In this paper there is some old news, but not, I hope, stale news. I shall reiterate the view that the dominant aim of education is to contribute to the good life for individuals, an aim expressed by J. S. and Harriet Mill in their famous essay On Liberty. But the paper is not stale news because it is no longer commonplace to defend individualism. The Mills' essay now appears to be a subversive document. Secondly, characterizing the good life at least partly in terms of ‘self-cultivation’ and ‘self-perfection’ seems anachronistic. Conceptions of the good life have changed. Thirdly, On Liberty was subject to sustained criticism by James Fitzjames Stephen, and some of that criticism requires modification of some of the views expressed by the Mills.

To discover David Hume's views on women it is necessary to bring together remarks scattered somewhat sparsely throughout his philosophical and historical writings. Although the titles of Hume's major works might suggest that he was describing the understanding and nature of all human beings, both male and female, in none of the works do we find a specific section devoted to an analysis of sexual differences in these two respects. There is a tidy chapter on female morality in A Treatise of Human Nature, but nothing comparable for female nature as such (T, 570–573). This omission does not, however, imply that Hume thought that biological differences had no concomitants in character and understanding. Neither, despite Hume's bantering remark that an essay on a ‘Subject so little to be understood as Women’ would be ‘unintelligible’, does this neglect imply that Hume was uncertain about these attendant differences (L, i, 45). Hume's exclusion of such a section seems to stem only from his desire to stress human uniformity, not from any lack of recognition of human variety. Because of the absence of any systematic treatment of the subject by Hume, it is necessary to proceed cautiously in interpreting his remarks on women. There is a further reason for caution in that Hume offers ‘jests and pleasantries’ as well as more serious comments on this subject; Hume, on occasions, gallantly woos his so-called ‘favourites’, his female readers, and when he does so sincerity is gallantly put aside.

My question is whether a prevalent conception of morality can admit the existence of moral delusion. The conception of morality I refer to is that of a set of rules, or principles, ‘accepted’ or ‘assented’ to by persons, which stipulate that certain kinds of human act or behaviour are permitted, or required, while other kinds are to be avoided. This conception of morality can be found virtually everywhere, outside as much as within philosophy, in anthropology, sociology, political studies, history, literary criticism, psychology, and law. But it is to a particular philosophical instance that I shall attend here. The instance in question is an essay by Jonathan Bennett which appeared in this journal seven years ago under the title ‘The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn’. My reason for addressing myself to Bennett's paper will become clear as I proceed.

To be truly provocative and outrageous the superior philosophical sophistry will commonly possess four somewhat adventitious features. I shall rate it as classic if it has all four. First, and least adventitiously, the argument will be crisp and initially seductive. Second, by the standard the sophistry sets direct rebuttal will be laborious and diffuse. Third, the recipe for the latter will prescribe that we pick out some hitherto unarticulated logical principle (e.g. ‘Existence is not a real predicate’) such that if the principle be true then the sophistical argument must be invalid, and then, on the strength of that consequence assume the principle to be true. Consequently and fourth, as an antidote parody is supreme. With a persuasive absence of fuss and bias we can turn the tables if we show that, if the sophistical argument were really valid, then some structurally similar argument would prove just as consummately far too much. In short, from the rhetorical point of view at least, Gaunilo is more lethal than Kant. Even if the similarity is defective, the sophist will lose some of his adventitious and insufferable poise, if he ventures to show why.

A work of art is something which is unlike anything else. It is art which, best of all, gives us the idea of what is particular.

A British historian might be excused for looking slightly askance at any collection of recent books relating to the philosophy of history. This is because we have been told, several times over and by distinguished members of the profession, that such speculative and analytic activity has little, if anything, to do with the actual business of historiography. One of the most forthright warnings was delivered on the very first page of Professor G. R. Elton's The Practice of History (1967), when we were advised that: ‘Every new number of History and Theory is liable to contain yet another article struggling to give history a philosophic base, and some of them are interesting. But they do not, I fear, advance the writing of history’. For Elton, therefore, there could be little point in granting his colleague in another discipline the right to assess the cognitive claims of historiography. The historian himself, and he alone, was qualified to determine, for all practical purposes, the aims and applications of historical method. It was left to the late Arnold Toynbee to diagnose (in Toynbee on Toynbee, 1974) the dangers in this protectionist approach. He claimed that Elton was ‘trying deliberately to create a closed circuit of “professional” historians’ which was, in his opinion, ‘fatal to any form of study’. But of course Toynbee's own lack of standing within the historical profession could be put forward as a telling index of the dangers of transgressing the barriers between history and philosophy.