The present century has witnessed human crimes on an unprecedented scale. It has also seen the decline of ethics as a major element in higher education and as an academic study forming an important aspect of philosophy.

In this paper we argue that a dominant view of Humean naturalism involves a fundamental misconception of Hume's naturalist project. We shall show that the naturalist project as Hume conceives it is philosophically much more interesting than the form of naturalism commonly attributed to him. We shall also argue, however, that Hume's commitment to principles of empiricist epistemology prevented him from bringing his naturalist project to a satisfactory conclusion. Finally, we shall suggest that Wittgenstein shares Hume's conception of a philosophically satisfactory form of naturalism, and that, unencumbered by empiricist doctrines, Wittgenstein was able to provide the sort of undogmatic unravelling of the sceptical problem that eluded Hume.

The ‘beautiful axiom’ to which Dickens refers is a central feature of Thomas Hobbes' thinking but its precise role in his moral philosophy remains unclear. I shall here attempt both to dispel the unclarity and to evaluate the adequacy of the position that emerges. Given the high level of contemporary interest in Hobbes' thought, both within and beyond philosophical circles, this is an enterprise of considerable importance. None the less, my interest is not merely interpretative, since the assessment of Hobbes' attitude to ‘the beautiful axiom’ raises important and difficult questions about what might be termed the preconditions of morality.

There are many problems of universals, at least the four distinguished by Jenny Teichmann. Consider her second one. ‘How can we form a general term when we are faced with easily distinguishable, widely differing examples?’ The term ‘blue’, for example, covers a wide range of—well, what does it cover a wide range of? A wide range of the colour blue? This is nonsense. What it covers is a wide range of blues—shades of blue. But we do not form a general term when faced with or referring to these items. We distinguish them: cerulean, ultramarine, cyan, cobalt, navy blue and so on. ‘Blue’ is not the name of any of these shades of blue. It does not ‘cover’ anything except the colour, of which it is the name. ‘Blue’ is the name of the colour blue. There are no widely differing, easily distinguishable examples of that. The colour blue cannot differ widely or easily be distinguished from the colour blue. Leibniz's law prevents it. It is shades of blue (blues, a blue, this blue, that blue) which differ and are easily distinguishable. The moment we try to say, ‘But this differs from that’, the question will be, ‘This and that what?’ If the answer is, ‘This colour (the colour blue)’ and ‘That colour (the colour blue)’, then a mistake has been made. For there is no differing and distinguishing in this case. (But cf. ‘This colour blue’ and ‘This blue colour’.) Teichmann's problem cannot even be stated. If we say that what differ are this blue and that blue, which is the right thing to say, then we have two count nouns which mean ‘shade of blue’. There is no general term for these different shades. There is no answer to the question, ‘What is the name of all these differing shades?’ Certainly they are all blues, but each has its own name, and it is not ‘blue’. Teichmann's question cannot arise here either. The question, ‘What do blues have in common in virtue of which they are blue?’ is either elliptical or bad logical grammar. Which it is depends on the construal, or misconstrual, of ‘are blue’. The question should be either, ‘…in virtue of which they are blues’ in the plural—they are not identical with the colour blue—or ‘…in virtue of which they are shades of blue.’ The plural agreement must come somewhere.

Those of us who were made to study Pride and Prejudice at school know that Darcy represents pride and Elizabeth represents prejudice. Those of us who have actually read the book know that the situation is a good deal more complicated than that. The motivation for a significant part of the action is Elizabeth's pride, a point that is made quite clearly and is recognized by Elizabeth herself in what sounds like a thoroughly rehearsed speech:

‘How despicably have I acted!’ she cried.—‘I, who have prided myself on my discernment!—I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity, in useless or blameable distrust.—How humiliating is this discovery!—Yet, how just a humiliation!—Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself’ (pp. 236–7) (All page references are to the Penguin edition of the novel.)

In his paper, ‘The Aroma of Coffee’, H. O. Mounce wants to expose what he takes to be a deep prejudice in philosophy, one which is at work in our culture more generally. Philosophers are reluctant to admit that there is anything which passes beyond human understanding. Of course, they are quite ready to admit that there are plenty of things that they fail to understand but this they would say simply happens to be the case. It does not mean that what they fail to understand is something which is beyond human understanding. Thus even when they fail to understand something, that ‘something’ remains, in principle, within the reach of their understanding. For Mounce this prejudice flies in the face of what is platitudinously obvious: that there is much that passes beyond human understanding.

Quentin Smith contends that modern science provides enough evidence ‘to justify the belief that the universe began to exist without being caused to do so.’

There was a time when such a claim would have been dismissed because it conflicts with a principle absolutely fundamental to all human thought, including science itself. As Thomas Reid expressed the matter:

That neither existence, nor any mode of existence, can begin without an efficient cause is a principle that appears very early in the mind of man; and it is so universal, and so firmly rooted in human nature, that the most determined scepticism cannot eradicate it.

In this essay an ‘objective’ account of intrinsic value is proposed and partly defended. It is claimed that a kind of value exists which is, or may reasonably be supposed to be, a property of certain objects. The presence of such value is not to be wholly accounted for as the ‘projection’ of certain human feelings elicited by the object thought to be of value, nor by the object's meeting certain operative human conventions prescribing what is to be admired, nor by its being conformable, in some way, to human needs or desires. Hume, of course, would have none of this. It is hoped to show that if one adopts Hume's account, then his attempt to show (in his essay ‘Of The Standard Of Taste’) that there nevertheless will be convergence in the long run as to what is of aesthetic value is forced and unsuccessful. By contrast, on the ‘objective’ account (and given certain assumptions) convergence is to be expected. This, of course, only shows the superiority of the ‘objective’ account so long as there is an expectation of long-term convergence. This is not an expectation of most contemporary value ‘subjectivists’, and therefore the argument will not be directly relevant to their positions.

Part I is about valuing fairness, II chiefly about not valuing it. Equally, I is about knowing fairness or taking yourself to know what it is, while II is chiefly about not knowing what it is: absolutely not knowing what it is, or not knowing what it is except when it is thought of in a narrow way. I want to know what all those states involve, e.g. whether knowing what fairness is involves valuing it, and most of all (in Part II) whether those two aforesaid ways of not knowing what fairness is involve some knowably undesirable kind of ignorance; in that sense, incur a cognitive penal sanction. But I begin elsewhere.

Few would disagree that depth is an admirable, highly desirable, and yet rare quality. One would expect to find, therefore, that much has been written on the subject. But this is not so. Perhaps the topic appears forbidding, because the nature of depth is itself a deep and difficult question, since it forces those who ask it to decide what is ultimately worth caring about. Be that as it may, I shall venture on to this rarely explored ground. My strategy is to begin with some introductory remarks about depth in general and about moral depth as a particular form of it; then discuss Sophocles' dramatic treatment of the development of Oedipus toward, as I shall interpret it, greater depth; and then go on to formulate a more discursive account based on Sophocles' poetic intimations.

My writing is simply a set of experiments in life—an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of—what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive—what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more than shifting theory. I became more and more timid—with less daring to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience, and perhaps that is a sign that if I help others to see at all it must be through the medium of art.

George Eliot.

In his inaugural lecture, given in Birkbeck College in 1987, Roger Scruton, who has done as much as anyone else in recent years to bring the importance of art in general and literature in particular to the attention of philosophers, contends that ‘philosophy severed from literary criticism is as monstrous a thing as literary criticism severed from philosophy’. The first, he argues, aims to be science: strives after theoretical truth which it can never attain; and results in banality clothed in pseudo-scientific technicalities: while the second is liable to find consolation in the kind of nonsense which pretends that in the study of literature we are confronted with nothing other than an author-less, unreadable, ‘text’. Philosophy, he maintains, ‘must return aesthetics to the place that Kant and Hegel made for it: a place at the centre of the subject, the paradigm of philosophy and the true test of all its claims’.

Professor Peter Bodunrin's paper ‘The Question of African Philosophy’ (Philosophy 55 (1981) 161–179) has, as it were, become the first question for most African scholars, teachers or students, starting a course in African philosophy. In most of the discussions, the controversy over what constitutes an African philosophy tends to dominate, sometimes so much that it forms almost the entire content of the course.