According to R.G. Swinburne in his ingenious discussion of the Euthyphro Dilemma, God, by which he means ‘the unconstrained, omnipotent, omniscient creator and sustainer of the universe’ can make actions morally obligatory, right, wrong, good and bad.

In response to this claim I shall concentrate on two issues. The first is whether Swinburne establishes that God is capable of making actions morally wrong. Admittedly much of Swinburne's discussion is couched in terms of whether God can make actions morally obligatory but his remarks about terminology make it abundantly clear that he thinks the same arguments show that God can make actions morally wrong; so in fixing on the latter — less equivocal — notion I shall still be dealing with the substance of his argument. My second concern is the more general one of drawing out and examining some of the implications of Swinburne's account of religious morality.

Swinburne does not hold that God, if he exists, makes all morally wrong actions morally wrong; on the contrary, he maintains that some actions are necessarily wrong, such as torturing innocent children for the fun of it.

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.

In two recent papers Joseph Margolis has sketched a situation, his characterisation of which involves a denial of the ubiquitous contention that knowing that p is logically sufficient for believing that p. There are not many philosophers who would follow him in this denial of what is most usually taken as the only “natural” way of construing knowledge. If Margolis has not succeeded in constructing a counterexample to the official view, and I do not believe that he has, it is of some importance to understand just why he has failed. No epistemological gain is achieved by meeting Margolis with a question begging reply, as I think has been done by his critic, J.A. Barker.

The case the Margolis offers is this:

Edmund Gettier objects to analysing knowledge as justified true belief (JTB) on the ground that someone can justifiably infer a true conclusion from a justified false premise and hence not know the conclusion's truth, although the conclusion is justified. For instance, someone can justifiably deduce a true p v r from a justified but false p, where he has no justification for the true r. Gettier's objection draws on two assumptions: first, that a justified belief can be false; second, that a premise can justify a conclusion even though the premise is false.

Some JTB advocates grant the first assumption but deny the second. They usually concede the first assumption to protect the respectability of non-deductive inference. The argument is that if evidence e can nondeductively justify the conclusion c, then it must be possible for c to be justified and yet false, since e does not entail c. Although the assumption is sound, the argument as it stands fails to show it. But let us set this point aside for the moment.

Avrum Stroll, in his article “Russell's ‘Proof’ “ (this Journal, IV.4, June 1975) makes a number of interesting ——though, as I shall argue, misconceived ——observations about Russell's philosophy of language. The points on which I take issue with Stroll concern, first, his claim that the arguments used in Principia Mathematica (hereafter abbreviated to PM) to distinguish names from descriptions differ significantly from the arguments to the same purpose in My Philosophical Development (MPD); second, his challenge to Russell's view that descriptive phrases acquire meaning by being put into a sentential context; third, his contention that Russell's various attempts to prove that names differ from descriptions are based on fallacious arguments; and fourth, his speculations about the factors prompting Russell to make the assumption that proper names have meaning and that this meaning is independent of any sentential context. I will discuss each of these points in turn.