In these prefatory remarks, which are designed to locate my topic within the complex and wide-stretching field of Popper's thought and writings, I shall not say anything that those familiar with his work will not already know. Moreover, what I do say will take as understood many of the problems and theories, not to mention the terminology, that I shall later be doing my best to make understandable. My apologies are therefore due equally to those who know something about Popper's discussions of indeterminism and of the propensity interpretation of probability, and to those who know nothing.

The philosophy of religion, as commonly understood by Christians in both the Catholic and Reformed traditions, whether they think it a worthwhile enterprise or not, begins with arguments for the existence of a deity, proceeds to show that this deity is necessarily unique, eternal, and suchlike, and leaves it to reflection on divine revelation to consider whether this deity might be properly designated as ‘three persons in one nature’. Much later, after discussing the metaphysical implications of the incarnation of the second person of the triune godhead, one would arrive at theories about the death of Jesus Christ as putatively redemptive, and describable as sacrificial, atoning and the like.

Marx did not approach the state in answer to some such broad and abstract philosophical question as: What is the state? Nor did he offer a full sociological or historical or analytic account of state institutions and functions, and there are hence clear and substantial dangers in extrapolating to all or most conditions an account which is, in large part, specific to bourgeois society. Failing a comprehensive and formal treatise on politics and the state, Marx's own discussion consists of a number of scattered and not altogether consistent general observations and some detailed investigation of the role and character of the state in particular historical situations. It seems sensible, then, to begin an elucidation of his account of the state with a comment on the nature of his interest in the subject. Why did he need a theory of the state? At what points does it become important to his explanatory and his revolutionary doctrines?

Notice the key concepts: wonder, purification of emotion, piercing the blindness of activity, transcendent functions. There are echoes here of the Platonic doctrine of philosophy as the care of the soul, therapy, the turning of the soul from fantasy to reality. Education, says Plato (and not just philosophy), is the art of orientation, the shedding of the leaden weights which progressively weigh us down as we become more and more sunk in the material world and the world of desire, eating and similar pleasures and indulgences. All this is in the context of the Cave, and a form of vision which is to become able to bear ‘the sight of real being and reality at its most bright… which is a form of goodness’.

This paper is stimulated by and indebted to a study by Charles Altieri of the ways in which affect is present and articulated in art and literature, which, he argues, hold significance for the philosophy of emotion. I focus on Altieri's thesis that affective states may have aesthetic qualities and value. I pursue this notion first with reference to Nietzsche's attempt to recruit affect as a means of countering Schopenhauer's pessimism. I then attempt to show the coherence of the (on the face of it problematic) notion that passion may exhibit an aesthetic dimension, drawing on Richard Wollheim's account of certain ideas in psychoanalytic theory, for which I suggest precedents in the history of philosophy.

Why does the problem of free will seem so intractable? I surmise that in large measure it does so because the free will debate, at least in its modern form, is conducted in terms of a mistaken approach to causality in general. At the heart of this approach is the assumption that all causation is fundamentally event causation. Of course, it is well-known that some philosophers of action want to invoke in addition an irreducible notion of agent causation, applicable only in the sphere of intelligent agency. But such a view is generally dismissed as incompatible with the naturalism that has now become orthodoxy amongst mainstream analytical philosophers of mind. What I want to argue is that substances, not events, are the primary relata of causal relations and that agent causation should properly be conceived of as a species of substance causation. I shall try to show that by thus reconceiving the nature of causation and of agency, the problem of free will can be made more tractable. I shall also argue for a contention that may seem even less plausible at first sight, namely, that such a view of agency is perfectly compatible with a volitionist theory of action.

People value highly the digital technologies that are so pervasive in everyday life and work, certainly as measured by economists. Yet there are also evident harms associated with them, including the likelihood that they are affecting political discourse and choices. The features of digital markets mean they tend toward monopoly, so great economic and political power lies in the hands of a small number of giant companies. While tougher regulation may be one way to tackle the harms they create, it does not get at the structural problem, which is their advertising-driven business model. The hunt for people's attention drives algorithmic promotion of viral content to get ever-more clicks. An alternative policy intervention to reclaim public space would be to create a public service competitor that could drive competition along other dimensions. Online space must be reclaimed as a public space from the privately-owned US and Chinese digital giants.

I shall start by considering the apparently paradoxical doctrines that Wittgenstein put forward about knowledge: they show how the concept of knowledge is, as he says, ‘specialized’. This is not, as I shall show, a very important issue in itself, but it leads on to other points, of more interest: how it comes about, for example, that ‘not all corrections of our beliefs are on the same level’. I shall then discuss the idea that we inherit a certain picture of the world that forms the background of our experiments and researches. This idea, which is not of course unique to Wittgenstein, is, however, developed with many fresh insights. I end with some discussion of Wittgenstein's reported views on religious belief, which should not, in my opinion, be regarded as part of his contribution to philosophy, the interest of them being, perhaps, more biographical than philosophical.

My title is in a way misleading, for I want to show that there is a number of concepts of heaven. I want to explore these in the first part of this lecture. In the second part I shall comment on most ofthem, to see which, ifany, seem to be viable.

Libertarians hold that free action and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism and that some human beings occasionally act freely and are morally responsible for some of what they do. Can libertarians who know both that they are right and that they are free make sincere promises? Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, contends that they cannot—at least when they assume that should they do what they promise to do, they would do it freely. Probably, this strikes many readers as a surprising thesis for a libertarian to hold. In light of van Inwagen's holding it, the title of his essay—‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’—may seem unsurprising.

‘Relativists' and ‘absolutists' about truth often see their own camp as promoting virtues, such as open-mindedness and intellectual humility, and see the opposing camp as fostering vices, like closed-mindedness and arrogance. Relativism is accused of fostering these vices because it entails that each person’s beliefs are automatically right for the person who holds them. How can we be humble or open-minded if we cannot concede that we might be wrong? Absolutism is accused of fostering these vices because the view is seen as entailing certainty. This also seems to preclude us from conceding that we could be wrong. However, no relativist defends the Protagorean version of relativism that entails infallibilism. And no absolutist posits infallible certainty. Fallibilism really is a precondition of various virtues, but both camps take themselves to be defending fallibilist positions against opponents who they take to be committed to infallibilism. Philosophers may inadvertently end up promoting precisely the sort of infallibilism they oppose by creating a false dichotomy and caricaturing the opposing camp. This underscores the importance of interpretive charity in both academic and public debate.

I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept ‘pragmatics’—in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision.

I wish from my Heart, I could avoid concluding, that since Morality, according to your Opinion as well as mine, is determin'd merely by Sentiment, it regards only human Nature & human Life. … If Morality were determin'd by Reason, that is the same to all rational Beings: But nothing but Experience can assure us, that the Sentiments are the same. What Experience have we with regard to superior Beings? How can we ascribe to them any Sentiments at all? They have implanted those Sentiments in us for the Conduct of Life like our bodily Sensations, which they possess not themselves. (Letter from Hume to Hutcheson: March 16, 1740)

When we ask whether morality ‘regards only human nature and human life’ we might be concerned with one of two kinds of question. We may be asking what kinds of being could share our moral point of view. What is the potential scope of the community of moral agents and assessors? Is the moral point of view essentially a human point of view? Could we, or should we, adopt a wider standpoint (say that of rational agency as such) which would leave room for a significant moral dialogue with non-human moral agents, if there are any? Alternatively, we could be asking whether only human beings should be the objects of moral concern or whether we should widen the circle of concern to include other kinds of being. We may make the same point using a helpful device of Cora Diamond's. We may be concerned with what should replace x or with what should replace y in the formula: We xs assess together conduct and character in so far as it affects ourselves and our fellow ys.

There are many people who think that deconstruction has run its course, has had its day, and that it is now time to return to the important business of philosophy, or perhaps to serious ethical, social and political questions. Derrida's work, it is said, leads nowhere but a sterile philosophy of difference that in its de-politicized, de-historicized abstractness is a form of conservatism little better than the kinds of identity thinking to which it seems to be so radically opposed. In short, we must go ‘beyond’ deconstruction.

When we try to think about the causal nexus and the physical nature of the world as a whole we may be struck by two quite different difficulties in finding room in it to accommodate together (a) knowledge or reasoned belief and (b) causal determinism. (a) may seem to us to exclude (b) and (b) may seem to us to exclude (a). Taking it as a fact that there is knowledge and that knowledge seems to be indefinitely extensible, it has been felt by some philosophers that we can disprove total determinism by showing that if there were laws of nature which purported to govern all movements of matter in the universe there would still be something which even an ‘all-knowing’ predicter could not predict, viz. his own predictions or his own actions; and that given enough knowledge any agent could refute anybody else's predictions of his actions. So it has been thought that the phenomenon of knowledge somehow shows there cannot be laws to govern all movements of matter in the universe. This comfortably anodyne reflection is examined in the second part of the lecture. It elevates human minds and even confers a sort of cosmic importance on them. The other difficulty in making room for both (a) and (b) is in some loose sense the dual of this. Instead of taking knowledge for granted and questioning total determinism, it merely takes causality for granted but then deduces the total impossibility of knowledge. It simply asks: ‘How can we take a belief seriously, or consider it seriously as a candidate to be knowledge, if it is no better than a simple physical effect?’ This is a more pessimistic reflection and I shall begin with it.

Contrary to one possible interpretation of my title, this paper will not advocate any scepticism or ontological deflation. My concern will rather be with how we should best think about a realm of phenomena the existence of which is in no doubt, what has traditionally been referred to as the genetic. I have no intention of questioning a very well established scientific consensus on this domain. It involves the chemical DNA, which resides in almost all our cells, which is capable of producing copies of itself that accurately reproduce a very long sequence of components, and which plays a role in the physiology of the cell which in certain basic respects is quite well understood. This substance has also achieved a remarkable iconic status in contemporary culture. It is seen as fundamental to personal identity both in the practical sense of providing a criterion of identity through DNA testing, and in the much deeper sense of being seen as, somehow, defining who we are. The latter role is illustrated, for example, by the recent debate about the right of children conceived by sperm donation to know who are their fathers.

There is an ancient and ambiguous philosophical doctrine that perception is passive. This can mean that the mind contributes nothing to the content of our sensory experience: its power of perception is a mere receptivity. In this sense the principle has often been questioned, and is indeed doubtful on empirical grounds, given one reasonable interpretation of what it would be for the mind to make such a contribution.

For the last few years, thanks to the Leverhulme Trust, I've been largely absent from my department, working on the late antique philosopher Plotinus. To speak personally – it's been a difficult few years, since my youngest daughter has been afflicted with anorexia during this period, and my own bowel cancer was discovered, serendipitously, and removed, at the end of 2005. Since then I've had ample occasion to consider the importance – and the difficulty – of the practice of detachment, and also to worry about the moral some have drawn from Plotinian and similar philosophies, namely that the things of this world really do not matter much, and that we should withdraw ourselves from them. Maybe it is true, as Plotinus says, that ‘some troubles are profitable to the sufferers themselves, poverty and sickness for example’. But this is not an altogether helpful message for those afflicted by the bundle of disorders that lead to anorexia. It's difficult not to suspect, for example, that Simone Weil would have lived longer but for her Neo-Platonism. It has also been made obvious to me that we are (or at any rate, I am) much less in control of our own mental and emotional states even than I had thought before. None of this, of course, should have been any surprise: I have frequently pointed out – to myself and others – the importance of distinguishing between one's self and the states one finds oneself in, and the extreme difficulty of controlling the thoughts we say are ours (but which, by that very fact, reveal themselves as very far from ours). Any delusion that my knowledge of these facts is of itself enough to render me immune to them has been – at least for the moment – thoroughly debunked – though the facts themselves are such that this disillusionment, so to call it, is probably both temporary and almost entirely insincere!

Among A. J. Ayer's many influential contributions to philosophy are the accounts of the nature of metaphysics which he propounded at various stages of his philosophical development. Whereas his early position is a clear version of the antimetaphysical attitude of the Viennese circle and, more generally, of logical positivism, his later position is, as he generously emphasized, in some crucial respects indebted to Peirce's pragmatism and to Ramsey's analysis of the structure of theories. His later views on the nature of metaphysics are contained in his book Central Questions of Philosophy and in his reply to my criticisms in a Festschrift, published on the occasion of his retirement from the Wykeham Chair of Philosophy at Oxford University (Macdonald, 1979). Although in this reply he describes his later account of metaphysics as ‘much too perfunctory’, it does constitute an important attempt at answering one of the central questions of philosophy.

‘Come on, it's not a matter of life and death’, said some Job-like comforter, following a defeat in a football match. ‘No’, replied Bill Shankly, the granite-like Scot who was manager of Liverpool FC during their days of pre-eminence, whose team had just lost, ‘it is more important than that’.