IN delivering this lecture I am to speak on some aspect of truth. The practice of examining the various contexts in which a word may be used, in order to disclose what its usages have in common as a clue to its meaning, is of respectable antiquity. If I indulge this practice I find an “embarras de richesse” in modern philosophical literature under two headings, the truth of analytic propositions and the truth of synthetic propositions: the first deals with criteria of consistency and the second with criteria of verifiability.

Professor Ayer's new book1 is of very great interest. All the discussion is skilful, much of it is ingenious; the arguments ramify, but never get out of control; the prose is pleasant, the presentation polished and civilized. Once before, Professor Ayer investigated the foundations of empirical knowledge; and the central topics of his new book are, to a large extent, the same as those of his earlier one. These are topics which have been much discussed since 1940. Ayer takes account of many of these discussions, and his views, in consequence, have changed. They have not changed quite so radically as one might have expected. Ayer thinks that the old-style sceptic ought still to be given a run on the old course against the old competitors. If I am not mistaken, it is important to keep this guiding thought in mind in trying to understand his book. For it is easy to glide comfortably over the smooth surface of this prose without noticing transitions and modulations which, in a less expertly composed treatise, might have given one a jolt.

Vladimir JankéLéVitch, who teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne, is one of the most highly individual philosophical writers in France today. He has been publishing books for some quarter of a century on both philosophy and music, of which the most recent, entitled La Rhapsodie: Verve et improvisation musicale, unites his two specialities. It is with his philosophical work that I want to deal here.

The central task to which contemporary moral philosophers have addressed themselves is that of listing the distinctive characteristics of moral utterances. In this paper I am concerned to propound an entirely negative thesis about these characteristics. It is widely held that it is of the essence of moral valuations that they are universalisable and prescriptive. This is the contention which I wish to deny. I shall proceed by first examining the thesis that moral judgments are necessarily and essentially universalisable and then the thesis that their distinctive function is a prescriptive one. But as the argument proceeds I shall be unable to separate the discussion of the latter thesis from that of the former.

The old guard still dominates the German scene. Jaspers leads with three publications, the monumental new volume of P. A. Schilpp's Library of Living Philosophers which appears first in German as Karl Jaspers (W. Kohl-hammer, Stuttgart); the third edition of his Philosophie in three volumes with an important “Postscript 1956” (Springer, Berlin); and the second edition of his Existenzphilosophie also with a new postscript explaining the situation in which these lectures arose (De Gruyter, Berlin). These volumes offer an opportunity for re-examining his philosophy, and are indeed used by himself for this purpose and therefore indispensable to any serious student of his thought. The Schilpp volume naturally offers the greatest amount of new material with its twenty-four contributors who have more or less succeeded in discussing a philosophy of pure reflexion without specific doctrines. They allow Jaspers to clarify his thought, especially concerning the problems of existential communication (in reply to Fritz Kaufmann's elaborate and penetrating defence of a more general theory), of psychology, history and politics.