Seeing human nature through the prism of grammar may seem rather unusual. I will argue that this is a symptom for a problem – in both discussions of human nature and grammar: Neither the theory of grammar has properly placed its subject matter within the context of an inquiry into human nature and speciation, nor have discussions of human nature properly assessed the significance of grammar.

Some books are like parents, grandparents or old friends. They have been with us from our earliest days and one treats them almost with familiarity. They belong to one's youth and the recognition that they have been around for months and years keeps company with surprise. For philosophers such a book is A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, first published over fifty years ago in 1936. There is a sense in which a similar point may be made about some individuals, but discretion and good manners should deter us from succumbing to the philosophical disease of pressing an analogy too far. Suffice it to say that over a period during which most English speaking philosophers were content (or perhaps constrained) to work within a context which was significantly influenced by Ayer's clear and cajoling formulation of a twentieth century of empiricism, F. C. Copleston provided one of the few distinctive alternative philosophical perspectives on major metaphysical questions. This essay will reflect upon the influence of Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic some fifty years after its publication, upon the philosophical discussion of religion and theological questions.

Many contemporary compatibilists about free will and determinism are agnostic about whether determinism is true, yet do not doubt that we have free will. They are thus committed to the thesis that free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism. This paper explores the prospects for this version of compatibilism, including its response to the argument (traditionally employed against incompatibilist accounts of free will) that indeterminism would introduce an element of randomness or chance or luck that is inimical to free will and moral responsibility.

For as long as realists and instrumentalists have disagreed, partisans of both sides have pointed in argument to the actions and sayings of scientists. Realists in particular have often drawn comfort from the literal understanding given even to very theoretical propositions by many of those who are paid to deploy them. The scientists' realism, according to the realist, is not an idle commitment: a literal understanding of past and present theories and concepts underwrites their employment in the construction of new theories. The theme of this book is philosophy and technology, and here's the connection: new theories point out—and explain—new phenomena. So realism, claim the realists, is at the heart of science's achievement of what Bacon, that early philosopher of technology, identified as science's aim: new knowledge offering new powers.

In this paper I propose to examine, and in part revive, a time-honoured perspective to inquiry in general and scientific explanation in particular. The perspective is to view inquiry as a search for answers to questions. If there is anything that deserves to be called a working scientist's view of his or her daily work, it surely is that he or she phrases questions and attempts to find satisfactory answers to them.

I have told elsewhere the story of my first meeting with Freddie Ayer, but I shall re-tell it. It made a great impact on me, though, I believe, none on him. Certainly at no point in our friendship did he ever bring it up.

It was mid or late 1946. I was an undergraduate at Balliol, having returned from three years in the army, and I was reading for Part II of the History Schools. Most of my friends, most of my intellectual friends, were reading philosophy, and there was a necessity, which I already sensed, for my returning to Oxford once again to follow in their footsteps. This happened later in the autumn of 1947. Post-war Oxford was a very different place from the Firbankian hothouse of wartime Oxford, at least as I knew it. We were all said to be ‘more mature’, but within the confines of austerity, we were determined to enjoy ourselves. Oxford was not, in the famous words that Max Beerbohm put into the mouth of Mrs Humphrey Ward, ‘wholly serious’.

Wittgenstein always thought that he had not been understood, and indeed that it was very unlikely that many people ever would understand him. Russell not only failed to understand Wittgenstein's later work; according to Wittgenstein himself, Russell profoundly failed to understand even the Tractatus. Professor Anscombe says even she did not understand him, and that to attempt to give an account of what he says is only to express one's own ordinariness or mediocrity or lack of complexity. Certainly, most people acquainted with the Tractatus, when that work was Wittgenstein's only published book, gave it what now seems a quite crass positivistic interpretation. Wittgenstein's own preface to the Tractatus, despite its last sentence, does not help. He does tell us that the whole sense of the work is that what can be said can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must consign to silence: but this does not make it clear that what we cannot talk about is all that is really important. Even when one has realised all this, however, one is aware mostly of one's failure to understand; and that if one did get any distance in understanding the last sixth of the Tractatus, the process would be extremely difficult, and the results quite astonishing.

Some years acquire symbolic status, and one such year is 1968. All over Europe and the United States university students exploded into violent rebellion. Insofar as this would-be revolution had an ideology it was unquestionably Marx-inspired, even if the Marxism was not always orthodox. It so happens that in the years 1970–1971 I was teaching philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford. And because of Oxford University's system, almost unique, of individual tuition for undergraduates, this meant I found myself in a continuing one-to-one relationship with bright students who were in the throes of revolutionary fervour.

This paper has a twofold structure: both parts concern philosophy's understanding (or misunderstanding) of its data—in the area of aesthetics. The first part (I) considers aesthetics as philosophy of art: the second part (II) considers aesthetics as concerned also with the appreciation of nature.

The history of liberalism is the history of an ethical ideal as well as a set of political and social arrangements. In the latter sense liberalism entrenches the juridical equality of all citizens, their equal civil and political rights – including among those rights a set of liberties strong enough to restrict the authority of society over the individual in a fundamental way. How to express in institutions this politically fundamental restriction is an important matter of debate, but that debate will not concern us. For present purposes I assume I can refer to liberalism as a set of political and social arrangements without further examination. Our concern will instead be the liberal ethical ideal and its present prospects.

As we all know, in Freddie Ayer's famous book Language, Truth and Logic metaphysics received short shrift. Metaphysical assertions were dismissed as being all nonsensical (LTL, 2nd edn, 41). In the work in question Ayer clearly tended to equate metaphysics with what Professor W. H. Walsh was to describe as ‘transcendent’ (as distinct from ‘immanent’) metaphysics (Walsh, 1963). This tendency is also discernible, I think, in the 1949 debate between Ayer and myself on logical positivism. After all, my defence of metaphysics was largely prompted and certainly strengthened by what I believed to be the religious relevance of metaphysical philosophy. A lot of what Aristotle would have described as ‘first philosophy’ and what some later philosophers would have classified as ‘ontology’ Ayer would have called ‘philosophical analysis’. What he was primarily concerned with undermining was any claim by metaphysicians to be able to extend our knowledge of what exists, of the Absolute or God for example, by metaphysical arguments.

I Shall begin by making a brief comparison between Spinoza and Tillich and then, in the second half of my paper, ask a few questions, and discuss some details, with regard to the nature of the type of thinking they exhibit which, in the broadest sense of the word, is metaphysical. My interest is not purely historical, although I believe that historical comparisons can throw light on what very many of our contemporaries have in mind. In fact, this is in part my justification for this paper, and it is perhaps as well, at the outset, to make clear the point of view from which I propose to look into the matter.

There is a certain attitude which makes freedom the main business of political thought and civil liberty the aim of government. I shall use the word ‘liberalism’ to refer to this attitude, in the hope that established usage will condone my description. And I shall explore and criticize two aspects of liberal thought: first, the concept of freedom in which it is based; secondly, the attack upon what Mill (liberalism's most eloquent exponent) called the ‘despotism of custom’. My conclusions will be tentative; but I should like to suggest that, properly understood, freedom and custom may require each other. Moreover to describe them as opposites is to make it impossible to see how either could be valued by a rational being, or why any politician should concern himself with their support or propagation.

Holding God to be transcendent does not mean having to regard the grammar of the word ‘God’ as isolated or unique or inscrutable: and in speaking of grammar I use this word in its familiar sense, not in some ill-explained neo-Wittgensteinian sense. I want to make a methodological suggestion. When a sentence containing the word ‘God’ is puzzling, it may help to look at a grammatically possible replacement for the word. For example, if we wish to understand the statement that God is man's last end, let us consider what it implies to say that gold, or sex, or military glory, is a given man's last end.

What is the relation of the biological to the social sciences? Fierce battles are being currently fought over this question and much hangs on the answer. If society (or culture) is taken as an irreducible category which can only be understood in its own terms, the social sciences can feel safe from the sinister designs of other disciplines. Yet it is a commonplace that cultures vary, and we humans are prone to look at the differences rather than the similarities between them. The result can be a thoroughgoing relativism. If culture cannot be understood by means of any non-cultural categories, cultural differences themselves can be accepted as the ultimate truth about man. When everything is cultural, even the notion of a non-cultural category can seem to be a ludicrous contradiction in terms. The categories with which we think are the product of our culture, or so we are told. Instead of our being able to understand culture in terms of anything beyond itself, our understanding appears totally moulded by the society to which we belong. Any theory can thus be seen as merely the expression of the beliefs of a particular society.

If an economist or an economic historian speaks about ethical or moral problems, one should be suspicious. Karl Popper continually repeated that he did not want to preach, and I believe that his deep-rooted distrust of modern philosophical moralists, who usually preach water and drink cognac, led to his not writing a greater work on ethics. Nevertheless he was a moral person, and perhaps we can learn more about his cosmology, his methodology, and about his philosophy in general if we probe into some of the ethical foundations of his life and his thinking. It may become apparent to you that I do not refer primarily to Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies or other works of his political writings alone. In choosing not to do so, it is my intention to demonstrate that all his thinking is deeply rooted in ethics.

There are at least three tolerably distinct views about the connections between liberty and property; two of these I shall discuss fairly briefly in order to get on to Mill's central claims about the relationship between property rights and freedom, but in conclusion I shall return to them to show how they bear on what Mill has to say.

Lewis, according to Kuklick, was ‘a private person’, of ‘unsparing honesty and … utter dedication to the rational pursuit of truth’. He was, Kuklick continues, ‘equally uncompromising in what he expected of his readers, and as a result wrote for and lectured to a tiny group of scholars’. I hope that—since I occasionally find myself borrowing from him and frequently find myself arguing with him—I may count myself as one of the ‘tiny group of scholars’ for whom Lewis wrote. And perhaps, by arguing with him again here, I may persuade some of you of the enduring interest of his work.

One of the most significant trends within linguistics in the 1970s has been the move away from the formalised models of language introduced by Chomsky towards an account of language that incorporates functional premises. As Charles Fillmore put it, in a 1972 paper, the emphasis on formalisation needs to be balanced by a consideration of what exactly it is that linguists want to formalise. Putting this another way, a contrast can be drawn between the stress laid in the 1960s on the specification in formal terms of the common factors that underlie utterances (on the similarities – deep or surface – between the sentences of a language, and on the similarities – the formal and substantive universals – between different languages) and the stress laid in the 1970s on the specification in functional terms of the differences between language forms, as captured by such notions as dialect, style, level, etc.