‘Philosophy’ means love of wisdom. So is philosophy primarily and rightly the province of those traditionally assumed to be wise, namely the old? Aristotle might have subscribed to some view of this sort. For him only those well on the way to middle age had the experience necessary to discourse sensibly on moral and political matters. Plato too, one suspects, would have agreed with something of the sort, albeit for different reasons. In The Republic education in wisdom just took an awful long time.

So what of the younger thinker who, in a burst of revolutionary fervour, changes the course of the subject, figures such as Descartes, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein and Ayer, down to the Young Turks of recent decades? Over recent centuries young philosophers have contributed much to the subject, particularly as philosophy itself has become infatuated with mathematics and science. Could there be a connection? And did any of the young men of philosophy increase in wisdom as they got older? Nietzsche? Russell? Wittgenstein? Ayer?

A cynic might suggest that in the past the very old were thought wise because there were so few of them. But now that the whole population is ageing, can we expect a renaissance of wisdom and a flowering of philosophy? And if not, is it because in the modern world the old characteristically ape the young? T.S. Eliot hinted at a more mundane reason when he asked not to be told

Of the Wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

Is this harsh observation of the narrowness of age as close to the truth as the conventional piety?

David Holdcroft

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Words and Deeds (Clarendon Press, 1978), and of Saussure: Signs, Systems and Arbitrariness (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Harry Lewis

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Leeds. He works in philosophy of mind and on the critique of evolutionary psychology. He has published articles in various journals, including Nous and Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Ilham Dilman

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is author of numerous philosophical books and papers. His last three books are: Language and Reality: Modern Perspectives on Wittgenstein (1998), Love: Its Forms, Dimensions and Pardoxes (1998), and Free Will (1999).

Julia Tanney

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent. She has published articles in the philosophy of mind. Her ‘A Constructivist Picture of Self-Knowledge’ appeared in Philosophy in July, 1996.

Michael Morris

Reader in Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of The Good and the True (Oxford University Press, 1992) and is currently working in the philosophy of language.

Dirk Baltzly

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Stephen Mumford

Lecturer in Philosophy at The University of Nottingham. He is Author of Dispositions (Oxford University Press, 1998) and several papers on metaphysics, including ones published in Philosophical Quarterly, Ratio, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Dialectica.

Whitley R. P. Kaufman

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho. His interests include ethical theory, philosophy of law, philosophy of literature and philosophy of religion.

It has been claimed, notably by Dawkins and Dennett, that there are units of cultural evolution, called ‘memes’, whose survival is explicable in terms of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. They also play an important part in Dennett's theory of consciousness. Memes are distinct memorable units, not atoms, which have vehicles, and whose success depends on the ability of those vehicles to multiply. We argue that even if the theory of memes is structurally isomorphic with the theory of natural selection, it has a very different ontology calling for novel accounts of variation, replication and fitness. We question whether such accounts are plausible, and conclude that memes and their tokenings cannot assume the causal roles they would have to to obey the ‘laws’ of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Much of the popular attraction of as well as hostility to psycho-analysis, as represented in Freud's ideas, come from its iconoclastic, debunking character. What we regard as the higher things of life are, or seem to be, lowered, much of what passes as the normalities of human life are so represented as to appear under a disturbing aspect. Love is reduced to sex, human freedom is represented as an illusion, the human psyche is pictured as forever divided into warring factions with the poor ego trying to keep peace by appeasements, compromises and, where these fail, by evasions and defensive manoeuvres, but without a will or convictions of its own beyond its own preservation. Moral conscience is said to be the internalized voice of a repressive authority in perpetual conflict with unruly instincts. Freud, who named it the super-ego said that it was ‘the representative of all moral restrictions, the advocate of the impulse towards perfection’. He added that it was ‘as much as we have been able to apprehend psychologically of what people call the “higher” things in human life’.

This paper argues that there is something deeply wrong with the attempt to give rule-following explanations of broadly rational activities. It thus supports the view that rational norms are part of the ‘bedrock’ and it challenges the widespread strategy of attempting to explain an individual's rational or linguistic abilities by attributing to her knowledge of a theory of some kind. The theorist who would attempt to attribute knowledge of norms to an individual in order to explain her ability to act rationally is presented with a dilemma: either she is committed to a (vicious) explanatory regress or she destroys the normative nature of these rational practices or activities, thus making it pointless to attribute knowledge of the norms to an individual who participates in these practices. The appeal to tacit or implicit knowledge does not help in avoiding the basic dilemma.

This paper presents a critical analysis of the central argument of Derrida's paper ‘White Mythology’. The crucial claims are that the concept of metaphor presupposes philosophy, that philosophy presupposes the concept of metaphor, and that philosophy cannot accommodate the concept of metaphor. I offer support for the first two claims, explaining the general kind of view of philosophy and of metaphor which they require, but I argue that even if we grant the first two claims, the concept of metaphor only presents a difficulty for a particular conception of philosophy, rather that philosophy as such.

W. A. Hart argues that Martha Nussbaum does not make a convincing case there are genuine moral dilemmas to be found in Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Hart claims that the impossibility of moral dilemmas flows from the Kantian principle that ‘ought implies can’. A certain understanding of OIC does rule out the possibility of moral dilemmas. However, this particular formulation of the OIC principle does not fit well with the eudaimonist framework common to ancient moral philosophy. It emerges that there are trade offs to be made between the ancients' views on the point of moral evaluation and ours. Thus the possibility of moral dilemmas is an issue that in inextricably enmeshed in larger issues in moral philosophy.

A theory of laws is developed that takes from E. J. Lowe the claim of natural laws being consistent with certain classes of exceptions. Neither abnormal cases, such as albino ravens, nor miracles falsify covering laws. This suggests that law statements cannot have the form of a universally quantified conditional. Lowe takes it that this is best explained by natural laws having normative force in the same way as moral laws and laws of the land. I argue that there is a non-normative, descriptivist account that also explains the exception cases and which is preferable, given our reservations about normative laws of nature. I also suggest an improved account of miracles within the descriptivist account.

In a recent edition of the journal Philosophy, Sophie Botros asserts that modern ethical theorists have badly misunderstood the role of the Doctrine of Double Effect, turning it into a device by which to prohibit actions which are deemed impermissible; whereas the true function of the Doctrine is rather one of justifying actions. In my reply, I argue that Dr Botros has misunderstood the Doctrine: that its ‘prohibitive’ and its ‘justificatory’ roles are merely two sides of the same coin, since its function is to decide for a given action whether it is permissible or impermissible. Furthermore, Dr Botros has misconstrued the essential contribution of the DDE is not the balancing of good results against bad ones, but the quite different position that the crucial moral distinction is between intended and merely foreseen results.