Legal theory for the purposes of this essay is the theory of mundane law—that is, our law. The legal system of a modern Western democracy is the phenomenon legal theory is trying to represent perspicuously. Such a legal system may be characterized prephilosophically as an institutionalized normative system. The associated institutions include legislatures, courts, police forces, civil services, royal families, and the like. The associated norms are of three kinds—norms directly enjoining, permitting or proscribing behaviour on the part of the norm-subjectss; norms for facilitating the creation of social arrangements between norm-subjects; norms for the creation, variation, administration, application and enforcement of norms of the first two kinds.

In his book The View from Nowhere, Thomas Nagel says that ‘the subjectivity of consciousness is an irreducible feature of reality’ (op. cit., p. 7). He speaks of ‘the essential subjectivity of the mental’ (ibid., p. 17), and of ‘the mind's irreducibly subjective character’ (ibid., p. 28). ‘Mental concepts’, he says, refer to ‘subjective points of view and their modifications’ (ibid., p. 37):

The subjective features of conscious mental processes—as opposed to their physical causes and effects—cannot be captured by the purified form of thought suitable for dealing with the physical world that underlines the appearances. Not only raw feels but also intentional mental states—however objective their content—must be capable of manifesting themselves in subjective form to be in the mind at all (ibid., pp. 15–16).

Whether one is reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus or his later writings, one must be struck by his insistence that he is not putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses; or by his suggestion that it cannot be done, that it is only through some confusion one is in about what one is doing that one could take oneself to be putting forward philosophical doctrines or theses at all. I think that there is almost nothing in Wittgenstein which is of value and which can be grasped if it is pulled away from that view of philosophy. But that view of philosophy is itself something that has to be seen first in the Tractatus if it is to be understood in its later forms, and in the Tractatus it is inseparable from what is central there, the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown.

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.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ (‘as I am already what I will be …, I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’, ‘I make myself not to be the past … which I am’.) He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure (paradox), or was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely (like many of his Anglo-Saxon contemporaries); for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ (or the everyday ‘I am not myself’) still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men.

This paper raises once more the question of the relationship between philosophy on the one hand and common sense on the other. More particularly, it is concerned with the role which common sense can play in passing judgment on the rational acceptability (or otherwise) of large-scale hypotheses in natural philosophy and the cosmological part of metaphysics. There are, as I see it, three stages through which the relationship has passed in the course of the twentieth century. There is the era of G. E. Moore, the Quine–Feyerabend period, and now a new and modest vindication of common sense is emerging in the work of Jerry Fodor.

What is a natural kind ? As we shall see, the concept of a natural kind has a long history. Many of the interesting doctrines can be detected in Aristotle, were revived by Locke and Leibniz, and have again become fashionable in recent years. Equally there has been agreement about certain paradigm examples: the kinds oak, stickleback and gold are natural kinds, and the kinds table, nation and banknote are not. Sadly agreement does not extend much further. It is impossible to discover a single consistent doctrine in the literature, and different discussions focus on different doctrines without writers or readers being aware of the fact. In this paper I shall attempt to find a defensible distinction between natural and non-natural kinds.

In his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, Raymond Chandler describes the world of the American detective story as ‘a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money making, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety’. Nevertheless, ‘down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.’ What are the possibilities of being such a man (or woman) in the world as we know it? The hero of the American detective story (of the Hammett-Chandler genre) is not only a good man, and a man of honour, but also a man who must get things done. In Dashiel Hammett's Red Harvest he is the man who is sent in to clean up the pig-sty that is Poisonville, and in so doing he becomes poisoned himself. He has a choice between being effective and being good, but he cannot be both together. ‘Poisonville is right’, he says despairingly. ‘It's poisoned me.’

My aim in this article is to make accessible to non-mathematicians the groundwork of the theory of effective methods and unsolvable problems. The beauty of the theory is that it needs hardly any hard work to get very quickly from simple intuitive ideas to some extraordinarily interesting and surprising results.

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 Liar Paradox is a philosophical bogyman. It refuses to die, despite everything that philosophers have done to kill it. Sometimes the attacks on it seem little more than expressions of positivist petulance, as when the Liar sentence is said to be nonsense or meaningless. Sometimes the attacks are based on administering to the Liar sentence arbitrary if not unfair tests for admitting of truth or falsity that seem designed expressly to keep it from qualifying. Some philosophers have despaired of ever beating the Liar; so concerned have they been about the threat posed by the Liar that they have introduced legislation to exclude the Liar sentence and anything like it.