It was in 1792 that Kant published the first Book of his most important single work on the philosophy of religion—Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. But it was his very interesting treatment of the biblical material in the second Book that involved the philosopher in his one serious conflict with official authority. Greene and Hudson give a good account of this conflict and its effect on the work as a whole in the introduction to their translation of Religion in the Harper Torchbook Series (1960).

Many philosophers have declared that everything which exists is a particular. There is a weak interpretation of this doctrine which I believe to be a true proposition, and a strong one which I believe to be false.

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1972) is an extremely long and elaborate work. But despite the length and the elaboration there is at the heart of the work a crucial set of unargued assumptions which need to be challenged. When this is done we are in a position to provide additional support for the critical conclusions of several other commentators who concentrate on other features of Rawls's system.

The theory of personal identity should illuminate and be illuminated by the theory of personality, of which it is a part. I believe that Locke's theory succeeds in this more than that of any other great philosopher, and the modifications which it may need are not fundamental ones. The problems raised by Butler and Flew can be made to disappear.

In the twenty-five years since philosophers began to bemoan ‘the dreariness of aesthetics’, students in Wittgenstein's wake have done a great deal to eliminate the grounds of the complaint. Unfruitful essentialist theories have been largely displaced by the vigorous, if somewhat uncontrolled, growth of an enterprise which attempts to characterize and explicate aesthetic phenomena outside the desert of definition. The resulting view portrays typically aesthetic concepts as being indivisibly characterizing and evaluative, relativistic in application, necessarily linked to human attitudes, irreducible to non-aesthetic concepts, and yet as having social conditions which make them capable of intersubjective comparison and test. These characteristics are usefully summarized in saying that aesthetic concepts are concepts of appraisal. The theory of aesthetic appraisal discussed here is clearly incompatible with views which postulate dichotomies between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and value, and it is quite analogous to ‘descriptivist’ theories in ethics which reject these absolute distinctions. Moral examples are thus often useful for explicating the notion of aesthetic appraisal and the theory embodying that notion likewise has an important bearing on contemporary controversies in ethics.