The following is an attempted answer to the question: in what kind of world is learning from experience possible? The method is to build up imaginatively a world until what has in general outline been constructed is such as to permit the kind of learning by experience with which we are all familiar. We may hope that some interesting facts even now may emerge from a consideration of this trite subject. Not all that we know has been learnt from experience, though, no doubt, anything we know, if it has come to our notice, has done so in the course of experience. With this truth we are not concerned. Our subject is what is called “empirical science”; but by sometimes calling it by the homelier name appearing in the title of this paper, we may remind ourselves that we are not dealing with a specialist branch of knowledge or a technical subject, but with what is a necessary feature of even the most commonplace experience.

Bertrand Russell is widely considered to be one of the founders of analytic philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Individuals have usually stressed his early philosophical contributions as seminal in this regards. But Russell also had another side–a naturalistic side–leading him towards a naturalistic epistemology and naturalistic philosophy of science of the type Quine later made famous. My goal is to provide an outline of Russell's naturalistic epistemology and the underlying philosophical motivations for such a move. After briefly presenting Russell's conception of the nature of philosophy, I sketch his theory of philosophical method, which is a version of the method of analysis. This provides the underpinnings for a discussion of his Naturalistic Epistemology, which led him to adopt a version of a behavioristic epistemology. Although Russell vacillated on the question of the adequacy of such an account, it provided a major element in his later philosophical views. I suggest that we must reevaluate our conception of the history of analytic philosophy and, in particular, our understanding of Russell's place in the history of 20th century philosophy.

There is a natural contrast often made in ordinary language between the actions which we do because we want or desire to do them, and the actions which we do although we do not want to do them. It is a contrast which has been ignored by much modern philosophy of mind which has seen desire as a component of all actions, and the reasons for all actions as involving desires of various kinds. The ignoring of the distinction between desire and the active component in every action (call it ‘trying’ or ‘seeking’ or ‘having a volition’) leads a man to suppose that he can no more help doing what he does than he can help his desires. But ‘desires’, in the normal ordinary language sense of the word, are natural inclinations to actions of certain sorts with which we find ourselves. We cannot (immediately) help our natural inclinations but what we can do is choose whether to yield to them, or resist them and do what we are not naturally inclined to do.

Nowadays the word “conscience” has an old-fashioned, obsolete air. I shall try to guess at the reasons, and then I shall consider whether they are good reasons.

Philosophers have not been sceptical only about metaphysics or religious beliefs. There are a great number of other beliefs generally held which they have had at least as much difficulty in justifying, and in the present article I ask questions as to the right philosophical attitude to these beliefs in cases where to our everyday thought they seem so obvious as to be a matter of the most ordinary common sense. A vast number of propositions go beyond what is merely empirical and cannot be seen to be logically necessary but are still believed by everybody in their daily life. Into this class fall propositions about physical things, other human minds and even propositions about one's own past experiences based on memory, for we are not now ‘observing’ our past. The phenomenalist does not escape the difficulty about physical things, for he reduces physical object propositions, in so far as true, not merely to propositions about his own actual experience but to propositions about the experiences of other human beings in general under certain conditions, and he cannot either observe or logically prove what the experiences of other people are or what even his own would be under conditions which have not yet been fulfilled. What is the philosopher to say about such propositions? Even Moore, who insisted so strongly that we knew them, admitted that we did not know how we knew them. The claim which a religious man makes to a justified belief that is neither a matter of purely empirical perception nor formally provable is indeed by no means peculiar to the religious. It is made de facto by everybody in his senses, whether or not he realizes that he is doing so. There is indeed a difference: while everyone believes in the existence of other human beings and in the possibility of making some probable predictions about the future from the past, not everybody holds religious beliefs, and although this does not necessarily invalidate the claim it obviously weakens it.

Discussion of the soul in this essay departs from the concept of the soul that for thousands of years has occupied the attention of philosophers and theologians and pervaded religious discourse. The author is concerned with what William James referred to as ‘the popular soul,’ the soul as it is invoked by expressions such as ‘an expansive soul,’ ‘a soulless person,’ ‘soul-mate,’ and ‘that melody touched my soul.’ Skepticism with regard to the existence of this soul is without warrant. How this soul comes into being and develops; what its essential features are; how the world, when the soul is engaged, is transformed; what its relationship is to one's conscience; its importance in a human life; its connections to purity and perfection, to silence; its survival upon death; and the perils posed today to its development and existence are the principal topics considered.

In the Platonic dialogue that bears his name Protagoras,1 in a myth (320c–324d) and in a logos (324d–328b) positively affirms the absolute character of universal moral values, such as force themselves upon all men; this makes one think that the famous man-measure dictum was subservient to the ends that the sophist had in view as a teacher of areté. Indeed, his condemnation in that dialogue of the sophists who, like Hippias, included in their teaching mathematical and naturalistic studies (318d-e), must be connected with the criticism of mathematics reported by an Aristotelian text.2 These studies, that is to say purely theoretic disciplines, were considered by Protagoras not only useless for the spiritual formation of men and citizens, but also void of any certitude and objectivity whatever.3 We feel therefore allowed to suggest that also the man-measure principle had to perform an office of the same kind: to show that natural philosophy (which then comprehended all theoretical knowledge) could not yield an objective knowledge of φ?σις which formed its object, because such knowledge is denied to man. Mistrust of the general conceptions of the cosmology of physiologists was widely spread at that time, and the authors of some medical treatises of the Hippocratean corpus used it to justify the construction of a discipline founded on the study of empirical materials interpreted rationally and not with the general hypotheses void of certainty

In Morality and Art Mrs Foot characterizes the formalist position about morality as holding ‘that a man can choose for himself, so long as he meets the formal requirements of generality and consistency, what his ultimate moral principles are to be’, and says, quite rightly in my opinion, that it is indefensible, ‘implying as it does that we might recognize as a moral system some entirely pointless set of prohibitions or taboos, or activities such as clapping one's hands, not even thought as harmful, aggressive, treacherous, cowardly by the community in which the prohibitions exist’. Then she adds:

A moral system seems necessarily to be one aimed at removing particular dangers and securing certain benefits, and it would follow that some things do and some do not count as objections to a line of conduct from a moral point of view.

It is usual to interpret Mill's understanding of liberty in terms deriving from his distinction in On Liberty between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct. Granted this distinction and Mill's genuine concern to define and defend it, it remains a relevant question why he attached so much importance to it. This raises a less familiar theme in Mill, namely the inter-connection of self-regarding and other-regarding conduct. An uncommitted reading of the main texts suggests an equivalent value is attached to this. Mill clearly and constantly asserts a close connection between each person's own attempt to improve himself, to cultivate his ‘affections and will’, and the social and political structure in which he acts. Self-regarding virtue and responsible social conduct are interdependent; the quality of each depends upon the quality of the other. A fuller recognition of this and its central place in Mill's revision of Bentham may be of help in examining some of the particular problems raised by recent scholarship on Mill.

Analytic philosophy's characteristic downgrading of literature's putative concern with truth, and envisaging of its interest to philosophy merely in terms of material for logical analysis, was prefigured by Frege. The initial plausibility of this approach was in part a function of certain preferred models of philosophy as analysis which were themselves deeply flawed. An exploration of their weaknesses in the light of more adequate theories of language, truth and logic enables us to give proper weight both to rhetorical and imaginative aspects of philosophical discourse, and to the capacity of works of literature to bear on issues of truth—and thereby contribute to philosophical understanding.

This paper is a reaction to a recent article by Raphael Woolf, the drift of which is that, according to the Republic, truth as such is not important. I am not persuaded and in what follows I try to get clear about why.

Because of the communicative function of propositions, Logic is a moral science about what ought to be said. The association with morality derives from the connection between Logic and Truth, and the social value of speaking the truth. Propositions are used rather than mentioned sentences, and so are not the platonically abstract objects they have often been taken to be. Instead they are social objects formed by a community's employment of language. So it is the public use of sentences that settles what they mean, and thereby their logic. The matter has a particular relevance to Graham Priest's non-classical views.