‘When the nation's history is poorly taught in schools, ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it.’ Thus Jacques Barzun, at the age of 93, describing what he sees as decadence.

Brian Grant

Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. His main areas of interest are epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He has a recent book in the latter area, The Condition of Madness.

Rom Harré

Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College Oxford and Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His published work includes studies in the philosophy of the physical sciences, such as Varieties of Realism (1986) and in the philosophy of psychology, such as The Singular Self (1988). His One Thousand Years of Philosophy was published last year.

Joel J. Kupperman

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His most recent books are Learning from Asian Philosophy, Value É And What Follows, and Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts.

Tony Lynch

Lectures in Philosophy and Politics at the University of New England, Armidale. His research interests are in the areas of moral psychology and liberal politics.

Gordon Graham

Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He has contributed to Philosophy on several occasions. His most recent books include the Internet: a philosophical inquiry (Routledge, 1999) and Evil and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Mark T. Nelson

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the co-editor of Christian Theism and Moral Philosophy and the author of articles on ethics, philosophy of religion, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.

Nicholas Maxwell

Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science at the University of London. Among his publications are From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell, 1984), The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 1998), and The Human World in the Physical Universe (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming).

Sophie Botros

Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her previous publications include ‘Precarious Virtue’ (Phronesis) and, for this journal, ‘Acceptance and Morality’ and ‘Acts, Omissions and Keeping Patients Alive in a Persistent Vegetative State’. She is presently working on Hume's practicality argument.

I defend, in this paper, a version of a philosophy of common sense. I have use of some things from Reid's account of these matters, others from Wittgenstein's. Scepticism looms large—as do the questions of arguments for and examples of common sense. At least two different notions of common sense emerge, one of which has often been overlooked by philosophers.

Extra-philosophical influences were very important in shaping Wittgenstein's philosophical ruminations. The Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus is misunderstood unless it is seen as deriving from the pre-Machian physics of the German tradition, adapted to the problems Russell confronted Wittgenstein with. In like manner, particularly in relation to the discussions of meanings and rules, the philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations is shaped by the role played by a powerful religious sensibility in Wittgenstein's extraordinary and tormented life.

Gilbert Harman has argued that it does not make sense to ascribe character traits to people. The notion of morally virtuous character becomes particularly suspect.

How plausible this is depends on how broad character traits would have to be. Views of character as entirely invariant behavioural tendencies offer a soft target. This paper explores a view that is a less easy target: character traits as specific to kinds of situation, and as involving probabilities or real possibilities. Such ascriptions are not undermined by Harman's arguments, and it remains plausible that the agent's character often is indispensable in explanation of behaviour. Character is indispensable also as processes of control that impose reliability where it really matters.

Often a concern for truthfulness becomes the celebration of radical truthfulness, where this involves both the utter refusal of deception and that all moral and political beliefs be fit to survive publicity. An unfortunate consequence of this is that it has blinded us to a fair and accurate understanding of the nature and role of an important technique of virtue—temperance. Temperance implies a strategy of renunciation and withdrawal from the full content of our psychological lives. It involves us in pursuing and sustaining a practice of deliberative silence about those purposes and ends which, as we see things, threaten us with corruption and the world with evil.

This paper argues that a recurrent mistake is made about Scottish moral philosophy in the 18th century with respect to its account of the relation between morality and feeling. This mistake arises because Hume is taken to be the main, as opposed to the best known, exponent of a version of moral sense theory. In fact, far from occupying common ground, the other main philosophers of the period—Hutcheson, Reid, Beattie—understood themselves to be engaged in refuting Hume. Despite striking surface similarities, closer examination reveals a deep difference between Hume's and Reid's conception of ‘the science mind’ which marked the philosophy of the period. Properly understood, this difference shows that mainstream Scottish moral philosophy, far from subscribing to Hume's dictum about morality being ‘more properly felt than judged of’, held that morality is ‘more properly judged than felt of’.

Bertrand Russell famously disparaged Thomas Aquinas as having ‘little of the true philosophic spirit’, because ‘he does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.’ Like many of Russell's pronouncements, this is breathtakingly supercilious and unfair. Still, even an enthusiastic admirer of Aquinas may worry that there is something in it, that there is something wrong with religious ‘commitments’ in philosophy. I examine Russell's objection by comparing standards of permissibility in epistemology with standards of permissibility in ethics, where these issues are better understood. I conclude that the epistemic standard behind Russell's criticism is no less contentious in epistemology than, say, direct utilitarianism is in ethics.

In my book The Comprehensibility of the Universe (OUP, 1998), I argue for a new conception of science that construes science as adopting a hierarchy of increasingly contentless cosmological assumptions about the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe. This view, I argue, solves outstanding problems about science, such as problems of induction, simplicity and verisimilitude. In his essay review of my book (Philosophy75, 2000, 296–309) Friedel Weinert criticizes me for defending a number of views about science. But, as I make clear from quotations from the book, I do not defend the views that Weinert attributes to me.

In replying to my article ‘An Error about the Doctrine of Double Effect’, Kaufman claims that the permission given by the four-condition Doctrine for certain mixed actions is merely complementary to an absolute prohibition—which he claims is the DDE's primary function. I point out again that in many cases this makes an appeal to the DDE's fourth condition not merely redundant but incoherent. Furthermore, his claim that I am a utilitarian maximizer, frustrated by a doctrine prohibiting intentional harms, however great the net overall benefit, is based on a misrepresentation. I did not object to a candidate for justification under the DDE being rejected before reaching the fourth condition, only to its being accepted.

The Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference

Philosophy and the Emotions

University of Manchester,

11–13 July 2001.

The conference aspires to act as a forum for the presentation of key papers by leading figures in the analysis of emotions, and for the commencement of a dialogue on this topic among advanced researchers from different philosophical disciplines, including the philosophy of action, art, meaning, mind and value.

Keynote Speakers include: Richard Wollheim, Aaron Ben Zeev, Peter Goldie, Patricia Greenspan, Paul Griffiths, Susan James, Karen Jones, Mike Martin, Al Mele, Hanna Pickard, David Velleman.

Please direct all enquiries to Anthony Hatzimoysis, Centre for Philosophy, University of Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. http://les1.man.ac.uk/philosophy/emotions.htm