Many writers have been struck by what Ronald Melzack, a leading investigator of pain mechanisms, calls the ‘puzzle’ of pain. Thus the surgeon Leriche, often quoted in this connection, says:

Defence reaction? Fortunate warning? But as a matter of fact the majority of illnesses, even the most serious, attack us without warning. Sickness is nearly always a drama in two acts, of which the first takes place, cunningly enough, in the dim silence of bur tissues, with the lights out, before the candles have been lit. When pain makes its appearance, we are almost in the second act…… Pain merely makes more distressing and sad a situation already long lost…… In fact, pain is always a baleful gift, which reduces the subject of it, and makes him more ill than he would be without it (pp. 22–23).

The following objection to the ‘ontological’ argument of St Anselm (Proslogion II) has a continuing importance. The argument begs the question by introducing into the first premise the name ‘God’. In order for something to be truly talked about, to have properties truly attributed to it—it has been said—it must exist; a statement containing a vacuous name must either be false, meaningless, or lacking in truth-value, if it is not a misleading formulation to be explained by paraphrase into other terms. In any case the question of the divine existence is begged.

A good deal of moral criticism employed in everyday life associates, in a variety of ways and in varying degrees of complexity, selfish behaviour and attitudes with a deficiency in what Dr Leavis calls ‘ethical sensibility’. A primitive ethical sensibility is a species of ignorance; it is to be unperceptive, muddled, superficial, undiscriminating and slipshod in one's understanding and appreciation of the nature and quality of one's own and other people's experience. It might involve, for example, being afflicted with sentimentalism; perceiving people through a distorting medium of stereotypes or impressionistically; being dominated by wishful thinking in the Freudian sense; holding beliefs on the basis of hearsay, authority, or because it suits one to hold them; being immersed in situations and relationships whose continued existence requires self-deception; having the sense of one's own worth be wholly dependent upon the opinions of others. A developed ethical sensibility, on the other hand, includes what Professor Peters and others believe to be among the defining characteristics of rationality—impartiality; a caring for clarity, evidence, relevance, consistency and sincerity; a willingness to question authorities, tradition and one's own motives; refusing to be tempted by the cosiness of easy certainties and the stock response. The content of such a sensibility will, of course, depend upon the context in which reason is employed, and attempts to describe the content must take the form of a detailed discussion of particular cases.

Discussions of moral weakness in recent and even not so recent ethics have generally neglected large areas of the moral life. In some cases, it may be argued, such neglect has been accidental in that the philosopher or philosophers concerned have set out to examine problems thrown up by a class or classes of actions without purporting to present an exhaustive account of moral weakness. In other cases such neglect is pernicious in that if not designed to protect a certain philosophical position it has by the doctrinaire delimitation of the range of examples considered had precisely that effect. This delimitation has often arisen out of unexamined presuppositions as to the nature of moral weakness. They are embodied in the following general framework suggested as an account not of some cases of weakness but of all cases:

In a case of weakness a man does something that he knows or believes he should (ought) not do, or fails to do something that he knows or believes he should do, when the occasion and the opportunity for acting or refraining is present, and when it is in his power, in some significant sense, to act in accordance with his knowledge or belief.

In this paper I ask whether in Aristotle's metaphysical system the form of a non-living sensible substance, such as the form of this house, is or is not universal. I argue that his position as it stands is self-contradictory, and then try to give some account of the pressures that led to this central contradiction in Aristotle's metaphysical thought.

The ways in which mental concepts can seem problematic are various, and consequently the idea of a coherent body of issues forming one part of philosophy, namely the philosophy of mind, is highly misleading. When Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle inaugurated the flood of recent writings about the concept of mind there was some similarity, although not identity, in the problems which led them to concentrate their attention on mental concepts. Wittgenstein saw that lack of clarity about such notions as willing, thinking, feeling and imagining generated powerful but misleading pictures about logic—about the difference between sense and nonsense —so that if we were to become clear about one we should have to become clear about the other. Worries about logic generated his interest in what it is to have a mind. In the case of Ryle, if we are to accept his own autobiographical remarks, an exposition of the logic of mental concepts was undertaken to illustrate whatever clarity had already been achieved by him and others with regard to logic and logical investigations. ‘The Concept of Mind was a philosophical book written with a meta-philosophical purpose’ (Gilbert Ryle, ‘Autobiographical’, in Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Oscar P. Wood and George Pitcher, 1970). Although I think it should be open for speculation just why specifically mental notions were singled out by him for such an illustrative purpose. In each case questions about logic prompted writing about the mind. There remains an echo of this in some of the books under review, but, as often with deepseated changes, the original impetus can soon be lost, and debates about distinctions in which it was first embodied can take on a life of their own.

John King-Farlow's ‘The Positive McTaggart on Time’ (Philosophy, 49, 1974, pp. 169–178) brings out extremely important likenesses between ‘abstract’ metaphysicians and ‘concrete’ philosophers of science. These striking similarities illustrate a perennial human quest for Something More Basic than Time, a quest which characterizes not only mystics who rejoice in contradictions but hard-headed philosophers who submit to the rigours of logic. King-Farlow is largely concerned with the McTaggart of 1908 and his motivation for writing ‘The Unreality of Time’. I should like to explore further the surprising bond between the Search for Something Deeper in the later McTaggart of The Nature of Existence and the writings on Time of Hans Reichenbach and Adolf Grünbaum. Reflection on this similarity should enable us better to evaluate the view that our vulgar, if practically useful, assertions about Time's Arrow must be reinterpreted by the wise in terms of chastened logical constructions out of statements about Something Deeper—logical constructions which are alleged, if chaste enough, to be eliminable.

John Searle attempts to show through a consideration of promising that at least some ‘ought’ statements can be derived from ‘is’ statements. He thinks (1) that you can determine on purely factual grounds that a person has made a promise, and (2) that it follows logically from the statement that a person has made a promise that he has at least a prima facie obligation to do the thing he promised to do. I agree with (2) but not with (1).

Philosophy, October 1974, contains an article entitled ‘Aristotle's Four Becauses’, by Professor Max Hocutt, who contends that Aristotle's aitia (or aition) means ‘a because’ or ‘an explanation’ rather than ‘a cause’ and should be translated accordingly. He argues (a) that only Aristotle's efficient ‘cause’ is a cause in the English sense of the word, and (b) that ‘Aristotle's theory of “causes” is simply an application of his theory of syllogistic to the analysis of scientific knowledge’ (p. 389). Both contentions deserve a word.

Mr Bennett in his interesting essay in the April 1974 issue of Philosophy claims that ‘… in a particular case sympathy and morality may pull in opposite directions. This can happen not just with bad moralities, but also with good ones like yours and mine.’ By sympathy he says he means ‘every sort of fellow-feeling’. Although a triumph of sympathy over morality may be a good thing, it also represents a triumph of irrationality over reason (p. 126).