Wittgenstein and expounded more at length by Professors Carnap, Schlick, and other members of the Viennese Circle (Wiener Kreis) in the periodical called Erkenntnis. The clearest account of it in English is that given by Mr. R. B. Braithwaite in the volume called Cambridge University Studies.

In his masterly article, “Sir Arthur Eddington and the Physical World,” which appeared in the January 1934 issue of Philosophy, Dr. Stace has brought out a number of interesting points on which I should like to comment. However, as the main issues between Professor Stace and Professor Eddington are with regard to the physical world and reality, these will form the main topics of my remarks.

The first important question which confronts the teacher of an introductory course in philosophy is likely to be the question as to how he may best approach the subject of what philosophy is, how to approach it in such a way as to pique the curiosity and excite the interest of the student from the beginning. After considering this question many times, it has recently occurred to the present writer that it might be helpful to make this approach by way of a parable, an allegorical account of what seem to be the three basic human desires—the desire to live, the desire to enjoy life, and the desire to understand life. He accordingly offers this suggestion for whatever it may be worth, and presents the following little tale as at least one possible working-out of that suggestion.

Not in the lay mind only, but also to a wide extent throughout the realm of Science itself, there exists the belief that no matter how thoroughly research is pursued, it can never yield anything more than descriptions of whatever it may be concerned with. Undeniably, such descriptions are becoming so complicated in detail, and at the same moment so far-ranging in their applications, that they inevitably assume the aspect of more or less final explanations; and previous investigators often regarded them as being actually explanatory, finding indeed in this supposed result one of the most powerful impulses to carry their inquiries to their utmost limit. This however, it is frequently contended, is at best a short-sighted error and at worst a misleading superstition; the truth, no matter how unwelcome it may seem, being that explanation is unattainable because it is a wholly non-scientific category and ideal. If then we wish to discover any sufficient reason, any ultimate ground, any final solution, we must turn from Science to Philosophy; and even so, many sceptics do not hesitate to add, we are foredoomed to disappointment.

The nature of poetic truth, and of the belief claimed by poetry, has become for many thinkers a question of keener interest through the discussions of Dr. I. A. Richards. In a recent article in this Journal,1 Dr. Helen Wodehouse has expressed her own view, elicited in relation to that of Dr. Richards, concerning truth in poetry. She urges that “a great poem seems sometimes centrally to be showing us the full measure and nature of some aspect of the actual world.” Our response involves essentially an element of belief in something revealed as rooted in reality, laying necessity upon the poet; even though that belief may not attach to all that the poet accepted as fact, and though we may be unable to formulate in reflective terms the nature of the truth discerned.

The Library of the Royal Society of London contains a large collection of manuscript material relating to Henry Oldenburg and his correspondents. Oldenburg was one of the two Secretaries of the Royal Society when it was founded in 1662. For many years he acted as intermediary between British and Continental philosophers: and scientists. He also edited the early volumes of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. His contacts were accordingly very extensive. Nearly all the seventeenth-century pioneers of science were among his correspondents. In his role of intermediary he was in the habit of sending extracts from some of his foreign letters to

There is no subject to which the writers of ethical textbooks have devoted more attention than that of the relations between pleasure and desire, and yet it is surprising how little agreement their efforts have produced in philosophical circles. This failure seems to me to be chiefly due to the fact that the question is only one among the many problems of conation, and can only be discussed in that context. In consequence, there remains a very wide gap between what psychologists have to say about the analysis of conation and what ethical writers have to say about the problems of moral psychology.1 My object in writing this article is to help to bring this deplorable state of affairs to an end by expounding a theory of the relations between pleasure and desire, which is based upon a careful analysis of the facts of conation.

To the bulk of the British reading public ‘contemporary French philosophy’ would seem to be interchangeable with ‘the works of M. Bergson.’ And it can scarcely be otherwise when, as an erudite correspondent of Le Temps relates, Paris now prints in a week one million books—as many as were printed annually in the reign of the Roi Soleil. For the proportion of these devoted to philosophy is not small. One voracious reader and professor of philosophy in Switzerland, Monsieur J. Benrubi, has withstood for thirty years the annual avalanche of philosophical books, read steadily on, abstracted and collated his gleanings. In him we have a most competent guide. Familiar with every rivulet and path, and with the historic formation of the country, he now reveals to us the whole panorama. His encyclopaedic enterprise, 1 treating some hundred and sixty authors, is neither a chronicle nor a classification, except in a secondary way. It aims principally at tracing cross-currents in recent philosophies so as to discover their internal connexions, and thence in what direction present French thought is heading. M. Benrubi's scrupulousness in seeing nobody is left out tends perhapsto overcrowding, and his emphasis on that which coheres may somewhat overshadow that which divides. And it may be inevitable, too, with a field of figures so vast, that the accounts of some should be insufficiently detailed. But the total effect is substantial, and his volumes are invaluable to whomever would appreciate whence and whither French thought is proceeding. There are three threads to guide us through the labyrinth. The distinct though still interacting tendencies are described as ‘empirical and scientific positivism,’ ‘epistemological and critical idealism,’ and ‘metaphysical and spiritual positivism.’ Each rests on certain characteristics manifested with varying explicitness in the thought of its many representatives. I indicate summarily and quite inadequately some points of M. Benrubi's conclusions.

The present essay is intended as a contribution to the investigation of the relations between the theoretical and the practical life of man. It makes the attempt to show that our assumption or rejection of even the highest and most abstract law of thought and reality is based on and rooted in our practical attitude towards the world. It tries to show that even the principle of contradiction (P.C.) owes its validity or non-validity to decisions made by the practical and emotional part of man, and that the objective validity of the P.C. is not absolute, but that it is relative to the practical and emotional attitude you choose to assume.

In a posthumous book by F. Meli1 there are joined two interesting studies in the history of philosophy. The first discusses the religious and political doctrines of Fausto Socino and their developments in the thought of the seventeenth century, and the second the rationalistic mentality of Spinoza. The two themes are essentially related, for in the religious rationalism of Socino the author recognizes one of the currents of thought that were to meet later in Spinoza’s philosophy. The first essay has the merit of greater novelty, because Socinian studies have been neglected up to the present and only touched on indirectly, in their repercussions rather than in their origins. For Meli the historical importance of Fausto Socino lies in the fact that he draws from the religious experience of the Reformation a new conception of religion, clearly affirming the principle that Holy Scripture does not aim at conveying abstract knowledge, a scientific doctrine, but on the contrary, as Galileo confirmed, it aims at increasing in us justice, charity, and the moral sense.

It is precision, M. Bergson suggests in his last book,1 that has most been lacking in philosophy. Imprecision declares itself in two respects: philosophical systems of the past apply indifferently to many imaginary worlds, and so allows this actual world to slip through their meshes; and they ignore the sense or direction evinced in the order and process of this actual world. Such systems “do not fit the reality in which we live, but are too large for it. Any of them would apply equally well to a world in which plants, animals, and men did not exist, or one in which men went without food and drink and did not sleep or dream or rave, to a world in which men were born decrepit and suckled in old age … Such systems of conceptions are so abstract, consequently so vast, that they can be made to hold everything possible alongside the real”. That we should interpret them always with an eye on this actual world and so regard them as being literal transcriptions of the actual is a witness to the practical bias of our thinking and a quite arbitrary reading of them. Contrasted with these highly abstract systems, M. Bergson claims that his own explanation “adheres to its object” and leaves no gap in which an alternative one could find foothold.

In his introduction to the logic of morals Karl Menger (Vienna) maintains that only two kinds of ethical inquiry are fruitful—the psychology or biology of morals and the logic of morals. The first of these is an empirical science which discovers what value judgments have actually been made and correlates them with various other factors. In this way it provides material for the logic of morals, which neither discovers empirical facts nor analyses them, but simply points out logical relations. In this book Menger discusses the nature of ethical judgments and carries out some investigations of the logical type.

In U.S.S.R. dialectical materialism is still the only subject discussed by writers on philosophy. Philosophical publications during the last year include Lenin’s Philosophical Note-books; Dialectical Materialism and the Theory of Balance, by Selektor; Marx’s Philosophical Development, by Lipendin; A Course of Dialectical Materialism, by Markuse; Dialectical Materialism and Social Democracy, by Rudash; The Idealistic Dialectic of Hegel and the Materialist Dialectic of Marx, by L. Axelrod. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Marx’s death the Communist Academy Institute of Philosophy has published a Symposium containing papers on materialistic dialectics, on the relation of Marxism-Leninism to culture and natural science, and discussion of those papers. A number of small textbooks on dialectical materialism, or Diamat as it is called for short, are issued for university schools not only in Russian but also in some of the languages spoken in the Soviet Union.