At the risk of proving myself such a caviller, I want to ask a question which I have seldom heard raised, and which I have never seen discussed in anything that I have read about Berkeley. If I am right, it poses a problem for his immaterialism, not only different, but coming from a different direction, from those objections that are commonly levelled against him. If I am wrong, it will show how right Berkeley was to stress the difficulty of using for one purpose our language which has become fashioned for another. At least, I hope that I shall not fail to be the ‘fair and ingenuous reader’for whom he asked.

1. What is it according to Berkeley for bodies to exist in the mind? Maybe no simple or single answer to this question fits everything that he says about it in the Principles and Dialogues, but I think he gives or suggests an answer in Principles section 49 that he may have to give or be willing to accept across the board. The trouble is that this answer comes with a fairly high price.

For the Stoic hero, the man or woman of virtue, the conduct of life presents no serious problems. The life of the sage comprises a consistent and effortless flow of actions, all conforming to virtue and all undertaken for the sake of their place in a virtuous life. The Stoic sage has advanced to a point where a life of courage and wisdom, justice and temperance comes easily and naturally, without struggle and without repinings.

1. Relativism has always seemed in some way to flow from, and yet in some way to undermine, a naturalistic attitude towards mind and society. That is true whether one goes back to the modern roots of relativism, in the historical and anthropological perspectives which began to flourish in the eighteenth century; or even further back, to the rather similar development from prehypenSocratic anthropological speculation to the Sophistic discussions which took place in fifthhypencentury Athens. Neither implication—from a purely naturalistic conception to relativism, or from relativism to the rejection of a purely naturalistic conception—is indisputable. I shall argue that neither holds. But each of them can be made to look quite plausible—and in fact both of them simultaneously; amounting in that case to an apparent reductio of naturalism.

This fact about the grammar of selfhypenreference doesn't answer the ontological question, however, of what sort of entity I am in so far as I am a speaker. Thinking about what is presumed in my understanding the concepts ‘one’ and ‘one who is speaking’ tells us this much, that I must be able to differentiate myself from other speakers at the same time as I must be like them. If I cannot differentiate myself from you then of course I cannot refer to myself to begin with. But I must be like you enough to be intelligible to you, and I must know that I am. Otherwise I could not know myself as ‘the one who is speaking’, speaking in the first person to others who also speak in the first person.

The general question to which this paper is addressed is whether knowledge and rationality carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction. Some of those who set out in search of knowledge come to believe as a result of their inquiries that the object of their quest is not what they had taken it to be; seeking to discover the way the world actually is, they are led to conclude that all they can hope to find is a reflection of their own needs and interests; the grail is but a beaker. Similarly, some of those whose aim is to formulate the principles of rational thought are led by reason to deny that any beliefs can be rationally justified; reasons are never reasons for believing but mere epiphenomena, produced by but not producing events whose only begetter is the passions; the quest is just another power struggle. The particular question I wish to ask is whether this picture is an accurate representation of social inquiry.

Hume is not a philosopher who has been viewed, on the whole, with excessive sympathy. Slips and inadequacies of argument, which are the inevitable consequence of human fallibility, are treated by his critics not with charity but with delight; and there are few who think it necessary to state his argument at its strongest before proceeding to refute it. A striking example of this procedure may be found in Antony Flew's paper ‘Another Idea of Necessary Connection’. The example is striking because Flew is normally one of the most sympathetic of Hume's critics and he might have been expected, in dealing with Humes view of causal necessity, to have proceeded with exceptional fairness, the incidental being identified and discarded and the essential view standing forth at its strongest. This, as I shall show, is not what occurs; but first let us consider what we are to take the essential view to be.

In any field it is common practice for an editor who is sent a book for review to put it into the hands of a reviewer who has published a book on the same subject. The reasons are self—vident: not only does the reviewer have specialist knowledge, he is known by the journal's readers to have it, and is likely therefore to be accepted by them as an authority. However, there are arguments against the practice which, though less often considered, deserve to carry the day more often than they do. The mere fact that the new author has written his bookat all means or ought to mean, that he thinks existing books on the subject leave something to be desiredhypenif he has nothing new to say he should have kept silent. But this in turn means that his book is in conflict with or goes beyond, what his reviewer has published on the same subject, and in that sense contains implicit criticism of the reviewer's work. It is this fact that creates the problem. For if the reviewer lets such elements in the book pass he will appear to readers who know his own work to be either conceding arguments or condoning what he ought to regard as error, while if he praises them he may appear to be recanting his own positions. In the circumstances what he tends to do is come down heavily on those aspects of the book that differ from his own, and criticize them. Thus it comes about that the sub-text of many a hostile review is less an impartial assessment of the author's work than an oblique defence of the reviewer's. To say this is not to impute bad motives to the reviewer: on the contrary, my point is that it is in the logic of the situation

Recently David Best has advanced the claim that sport is not an art form, and that although sport may be aesthetic, it is not artistic. Such a claim is false and runs counter to ordinary usage and sport practice. On behalf of sport practice, let me cite as an example the world-class Canadian skater, Toller Cranston, who thinks there are such things as ‘artistic sports, those being gymnastics, diving, figure skating’. (I might add trampolining and power- or weight-lifting to this category.) Best claims that athletes like Cranston are conceptually confused and that they endow sport with greater respectability than should be allowed. Ascribing the predicate ‘artistic’ to sport performances reflects ‘barbarous usage’. Why does Best exclude the artistic from the realm of sport? Upon examination of his argument, one finds that this exclusion derives mainly from his concepts of art and sport. He thinks that art has a subject-matter, a content, and that sport does not. Sport is contentless, so ‘sport’ and ‘art’ are two logically distinct regions. But is this so? Are we to accept Best's argument or are we to listen to accomplished, reflective athletes in the area of artistic sports? It seems the most reasonable analytic procedure would be to listen to Cranston's case and decide whether such a piece of intentionalist criticism5 should override Best's premises.