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.

A number of philosophers have defended the view that mental or psychological verbs share a certain distinctive logical feature, though there is disagreement as to exactly what feature it is. Harold Morick has recently accused several of these philosophers (including Brentano, Chisholm and me) of having “ignored or misinterpreted” verbs of a certain kind, in their search for this characteristic trait of mental verbs (normally called “intentionality“).

The verbs he is talking about are those that represent some of a person's activities, which are physical activities but which that person must allegedly be conscious in order to perform. Since a “basic sentence” containing such a verb typically entails the existence of its object's referent, Morick contends, the verb in question fails io count as “intentional” either on Brentano's definition, on Chisholm's, or on mine (each of these three definitions requires that a basic sentence containing an intentional verb not entail the existence of its object's putative referent.). Thus, Brentano, Chisholm and I have failed to make good our claim that all mental or psychological verbs are intentional.

Rights and duties to will to believe have too long been considered an embarrassing indulgence by philosophers who pride themselves on their methodological rigor. A fresh look at William James's work will show how a more robust, though no less analytically rigorous, ethics of belief is possible.

The history of James's ethics of belief is a stormy one, filled with mainly hostile criticisms on the part of others, with seminal suggestions, gropings, and retractions on the part of James himself. At various points in the development of this ethics of belief, one encounters such expressions as “duty to believe,” “will to believe,” and “right to believe,” the last gaining prominence (and the others dropping out of sight) as James grew older.

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.

My paper “On the Indispensability of Intentionality” is faulted on two counts by William Lycan:

1. (i) I fail to show that there are any non-intentional psychological verbs

2. (ii) my argument against eliminative materialism contains a false premiss.

I intend to deal swiftly with Lycan's indictment, as I believe it to be patently insubstantial. The aim, in my paper, of pointing out that there are non-intentional psychological verbs was to show that Lycan and others have been mistaken in believing that every psychological verb is intentional.

I shall respond first to (ii), to Lycan's charge that the fifth premiss of his reconstruction of my argument against eliminative materalism is false, or at least not obviously true. The premiss reads: “If language takes place, it takes place between persons.” The eliminative materialist can reasonably deny this premiss, Lycan maintains, since it “seems plausible” to predict that we will someday be able to explain, with no reference to people's mental states or activities, what language is and how it works. I believe that because this “prediction” is in fact self-contradictory, it casts no doubt whatsoever on the fifth premiss of my anti-materialist argument.

We wish to examine Hartshorne's ontological argument, as formulated in his discussion entitled “The Irreducibly Modal Structure of the Argument.“ The argument is as follows.

We wish to show that, if the above argument is to work, “q” (A perfect being exists“) must be analytic. If it is analytic, Hartshorne is saddled with a contradiction. Furthermore, if “q” is analytic, the argument is irrelevant. (One could take Baier's position on analyticity and argue that “q” is analytic, but tells us nothing about what, in fact, exists, but now the “proof” would not prove that a perfect being exists.)

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).

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.

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.

Can an omnipotent being create a stone too heavy for him to lift? If not, he is not omnipotent. But if so, he is not omnipotent either, since there is something he cannot lift. Hence there can be no omnipotent being. J .L. Cowan's recent reformulation of this paradox of omnipotence (this Journal, vol. III, no. 3, March, 1974) has been sharpened through a number of objections and clarifications, and, in its final form, constitutes a significant problem for the analysis of the concept of an omnipotent agent. I will develop fragments of two systems in which the problem can be defined more exactly, and try to indicate some formal guidelines within which constructive steps towards a solution may be possible. I will argue that the paradox shows the need for a special kind of restriction on omnipotence that can be distinguished from some related restrictions.

Can one deny the intelligibility of “extramental nonbeing” in pure ontology while affirming its intelligibility in physics? When one sweeps the heavens clean of matter does one also necessarily affirm the existence of absolute nonbeing in those “clean” spaces? Does talking about space necessarily mean talking about nonbeing? How could there possibly be “space” which is not absolute nothingness? How, if at all, can statements about space be reconciled with such self-contradictory statements as “What is not, is“?

The purpose of this brief paper is not to argue, within the context of the physical sciences, about whether or not there exist voids or absolutely empty spaces in the universe. Neither is it to discuss the existence or nonexistence of the aether. And although I shall be using texts taken from several famous historical figures, my purpose is not primarily historical.

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.

In his Generalization in Ethics, Marcus Singer distinguishes between individual and collective consequences. According to Singer, the collective consequences of everyone's acting in a certain way is for certain kinds of acts not the sum of—or, more exactly, is greater than the sum of—the individual consequences of each individual act. The point is put more straightforwardly by Sir Roy Harrod:

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.

It is customary to dismiss such queries as ‘Can God create a being he cannot control?’ and ‘Can God create a knot he cannot untie?’ with the comment that such questions in fact fail to specify a task for God to perform. The reason given is that omnipotence is included in the idea of God, with the alleged result that such expressions as ‘a being God cannot control’ and ‘a knot God cannot untie’ contain contradictions. J .L. Cowan has argued that this conventional response is mistaken, and subsequently expanded upon this contention in reply to some of its critics. I shall try to show that Cowan's defense of the coherence of expressions like these is mistaken, and with it his conclusion that since an omnipotent God clearly cannot perform such tasks the concept of omnipotence is self-contradictory.

Cowan has no quarrel with one assumption of the customary reply. If the specification of a task is self-contradictory, he agrees that the inability of God to perform it is no blemish on his omnipotence.

This article is a selective review of David Lewis's Counterfactuals (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), a challenging, provocative, absorbingly interesting attempt to analyze statements of the form “If it were the case that P, then it would be the case that Q.” I shall follow Lewis in calling these “counterfactuals,” and shall nearly follow him in abbreviating them to the form P→Q.

Chapter 1, which is nearly a third of the whole, gives the analysis and proves that it endows counterfactuals with some properties which they evidently do have. Chapter 2 presents some “alternative formulations” of the analysis—a logical jeu d'esprit which I shall not discuss except for the section ( § 2.6) about “cotenability.”