I find myself in profound disagreement with Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion and hence in disagreement also with those philosophers who have undertaken to elaborate and defend Wittgenstein's position. My principal objection is to the idea that religion is a language-game (or perhaps that each religion is a language-game) and that because of the kind of language-game it is, religious believers are not to be thought of as necessarily harbouring beliefs about the world over and above their secular beliefs. I reject this position, not because I think that there are language-games and that religion happens not to be one, but because I find the very idea of a language-game to be indefensible. Put another way, I find myself out of sympathy with the recent idea that in philosophy of religion we ought to be discussing something called ‘religious language’ or ‘the kind of language involved in religious beliefs’.

There are some people whose actions are much more often good than evil. If their infrequent immorality does not cause much harm, it is reasonable to regard such people as morally good. Nevertheless, moral goodness remains an elusive quality, because it is difficult to identify good actions. Motives, consequences, knowledge of alternatives and of the conventions prevailing in the context, the agent's history, character, and information all have a bearing on whether particular actions are good. These facts are not easy to ascertain in any case, but when we are looking for a pattern formed of countless good actions over a lifetime, the difficulties are compounded.

Objectivity is not the same thing as independence from the mind. Because the word ‘mind’ has been used to cover myriad things from pains to practices, care must be taken as to just what it is independence from which is in question. The gut notion of objectivity is captured in an anecdote from the life of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and a political colleague were discussing how to get a policy across and the colleague suggested labelling the policy in a certain way; they happened to be near a donkey and their dialogue went like this:

‘Sir, how many legs does this donkey have?’

‘Four, Mr. Lincoln’

‘And how many tails has it?’

‘Why, just one, Mr. Lincoln’

‘Tell me, sir, what if we were to call the tail a leg; how many legs would the donkey then have?’

‘Five, Mr. Lincoln’.

‘No, sir; for you cannot make a tail into a leg by calling it one’.

The history of philosophy provides part of the history, or pre-history, of the social sciences. As they were struggling into being, or even before they existed, philosophy was hammering out some of the conceptual tools, lines of approach and basic hypotheses. One of the constantly recurring themes in the history of philosophy which has a direct bearing on the social sciences is the relationship between mind and matter.

There is no right to blackmail. So says the law and so say most moral observers. A few libertarian voices have been raised in defence of blackmail (e.g. Mack) but such a defence is liable to be treated as a reductio of the defender's own free market philosophy. However, it is surprisingly difficult to say just what is wrong with blackmail.

The general context of this writing is that of finding exits both from dualism and from reductive physicalism. Dualism—the attitude of seeing and taking things according to a fixed absolute distinction, with mind as invisible, conscious ‘containing’ the thought, feeling and sensation ‘hidden’ by body. Reductive physicalism—the attempt to grasp and be satisfied with body as left over by dualism's rape of its mentality, dualism's refusal to recognize the distinctiveness of point of view, as requiring a bodily mentality. Physicalism finally supplants an ‘inner life’ within the bodily vacancy after all, as in traditional dualist image, but now understands that ‘inner’, ‘conscious’ life in the terms pertaining to processes in the brain, rather than as deeds, passions, thoughts, reasoning as within the general ‘imaginary’ of our several minds.