Explanation of cognition as a special way of being appears in Aristotle without traceable ancestry. Earlier, in Parmenides (Fr. 16; DK, 288) and in Empedocles (Fr. 108; DK, 318), the notion that cognition is somehow equated with the physical constitution of the knower at any given moment had been put forward. But the now rather enigmatic fragments of those thinkers fail to show how this notion foreshadowed any new kind of being over and above the physical. In fact, would it not seem incongruous to use the term “being” for something proposed by them in terms of change? ·

We talk of the differences between the old Camus and the new Camus. Often such talk is equivalent to talk of the differences between Camus’ old self and Camus’ new self, between Camus’ diachronous selves. In other contexts, contexts which I shall ignore, the old and the new Camus is something we can read, provide literary criticism of, ponder over. In these contexts it is to the literary works of the old and new Camus that we are referring. The same kind of ambiguity attaches to the expressions ‘the early Beethoven’ and ‘the later Beethoven’.

In most discussions of civil disobedience, certain characteristics are offered as essential to an act of justifiable civil disobedience, or sometimes to any act of civil disobedience. Among these one of the most frequently mentioned is nonviolence. Some thinkers, like Bedau and Wasserstrom, require an act to be nonviolent before they will even count it as an act of civil disobedience; the very concept for them includes the notion of nonviolence. Others, like Stuart Brown, Rex Martin and Michael Bayles, admit the possibility of a violent act of civil disobedience; but hold that, though nonviolent civil disobedience is justifiable, violent civil disobedience is not justifiable.

Some recent writers on practical reasoning have had it that reasoning about what to do differs in logical structure from theoretical reasoning. In particular, Anthony Kenny and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that there are permissible inferences in practical reasoning which lack analogues in theoretical reasoning. Such discussions seem inevitably to draw their impetus from what Aristotle had to say on the topic, both in the Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere.

The idea of equality exerts considerable influence on our moral imaginations, yet it has remained philosophically elusive. Although men and women have thought equality worth dying for, philosophers have been largely unable to give any systematic account of its importance as a moral ideal, or of its function in moral and political theory.

Functional words are of substantial interest in moral philosophy because they appear to lie at the juncture of description and evaluation. This is no doubt the reason that they have played a significant part in much recent discussion of the relation between facts and values. Yet, in spite of the many discussions in which functional words have made an appearance, their significance for an understanding of the relation between facts and values remains unclear. A thorough-going examination of the nature of functional words would appear to be in order. And while such a study is beyond the scope of a single article it should nevertheless be possible to make a beginning. That, at any rate, is my objective in what follows.

In The Nature of Necessity (Oxford, 1974), Alvin Plantinga asserts (1) that “the number 7 exists necessarily and Socrates does not.” (p. 212) This is, to my way of thinking, reasonable enough. Unhappily, (1) cannot be reconciled with Plantinga's further claims that (2) an object x has a property P essentially or necessarily (on page 14 Plantinga tells us that he employs these expressions “as synonyms”) if and only if x has P in every world in which x exists and (3) existence is itself, although not “an ordinary property,” nevertheless a property.

First, I wish to thank Professor Carter for his comments. They do contain some misunderstandings, however, some of which I shall try to straighten out.

In “Physicalism and the Evolution of Consciousness” Roland Puccetti argues that the simultaneous isomorphism between mental and physical events required by the identity theory confers no selective advantage on organisms manifesting it, and in consequence is rendered at least implausible, if not simply false, by the theory of natural selection. We shall try to show that his arguments are defective.