One of the purposes of this paper is to explore a number of questions which-to judge from what he assumes–Aristotle might well have asked, but which he apparently did not ask. It is often informative in the history of philosophy to point out the (apparently obvious) questions which are not raised; it sets those which are raised in a more precise frame.

It can be argued that Aristotle implies that it is possible to look like a human being–and indeed be called a human being–without “really” or “fully” being one. Leaving aside the status of females (who for Aristotle are males manques, analogous to the blind or deaf, and of children, we cannot be certain that all adult males of the class whose members look like men “really” are men.

It has long been believed that if man had a special function appropriate to him, and that if we could discover what it was, then we would be in a perfect position to solve all of the basic problems of ethics. For if we were, for example, shovels, and knew ourselves to be shovels, then we would also know that to spend our lives in digging would best serve our fundamental interests, realize our highest aspirations, and be in every respect the correct thing to do. Or so the theory goes; a theory which is shared, interestingly enough, by Aristotle and Sartre, even though they share little else, and even though one of them believes that man has a function and the other does not.

In his paper “The Meaning of a Word” J. L. Austin argues that a set of questions and (hence?) a set of answers to these questions is nonsensical. The philosophical claim that a question or answer is nonsense is an important part of the philosopher's stock and trade; for to ask and to propose answers to nonsensical questions is to reveal confusion and the tracking down and unraveling of confusion is one of the valuable contributions that philosophy has to make in the advancement of understanding.

At the same time one must not accept too easily the charge that a question or a form of answer to a question is nonsensical, for to do this is to block off a whole avenue of inquiry and therein direct one's efforts away from a route that might yield positive results.

People do, quite naturally and not uncommonly, speak of other people as deceiving themselves, as being their own dupes. A man's child is ill and growing constantly worse. The father keeps talking optimistically about the future, keeps explaining away the evidence, and keeps pointing to what he insists are signs of improvement. We can easily imagine ourselves deciding that he has deceived himself about his son's condition. Nor is it the case that talk of self-deception is appropriate only in connection with other people. We can easily imagine the father admitting, say, after the son's death, that he has deceived himself about the child's condition. Thus the notion of self-deception obviously has application. Furthermore, ordinarily talk of self-deception is not thought to be puzzling.

One might want to say that the difference between an apple and the colour red is a greater difference than that between an apple and a pear, between red and blue. In the same vein, one might want to say that the philosopher's question “What, really, is a piece of wax?” has greater generality than the more ordinary question “What distinguishes a piece of wax from a piece of soap?” I think Wittgenstein would say that to talk in this way (and it is the same way in each case) is to make the difference at issue seem too slight, so that we fail to see what the difference really amounts to.

I should like to suggest that the following thesis is pervasive and fundamental in Wittgenstein's later teaching.

According to an accepted view of the nature of evaluation, which many trace to Hume, knowledge does not provide us with the criteria for judging whether something is good. For this, it is said, we need something like a pro-attitude such as C. L. Stevenson argues for, or a decision such as R. M. Hare argues for. Some act of the will is required to create the criteria for evaluation. I shall argue against this view. I shall argue that the criteria for evaluating something are identical with the criteria for classifying it and that, therefore, the knowledge which provides us with the criteria for classification provides us with the criteria for evaluation.

In Section I, I give a brief account of the way in which knowledge provides the criteria for a classification and the significance of borderline cases and degree differences in classification. In Section II, I develop the idea of degree differences in classification and tie it to the idea of evaluation. In Section III, I defend my account of evaluative criteria by contrasting it with R. M. Hare's account, and I argue that the criteria for the class concept of man are at the basis of moral evaluation. I end with a brief illustration of my thesis from Kant's Metaphysics of Morals.

Philosophical theses are sometimes assailed from so many sides that, even if they have not been refuted, it becomes difficult for them to gain a fair hearing. A case in point seems to be the thesis that the sentence ‘Every event has a cause' (commonly known as the Causal Principle) may on occasion be used to assert something which, as a matter of contingent fact, is either true or false. In the interests of logical chivalry, I want to take up its defence.

My aim, it should be noted, is not to defend the truth of the Causal Principle, to claim that our world is one in which every event is causally determined by another event or set of events. So I shall have nothing to say about the arguments of those who—like the quantum physicists, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Born—claim to have shown that the Causal Principle is false; claim, that is, that our world is fundamentally indeterministic. My concern is only to establish the right of determinists and indeterminists alike to take seriously the question whether our world is in fact one in which every event has a cause.

Consideration of the counting and reidentification of particulars leads naturally enough to the orthodox doctrine that, “on pain of indefiniteness,” an identity statement in some way involves or presupposes a general term or “covering concept”: i.e., that the principium individuationis or criterion of identity implied depends upon the kind of thing in question. Thus it is said that an auditor understands the question whether A is the same as B only in so far as he knows, however informally or implicitly, the answer to the supplementary question, “The same what?”

rests in part on the twin claims that the best reason we have for belief in other minds is the analogical argument, and the best reason we have for belief in God is the teleological argument. The conclusion also rests on Plantinga's analyses of these two arguments, which show that both fail for very similar reasons. Thus the beliefs based on these arguments are “in the same epistemological boat,“ and Plantinga draws his conclusion. This is, as James Tomberlin says, “an ingenious argument for the conclusion that belief in God is justified in the absence of any good reason whatever.“

In this paper I wish to consider the two claims mentioned above, that the best reasons we have for belief in other minds and belief in God are the analogical and teleological arguments, respectively.

As little as a decade ago most moral philosophers still believed that the exercise of their craft did not include defending positions on actual moral problems. More recently they have come to their senses, one happy result being a spate of articles in the last few years on the subject of abortion. These discussions have contributed much toward an understanding of the abortion issue, but for the most part they have not attempted a full analysis of the morality of abortion. Such an analysis is too large a task for a single paper, but a sketch of it will be undertaken here, the details to be filled in elsewhere.

In “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental,” Richard Rorty argues that although there is no characteristic that marks off everything that is mental, the contents of the stream of consciousness (thoughts and sensations) may be considered as that which is paradigmatically mental, and they are distinguished by the fact that sincere first-person reports about them are currently treated as incorrigible. (From now on, “incorrigible” will stand for “treated as incorrigible.“) He adds that “beliefs, desires, moods, emotions, intentions, etc.“ (p. 491) are also taken to be mental because reports about them are almost incorrigible.

Professor Sikora rightly says that the claim that there might turn out to be no mental events turns on finding some mark of the mental “such that certain events could be mental at one time and then cease to be mental at another time.” This sounds paradoxical, but perhaps the paradox can be mitigated as follows. On the view that I want to recommend, “being mental” resembles “being a capital crime.” One might want to say that there never were any such crimes—for there never were any acts which deserved death. Or one might want to say that there used to be such crimes, but that now, thanks to new legislation, there no longer are.

Richard Robinson has argued that “no consistent and useful and desirable meaning” can be given to the philosophical terms “corrigible” and “incorrigible” so long as one espouses a bivalent theory of truth with the law of excluded middle operative. The crux of his argument is that the corrigibility-incorrigibility distinction can be shown to be redundant since, in effect, incorrigibility is materially equivalent to truth and corrigibility materially equivalent to falsehood. Robinson understands the correcting of a proposition to consist in “abandoning one's belief in a false proposition and adopting its true contradictory instead. “ But given that it makes no sense to speak of correcting a true proposition, all true propositions are incapable of emendation simply by virtue of their being true, and all incorrigible propositions are by definition true.