It was, we suppose, inevitable. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full ends with The Stoic's Hour on American network television. (See Philosophy, April 1999.) Fiction, of course, but Philosophy, a Guide to Happiness, presented by the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life is real and over here and on British television. Professional philosophers are reported to be snooty at what they see as shameless opportunism (or is it just they are annoyed that they didnÕt have the idea for themselves?).

Editorial: The Millennium and Philosophy

What is there to celebrate at the millennium? Or, to put it differently, what if we were celebrating the millennium would it be that we were celebrating? Of course, the millennium might be just an even more than usually lavish and excessive Christmas, Christmas itself having been largely emptied of any meaning, religious or secular, and little more than a pretext for lavishness and excess.

But like Christmas, the millennium is rooted in the events, mythical and historical, surrounding the founding of Christianity. And Christianity is a religion of the Book and of revelation. In the Christian scheme of things, value derives from the Book and from revelation. And as Christianity's followers and some of its critics understood, the values promulgated in Christianity may not be easy to sustain once the Book and the revelation are forgotten.

Over the Christian millennia, philosophy has played its part in upholding Book and revelation, and also, more recently, in undermining them. The latter has come to be seen as philosophy's more characteristic role, implying that Book and revelation sit uneasily with autonomous reason. But is this so, and if so, what follows for the values originally promulgated in Christianity and which many of us still accept? Hardly original questions, but ones with genuinely millennial significance.

Editorial: Thinking Skills

The Government is, it seems, keen to introduce ‘thinking skills’ into the curriculum. Of course, no one could be against people, young or old, thinking. Nor would it be appropriate in a philosophical journal to cast doubt on an initiative that might expand the market for philosophers. Nevertheless, one may he forgiven for wondering just what is being envisaged by the notion of thinking skills.

Are these, in the modern jargon, ‘transferable’? Can someone who can think excellently about physics thereby think well about practical matters? Is there such a thing as musical thought, or painterly thinking? Are those who can compose or paint well necessarily any good at thinking when it comes to horse racing or tax returns?

Perhaps what is meant is something like the ability to do some formal and informal logic. No doubt it would be a good thing if people avoided the more glaring fallacies in their thinking, but that does not get us very far (two lessons, maybe). And there is no guarantee that those expert at logic, formal and informal, are going to be much good when it comes to thinking about other people, or even about politics. (All the usual suspects, starting with Frege and Russell.)

In any case, even in philosophy, the relationship between perennial fascination and thought in any straightforward, argumentative sense is by no means clear. Every first year undergraduate is given a quiver-full of arguments to show that Descartes and Plato can be punctured at crucial points, and, in Jonathan Bennett's words, every great philosopher is fought ‘tooth and nail’ at every step by those who follow. Mostly this has a disconcertingly small effect on the reputation of those who have a vision and a breadth to compel. If philosophy is a guide, what counts in the end are not thinking skills, but generosity of vision and human resonance: qualities which cannot be characterized as skills at all.

‘Philosophy’ means love of wisdom. So is philosophy primarily and rightly the province of those traditionally assumed to be wise, namely the old? Aristotle might have subscribed to some view of this sort. For him only those well on the way to middle age had the experience necessary to discourse sensibly on moral and political matters. Plato too, one suspects, would have agreed with something of the sort, albeit for different reasons. In The Republic education in wisdom just took an awful long time.

So what of the younger thinker who, in a burst of revolutionary fervour, changes the course of the subject, figures such as Descartes, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein and Ayer, down to the Young Turks of recent decades? Over recent centuries young philosophers have contributed much to the subject, particularly as philosophy itself has become infatuated with mathematics and science. Could there be a connection? And did any of the young men of philosophy increase in wisdom as they got older? Nietzsche? Russell? Wittgenstein? Ayer?

A cynic might suggest that in the past the very old were thought wise because there were so few of them. But now that the whole population is ageing, can we expect a renaissance of wisdom and a flowering of philosophy? And if not, is it because in the modern world the old characteristically ape the young? T.S. Eliot hinted at a more mundane reason when he asked not to be told

Of the Wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

Is this harsh observation of the narrowness of age as close to the truth as the conventional piety?

David Holdcroft

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Words and Deeds (Clarendon Press, 1978), and of Saussure: Signs, Systems and Arbitrariness (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Harry Lewis

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Leeds. He works in philosophy of mind and on the critique of evolutionary psychology. He has published articles in various journals, including Nous and Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Ilham Dilman

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is author of numerous philosophical books and papers. His last three books are: Language and Reality: Modern Perspectives on Wittgenstein (1998), Love: Its Forms, Dimensions and Pardoxes (1998), and Free Will (1999).

Julia Tanney

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. She has published articles in the philosophy of mind. Her ‘A Constructivist Picture of Self-Knowledge’ appeared in Philosophy in July, 1996.

Michael Morris

Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Good and the True (Oxford University Press, 1992) and is currently working in the philosophy of language.

Dirk Baltzly

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Stephen Mumford

Lecturer in Philosophy at The University of Nottingham. He is Author of Dispositions (Oxford University Press, 1998) and several papers on metaphysics, including ones published in Philosophical Quarterly, Ratio, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Dialectica.

Whitley R. P. Kaufman

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho. His interests include ethical theory, philosophy of law, philosophy of literature and philosophy of religion.

Notes on Contributors

Bernard Williams

Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford. He has held chairs in London, Cambridge, and Oxford, and from 1979 to 1987 he was Provost of King's College, Cambridge. His most recent publications are Making Sense of Humanity and Plato.

Michael Dummett

Emeritus Professor of Oxford University, Honorary Fellow of New College, Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls' College. He was Wykenham Professor of Logic from 1972 to 1992. Earlier he was for 13 years reader in Philosophy of Mathematics.

David S. Oderberg

Reader in Philosophy at the University of Reading. His most recent books are Moral Theory: A Non-consequentialist Approach and Applied Ethics: A Non-consequentialist Approach (Blackwell, 2000).

Andrea Christofidou

Lecturer in Philosophy, Worcester College, Oxford. She is currently working on a book called Descartes: God, Mind and the World.

E. J. Lowe

Professor of Philosophy, University of Durham. Author of Kinds of Being, Subjects of Experience, and The Possibility of Metaphysics.

Roger Fellows

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bradford. His publications include: What Philosophy Does, Open Books 1977; Philosophy and Technology, (ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Robert J. Deltete

Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He has published on the history and philosophy of science, especially 19th and 20th century physics and cosmology.

William F. Vallicella

After some years of teaching at University of Dayton and Case Western Reserve University, Dr Vallicella abandoned a tenured position, retiring to the Sonoran desert to live the life of the independent philosopher. He is the author of many published articles, mainly in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, in such journals as Analysis, Ratio, and Nous.

Notes on Contributors

Gilbert Ryle (1900–76)

Taught at Christ Church, Oxford from 1924–45 and was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics at Oxford University from 1945–68. His Concept of Mind (1949) is one of the classics of twentieth century philosophy.

Jennifer Nagel

Teaches philosophy at the University of New Mexico and the University of Toronto.

Philip Kitcher

Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He has written books and articles on a variety of topics in the philosophy of science.

Achille Varzi

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

Neil Cooper

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Dundee. He is author of The Diversity of Moral Thinking. His contributions to Philosophy include ‘Two Concepts of Morality’ (January 1996) and ‘The Art of Philosophy’ (April 1991).

Stephen R. L. Clark

Professor of Philosophy, University of Liverpool. His most recent book is Biology and Christian Ethics (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).

D. Goldstick

Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto. His earlier contributions to Philosophy include ‘The Welfare of the Dead’ (January 1988).

Colin Radford

Formerly Research Professor of Philosophy, University of Kent. Now Emeritus (since 1996).

Phil Dowe

Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. He works on causation, time and chance. He has published a book on causation, Physical Causation (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and is currently working on a book on time travel called ‘Backwards Causation’.

Our world seems fine tuned in life-permitting ways. If the cosmos contains many universes, only the appropriately tuned ones can be seen by living beings. An alternative is that God acted as Fine Tuner. We might account for God in terms of an eternally powerful ethical requirement that God exists, rejecting J. L. Mackie's judgment that absolute ethical requirements are incredibly queer. Mackie viewed such requirements as logically possible, so if they were absent then this would seem a matter of synthetic necessity. Again, if they existed then their creative effectiveness would, Mackie thought, be logically possible. Their actual ineffectiveness would thus involve a further synthetic necessity. Theists could maintain that the synthetic necessities were instead ones making ethical requirements real and creatively powerful. Yet why, then, would there exist anything but divine knowledge of everything worth knowing? A spinozistic answer is that such knowledge is all that exists.

Philosophy should not try to assimilate itself to the aims of the sciences. Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding. Philosophy must concern itself with the history of our conceptions, and we must overcome the need to think that this history should ideally be vindicatory. There is no basic conflict between arguing within the framework of our ideas, reflectively making better sense of them, and understanding their highly contingent history. The third of these activities is an inescapable part of the second.

We falter and stammer when trying to describe our own mental acts. Many mental acts, including thinking, are what the author calls ‘chain-undertakings’, that is, courses of action with some over-arching purpose governing the moment-by-moment sub-acts of which we are introspectively aware. Hence the intermittency and sporadicness of the passage of mental activity which constitutes thinking about something.

It has been claimed, notably by Dawkins and Dennett, that there are units of cultural evolution, called ‘memes’, whose survival is explicable in terms of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. They also play an important part in Dennett's theory of consciousness. Memes are distinct memorable units, not atoms, which have vehicles, and whose success depends on the ability of those vehicles to multiply. We argue that even if the theory of memes is structurally isomorphic with the theory of natural selection, it has a very different ontology calling for novel accounts of variation, replication and fitness. We question whether such accounts are plausible, and conclude that memes and their tokenings cannot assume the causal roles they would have to to obey the ‘laws’ of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Much of the popular attraction of as well as hostility to psycho-analysis, as represented in Freud's ideas, come from its iconoclastic, debunking character. What we regard as the higher things of life are, or seem to be, lowered, much of what passes as the normalities of human life are so represented as to appear under a disturbing aspect. Love is reduced to sex, human freedom is represented as an illusion, the human psyche is pictured as forever divided into warring factions with the poor ego trying to keep peace by appeasements, compromises and, where these fail, by evasions and defensive manoeuvres, but without a will or convictions of its own beyond its own preservation. Moral conscience is said to be the internalized voice of a repressive authority in perpetual conflict with unruly instincts. Freud, who named it the super-ego said that it was ‘the representative of all moral restrictions, the advocate of the impulse towards perfection’. He added that it was ‘as much as we have been able to apprehend psychologically of what people call the “higher” things in human life’.

Mill's considered conception of happiness is as much stoic as hedonistic, actually more so, despite what he says in a number of places in Utilitarianism, and his considered conception of the workings of the principle of utility is pragmatic, in a sense developed years later by John Dewey. In this conception, it is a working principle, not for testing the rightness or wrongness of actions from the point of view of an uninvolved spectator, but for bringing about the sweeping changes in society that it actually requires. Mill's Utilitarianism is often cluttered up with attempts to defend the version of hedonistic utilitarianism he inherited from his father and Bentham. But it is not important whether Mill is consistent with traditional hedonism. He has much to say that is true and enlightening—this is what is important.

Our model of time is the classical continuum of real numbers, and our model of other measurable quantities that change over time is that of functions defined on real numbers with real numbers as values. This model is not derived from reality or from our experience of it, but imposed on reality; and the fit is very imperfect. In classical mathematics, the value of a function for any real number as argument is independent of its value for any other argument: the analogue is Hume's doctrine that events are loose and separate. This makes continuity in the change of any quantity a contingent law of physica, rather than a conceptual necessity. The article explores alternatives to this classical model.

Does a healthy respect for the deliverances of experience require us to give up any claim to non-trivial a priori knowledge? One way it might not would be if the very admission of something as an episode of experience required the use of substantive a priori knowledge — if there were certain a priori standards that a representation had to meet in order to count as an experience, rather than as a memory or daydream. What is surprising is that we can find elements of this essentially Kantian line about experience even in the work of empiricists such as Locke and Bas van Fraassen.

The cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words vastly underestimates the expressive power of many pictures and diagrams. In this note we show that even a simple map such as the outline of Manhattan Island, accompanied by a pointer marking North, implies a vast infinity of true statements.

Freedom of belief is one of the entrenched values in modern society. Interpreted as the right not to be coerced into believing something, it is surely correct. But most people take it to mean that there is a right to false belief, a right to be wrong. People think that freedom of thought is a good thing, and this must include the freedom to make mistakes. It is also often thought that making mistakes is a life-enhancing and essential part of personal development. I argue that these ideas are false. Beginning with an examination of the basic good of truth, and making comparisons with other goods like health and friendship, I argue that there is a duty to believe only the truth, which thus logically excludes the right also to believe falsehood. I distinguish between the strict wrongness of false belief and the fact that, because of our epistemic limitations, we are not always to be blamed for our false beliefs. Even in the case of those beliefs which are involuntary, there is no right to have them if they are false, even though we are not to be blamed for having them. The right to be wrong, I conclude, is a modern myth.

This paper argues that there is something deeply wrong with the attempt to give rule-following explanations of broadly rational activities. It thus supports the view that rational norms are part of the ‘bedrock’ and it challenges the widespread strategy of attempting to explain an individual's rational or linguistic abilities by attributing to her knowledge of a theory of some kind. The theorist who would attempt to attribute knowledge of norms to an individual in order to explain her ability to act rationally is presented with a dilemma: either she is committed to a (vicious) explanatory regress or she destroys the normative nature of these rational practices or activities, thus making it pointless to attribute knowledge of the norms to an individual who participates in these practices. The appeal to tacit or implicit knowledge does not help in avoiding the basic dilemma.

An important part of the mind–brain problem arises because consciousness seems inherently resistant to scientific explanation. The solution to this dilemma is to recognize, first, that scientific explanation can only render comprehensible a selected aspect of what there is, and second, that there is a mode of explanation, the personalistic, different from, irreducible to, but as viable as, scientific explanation, in terms of which consciousness can be understood. The problem of explaining why experiential or mental aspects of brain processes or things should be correlated with certain physical processes or things is a non-problem because there is no kind of explanation possible in terms of which an explanation could be couched. A physical theory, amplified to include the experiential, might be predictive but would, necessarily, cease to be explanatory; and an amplified personalistic explanation could not succeed either. There is, in short, an explanation as to why there cannot be an explanation of correlations between physical and mental aspects of processes going on inside our heads. Despite this, there are important, as yet unsolved but solvable problems of knowledge and understanding concerning such correlations. The central serious task for research is to discover how the two explanatory accounts of what goes on inside our heads, physical and personal, are inter-related.