It is often held that movement can be defined in terms of places and times. Thus Russell says:

We must entirely reject the notion of a state of motion. Motion consists merely in the occupation of different places at different times, subject to continuity as explained in Part V (Principles of Philosophy §447).

Philosophy in Africa has for more than a decade now been dominated by the discussion of one compound question, namely, is there an African philosophy, and if there is, what is it? The first part of the question has generally been unhesitatingly answered in the affirmative. Dispute has been primarily over the second part of the question as various specimens of African philosophy presented do not seem to pass muster. Those of us who refuse to accept certain specimens as philosophy have generally been rather illogically said also to deny an affirmative answer to the first part of the question. In a paper presented at the International Symposium in Memory of Dr William Amo, the Ghanaian philosopher who taught in German universities in the early part of the eighteenth century, Professor Odera Oruka identified four trends, perhaps more appropriately approaches, in current African philosophy.

Deep beneath the surface of Kant's theory of knowledge lies the metaphysical doctrine of noumena, things in themselves, intelligible entities. For lengthy periods these creatures are surprisingly unobtrusive and can be safely disregarded. But at certain points Kant hauls them to the surface and tries to put them to work in perplexing ways. My concern is not with these attempts, but with what can be learned, if not salvaged, from the metaphysical doctrine as it is expounded in the chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason entitled ‘The Ground of the Distinction of all Objects in General into Phenomena and Noumena’. I shall start by giving, for the most part in Kant's own words, as blunt an account as possible of how he appears to reduce his own doctrine to nonsense. I shall then argue that such an account, while not straightforwardly wrong, ignores matters of very great interest. I shall do so in terms of two theories, which I distinguish, about the relationship between knowing, changing and conceptualizing. Finally, I shall draw some more and less general conclusions.

The most common view of suicide today is that it is intentional self-killing.1 Because of the self-killing component, suicide is often described as self-inflicted death or as dying by one's own hand, and the victim is in turn often described as having done himself to death or as having taken his own life. But must one's death be self-inflicted in order to be suicide? The answer, I want to suggest, is arguably no.

Most of the standard arguments against the retributive theory of punishment are hardly new. That the retributive view of punishment is but a rationalization of a primitive urge for revenge; that the retributivists, instead of providing an answer to the question about the source of our moral right to add a new evil (punishment) to an already perpetrated one (the crime), simply assert dogmatically that punishment is an intrinsic good, i.e. something that needs no further moral justification; that it is impossible to apply the lex talionis in practice; that the retributivist thesis that the criminal has a right to punishment is absurd, because the criminal himself would be the first to deny that he has any such right; that the retributive theory is incompatible with the claims of forgiveness and mercy; that the practical consequences of the theory are conservative, the theory itself being in fact an apology for the existing laws and the existing social order; that the Hegelian idea of punishment as a ‘negation’ or ‘annulment’ of crime is either unintelligible or essentially utilitarian in character–most of this had been said already in the last century, or even earlier. All these arguments are still in use.1 But in recent literature–in a number of papers published in the last twenty years or so–we find a new argument against the retributive theory. It is only natural that this particular argument should not have been used earlier: methodologically it is typical of a philosophical orientation which emerged only in our century–analytical philosophy.

In ‘Berkeley and God’, Jonathan Bennett diagnoses Berkeley's intermittent advocacy of the proposition that physical things ‘do sometimes exist when not perceived by any human spirit’ (380) by pinning on him the invalid argument, vitiated by the ambiguity of ‘depend’, from (i) all ideas depend on (=belong to, are owned by) some spirit or other, via (ii) some sensible ideas do not depend on (=are not caused by) these spirits themselves, to (iii) some ideas depend on (=belong to, are owned by) non-finite spirits.