David Hume's most brilliant and ambitious work is entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, and it, together with his other writings, has left an indelible mark on philosophical conceptions of human nature. So it is not merely the title of Hume's work that makes discussion of it an appropriate inclusion to this volume, but the fact of its sheer influence. However, its pattern of influence – including, of course, the formulations of ideas consciously antithetical Hume's own – is an immensely complex one, subtle and incredibly difficult to decode. In all probability ‘Hume's’ presence in contemporary thinking of human nature is to likened to the end product of a historiographical game of Chinese whispers, whereby ‘Hume's’ view on x and y is now inflected with interpretations his work – or, more accurately, selected parts of it – that are in turn filtered by thinkers and traditions with different focuses and interest from Hume's own. I am not equipped even to begin to trace this line of influence, a lack compounded by my relative ignorance of the present state of the debate on human nature. Nevetheless various ‘humean’ doctrines still orient debate (even if they aren't labelled as such) and I guess these claims include the idea that causation is a matter of instantiating a universal regularity, that normativity can understood causally, that motivation is a matter of belief plus some independently intelligibly ‘attitude’, that a self is best conceived as a collection of independent states that (somehow) combine to yield a self and so on.

Pictures have always played a prominent role in philosophical speculation about the mind, but the concept of a picture has itself been the object of philosophical scrutiny only intermittently. As a matter of fact, it was studied most intensively in the course of a theological controversy in the Eastern Roman Empire, during the eighth century - which is a sufficient indication of its marginal place in the history of philosophy. Perhaps this is because pictures have never produced in us the theoretical paralysis which Augustine famously associated with time, but have on the contrary generally seemed too unproblematic to deserve much time from philosophers. Even today, after several decades of accumulating theory, philosophers with no stake in the matter are often impervious to its charm. I feel some sympathy for this attitude, because the task of explaining the nature of depiction is, I believe, one which calls for the refinement rather than refutation of our first thoughts about it. But a precise understanding of depiction is both a necessary prolegomenon to a significant part of aesthetics, and a useful prophylactic against confusion in the theory of the imagination. Besides, there is also the pleasure of the chase, which J. L. Austin nonchalantly appealed to many years before the Research Assessment Exercise was inaugurated.

Much of traditional natural theology offers causal explanations- e.g. for the universe's existence and ability to host our sort of life. But a less-remarked strand offers ontological explanations, claiming that theories involving God are the best answers to ontological questions. Leibniz, for instance, wrote in the Monadology that

Here I argue that the hyper-individualistic and rationalistic ethical paradigms – originating in the late eighteenth century and dominating moral philosophy, in various permutations, ever since – cannot capture the moral concerns evoked by the prospect of global climate change. Those paradigms are undone by the temporal and spatial scales of climate change. To press my argument, I deploy two famous philosophical tropes – John Rawls's notion of the original position and Derek Parfit's paradox – and another that promises to become famous: Dale Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill. I then go on to argue that the spatial and especially the temporal scales of global climate change demand a shift in moral philosophy from a hyper-individualistic ontology to a thoroughly holistic ontology. It also demands a shift from a reason-based to a sentiment-based moral psychology. Holism in environmental ethics is usually coupled with non-anthropocentrism in theories constructed to provide moral considerability for transorganismic entities – such as species, biotic communities, and ecosystems. The spatial and temporal scales of climate, however, render non-anthropocentric environmental ethics otiose, as I more fully explain. Thus the environmental ethic here proposed to meet the moral challenge of global climate change is holistic but anthropocentric. I start with Jamieson's six little ditties about Jack and Jill.

It is usually assumed in moral philosophy that a teleological approach, as exemplified by Aristotle's ethics of virtue, and a deontological approach, as heralded by Kant's ethics of duty, are incompatible; either the good or the right, to designate these two major traditions by their emblematic predicates. My purpose in this paper is to show that a theory of action, broadly understood, may provide the appropriate framework of thought within which justice can be done to both the Aristotelian and Kantian, the teleological and deontological moments of morality.

The philosophical problems of liberty may be classified as those of definition, of justification and of distribution. They are so complex that there is a danger of being unable to see the wood for the trees. It may be helpful, therefore, to provide an aerial photograph of a large part of the wood, namely, the liberty of individual persons. But it is, of course, a photograph taken from an individual point of view, as Leibniz would have put it.

It is an obvious fact of history that human beings have always entertained and continue to entertain different conceptions of the good and lead very different lives both individually and collectively. This raises two questions. First, why do ways of life differ? And second, how should we respond to their differences? The first is an explanatory, and the second a normative question, and the two are closely related. The first question has been answered differently by different writers, of which I shall mention three by way of illustration.

This chapter explores the state of public and academic discourse about socio-moral issues elicited by the Covid-19 pandemic, through two informal case studies of Facebook statuses and columns in two leading UK newspapers. The Facebook statuses tended to focus on performance virtues as remedies rather than moral virtues, whereas a survey among the general public highlighted the role of moral virtues. Divisions of opinion among columnists in the Guardian and Daily Telegraph turned out to be about different prioritisations of moral virtues rather than a trade-off between virtues and economic values. However, missing from all those discourses was attention to the meta-virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom, as an adjudicator of virtue conflicts. Recent psychological work on wisdom does not fully ameliorate this lacuna; the paper argues that a retrieval of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis is needed to help us make balanced moral decisions.

Only a fool would attempt to discuss the morality of strikes in twenty-five pages or less, and even he will fail. For one thing he can be sure in advance that whatever conclusions he might come to will be ridiculed as outrageous, prejudiced or self-serving by one party or the other. There is, in particular, the accusation that the attempt to discuss in moral terms what is essentially a political issue, is itself an exercise in bourgeois politics disguised as morals, their morals but not ours. But there is also, and more worrying to my mind, the sheer complexity of the issues. This complexity is, however, simply unmanageable in the space available, and I have gone instead for the simple story, in the hope that the essentials will stand out that much more clearly. Whether I have got the right essentials, whether the elegance of the picture compensates for its lack of realism, is something that will have to emerge.

The whole of our human experience is determined by certain material conditions which cannot themselves be a part of that experience. In particular there exist objects, inaccessible to our senses, which nevertheless interact with ourselves to produce that experience. But the selves which are so affected by these objects outside our experience, and the internal mechanisms which somehow construct that experience, are also just such material conditions of, and not parts of, that experience. We might describe this appeal to material conditions of experience in Kant's technical terms as the ‘intelligible’ or even ‘transcendental’ background to our empirical experience. In its attempt to provide some explanation, in terms of things in themselves, of empirical objects (whether physical things or persons) it forms a central part of what Adickes called Kant's ‘double affection’ theory.

Here are some sentences from Fred Dretske's book Naturalising the Mind:

For a materialist there are no facts that are accessible to only one person … If the subjective life of another being, what it is like to be that creature, seems inaccessible, this must be because we fail to understand what we are talking about when we talk about its subjective states. If S feels some way, and its feeling some way is a material state, how can it be impossible for us to know how S feels? Though each of us has direct information about our own experiences, there is no privileged access. If you know where to look, you can get the same information I have about the character of my experiences. This is a result of thinking about the mind in naturalistic terms. Subjectivity becomes part of the objective order. For materialists, this is as it should be.

This paper examines Hume’s ‘Title Principle’ (TP) and its role in a response to one of the ‘manifest contradictions’ he identifies in the conclusion to Book I of A Treatise on Human Nature. This ‘contradiction’ is a tension between two ‘equally natural and necessary’ principles of the imagination, our causal inferences and our propensity to believe in the continued and distinct existence of objects. The problem is that the consistent application of causal reason undercuts any grounds with have for the belief in continued and distinct existence, and yet that belief is as ‘natural and necessary’ as our propensity to infer effects from causes. The TP appears to offer a way to resolve this ‘contradiction’. It states

Where reason is lively, and mixes itself with some propensity, it ought to be assented to. Where it does not, it never can have any title to operate upon us.’ (T 1.4.7.11; SBN 270)

In brief, if it can be shown that the causal inferences that undermine the belief in external world are not ‘lively’ nor mixed with some propensity’ then we have grounds for think that they have no normative authority (they have no ‘title to operate on us). This is in part a response to another ‘manifest contradiction’, namely the apparently self-undermining nature of reason. In this paper I examine the nature and grounds of the TP and its relation to these ‘manifest contradictions’.

Utilitarianism has a curious history. Its most celebrated founders—Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill—were radical progressives, straddling the worlds of academic philosophy, political science, economic theory and practical affairs. They made innumerable recommendations for legal, social, political and economic reform, often (especially in Bentham’s case) described in fine detail. Some of these recommendations were followed, sooner or later, and many of their radical ideas have become close to articles of faith of western liberalism. Furthermore many of these recommendations were made expressly to improve the condition of the deprived, or of oppressed groups. Yet the moral theory which inspired this reforming zeal is, at least officially, utilitarianism, and when we teach this theory to our students we feel it our duty to point out the horrors that could be justified by any theory which assesses the moral quality of actions in terms of the maximization of good consequences over bad. No consequence is so bad that it cannot, in principle, be outweighed by a large aggregation of smaller goods. Hence there are circumstances in which utilitarianism can require slavery, the punishment of the innocent, and redistribution of resources from the poor to the rich, or from the disabled and the sick to the able bodied and healthy. Indeed, in the right circumstances, it can justify pretty much anything you can think of. For all their intelligence and imagination neither Bentham nor Mill seemed to recognise or discuss these catastrophic possibilities.

The aim of this paper is to critically assess the present state of Islamic philosophy in its main home, namely, Iran. However, since such a study requires some knowledge of the past developments of philosophical thought among Muslims, the paper briefly, though critically, deals with the emergence and subsequent phases of change in the views of Muslim philosophers from ninth century onward. In this historical survey I also touch upon the role played by other Muslim scholars such as theologians, mystics and jurists, in shaping Islamic philosophy. The last section of the paper, deals, not in great details, with one or two possible scenarios for the future of Islamic philosophy.

According to logical positivism, so the story goes, metaphysical questions are meaningless, since they do not admit of empirical confirmation or refutation. However, the logical positivists did not in fact reject as meaningless all questions about for example, the structure of space and time. Rather, key figures such as Reichenbach and Schlick believed that scientific theories often presupposed a conceptual framework that was not itself empirically testable, but which was required for the theory as a whole to be empirically testable. For example, the theory of Special Relativity relies upon the simultaneity convention introduced by Einstein that assumes that the one-way speed of light is the same in all directions of space. Hence, the logical positivists accepted an a priori component to physical theories. However, they denied that this a priori component is necessarily true. Whereas for Kant, metaphysics is the a priori science of the necessary structure of rational thought about reality (rather than about things in themselves), the logical positivists were forced by the history of science to accept that the a priori structure of theories could change. Hence, they defended a notion of what Michael Friedman (1999) calls the ‘relativised’ or the ‘constitutive’ a priori. Carnap and Reichenbach held that such an a priori framework was conventional, whereas Schlick seems to have been more of a realist and held that the overall relative simplicity of different theories could count as evidence for their truth, notwithstanding the fact that some parts of them are not directly testable. All this is part of the story of how the verification principle came to be abandoned, and how logical positivism transmuted into logical empiricism.

Derek Parfit claims that we are not human beings. Rather, each of us is the part of a human being that thinks in the strictest sense. This is said to solve a number of difficult metaphysical problems. I argue that the view has metaphysical problems of its own, and is inconsistent with any psychological-continuity account of personal identity over time, including Parfit's own.

There is a gap between what we think about ethics, and what we think we think about ethics. This gap appears when elements of our ethical reflection and our moral theories contradict each other, or otherwise come into logical tension. It also appears when something that is important in our ethical reflection is sidelined, or simply ignored, in our moral theories. The gap appears in both ways with an ethical idea that I shall label glory. This paper's exploration of the idea of glory, and its place in our ethical reflection, is offered as a case-study of how far such reflection can diverge from what we might expect, if we suppose that actual ethical reflection usually or mostly takes the forms that might be predicted by moral theory. I shall suggest that this divergence tells against moral theory, and in favour of less constricted and more flexible modes of ethical reflection.

We often think of works of art as possessors of meaning, and we think of museums as places where that meaning can be exhibited and encountered. But it is precisely at this first step of thinking about artistic meaning that we too easily import a conceptually entrenched model or picture of linguistic meaning that then constrains our appreciation of artistic meaning and what museum exhibitions actually do. That model of linguistic meaning is atomism: the notion that the single, self-contained word is the ultimate building block of meaning. This picture was excavated with exacting precision in Wittgenstein's sustained reflections on the nature of meaning, and the new way of seeing linguistic meaning that those reflections usher in holds direct significance for our understanding of artistic meaning, as we see here in examples from Rembrandt, Rietveld, and others. A more complete understanding of a dynamic, interactive, contextual, and use-based conception of language better reveals what actually happens in museums and the nature of the meaning we find there.

Bertrand Russell said more than once that he was uncomfortable about a conflict, as he saw it, between two things: the strength of the conviction with which he held his ethical beliefs, and the philosophical opinions that he had about the status of those ethical beliefs—opinions which were non-cognitivist, and in some sense subjectivist. Russell felt that, in some way, if he did not think that his ethical beliefs were objective, he had no right to hold them so passionately. This discomfort was not something that Ayer noted or discussed in his account of Russell's moral philosophy and ethical opinions, at least in the book that he wrote for the Modern Masters series (RS). Perhaps this was because it was not a kind of discomfort that Ayer felt himself. His own philosophical views about the status of ethics were at all periods at any rate non-cognitivist, and I think that he did not mind them being called ‘subjectivist’. He did indeed argue that the supposed difference between objectivism and subjectivism in ethics did no work, and that philosophers who took themselves to be objectivists could not achieve anything more than those who admitted they were subjectivists. Ayer based this mainly on the idea that the claims made by objectivists for the factuality, objective truth, and so forth of moral judgments added nothing to those judgments—so far as moral conclusions were concerned, the objectivist was saying the same as the subjectivist but in a louder voice.

According to logical positivism, so the story goes, metaphysical questions are meaningless, since they do not admit of empirical confirmation or refutation. However, the logical positivists did not in fact reject as meaningless all questions about for example, the structure of space and time. Rather, key figures such as Reichenbach and Schlick believed that scientific theories often presupposed a conceptual framework that was not itself empirically testable, but which was required for the theory as a whole to be empirically testable. For example, the theory of Special Relativity relies upon the simultaneity convention introduced by Einstein that assumes that the one-way speed of light is the same in all directions of space. Hence, the logical positivists accepted an a priori component to physical theories. However, they denied that this a priori component is necessarily true. Whereas for Kant, metaphysics is the a priori science of the necessary structure of rational thought about reality (rather than about things in themselves), the logical positivists were forced by the history of science to accept that the a priori structure of theories could change. Hence, they defended a notion of what Michael Friedman (1999) calls the ‘relativised’ or the ‘constitutive’ a priori. Carnap and Reichenbach held that such an a priori framework was conventional, whereas Schlick seems to have been more of a realist and held that the overall relative simplicity of different theories could count as evidence for their truth, notwithstanding the fact that some parts of them are not directly testable. All this is part of the story of how the verification principle came to be abandoned, and how logical positivism transmuted into logical empiricism.