My thesis is that ‘rational’ is an absolute concept like ‘flat’ and ‘clean’. Absolute concepts are best defined as absences. In the case of flatness, the absence of bumps, curves, and irregularities. In the case of cleanliness, the absence of dirt. Rationality, then, is the absence of irrationalities such as bias, circularity, dogmatism, and inconsistency.

The ability to feel pain is a property of human beings that seems to be based entirely in our biological natures and to place us squarely within the animal kingdom. Yet the experience of pain is often used as an example of a mental attribute with qualitative properties that defeat attempts to identify mental events with physiological mechanisms. I will argue that neurophysiology and psychology help to explain the interwoven biological and subjective features of pain and recommend a view of pain which differs in important respects from the one most commonly accepted.

The present paper is an attempt to show that Kolakowski's contention is fundamentally correct. But Part I begins by distinguishing, as here he does not, two very different senses of ‘freedom’. In one freedom is a possible but not a necessary condition and objective of human activity: it is a condition which may or may not obtain on particular occasions; and an objective which particular people may or may not choose to pursue. In the other freedom is indeed inescapably ‘rooted in the very quality of being human’. So the remainder of Part I is devoted to the elucidation of this second sense, and to showing that any study of human behaviour which is to deserve the diploma description ‘science’ must start by recognizing rather than denying this definitive fact of our nature. It is argued that no one would be able even to understand such a denial unless they were equipped with premises sufficient for a demonstration of its falsity. Part II goes on to make an example of a widely read work by a leading behavioural scientist. The author starts by insisting, contrary to the contentions of Part I, that any true science of human psychology must presuppose the truth of that denial. He then proceeds to make it clear that, in consequence, he himself places no value upon freedom in the first sense.

The Alligator's Child was full of 'satiable curtiosity. One day while rummaging in a trunk in the lumber room he came across a photograph of his father wearing an aardvark uniform and standing by a large ant hill. All excitement, he rushed to his father and breathlessly said, ‘Father, I didn't know that you had been an aardvark! What is it like to be an aardvark?’

What is it about having a body that might dispose us to think it a plausible candidate for the basis of personal identity? The answer seems plain: the body is a physical object which, as long as it exists, is spatio-temporally continuous throughout the different moments of its existence. In consequence, myself of today can be said to be the same person as myself of twelve years ago so far as my body of today is spatio-temporally continuous with my body of twelve years ago. Exponents of this view are not, of course, denying that over time a person's body will or may undergo various changes; rather they are claiming that so long as these changes occur within a body which maintains a spatio-temporal continuity, then the identity of the person whose body it is will be ensured.

As far as consideration of man as phenomenon, as appearance, as an empirical self, is concerned, Kant appears to be a thoroughgoing psychological hedonist.

‘What is this thing called “love”?’, asks Cole Porter in his well known song, echoing our own doubts and confusions. Well, certain things can be said immediately in answer to his question: ‘Love’ is a four letter word but of the respectable variety describing a human emotion. Everybody wants it, seeks it, hopes for it but some are incapable of giving it; some doubt its existence, others are just confused, still others accept substitutes for the real thing. Often we find ourselves arguing about it, implying the possibility that love just means different things to different people. So while we all agree that love is desirable, very important, a good worth having and so on, our discussions of it reveal all kinds of inconsistencies in our understanding. This is a state of affairs which philosophers have tried to combat in various ways but always focusing on producing objective, general accounts of emotions which include love. Very few have concentrated on love independently of other emotions although love is a very popular example in general accounts. This practice, at the very least, tends to distort the importance of the concept and, at worst, kills dead its formidable significance.

Of course there's every difference in the world between my merely saying something and its being so. My claim that I have a toothache is a far cry from the toothache itself. Words are not things: I neither sit in the word ‘chair’ nor eat the word ‘food.’

Sachverhalt and Gegenstand are dead. Wittgenstein announces their passing in Philosophische Untersuchungen and he of all people should know when the brainchildren of his youth were no more. But it is surprising that he does not accord them more generous obsequies than a fragmented, offhand obituary. Their existence was a logical necessity in his erstwhile scheme of things, not a dispensable phenomenon of the contingent world:

Even if the world is infinitely complex, so that every fact consists of infinitely many Sachverhalte and every Sachverhalt is composed of infinitely many Gegenstände, even then there would have to be Gegenstände and Sachverhalte (T 4.2211)

Amongst Kant's lesser known early writings is a short treatise with the curious title Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics, in which, with considerable acumen and brilliance, and not a little irony, Kant exposes the empty pretensions of his contemporary, the Swedish visionary and Biblical exegete, Emanuel Swedenborg, to have access to a spirit world, denied other mortals. Despite his efforts, it must be feared, however, that Kant did not, alas, succeed in laying the spirit of Swedenborg himself to rest once and for all, for there has arisen in our own day, and within philosophy itself, a movement of thought, if such it can be called, which, like that of Swedenborg, is founded upon an unbridled and unhealthy exercise of the imagination, and apparently believes that philosophical problems can be discussed and resolved by the elaboration of fantastical, and at times repulsive, examples; if we require a name for this contemporary pretence at philosophy, we could take as our model the Italian word for science fiction, fantascienza, and call it ‘fantaphilosophy’: it is my aim to show that this fantaphilosophy is a phantom philosophy.

In its central object of attachment—the figure of Christ Incarnate—the Christian religion could be said to embrace what would ordinarily be taken to be an impossible object of belief. That is, the logic of the Incarnation demands close scrutiny: and in response, the question may be begged, given such an analysis of that life, may not any belief which does take this figure to be a central object of faith, be then held to be sui generis, a logically extraordinary form of belief?

How could the self be a substance? There are various ways in which it could be, some familiar from the history of philosophy. I shall be rejecting these more familiar substantivalist approaches, but also the non-substantival theories traditionally opposed to them. I believe that the self is indeed a substance—in fact, that it is a simple or noncomposite substance—and, perhaps more remarkably still, that selves are, in a sense, self-creating substances. Of course, if one thinks of the notion of substance as an outmoded relic of prescientific metaphysics—as the notion of some kind of basic and perhaps ineffable stuff—then the suggestion that the self (or indeed anything) is a substance may appear derisory. Even what we ordinarily call ‘stuffs’—gold and water and butter and the like—are, it seems, more properly conceived of as aggregates of molecules or atoms, while the latter are not appropriately to be thought of as being ‘made’ of any kind of ‘stuff’ at all. But this only goes to show that we need to think in terms of a more sophisticated notion of substance—one which may ultimately be traced back to Aristotle's conception of a ‘primary substance’ in the Categories, and whose heir in modern times is W. E. Johnson's notion of the ‘continuant’. It is the notion, that is, of a concrete individual capable of persisting identically through qualitative change, a subject of alterable predicates that is not itself predicable of any further subject.

We spent a wonderful morning in the van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam. Of course we knew all the paintings, we had seen them all in reproduction, and the building was more like a bank vault than a setting for art. But what art! At first sight how small and uniform the paintings were in reality: yet every blade of grass, every flower in a field, every olive tree, every vibration in the sky, every patch of colour, every brush stroke, testified to life and to a life vibrating beneath the surface form. In a true sense, an artist inspired, an artist breaking convention, artistic and social, but nevertheless an artist transforming life with a vision of the enhancement of life, a vision inviting each one of us to look again at the natural forms around us, to feel the spirit or the gods dwelling in them, a vision of enchantment and of humanity in a disenchanted world. Art—painting—can, then, be a source of spiritual nourishment as Kant and Schiller and Ruskin in their different ways thought it should be.

Moral dilemmas, or moral conflicts, present a leading problem in Ethics. Ross calls them the problem of conflicting prima facie moral obligations. Lemmon calls them ‘moral dilemmas’, and Sinnott-Armstrong in his recent book discusses them thoroughly and provides extensive references to relevant literature.

In ‘Do Animals Feel Pain?’ Peter Harrison argues that there are no good reasons to think that animals feel pain, that there are good reasons to think they do not feel pain, and that they should be treated well in order to promote not animal, but human, welfare. This is a provocative, and implausible, thesis. It has succeeded in provoking me, to rage and to rejoinder, but it has failed to convince me that a monkey shrieking as it is mutilated is not feeling pain and that feelings of concern for the monkey should play no part in my attempt to stop the mutilation.

According to David Hume our idea of a necessary connection between what we call cause and effect is produced when repeated observation of the conjunction of two events determines the mind to consider one upon the appearance of the other. No matter how we interpret Hume's theory of causation this explanation of the genesis of the idea of necessity is fraught with difficulty. I hope to show, looking at the three major interpretations of Hume's causal theory, that his account is contradictory, plainly wrong, or (at best) inherently impossible to verify.