Few stage plays have much to do with analytic philosophy: Tom Stoppard has written two of them—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Jumpers. The contrast between these, especially in how they involve philosophy, could hardly be greater. Rosencrantz does not parade its philosophical content; but the philosophy is there all the same, and it is solid, serious and functional. In contrast with this, the philosophy which is flaunted throughout Jumpers is thin and uninteresting, and it serves the play only in a decorative and marginal way. Its main effect has been to induce timidity in reviewers who could not see the relevance to the play of the large stretches of academic philosophy which it contains. Since the relevance doesn't exist, the timidity was misplaced, and so the kid gloves need not have been used. Without doubting that I would have enjoyed the work as performed on the London stage, aided by the talent of Michael Hordern and the charm of Diana Rigg, I don't doubt either that Jumpers is a poor effort which doesn't deserve its current success. I shan't argue for that, however. I want only to explain why Jumpers is not a significantly philosophical play, before turning to the more important and congenial task of showing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is one.

Many writers have been struck by what Ronald Melzack, a leading investigator of pain mechanisms, calls the ‘puzzle’ of pain. Thus the surgeon Leriche, often quoted in this connection, says:

Defence reaction? Fortunate warning? But as a matter of fact the majority of illnesses, even the most serious, attack us without warning. Sickness is nearly always a drama in two acts, of which the first takes place, cunningly enough, in the dim silence of bur tissues, with the lights out, before the candles have been lit. When pain makes its appearance, we are almost in the second act…… Pain merely makes more distressing and sad a situation already long lost…… In fact, pain is always a baleful gift, which reduces the subject of it, and makes him more ill than he would be without it (pp. 22–23).

It was in 1792 that Kant published the first Book of his most important single work on the philosophy of religion—Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. But it was his very interesting treatment of the biblical material in the second Book that involved the philosopher in his one serious conflict with official authority. Greene and Hudson give a good account of this conflict and its effect on the work as a whole in the introduction to their translation of Religion in the Harper Torchbook Series (1960).

Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism integral to Zen coincide in a fundamental aspect: for Wittgenstein language has, one might say, a mystical base; and this base is exactly the Buddhist ideal of acting with a mind empty of thought. My aim is to establish and explore this phenomenon. The result should be both a deeper understanding of Wittgenstein and the removal of a philosophical objection to Zen that has troubled some people.

The following objection to the ‘ontological’ argument of St Anselm (Proslogion II) has a continuing importance. The argument begs the question by introducing into the first premise the name ‘God’. In order for something to be truly talked about, to have properties truly attributed to it—it has been said—it must exist; a statement containing a vacuous name must either be false, meaningless, or lacking in truth-value, if it is not a misleading formulation to be explained by paraphrase into other terms. In any case the question of the divine existence is begged.

I wish to discuss some of the problems that arise when we attempt to understand beliefs and actions that are alien to the things we believe and do. This will involve my saying something about the concepts of rationality and understanding so as to provide grounds for a claim I wish to make that we can understand beliefs, or doctrines, and actions that would not count as rational by our standards. I shall further examine a problem, in education, not all of whose perplexities have been resolved by empirical research in conceptual development: the problem of how children with only a limited familiarity with the conceptual frameworks of their own culture can come to understand conceptual frameworks and ways of acting radically at variance with their own. British children, from the ages of eight or nine onwards, hear stories of the lives of the Aboriginals and the Eskimoes, and learn about the Romans, the Vikings and Elizabethan England, the beliefs and prophecies of the Old Testament, moral stories of the classical world and even the characteristics within their own societies of such institutions as monasteries. Not only have they to meet the problems of the historian and the anthropologist of understanding ways of life strange and distant, but they encounter them without the conceptual familiarity with the beliefs and actions of their own society possessed by the former. Lacking settled criteria of intelligibility for understanding their own society, they are asked to develop the criteria of intelligibility necessary to making some sort of sense of societies very different from their own: a situation probably not paralleled in any other aspect of their education.

Many philosophers have declared that everything which exists is a particular. There is a weak interpretation of this doctrine which I believe to be a true proposition, and a strong one which I believe to be false.

Although there are many different philosophical hares that could be started by the use of the term ‘historical fact’ I am interested in pursuing one that is related to the historian's attitude to testimony. By way of preliminary, however, I should say something about my use of the word ‘fact’. A contrast that sets off my use best is probably that between fact and theory. This distinction is at once methodological and epistemological in that it concerns the structure of inquiry as well as the structure of secure belief. As far as inquiry is concerned it is plausible to suppose that an investigation begins with a problem or a puzzle, the delineation of which requires certain data in the form of propositions that are known to be true, or are taken for granted or commonly agreed upon as sufficiently secure to provide a grounding for the inquiry. It is to cover such data that I am using the word ‘fact’ and hence it will not refer to just any true proposition. Theories however stand as the outcome of inquiry and involve generality and inference and classification in a way that facts do not. It is interesting that the term ‘datum’ came into use in English at the same time (the middle of the seventeenth century) that the word ‘fact’, which had meant ‘a deed or action’, acquired the sort of meaning that interests me here.

A good deal of moral criticism employed in everyday life associates, in a variety of ways and in varying degrees of complexity, selfish behaviour and attitudes with a deficiency in what Dr Leavis calls ‘ethical sensibility’. A primitive ethical sensibility is a species of ignorance; it is to be unperceptive, muddled, superficial, undiscriminating and slipshod in one's understanding and appreciation of the nature and quality of one's own and other people's experience. It might involve, for example, being afflicted with sentimentalism; perceiving people through a distorting medium of stereotypes or impressionistically; being dominated by wishful thinking in the Freudian sense; holding beliefs on the basis of hearsay, authority, or because it suits one to hold them; being immersed in situations and relationships whose continued existence requires self-deception; having the sense of one's own worth be wholly dependent upon the opinions of others. A developed ethical sensibility, on the other hand, includes what Professor Peters and others believe to be among the defining characteristics of rationality—impartiality; a caring for clarity, evidence, relevance, consistency and sincerity; a willingness to question authorities, tradition and one's own motives; refusing to be tempted by the cosiness of easy certainties and the stock response. The content of such a sensibility will, of course, depend upon the context in which reason is employed, and attempts to describe the content must take the form of a detailed discussion of particular cases.

In what sense can we not help thinking that every event has a cause? One answer is, that this begs the question: we can think of events as uncaused. Well, we can think of events in isolation from causes, and we can formulate the proposition that some events have no cause, or that no event needs a cause. But the first of these does not constitute thinking of an event as not caused, but thinking of an event not-as-caused (or, not thinking of the event as caused); while the implications of the second, forming anti-causal propositions, are obscure. I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some events are uncaused’; the question is, whether it makes sense to affirm it. Now I can verbally formulate the proposition ‘some triangles are quadrilateral’, and we must not say that this does not make sense; for I know the criteria for being a triangle, and I know the criteria for being quadrilateral; and the proposition simply asserts that there are some figures which satisfy both sets of criteria. That this is logically impossible is true, but it is not unintelligible. It does not, however, make sense to affirm a logical impossibility, simply because I cannot meaningfully affirm what I do not understand and believe to be possible (though of course I can meaningfully affirm what I believe to be false), and if I understand what it means to be both triangular and quadrilateral, I cannot also believe it to be possible, since to understand what it means for a plane figure to have three sides is to understand that this excludes its having any other number of sides, e.g. four. But ‘some events are not caused’ is not logically incoherent in this way, or not apparently so; for in thinking of an event (as opposed to thinking of an effect) I am by definition thinking of a happening (whether caused or not) in isolation from any cause; I am thinking of it not as caused. Thus ‘some events are uncaused’ is not incoherent ex vi terminorum.

In American legal journals over the last decade there were hundreds of pages of articles worrying over threats to justice and freedom arising from the power to withhold benefits. Government officials have tremendous discretion to offer or withhold foreign aid, ration-books, government contracts and jobs, welfare subsidies, public housing, tariff protection, academic grants, alien resident status, paroles, or exemption from conscription or combat, from arrest or prosecution or imprisonment. Right-wing economists have worried about welfare-state emphasis on administrative discretion rather than the rule of law. And left-wing economists have worried about the rich man's power to intimidate the poor man by threatening to cut off his productive work.

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972) is an extremely long and elaborate work. But despite the length and the elaboration there is at the heart of the work a crucial set of unargued assumptions which need to be challenged. When this is done we are in a position to provide additional support for the critical conclusions of several other commentators who concentrate on other features of Rawls's system.