It was with this bitter intervention from Thrasymachus, occurring halfway through the first of its ten Books, that that work begins to come urgently alive. For the remainder of Book I the Socrates of the Dialogue asks questions and raises objections, while Thrasymachus keeps urging that in fact the just become through their very justice the victims of exploitation–the suckers!

It was with this bitter intervention from Thrasymachus, occurring halfway through the first of its ten Books, that that work begins to come urgently alive. For the remainder of Book I the Socrates of the Dialogue asks questions and raises objections, while Thrasymachus keeps urging that in fact the just become through their very justice the victims of exploitation–the suckers!

In this brief but powerful book, acclaimed political philosopher C.B. Macpherson sets out in bold relief the essence of liberal democracy, both as it is currently conceived and as it might be reimagined. The Wynford edition includes a new Introduction by Frank Cunningham.

Dr Neil Campbell suggests that when patients suffering extremes of protracted pain ask for help to end their lives, their requests should be discounted as made under compulsion. I contend that the doctors concerned should be referred to and then act upon advance directives made by those patients when of sound and calm mind and afflicted by no such intolerable compulsion.

I want to discuss philosophically, to glance at the logic of, the parts of this expression “the justification of punishment” and then to draw from this discussion one or two morals for discussions of the justification of punishment. This paper is based on one originally given to the Scots Philosophy Club at its Aberdeen meeting in 1953, as the third part of a symposium on The Justification of Punishment.

Locke's contribution to the discussion was fourfold: First , he saw the importance of the problem; Second , he realized that the puzzle cases, the “strange suppositions,” were relevant; Third , he maintained “same” had a different meaning when applied to “person” from its meaning in other contexts; and, Fourth , he offered his much criticized solution of the problem.

In this paper I shall do three things. Firstly , I shall distinguish between three senses of “imagine”: one in which the word is used to report the occurrence of mental imagery; a second in which “imagined” is used as substantially equivalent to “thought”; and a third in which “imagine” is used as substantially equivalent to “suppose.” Secondly , I shall discuss Hume's thesis about imagination: both because, although this is set out as a plausible generalization about psychology, it nevertheless (...) seems to me that Hume dealt with a central philosophical problem concerning imagination—the relation of descriptions to imagery—in a way that is suggestive and fruitful; and—the main reason for mentioning Hume—because a study of the relation between imagining and imagining will help us to reinterpret his thesis from a mistaken one about psychology into a correct one about logic and language. Thirdly , I shall give thecentral arguments and the conclusion of the chapter on Imagination in The Concept of Mind , and comment on them. (shrink)

In Chapter VI of his powerful study God and Other Minds Dr Alvin Plantinga deploys what—following a suggestion of mine—he calls ‘The Free Will Defence’. He presents his case there as a reaction to two earlier attempts to overcome that defence. I propose to take this chapter in Plantinga as my starting point here; and, as far as can be, to ignore, though not by that token to repudiate, those by now rather ancient earlier essays.

In the winter of 1969 the Harvard Educational Review published a long article by Professor Arthur Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley. In this article Jensen reviewed the psychological evidence bearing upon the question ‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ The original publication occasioned an enormous coast to coast brouhaha of protest and denunciation; including tyre-slashing, slogan-painting, telephoned abuse and threats, and strident demands to ‘Fire’ or even to ‘Kill Jensen’. The author has now republished (...) this offending article, along with several shorter contributions in the same area, under the title Genetics and Education. He has also supplied, in addition to a full collection of References for the papers included, a Bibliography of the controversy, two Indices, and a 67 page Preface. (shrink)

The general moral decline widely perceived to be in process in both the UK and the USA is no doubt the effect of many causes. The present paper attends to only one, the de-moralization more or less unintentionally encouraged by the working of the machinery of the welfare state, and then further encouraged by a deliberate and systematic de-moralization of that machinery. It attempts to undermine a main assumption supporting that de-moralization, and thus contribute to the campaign for re-moralization waged (...) in recent years by, among others, the Social Affairs Unit in London and like-minded think-tanks in the USA. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Occasioned by but not pretending to constitute a critique of Julian Le Grand's ‘Equity as an Economic Objective‘, published in the first issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy, this paper argues that the concept of justice must be distinguished from conceptions thereof. Once this is done it emerges that many of what are both offered and accepted as conceptions of justice really are not. By proceeding next both to enquire what are the incentives to such misrepresentations and to (...) reveal some of their unrecognized costs, this is shown to be by no means a merely trifling and purely verbal matter. In particular, by misrepresenting the imposition of their peculiar and characteristic ideal of equality of outcome as the enforcement of the mandate of justice, Procrusteans unwittingly imply that they are themselves involved in appallingly shabby and discreditable practices. (shrink)

1. Nowadays, I am told, many popular novels have anti-heroes not heroes. So perhaps it accords with the spirit of the times for my sermon to have not a text but an anti-text. This is taken from the first chapter of Our Knowledge of the External World by Bertrand Russell. It reads: ‘All the questions which have what is called a human interest—such, for example, as the question of a future life—belong, at least in theory, to special sciences and are (...) capable, at least in theory, of being decided by empirical evidence … a genuinely scientific philosophy cannot hope to appeal to any except those who have the wish to understand, to escape from intellectual bewilderment … it does not offer, or attempt to offer, a solution to the problem of human destiny, or of the destiny of the Universe’. (shrink)