‘There is no opinion so absurd but that some philosopher has held it.’ Cicero wrote this around 44 B.C., and even then he was only repeating a saying already current. The reputation of philosophers for holding absurd opinions is therefore very old. Equally undeniably, it is also a well-founded reputation.

I favour an analysis of selfhood which ties it to the possession of certain kinds of first-person knowledge, in particular de re knowledge of the identity of one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. My defence of this analysis will lead me to explore the nature of demonstrative reference to one's own conscious thoughts and experiences. Such reference is typically ‘direct’, in contrast to demonstrative reference to all physical objects, apart from those that are parts of one's own body in which one can localize sensations or which are directly subject to one's will. My conclusion will be that the semantic distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ demonstrative reference helps to delineate the metaphysical boundary between oneself and the rest of the world. But I do not contend that one is to be identified with one's own body: indeed, I shall try to show that one can know a priori that no such identity can obtain.

There is a special problem with respect to our obligations to future generations which is that we can benefit or harm them but that they cannot benefit or harm us. Goodin summarizes the point well:

No analysis of intergenerational justice that is cast even vaguely in terms of reciprocity can hope to succeed. The reason is the one which Addison… puts into the mouth of an Old Fellow of College, who when he was pressed by the Society to come into something that might rebound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish. ‘We are always doing’ says he, ‘something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us’.

Deconstruction is commonly associated with the philosophy of Derrida. But there are also non-philosophers who say they engage in deconstruction, for example architects, anthropologists and literary critics. This may lead some people to suppose that deconstruction is not concerned with specifically philosophical problems.

‘Marital faithfulness’ refers to faithful love for a spouse or lover to whom one is committed, rather than the narrower idea of sexual fidelity. The distinction is clearly marked in traditional wedding vows. A commitment to love faithfully is central: ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part… and thereto I plight [pledge] thee my troth [faithfulness]’. Sexual fidelity is promised in a subordinate clause, symbolizing its supportive role in promoting love's constancy: ‘and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her/him.’

Ever since Plato took it out of public places and made it academic, Western philosophy has been the work of theorists: people whose leisure and culture leave them free to stand back from history and look on as spectators. Traditionally, Western philosophers have tried to build their theories on suprahistorical foundations. With the American and French revolutions, history and historical consciousness become essential elements of philosophy, but its suprahistorical foundations remain. Hegel's theory completes all prior philosophical theories by showing how they progressively embody history's transcendent reality. Marx makes Hegelian idealism stand up: it becomes the historically contingent theory of revolutionary practice. Yet Marxian philosophy is haunted by a spectre of its own historical inevitability that subsequent Marxists have characteristically invoked to legitimate their contingent practice.

In his article ‘Healthy Scepticism’, James Franklin gives an admirable survey of thirteen kinds of attempts to refute what he calls ‘symmetry arguments for scepticism’, finding all of them inadequate. The symmetry argument that he proposes to test is given as follows:

Firstly, it is possible that what we perceive is entirely an illusion created by a deceitful demon. Second, there is no reason to prefer the realist hypothesis to this one (308).

Professor Flew has recently sought to demolish the philosophical pretensions of Marx and the Marxists by the use of Hume's Fork and Popper's demand for falsifiable consequences. Marx tried to derive matters of ‘fact and existence’ from ‘relations of ideas’, which Hume's Fork states to be impossible. From this and not from empirical study, he derived predictions for the future course of history which neither he nor his followers have ever properly tested by empirical enquiries. Nor have they ever provided any clear, unambiguous and therefore testable formulations of those predictions. In particular, Flew claims, they have never given any concrete content to the central notion of ‘alienation’ such that an Index of Alienation could be drawn up and enquiries could be made as to whether, for example, the workers are more or less alienated under the private or public ownership of factories. Both faults stem from Marx's continuation of German, specifically Hegelian, philosophy.

In ‘The Mind's I is Illiterate’, G. S. Miller discusses several paradoxes and paradoxical sentences which Miller claims are related by a common abuse of language. The Whiteley sentence ‘Lucas cannot consistently believe this sentence’ fails to be meaningful for want of a referent outside of the sentence for the phrase ‘this sentence’; the Liar Paradox when formulated as ‘I am lying’ is similarly disposed of when it is seen that the verb is defective and the sentence fails to refer to anything outside of itself. The same point is made concerning the Russell Paradox of the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves. The moral made is that philosophers are simply to be more careful about the laneuaee that thev are usine and then the paradoxes will go away.