Miss G. E. M. Anscombe has said that, in order for progress to be made in ethics, we must have some determinate idea of ‘human flourishing.’ I want to cite in what follows the work of a number of writers in the psychiatric field who seem to me to throw light on just what it is for a human individual to flourish, for a human community to flourish, and for a human individual to flourish in relation to or in spite (...) of his community. (shrink)

Some years ago, it was fashionable for philosophers not to take sceptica arguments seriously. Now, it seems no longer so.

I n my argument in this paper I shall assume rather than try to prove the proposition, surely not on the face of it an unreasonable one, that the question of what actions, dispositions and circumstances are such as to frustrate human beings, and what are such as to make them comparatively happy and fulfilled, has a great deal of bearing on the question of what actions and dispositions are good or bad. I shall also assume that the way in (...) which human persons or societies can achieve fulfilment, or fail to achieve it, is explicable largely on the basis of the way in which man as a species has evolved. Few people, except those strongly affected by philosophical fashion, will wish to deny the first of these propositions. What one might call the hard utilitarian thesis, that goodness is to be defined in terms of contribution to happiness or fulfilment, may involve the ‘naturalistic fallacy’, may be vulnerable to the arguments of Moore, Hare and others. But I shall not commit myself here to the hard utilitarian thesis, since I am not insisting that goodness may be defined in terms of contribution to human happiness or fulfilment, but only that the question of how far anything contributes to human happiness or fulfilment has a vital bearing on the question of whether and to what extent it is good. I do not think that many people really doubt the truth of this proposition, unless they confuse it with the hard utilitarian thesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A WAY OF LOOKING AT HEIDEGGER HUGO MEYNELL University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta IN THE FOLLOWING essay I w;ant to examine some of rthe ba1Sic ~deas of Heidegger from SIOmething of a " transcendiental Thomist " pevspective, 1 as represented by Bernard Lonergian's " generalized empirical method." I believe that there are a nlllmber of important insights :to be gained from Heidegger's work but that it contains a fow (...) very perilous oversights as well. To my mind, Heidegger shows with more conviction and power than any other thinker how our anxieties and our trivi1al everyday concerns are apt to shut us out from 1apprehending the deep my;stery of things, and how great art :and poetry, together with a,sustained thinking-through of the nmbure of consciousness :and of the woJ.'11d 1 wihich it reveals, have the power of opening up this mystery to us again.. I ailso agree with Heidegger when he says that the technicaiL fanguages of the scieDJoes and of traditional metaphysics as weH al'le, to a consiiew, one has to dismantle the conceptual appa- :vaitus which we take for granted, an appara;bus wherein the answers are given or presuppos,ed, but the questions al'e never e1q>erienced any more-least of all those aborut orur own nature, desbiny, and state in the wol'l1d. In asking these questions, we must be constantly ·aware of the limitations which aiccrue mom our particular historical sitruation.5 These were not sufficiently taken account of in the dassicaJ. phenomenology of Husserl, with its "transcendental subjectivity " based on an allegedly "d!isintel'ested observer." For all. its determination to 11eturn :to" the things themselves," this phenomerno~ogy did not attend sufficiently to the manner in which its own aims :and IJ[>ocedures we:ve determined historicaUy.6 Husserl, as he himself aJC1knowledged, was very much in the tradition of Descartes, who was trying to find an uns:hakabJe basis for the practice of phll.osophy. But it is just this basis which Heidegger seeks to prut into qruestion.7 We have to a.sk what is the decisiY.e matter for,thinking: "Is it consciousness and its objectivity or is it the Being of beings in its unconcealedness and concealment?" 8 Access to the things themselves is best thought of in true Greek fashion as " aletheia, the unoonceaJ.edness of what is present, iits being revealed, its showing itself." 9 (A,s he quite often does, Heidegger is here making capital out of ·an etymological point; " aletheia," the Greek word for """.t-1.,, • • 1 " i-th. " cealm t),..,ruuu, iI.S eqwv:a1ent to a- e ei,a, non~con · en. So what is basic to truth, irt must be inferred, is not the 00['rectness of assertions, or their cor11espondence with states of a:fiaim, or the :agreement of subjoot and object express1 ed by them; it is the self-showing which is necessary for things if 5 Cf. Krell, "Introduction," 21. 6 Ibid., 13. 7 Cf. Walter Biemel, Martin Heidegger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 8-9; Krell, 31. On the alleged errors of Descartes, see BT 123-33. sHeidegger, On Tflrne and Bemg (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 79; Krell, 14. oHeidegger, loc. cit., Krell, 13. 616 HUGO MEYNELL they 1arie to become objects of assertions.at all.10 The £.act is that.rulil (lO!l'respondence, " rudequation "11 or whatev. (shrink)