William Blake's dark Satanic mills were apparently not the industrial mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, but the schools of his day, which in his view ground all the spirit out of those who were unfortunate enough to suffer them. The clergy who ran Blake's mills were grinding out deadened souls, not industrial riches.

With the explosion of courses in the ethics of various fields, medical, managerial, environmental and so on, the question of the nature of the philosophical enterprise is once again a live topic. Maybe as a result of sensitivity to accusations of bias and preaching in the way individual philosophers might teach these courses, the supposedly discredited conceptual analysis view is once again gaining adherents. Philosophers ought to clarify concepts and commitments, but they ought not to argue for particular concepts or commitments. When they do, they exceed their brief as philosophers, and become proponents of particular causes and world-views. And this is unprofessional, not to be tolerated in the academy.

In an earlier age there was much discussion of a so-called ‘paradox of democracy’. The point seemed to be about what would happen if a democratic society voted democratically to abolish its democratic procedures and to move to a dictatorship. Would that be democratic or not?

‘When the nation's history is poorly taught in schools, ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it.’ Thus Jacques Barzun, at the age of 93, describing what he sees as decadence.

John R. Searle

John R. Searle is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is author of many distinguished works on the philosophy of language and mind.

Luke Purshouse

Temporary Lecturer in Philosophy at St John's College Cambridge who has researched interests in accounts of emotions and their rational appraisal and has recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the subject.

Christopher Cordner

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His book Ethical Encounter will soon be published by Palgrave.

Thom Brooks

Recently received his MA from University College Dublin. He is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Sheffield. His dissertation is on Hegel's political philosophy.

Roberto Casati

A researcher at the Nicod Institut of CNRS, Paris. His most recent works are The Discovery of the Shadow (Little Brown/Knopf) and Parts and Places (MIT Press, with Achille C. Varzi).

Achille C. Varzi

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. His most recent works are An Essay in Universal Semantics (Kluwer) and Parts and Places (MIT Press, with Roberto Casati).

Jeremy Randel Koons

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut. His primary research interests are in ethical theory and epistemology. His article ‘Do Normative Facts Need to Explain?’ recently appeared in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.

Hilary W. Putnam

Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. His books include Reason, Truth and History, Realism with a Human Face, Words and Life, Pragmatism and The Threefold Cord: Body and World.

Graham Oppy

Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. His research interests lie in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is the author of Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Brian Grant

Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. His main areas of interest are epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He has a recent book in the latter area, The Condition of Madness.

Rom Harré

Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College Oxford and Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. 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 (1988). His One Thousand Years of Philosophy was published last year.

Joel J. Kupperman

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books are Learning from Asian Philosophy, Value É And What Follows, and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts.

Tony Lynch

Lectures in Philosophy and Politics at the University of New England, Armidale. His research interests are in the areas of moral psychology and liberal politics.

Gordon Graham

Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He has contributed to Philosophy on several occasions. His most recent books include the Internet: a philosophical inquiry (Routledge, 1999) and Evil and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Mark T. Nelson

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the co-editor of Christian Theism and Moral Philosophy and the author of articles on ethics, philosophy of religion, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.

Nicholas Maxwell

Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science at the University of London. Among his publications are From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell, 1984), The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1998), and The Human World in the Physical Universe (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).

Sophie Botros

Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her previous publications include ‘Precarious Virtue’ (Phronesis) and, for this journal, ‘Acceptance and Morality’ and ‘Acts, Omissions and Keeping Patients Alive in a Persistent Vegetative State’. She is presently working on Hume's practicality argument.

Hasok Chang

Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University College London. His chief research interests are in the history and philosophy of the physical sciences from the 18th century onwards.

Fiona Ellis

Lecturer in Philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. She works in metaphilosophy, metaphysics, and aesthetics. An article on Sartre is forthcoming in Sartre Studies.

James Somerville

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hull. He is author of The Enigmatic Parting Shot. His book The Epistemological Significance of the Interrogative is in preparation.

J. Angelo Corlett

Professor of Philosophy at San Diego State University. He is author of Responsibility and Punishment (Kluwer, forthcoming) and Analyzing Social Knowledge (Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), as well as over 50 articles on moral, social, political and legal philosophy, and epistemology. He is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review.

Charles Taliaferro

Professor of Philosophy, St Olaf College. He is currently writing The Evolution of Modern Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge University Press).

Stephen Hetherington

Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of two books, Epistemology's Paradox (Rowman & Littlefield, 1992) and Knowledge Puzzles (Westview Press, 1996).

Timothy Chappell

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. He has published books on ancient philosophy (Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom of Action; The Plato Reader), edited a collection on environmental philosophy (The Philosophy of the Environment), and most recently argued for an Aristotelian pluralism in ethics in Understanding Human Goods.

Jenny Teichman

An Emerita Fellow of New Hall in the University of Cambridge. Her previous publications in Philosophy include papers on personhood, on terrorism and on Derrida, Her last two books are Social Ethics (Blackwell) and Polemical Papers (Ashgate).

This paper introduces a conjecture that laws of nature may be of different kinds, in particular that there may, in addition to laws which constrain outcomes (C-laws), be laws which empower systems to direct or select outcomes (E-laws) and laws which guide systems in such selections (G-laws). The paper defends this conjecture by suggesting that it is not excluded by anything we know, is plausible, and is potentially of great explanatory power.

I defend, in this paper, a version of a philosophy of common sense. I have use of some things from Reid's account of these matters, others from Wittgenstein's. Scepticism looms large—as do the questions of arguments for and examples of common sense. At least two different notions of common sense emerge, one of which has often been overlooked by philosophers.

I propose a reformulation of realism, as the pursuit of ontological plausibility in our systems of knowledge. This is dubbed plausibility realism, for convenience of reference. Plausibility realism is non-empiricist, in the sense that it uses ontological plausibility as an independent criterion from empirical adequacy in evaluating systems of knowledge. Ontological plausibility is conceived as a precondition for intelligibility, nor for Truth; therefore, the function of plausibilty realism is to facilitate the kind of understanding that is not reducible to mere description or prediction. Difficulties in making objective judgements of ontological plausibility can be ameliorated if we adhere to the most basic ontological principles. The workings of plausibility realism are illustrated through a detailed discussion of how one ontological principle, which I call the principle of single value, can be employed with great effect. Throughout the paper the discussion draws on concrete examples from the history of science.

The problem of free will arises because of the conflict between two inconsistent impulses, the experience of freedom and the conviction of determinism. Perhaps we can resolve these by examining neurobiological correlates of the experience of freedom. If free will is not to be an illusion, it must have a corresponding neurobiological reality. An explanation of this issue leads us to an account of rationality and the self, as well as how consciousness can move bodies at all. I explore two hypotheses. On the first, freedom is a complete illusion. On the second, it is not an illusion, and there is a corresponding indeterminism at the neurobiological level. This can only occur if there is in fact a quantum mechanical element in the fundamental neurobiology of consciousness.

This paper considers the sorts of evaluations that underlie the emotion of embarrassment, by questioning what unifies the various kinds of situations in which this emotion typically arises. It examines the difference between embarrassment and shame, and then addresses problems with the accounts of embarrassment proposed by previous authors, in particular Solomon, Taylor and Goffman. It proposes a new model, on which the emotion involves viewing an interpersonal situation, in which you are involved, as containing an exposure to which you are averse. This may either be your own exposure to others, or others' exposure to yourself. The emotion thus reflects the value we attach to placing limits on the sorts of interactions and contact we have with other people.

I am concerned to examine a mode of argumentation in recent analytic philosophy which, I claim, has its origin in Hegel's ‘dialectical’ method. I give examples of this mode of argumentation in McDowell and Wiggins, followed by a formal representation which distinguishes two possible models both of which have negative and positive aspects. I consider what the commitments of the negative aspect of this approach are, and argue that the desire to avoid naturalism constitutes a common goal. I turn then to its positive aspect, making explicit and criticising some of the metaphilosophical implications contained therein. Finally, I make brief contact with Hegel.

Extra-philosophical influences were very important in shaping Wittgenstein's philosophical ruminations. The Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus is misunderstood unless it is seen as deriving from the pre-Machian physics of the German tradition, adapted to the problems Russell confronted Wittgenstein with. In like manner, particularly in relation to the discussions of meanings and rules, the philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations is shaped by the role played by a powerful religious sensibility in Wittgenstein's extraordinary and tormented life.

This paper examines some recent trends in feminist epistemology. It argues that theories that make a priori claims to the effect that the structure of our body of knowledge must encode a masculine bias are both philosophically problematic and politically counterproductive, and it recommends a feminist methodology free from such general theoretical claims as best suited for the promotion of productive feminist thought and action.

Against moral philosophers' traditional preoccupation with ‘ought’ judgments, Bernard Williams has reminded us of the importance of locutions such as ‘I must’, ‘I have to’ and ‘I can't’. He develops an account of the ethical necessity and impossibility these locutions are able to mark. The account draws on his thesis that all reasons for action are ‘internal’. I sketch the account, and then try to show that it is insensitive to important aspects of how the concepts of ethical necessity and impossibility inform our lives.

Despite some talk of ‘erotetic logic’ and ‘the logic of interrogatives’, logicians have hitherto completely overlooked the peculiar logical form of questions, also shared by interrogative clauses generally. Of relevance to an understanding of time are those interrogative clauses that are janus-like: sometimes raising a question, sometimes answering it—which can then no longer arise. Since a closed question can no longer arise, it might seem that simply the passing of time turns an open into a closed question. Instead, the passing of time itself can be understood as the closing or resolution of open questions, of the determination of what is not fixed but as yet in question.

Gilbert Harman has argued that it does not make sense to ascribe character traits to people. The notion of morally virtuous character becomes particularly suspect.

How plausible this is depends on how broad character traits would have to be. Views of character as entirely invariant behavioural tendencies offer a soft target. This paper explores a view that is a less easy target: character traits as specific to kinds of situation, and as involving probabilities or real possibilities. Such ascriptions are not undermined by Harman's arguments, and it remains plausible that the agent's character often is indispensable in explanation of behaviour. Character is indispensable also as processes of control that impose reliability where it really matters.

I criticize the ‘Humean’ view of reasons for actions, the view that the reasons for an action can be stated in terms of desires and beliefs. I point out that this view must ignore concepts which are central to our understanding of human actions, namely, intention, motivation and associated concepts such as decision. One can then see just how inadequate the Humean view is.