We would be very far from doubting the sincerity of the majority of our politicians or their integrity. People, in Britain at least, who actually meet politicians from all parties are often pleasantly surprised. They usually find ordinary and sometimes quite able people trying to do their best in difficult circumstances, rather than the monsters of sleaze, hypocrisy and self-centredness of the caricatures. Nor is it the place of Philosophy to criticize the policies of governments, particularly not those of democratic governments, popular in themselves and with popular mandates.

What, though, does seem a disturbing contemporary trend is for political leaders to present themselves as articulating the feelings of a whole people, particularly when this is over specific issues or events. Should a whole people have just one feeling? What happens to those within the society who do not share the feeling? Are they still part of the ‘people’? Do they have to hide and go underground? And should politics be driven by feeling, however sincere, however worthy, rather than by reason and dispassionate analysis? Whatever is the case with politics, philosophy involves reason and dispassionate analysis. It is at this point that the philosopher may find him or herself at odds with popular feeling, particularly with feelings of the synthetic sort political spinners are tempted to whip up. It is then that the philosopher may find him or herself a stranger in his or her own land, perhaps not for the first time this century.

Thomas Nagel

Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Among his books are The View From Nowhere, Equality and Partiality, and most recently, The Last Word.

Rom Harré

Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College Oxford and Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. His published work includes studies in the philosophy of the physical sciences, such as Varieties of Realism (1986) and in the philosophy of psychology, such as The Singular Self (1998).

Clifford Williams

Teaches philosophy at Trinity College in Illinois. Recent articles on time have appeared in The Philosophical Quarterly, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy.

Gerald Vision

Professor of Philosophy, Temple University. His most recent book is Problems of Vision: Rethinking the Causal Theory of Perception.

Lisa Van Alstyne

Graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh.

John R. Gibbins

Principal Lecturer at the University of Teeside and a member of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has degrees from London, Durham and Newcastle Universities. He publishes in the fields of Victorian Philosophy and postmodernism.

The apparent conceivability of a zombie — a physically indistinguishable duplicate of a conscious person that nevertheless lacks consciousness — seems to show that the relation between brain processes and conscious experience is contingent. But this is probably an illusion of contingency, due to the limitations of our current concepts and tricks of the first-person imagination. The mental is at present conceptually irreducible to the physical, but the strict supervenience of the former on the latter suggests the presence of a concealed necessary connection, which could become transparent to us only through a third type of concept that we would have to create — as part of a theory that yields the necessary connection between the mental and the physical as a logical consequence. Such conceptual creations have been important elsewhere in the development of science.

One of the roots of anti-science is an implausible account of experiments which opens up a seemingly unbridgeable gap between what it would be rational to believe on the basis of an empirical research programme and what scientists do believe. Post-modernists and others of a similar persuasion, for example Goodman, Rorty, Latour and Gergen, have marched into this alleged gap, insisting that experiments do not probe an independent reality, but create worlds to which they are perfectly tailored. In response I argue that if experiments are understood as working models of parts of Nature, Nature domesticated, then there is no epistemic gap to fill. There are complexities with this thesis that can be resolved by developing a Bohrian account of the experiment as involving an indissoluble union of apparatus and Nature, giving us access, not to occurrent properties of the world but to affordances.

Debate between the A- and B-theories has rested on the supposition that there is a clear difference between A- and B-time. I argue that this supposition is mistaken for two reasons. (1) We cannot distinguish the two conceptions of time by means of Bergsonian intuition. (2) Unless we can do so, we cannot distinguish them at all. I defend (1) by imagining various ways to intuit the two kinds of time, and maintaining that none of them works. I defend (2) by showing that the issue is an experiential one, unlike metaphysical issues that are less connected to experience. My conclusion is that no progress will be made in the debate between the two theories until it becomes clear what the difference is between the two kinds of time.

Some hold that perceptual contents are an unresolvable mixture of what is received from the world and the contributions of our own conceptual resources. This is a broadly Kantian outlook. On some versions, such as that of John McDowell, it is offered as a defense of direct realism. My counterclaims are, first, that the defense works only by underestimating the force of the particular antirealist challenge; second, that we must take more seriously the fact that we share perceptual faculties with other creatures to whom we are unwilling to accord similar conceptual faculties; third, if we dispense with certain unwarranted assumptions associated with notions of the ‘Given’, that the predicament from which Kantianism is supposed to save us needn't arise; and, finally, once we are clear on these matters, and how we may be viewed as selective and selected detectors of scenes, stubborn challenges to direct realism from this quarter should dissipate.

Aristotle's ethical theory is often alleged to be inherently morally conservative — not only in the sense that it reflects the mores of a particular parochial form of society, but also in the sense that it lacks the resources to critically reflect upon the presuppositions of that form of society. Aristotle's ethical theory is thus charged with leaving no room for something upon which “we moderns” have learned to place a preeminent value: namely, the need to subject any merely inherited scheme of values to a process of rational criticism. This paper identifies two of the more compelling versions of this charge and, with respect to each, demonstrates that the charge turns on a misreading of Aristotle's text. The first misreading is shown to derive from a failure to appreciate Aristotle's distinction between virtue of character and practical wisdom. The second misreading is shown to derive from a failure to appreciate the differences between Aristotle's dialectical method and “The Method of Common Sense”. The discussion of these two misreadings occupies the first two sections of the paper. The third and final section tries to show that, far from being insensitive to the need for rational criticism, Aristotle, in fact, assigns to such criticism a fully adequate place in his ethical theory.

The writings of John Grote (1813–1866) are a valuable resource for both historians and those continuing to explore and utilize modern Cambridge philosophy. Grote was the inheritor of the mantle of Cambridge philosophy when appointed to the Knightbridge Chair in 1855 and he transformed and professionalized philosophical studies there. In the Grote Society, and the reform of the syllabus, reading and tutoring of the Moral Sciences, he influenced the next generation of Cambridge philosophers, especially Henry Sidgwick, John Venn, W. K. Clifford and James Ward. Like his successors, Sidgwick, Moore and Broad, he rejected both identification with schools of philosophy and the internecine warfare in and between them, in favour of careful linguistic analysis, boundary commissioning and eclecticism. His patient and respectful analysis of phenomenalism, materialism, positivism, common sense, idealism, utilitarianism, and philology, are typical of an approach, style, method, and way of conducting philosophical conversation, that is characteristic of modern Cambridge philosophy. Claims for connections with the latter work of the above, and Sorley, Russell, McTaggart, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, are explored and supported. That Grote was the younger brother of the Greek historian, agnostic, phenomenalist and Philosophical Radical, George Grote, goes further to make him an interesting, as well as a stimulating philosopher, to engage.

The trouble with Kant, according to Anthony Quinton (Philosophy 72 [1997], 5–18), is that he does not take empirical experience to have any significant role to play in our knowledge of the world. The world we know is constituted through the imposition of a priori forms — space, time, substance and cause — on a ‘wholly passive sensory raw material’ This sensory material does not guide the manner in which the a priori forms are imposed in any way, so that the imposition is ‘entirely arbitrary’. Thus, Kant's ‘account of the matter allows for an indefinitely large number of orders in which our successive manifolds of sensation could be arranged. None of these ways of distinguishing what there is and occurs from what I merely think is and occurs has any priority or superiority to any of the others’ (Quinton, 17–8).

In a recent Discussion in this journal, Quentin Smith seeks to advance the debate between theistic and atheistic accounts of a universal big-bang singularity (BBS) by suggesting a novel hypothesis that explains why the Universe began with a singularity. The hypothesis he proposes is a ‘new law of nature’, which he calls ‘the Law of the Simplest Beginning’ (LSB) and which says that ‘the simplest possible thing [SPT] comes into being in the simplest possible way’ (128; Smith's italics). To make his case, Smith argues that a BBS is the simplest possible thing and that it did come into being in the simplest possible way. (He also argues (129) that a BBS, as the SPT, is unique; but, since I shall not be concerned here with that claim, I use an indefinite article to refer to a BBS.) A BBS is the simplest possible thing, Smith avers, because it has no positive, essential properties (apart from being the simplest possible thing): It has no spatial extension (a BBS is a geometrical point), no temporal duration, no mass, and is governed by no laws (apart from LSB) (128-9). Moreover, Smith says, a BBS comes into existence in the simplest possible way because ‘it has no positive relations to any grounds for coming into existence’ (129): ‘The simplest possible way [for the Universe] to come into existence is to come to exist from nothing (from no previously existing material, no material cause), to come to exist by nothing (by no efficient cause) and to come to exist for nothing (for no purpose or final cause)’ (129).

In 1990 Hilary Putnam wrote that ‘it cannot be the case that scientific knowledge (future fundamental physics) is absolute and nothing else is; for fundamental physics cannot explain the possibility of referring to or stating anything, including fundamental physics itself’ Readers of Philosophy will also be aware of Thomas Nagel's doubts about the ability of our current modes of scientific and philosophical thinking to encompass the subjective at all (expressed most recently in our current issue). Even after the most strenuous efforts of contemporary philosophy of mind, many continue to feel cheated: has anything been said which throws light on just how it is that consciousness, thought and reference are possible? Have subjectivity and the intentionality of thinking been adequately characterized?

Almond, Brenda. Exploring Ethics. Blackwell. 1998. Pp. x and 259. £14.99 or $24.95.

Anderson, Brian C. Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political. Rowman & Littlefield. 1998. Pp. ix and 215. No price given.

Arden, Margaret. (Forward by Elizabeth Spillus.) Midwifery of the Soul. Free Association Books. 1998. Pp. xii and 126. £15.95.

Aristotle. (C. D. C. Reeve, trans). Politics. Hackett. 1998. Pp. lxxix and 288. £27.95, £6.96.

Ashby, Warren. (Foreword by W. Allen Ashby, Ed.) A Comprehensive History of Western Ethics. Prometheus Books. 1998. Pp. 569. £34.

Audi, Robert. Epistemology. Routledge. 1997. Pp. xii and 340. £12.99.

Berkeley, George. (Jonathan Dancy, Ed.) A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. vi and 237. £18.99, £5.99.

Berkeley, George. (Jonathan Dancy, Ed.) Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. v and 186. £18.99, £5.99.

Blachowicz, James. Of Two Minds. SUNY Press. 1998. Pp. xv and 434. $24.95.

Bohm, David. Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. New Edition with New Preface. Routledge. 1997. Pp. xv and 174. £12.99.

Bonjour, Laurence. In Defense of Pure Reason. Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xiv and 232. £37.50, £13.95 or $54.95, $18.95.

Brecher, Bob. Getting What you Want? Routledge. 1997. Pp. x and 217. £11.99

The Good, the True and the Beautiful: Enquiries into Contemporary Value Theory

1998

9 October: David Wiggins

Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Value

16 October: Paul Horwich

Norms of Language

23 October: Bernard Williams

Epistemic Values, Normativity and Naturalism

30 October: Simon Blackburn

Battering, Gilding, and Staining

6 November: John Leslie

The Divine Mind

13 November: Ronald Hepburn

Values and Cosmic Imagination

20 November: David Evans

Beyond Reality: Plato's Good Revisited

27 November: Robert Hopkins

Beauty and Testimony

4 December: Anthony Price

Criticising Values

11 December: Roger Fellows

Enchantment