Photographs, paintings, rigid sculptures: all these provide examples of static images. It is true that they change—photographs fade, paintings darken and sculptures crumble—but what change they undergo (unless very damaging) is irrelevant to their representational content. A static image is one that represents by virtue of properties which remain largely unchanged throughout its existence. Because of this defining feature, according to a long tradition in aesthetics, a static image can only represent an instantaneous moment, or to be more exact the state of affairs obtaining at that moment'. It cannot represent movement and the passage of time. This traditional view mirrors a much older one in metaphysics: that change is to be conceived of as a series of instantaneous states and hence that an interval of time is composed of extensionless moments. The metaphysical view has been involved in more controversy than its aesthetic counterpart. Aristotle identified it as one of the premises of Zeno's arrow paradox and Augustine employed it in his proof of the unreality of time.

The voice of conservatism is not much heard in contemporary political philosophy. There is no shortage of conservatives, but there is a shortage of systematic, articulate, and reasonable attempts to defend conservatism. The aim of this paper is to provide the outlines of such a defence. It is not possible, in a paper, to provide more than an outline. The argument proceeds by identifying several features of what is taken to be thestrongest version of conservatism. These features jointly define it and distinguish it from other versions of conservatism, as well as from other political outlooks.

1. There is a tendency nowadays for linguists, philosophers and other theorists of language, to dismiss the notion of an object like the English language or the Polish language as simply mythological or mythopoeic—as of no interest to any serious science of language. Some theorists even appear to deny that there are such things as languages (in the plural). ‘This notion [of a public language] is unknown to empirical inquiry and raises what seem to be irresolvable problems’, Chomsky said in a lecture he gave recently in London (1994).

In setting out to discuss the trouble with Kant I may seem to be suggesting that there is only one. I do think that there is one fundamental one, which is that he is a wild and intellectually irresponsible arguer. Any innate leaning that way must have been enhanced by the intellectual isolation of Konigsberg, which preserved him from serious criticism. I shall be sticking to one particular example of this failing. It is the account he gives of the way in which the common world of experience is constructed or synthesized by applying some piece of mental apparatus—the forms of intuition and the categories—to what he calls the manifold of sensation. The rather elementary question I want to raise about this theory is that of how the claim can be made good that the outcome of this process is just one, single world; for all of us, for each of us at different times, even for any one of us at a particular time.

Cognitive science is held, not only by its practitioners, to offer something distinctively new in the philosophy of mind. This novelty is seen as the product of two factors. First, philosophy of mind takes itself to have well and truly jettisoned the ‘old paradigm’, the theory of the mind as embodied soul, easily and completely known through introspection but not amenable to scientific inquiry. This is replaced by the ‘new paradigm’, the theory of mind as neurally-instantiated computational mechanism, relatively opaque to introspection and the proper subject of detailed empirical investigation. Second, in the constitutive disciplines of cognitive science (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science etc.) we have for the first time the theoretical, experimental and technological resources to begin this investigation. My concern here is to show that, despite its scientific and philosophical sophistication, the new (computational) paradigm is in certain striking ways very similar to the old paradigm and that Wittgenstein's criticisms of the former apply to much of the latter.

There has been a time in my teaching career that I used to cite in my introductory classes ‘Moral Philosophy’ from Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (a best seller of the 1970's). The situation leading up to the quote is that the main character, Isadora, is asked a sexual favour by her brother in law, Pierre. Her answer and the subsequent dialogue read then as follows: ‘I can't’, I said. ‘Come on,’ Pierre said, ‘I'll teach you.’ ‘I didn't mean that… I meant that I can't; morally, I can…’

Frege's doctrine that the demonstrative ‘I’ has a private, incommunicable sense creates tension within his theory of meaning. Fregean sense is supposed to be something objective, which exists independently of its being cognized by anyone. And the notion of a private sense corresponding to primitive aspects of an individual of which only he can be awaredoes violence both to Frege's theory of sense as well as to our notionof language as something essentially intersubjective. John Perry has arguedthat Frege was led to the doctrine of private senses in spite of his beliefin the objectivity of sense through his attempt to solve a problem which indexicals posed for his theory. And while philosophers have argued about whether the notion of a private sense is in fact problematic for Frege, they have tended to share Perry's assumption about its origin.

A natural picture to have of events and processes is of entities which extend through time and which have temporal parts, just as physical objects extend through space and have spatial parts. While accepting this picture of events, in this paper I want to present an alternative conception of processes as entities which, like physical objects, do not extend in time and do not have temporal parts, but rather persist in time. Processes and events belong to metaphysically distinct categories. Moreover the category of events is not the more basic of the two.

The view that ‘ought’ cannot be deduced from ‘is’, credited to Hume as a major insight into the nature of morality, is surprisingly easy to refute. (1) What they are doing is evil. (2) Therefore, they ought not to do it. Here we have a case of deducing ‘ought’ from ‘is’. The conclusion follows, because ‘ought not’ is analytic to ‘evil’. ‘Ah, but that's just what is wrong with the example: the premise is not a pure “is”; it contains an “ought”, though this does not appear explicitly.’ This is true, of course; the inference would not be valid otherwise. Still, the example shows that the is/ought principle will not do as it stands.

Tom Phillips' painting for the dustjacket of the hardback edition of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals depicts a faintly translucent, darkly-coloured, multi-layered lattice of letters, in which each character abuts directly upon others above, below and beside it, each overwrites or is overwritten by others of varying dimensions, but none is immediately decipherable as part of a word; and at the centre of this array is a geometrically precise, illuminated circle—perhaps emanating from a light located behind or under the layers of letters, perhaps from one directed at them from above. This image is open to many interpretations. It could represent the sun from Plato's myth of the cave shining through the dialogue in which he presents it (a myth that irradiates Iris Murdoch's text); it could also represent the light of Miss Murdoch's attention playing over the palimpsest of texts that make up the Western tradition of metaphysical thought. But for anyone encountering it upon closing the book after a first reading, it may also seem very precisely to crystallize one's initial impression of that text.

Judgments about right are normally circumscribed and balanced by other considerations but it is possible to imagine ‘rights thinking’ as occurring without any such admixture. This pure rights thinking is characterized by several distinctive features. First, resentment, respect, and other passions of rectitude overrule sympathetic feelings of concern and compassion, love and affection. One responds simply as justice demands, never allowing extraneous factors to interfere with satisfaction of this moral ideal. Second, when claims of rights collide with personal attachments or calculations of benefit, the right systematically prevails. For example, rights thinking resists assertions presented to justify breaking promises to friends for their supposed greater good. Third, although rights entail obligations to their holders, responsibilities to others extend no further than these entailments within pure rights thinking. No general obligation of benevolence is recognized, for example, since no one in particular has a right to one's benevolence. Hence, fourth, as well as entailing moral protections for their holders and defining centres of independent agency, the perception of rights also promotes one's fundamental separateness from others.

From Plato through Aquinas to Kant and beyond beauty has traditionally been considered the paradigmatic aesthetic quality. Thus, quite naturally following Socrates' strategy in The Meno, we are tempted to generalize from our analysis of the nature and value of beauty, a particular aesthetic value, to an account of aesthetic value generally. When we look at that which is beautiful, the object gives rise to a certain kind of pleasure within us. Thus aesthetic value is characterized in terms of that which affords us pleasure. Of course, the relation cannot be merely instrumental. Many activities may lead to consequent pleasures that we would not consider to be aesthetic in any way. For example, playing tennis, going swimming or finishing a book.