1. There is a tendency nowadays for linguists, philosophers and other theorists of language, to dismiss the notion of an object like the English language or the Polish language as simply mythological or mythopoeic—as of no interest to any serious science of language. Some theorists even appear to deny that there are such things as languages (in the plural). ‘This notion [of a public language] is unknown to empirical inquiry and raises what seem to be irresolvable problems’, Chomsky said in a lecture he gave recently in London (1994).

There has been a time in my teaching career that I used to cite in my introductory classes ‘Moral Philosophy’ from Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (a best seller of the 1970's). The situation leading up to the quote is that the main character, Isadora, is asked a sexual favour by her brother in law, Pierre. Her answer and the subsequent dialogue read then as follows: ‘I can't’, I said. ‘Come on,’ Pierre said, ‘I'll teach you.’ ‘I didn't mean that… I meant that I can't; morally, I can…’

The view that ‘ought’ cannot be deduced from ‘is’, credited to Hume as a major insight into the nature of morality, is surprisingly easy to refute. (1) What they are doing is evil. (2) Therefore, they ought not to do it. Here we have a case of deducing ‘ought’ from ‘is’. The conclusion follows, because ‘ought not’ is analytic to ‘evil’. ‘Ah, but that's just what is wrong with the example: the premise is not a pure “is”; it contains an “ought”, though this does not appear explicitly.’ This is true, of course; the inference would not be valid otherwise. Still, the example shows that the is/ought principle will not do as it stands.

Justice is a constant and perpetual will to give every man his due. The principles of law are these: to live virtuously, not to harm others, to give his due to everyone. Jurisprudence is the knowledge of divine and human things, the science of the just and the unjust. Law is the art of goodness and justice. By virtue of this [lawyers] may be called priests, for we cherish justice and profess knowledge or goodness and equity, separating right from wrong and legal from the illegal. (Ulpian in the Digest of the Roman book of law Corpus Juris, ca 200AD)

A sharp contrast had recently been drawn by one of our Cambridge Professors between Bertrand Russell and Broad1 in respect of their characters and their intellectual and moral careers. We have been told that Russell was several times in prison, married and divorced several times, had several mistresses, was frequently short of money, and very unstable in changing his philosophical views. As far as I know Broad was never in prison for anything. Again, so far from marrying several times, he tells us with some satisfaction in his Autobiography that there was ‘never any risk’ of his ‘catching his foot in the man-trap of matrimony.’ This was one of the reasons why, in contrast with Russell, he was never short of money. Other reasons were that his tastes were simple, and that like his West Country philosophical forerunner, John Locke, and evidently like his Director of Studies, McTaggart, he paid great attention to investment. He was determined to save and invest enough to make himself ‘as soon as possible independent of the vicissitudes of employment’.