Economic man seeks to maximize utility. The rationality of economic man is assumed, and is identified with the aim of utility-maximization. But may rational activity correctly be identified with maximizing activity? The object of this essay is to explore, and in part to answer, this question.

This is not an issue solely, or perhaps even primarily, about the presuppositions of economics. The two great modern schools of moral and political thought in the English-speaking world, the contractarian and the utilitarian, identify rationality with maximization, and bring morality into their equations as well. To the contractarian, rational man enters civil society to maximize his expectation of well-being, and morality is that system of principles of action which rational men collectively adopt to maximize their well-being. To the utilitarian, the rational and moral individual seeks the maximum happiness of mankind, with which he identifies his own maximum happiness.

After almost a decade, the discussion initiated by Professor Edmund Gettier's provocative paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” continues. The most recent contribution to this discussion is Professor John Turk Saunders' attempt to counter Professor Irving Thalberg's claim that a principle that Gettier employs in reaching his notorious negative conclusion is unjustified. I am moved to add to the discussion at this time because it seems to me that the principle in question is unjustified. But more fundamentally, Gettier's argument fails because the putative counter-examples on which it rests fail to make their intended point. I shall discuss these claims in turn.

The epistemic principle which I consider unjustified is the one which Thalberg has called the Principle of Deducibility for Justification (PDJ) and which Gettier formulates as follows: “for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q.”

The problem to be discussed here concerns ontology so far as it may not be formed by scientific theory. In brief terms, the problem arises in the following way. On the one hand, the world surely consists of whatever is there, irrespective of whether human beings are around or not, and irrespective especially of whether human beings have constructed any scientific theories depicting the nature of the world; on the other hand, scientific theories are subject to the limitation that we can never verify them or prove them to be true, so that the ontology prescribed by scientific theory is not firmly established but is only what is attributed to the world by a fallible scientific theory at any given time. The problem could also be put in terms of ‘conceptual networks’ or in terms of language-systems.

W. V. Quine had, in Word and Object, drawn prominent attention to the opacity of the necessity operator, by comparing the sentences

and

Of these, Quine had said, “surely, on any plausible interpretation, (1) is true and (2) is false. Since 9 = the number of major planets, we can conclude that the position of ‘9’ in (1) is not purely referential and hence that the necessity operator is opaque.” The puzzle has generated a good deal of interest, particularly with an eye to the prospects of quantifying in modal contexts. But, given the substantial literature that has sprung up around the issue, it is rather easy to misunderstand the force of any challenge to Quine's account.

What is the source of the hardness of the logical must? What does the necessity of mathematical and logical inference consist in? If I am plotting the curve y = x2 and assume that x = 2 I must conclude that y = 4; no other consequence can be drawn. What is the nature of this ‘must'?

Understanding Wittgenstein's answer to this question is essential to understanding his later philosophy. The question of the nature of logical or mathematical necessity is as fundamental for the Investigations as it obviously was for the Tractatus. Barry Stroud's article “Wittgenstein and Logical Necessity” certainly is still one of the most illuminating and important of the papers dealing with this question.

One of the conclusions reached by Antony Flew in his interesting paper “Is There a Case for Disembodied Survival?” is that “if there is to be a case for individual and personal survival, what survives must be some sort of astral body.” In the present paper I shall investigate whether he is really justified, on the basis of the arguments he presents, in drawing this conclusion.

I feel most flattered by the careful attention which Dr. Roger Smook has devoted to my paper “Is There a Case for Disembodied Survival?” and I am duly grateful to him.

We certainly agree that the most important thing in his reply is his response to my challenge “to show: (a) that there can be a coherent notion of an incorporeal personal being, and (b) that a being of this sort could significantly be said to be the same person as he was when he was a creature of flesh and blood” (p. 139). Smook's response runs: “By a conscious being (henceforth abbreviated ‘CB’) I understand any entity which has an ongoing conscious life of however rudimentary a sort …. I begin by assuming 1.

There are a number of different grounds on which philosophers have argued that the question “Should I be moral?” is unintelligible or at least somewhat odd. Some evidently are unable to understand ‘should’ in any other way than ‘morally ought’, with the consequence that the question can admit of no answer but the affirmative. Others, influenced by the later Wittgenstein, hold that, although ‘should ’-questions have a role within the moral language game, the ‘should’ in the question above has no real function, it is like a ‘machine idling,’ and we can attribute no real sense to it. Now I consider neither of these arguments to be successful or even very plausible, but I do wish to consider a further argument which is logically independent of the above and which appears, initially at least, to be quite plausible.

Lately, the attitude of philosophers generally toward the free will issue has taken what I regard as an inauspicious turn. Where the predominant opinion had been that determinism and freedom were at harmony with one another, today it is incompatibilism which seems to prevail, and new voices raised in defense of libertarianism now offer their promise that problems once thought prohibitive to an acceptance of contra-causal freedom might be surmounted. I shall attempt to show that this recent rejection of compatibilism in fact rests on a mistake, and I shall suggest the outline of a solution to the free will issue which reconciles determinism and freedom.

We shall say that an event is nomologically necessary if and only if given a specified set of conditions (the initial conditions) and the actually existing laws of nature, the statement of that event could in principle be deduced as the conclusion of a valid deductive argument having the statement of initial conditions and the statement of the relevant law(s) as premises.

It is generally agreed that these passages are among the most important to be found in the Tractatus; they give the gist of Wittgenstein 's argument for his atomistic ontology as well as the crucial notion of propositional analysis. It is surprising therefore that most discussions of these entries are cursory and fail to set out the argument in detail.

T. A. Gouge has argued that certain explanations in evolutionary biology should be understood as conforming to the so-called ‘narrative’ model of explanation, where the chief distinguishing feature between this model and the well-known ‘covering-law’ model is that this narrative model, unlike the covering-law model, makes no appeal at all to laws. In support of his case Goudge offered an example of an evolutionary explanation which, he claimed, comes closer to the narrative model than the covering-law model. In a recent paper in this Journal I offered a critique of Goudge's model of narrative explanation, and I suggested that there were good reasons for understanding Goudge's example of an evolutionary explanation as making some kind of appeal to laws (and thus in vital respects conforming to the covering-law model).

Picture-theories of visual perception usually maintain that, when something is simply seen, then (1) the seer “has” a picture of the thing, (2) the thing is the primary cause of the picture, (3) the thing in itself is not the primary object of sight, and (4) it is the picture itself that is the primary object of visual (not thoughtful) awareness.

I shall argue in this essay that there are not only proper, but required, senses in which the first three of these propositions are true, but that the fourth is always false or that one never simply sees (even imagines or senses) the picture. Rather, what is thus seen is always in the picture, never the picture itself. The grounds on which I make this complex point will also undo the time-lag argument, at least in the standard interpretation of it associated with the false fourth proposition above.

Utilitarianism, For and Against contains in a single volume a slightly revised version of An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics which J. J. C. Smart published in 1961, together with a critique of it by Bernard Williams. Stuart Hampshire gives another critique in Morality and Pessimism.* After touching on Hampshire I shall outline what seems distinctive of Smart's utilitarianism then consider Williams’ objections.

If I remember rightly, Bentham wrote an ‘analysis of the effects of Christianity on the temporal happiness of mankind’. In his Leslie Stephen Lecture, Hampshire gives utilitarianism a similar examination. We all know that for its fathers, utilitarianism was not simply a moral theory. They set out to do good in the world. Hampshire acknowledges that for long utilitarianism did much good.