In the idealistic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British philosophy under Hegelian influence endeavoured to demonstrate the rationality of the universe as based on logical construction. The keynote of the Hegelian dialectic, as interpreted by both F. H. Bradley and J. E. McTaggart is that the mind is there from the first. In the advance from the bare abstraction of Being to the fully concrete whole—“Before the mind there is a single conception, but the whole mind itself which does not appear, engages in the process, operates on the datum, and produces the result.” The idea expressed by poetry in Tennyson's “Flower in the crannied wall,” which as the mind is fixed upon it reveals in an expansion to the universe the nature of God and Man, illustrates in a simple way the central philosophic conception of the British metaphysical idealists. Poetry could overlook the hard struggle of the little plant to keep its foothold against crowding competitors. Philosophy was perhaps too oblivious of this in its compelling postulate of the all pervading unity in which every difference and seeming contradiction would be reconciled.

The connection of value-experience with activity has led to the widespread modern tendency to interpret value in terms of interest. To value a thing is certainly to take an interest in it, and there can be no doubt that the value any object has for us tends to vary with the interest we take in it. The suggestion readily arises, therefore, that the value of any object simply is the interest we take in it. The difficulty with views of this type is that interest is a distinctly subjective category while value is persistently spoken of as if it were somehow objective. Indeed, the term “value” would lose the most essential element of its meaning if it could not be applied to objects of common knowledge in such a way that two people could significantly discuss the question as to whether the object A is not more valuable than the object B and each, on the basis of his own interest and experience, defend a different view. I do not think the subjectivity of value can be as easily disposed of as does Laird1 in discussing the argument, “Beauty is not in the aurora. Therefore it is in the beholder's mind.” This, he says, leads to the absurdity, “Therefore the beholder's mind is beautiful.” The apparent absurdity is due to the ambiguity of the term “beautiful.” It is applied either to an experience or to the object of that experience.

Jonathan Glover and I, while not in such deep disagreement about the ethics of killing as to make all communication impossible, still disagree enough to make sustained confrontation worthwhile. (Very briefly, Glover is a utilitarian, while I am not.) At minimum, such confrontation should make it clear what are the most fundamental issues at stake in ethical arguments about various kinds of killing.

There is at the present time a bewildering variety of schools of psychology in open rivalry and conflict with one another. The Press and the general public, in America, at least, seem to be aware of only two of these, namely the psychoanalytic and the behaviouristic schools; and the newspaper writers and the average highbrow are content to mix snippets and catchwords from these two utterly different schools, ignoring all the rest, unless they add to their shop-window display some uncertain reference to the work of the mental testers.

All men desire their own happiness: which is not to say that they desire nothing else, or regulate all their actions with a view to it. But very many men are also puzzled and perhaps distressed by the fact of unhappiness, whosever it may be. For it seems evil, and evil is a problem, whether seen in animal pain, or in human unhappiness, or in wrong-doing, or in what, though not the work of man, yet seems unjust: as, for example, that one who does his duty should perish miserably. True, we should most of us say that our own interest has nothing to do with our duty; and the Psalmist blesses him that sweareth unto his neighbour and disappointeth him not, “though it were to his own hindrance.” Yet almost in the same breath he declares that such a man shall never fall, that he shall dwell in the tabernacle of the Lord, and rest upon his holy hill. Clearly he thought that, unless this were so, something would be very much amiss, though even so he might have maintained that a man ought to keep the promise which he has sworn to his neighbour. It has been impressively contended by Professor Prichard that there is no sense of “advantage” in which the question whether to keep his promise is advantageous to me is relevant to the question whether I ought to keep it, not even if I identify my own advantage with what advantages society: “our conviction that we ought to do certain actions does not in fact arise from our thought that our action will conduce to the good of society which is also our own good.” Yet the contemplation of a world in which, though men did their duty, they were always involved in misery by doing it, would be gravely disconcerting. Kant himself could not believe such a world possible, though more almost than any other moralist he insisted that our consciousness of obligation had no connection with any thought of how discharging it bore upon our happiness, nor the obligation itself with how discharging it actually did so. Rather than admit that there could in the last resort be even a partial maladjustment between virtue and happiness, he was prepared to accept what he claimed to have shown that the speculative reason could never establish, the existence of an all-powerful and all-righteous God.

Only one volume has reached us to mark the centenary of Bergson's birth. Is this significant? If a writer lives to an advanced age his centenary usually falls at a time when fashion has turned against him, and the consequent attitudes are perhaps more interestingly gleaned from comparitively informal assessments than from carefully timed publications. In the Nouvelles Littéraires of October 22,1959, there appeared, almost a hundred years to the day after Bergson's birth, a reported discussion on his philosophy between Gaston Berger, Gabriel Marcel, Henri Gouhier, Jean Brun and a young “normalien” Dominique Janicaud.The talk, presumably more or less spontaneous, was naturally desultory. The older participants could always compensate for implicit misgivings by falling back on affectionate personal recollections, and the youngest would perhaps have preferred not to have to say anything at all. The most cogent general estimate was probably M. Jean Brun's, when he described Bergson as in effect making a stand against the danger of specialist appropriation of the dismembered fragments of philosophy by the various branches of science. We have seen this very nearly come about in England, where a fairly narrow linguistic and logical sector alone has been held with any feeling of conviction. What is here exemplified is the difference of outlook on any question that the English Channel makes. I once heard an English professor of English literature say that when reading Emile Legouis' History of English Literature he had some difficulty in persuading himself that his own professional speciality was being dealt with. It is not difficult to see how this comes about. What one nation takes for granted appears to another as excitingly significant.

1. ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office, but to serve and obey them.’ (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (THN) 2.3.3) Unfortunately, Hume uses ‘reason’ to mean ‘discovery of truth or falsehood‘ (THN 3.1.1) as well as discovery of logical relations. So suppose we avoid, as Hume I think does not, prejudging the question of how many ingredients are requisite for action, by separating these two claims out:

A. Reason (= logical powers) is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

B. Reason (= belief(s)) is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

There is a wide gap, at any rate in the English-speaking world, between the people whose business it is to talk about the nature of poetry and those who are concerned with the critical analysis of language. Although both subjects are legitimate topics for philosophical discussion, there are few philosophers who combine a deep and effective interest in aesthetics with a concern in the problems of linguistic analysis. The analytical philosopher is only too ready to relegate poetry to the field of “emotive” meaning; and, although “emotive” is a convenient term for marking off aspects of meaning with which the scientist (for example) is not concerned, it is also a means for keeping questions closed which ought to be opened. For it conceals the enormous differences which exist between various nonscientific uses of language. It does this behind an implicit suggestion that, since “emotions” are the province of the psychologist, any sort of inquiry into these uses of language will be merely a psychological inquiry. Poetry, of course, falls into this category of non-scientific uses of language, and a few psycho-analysts have accepted the commitment to discuss it; but on the whole its discussion is left to a very small band of aestheticians and a very large fraternity of literary critics.

I am concerned to examine a mode of argumentation in recent analytic philosophy which, I claim, has its origin in Hegel's ‘dialectical’ method. I give examples of this mode of argumentation in McDowell and Wiggins, followed by a formal representation which distinguishes two possible models both of which have negative and positive aspects. I consider what the commitments of the negative aspect of this approach are, and argue that the desire to avoid naturalism constitutes a common goal. I turn then to its positive aspect, making explicit and criticising some of the metaphilosophical implications contained therein. Finally, I make brief contact with Hegel.

John Rawls’ gamification of justice leads him – along with many other monist political philosophers, not least Ronald Dworkin – to fail to take politics seriously enough. I begin with why we consider games frivolous and then show how Rawls’ theory of justice is not merely analogous to a game, as he himself seems to claim, but is in fact a kind of game. As such, it is harmful to political practice in two ways: one as regards the citizens who participate directly in it, and the other as regards those who do no more than follow it.

The man in the street to-day is aware that recent developments in the physical sciences have necessitated a fundamental revision of the concepts of physics; he finds that Einstein is no less upsetting to his ideas than was Copernicus to those of his own time or than Darwin was to Bishop Wilberforce. The plain man who has “ philosophical leanings ” is aware that questions previously regarded as metaphysical—and about which philosophers have written much that is unintelligible—are now recognized as falling within the scope of physics. Every reader of this Journal is aware that the criticism to which the main concepts of physics—space, time, matter—have been subjected is so fundamental that it is no longer possible tosay that there are material bodies in space, which have events happening to them at a given time. We must substitute the conception of a fourfold continuum within which space, time and matter are inextricably involved. Finally, we are told that this new way of regarding the classical trinity suggests the consequence that we know nothing about the “ inner nature ” of the terms with which we deal, we can make no assertions as to the ultimate nature of that to which they may refer. In this respect the prevailing temper of the present-day scientist is to be contrasted with the cocksureness of most nineteenth-century physicists l who, even if they did not go so far as to say “ we know what matter is,” at least suggested that only the metaphysician had, or could have, any doubts as to its nature and reality^