‘Hostility to psychologism’, John McDowell writes, 'is not hostility to the psychological. ‘Psychologism’ is an accusation. But it may be either of several.

The psychologism McDowell is master of detecting is, as he sometimes puts it, a form of scientism. It is a priori psychology where, at best, only substantive empirical psychology would do. It often represents itself as describing the way any thinker (or any empirical, or language-using one) must be; as describing requirements on being a thinker at all. But it misses viable alternatives. It is just speculation as to how we are.

Recent considerations of mind and world react against philosophical naturalisation strategies by maintaining that the thought of the world is normatively driven to reject reductive or bald naturalism. This paper argues that we may reject bald or ‘thoughtless’ naturalism without sacrificing nature to normativity and so retreating from metaphysics to transcendental idealism. The resources for this move can be found in the Naturphilosophie outlined by the German Idealist philosopher F.W.J. Schelling. He argues that because thought occurs in the same universe as thought thinks, it remains part of that universe whose elements in consequence now additionally include that thought. A philosophy of nature beginning from such a position neither shaves thought from a thoughtless nature nor transcendentally reduces nature to the content of thought, since a thought occurring in nature only has ‘all nature’ as its content when that thought is additive rather than summative. A natural history of mind drawn from Schellingian premises therefore entails that, while a thought may have ‘all nature’ as its content, this thought is itself the partial content of the nature augmented by it.

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.

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’.

Papers about philosophy, as distinct from papers within it, are like homeopathic medicines – thin in content. We can only hope to provide some substance if we confine ourselves to some particular aspect. The aspect I have chosen to discuss is this. What hope should we have of finding from within this rather curious and academic subject of ours a help in the affairs of life? Could we expect a doctor of philosophy to give practical advice, rather like a medical doctor?

In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’ Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’ which, on the whole, add little to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge. On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself:

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.

In ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Anscombe writes: ‘It is not profitable at present for us to do moral philosophy. It should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’. In consideration of this Anscombe appeals to the relation of ‘brute-relative-to’ which holds between facts and descriptions of human affairs. This paper describes the reorientation in philosophy of action that this relation aims to effect and examines the claim that this reorientation makes possible the sort of philosophy of psychology that can provide a starting point for ethics.

The work of Jürgen Habermas has been described as eclectic. It is also prolific. Fortunately for his readers the prolificacy and eclecticism of the author are mitigated by the recurrence of his themes. These concern the emergence and nature of modern occidental society, both from a sociological and philosophical perspective. On a more philosophical level, there is also a strong plea for a paradigm change. The philosophy of the consciousness made the lone subject, in search of knowledge, face the external world. The dialogic philosophy of Habermas sees interlocutors engaged in dialogue about the material, social and internal world and their many aspects. Furthermore, there are many fruitful sidelines: the nature of language, the personality structure of the individual, socialisation and the status of the social sciences. All these various strands are woven into a coherent model of the nature of western civilisation. In the recombination of the contributory constituents, derived from American pragmatism, German Idealism, Hermeneutics, Marxism, the Frankfurt School of Sociology and Systems Theory, lies the originality and breadth of his work.

Sport builds character. If this is true, why is there a consistent stream of news detailing the bad behavior of athletes? We are bombarded with accounts of elite athletes using banned performance-enhancing substances, putting individual glory ahead of the excellence of the team, engaging in disrespectful and even violent behavior towards opponents, and seeking victory above all else. We are also given a steady diet of more salacious stories that include various embarrassing, immoral, and illegal behaviors in the private lives of elite athletes. Elite sport is not alone in this; youth sport has its own set of moral problems. Parents assault officials, undermine coaches, encourage a win-at-all costs mentality, and in many cases ruin sport for their children.