Karl Popper attempted to give an account of scientific research as the rational pursuit of the truth about nature without any appeal to what he took to be the fictitious notion of non-demonstrative or inductive support. Deductive inference can be seen to be inference enough for science, he claimed, once we appreciate the power of data to refute theory. Many of the standard objections to Popper's account purport to show that his deductivism actually entails a radical scepticism about the possibility of scientific knowledge. Some of these objections appear unanswerable in the context of the traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief; but this is neither a conception of knowledge that Popper himself accepted nor one that is currently in fashion. Reliabilism, the view that knowledge is a true belief generated by a reliable method, is now a popular replacement for the traditional analysis and one that is closer to Popper's own conception of knowledge. My aim in this essay is to consider in brief compass the prospects of a reliabilist reading of Popper's account of science. Such a reading makes it possible to turn some of the standard objections and helps to show which of Popper's views should be accepted and which rejected.

The needs principle—that certain goods should be distributedaccording to need—as been central to much socialist andegalitarian thought. It is the principle which Marx famously takesto be that which is to govern the distribution of goods in the higherphase of communism. The principle is one that Marx himself tookfrom the Blanquists. It had wider currency in the radical traditionsof the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century it remainedcentral to the mutualist form of socialism defended by Tawney andTitmuss. The principle underlay the development and justificationof the modern welfare state—thus the National Health Service isstill founded upon the idea that the distribution of medicalresources should be determined by medical need, not by ability topay. One source of the power of the needs principle lies in the factthat it appears to be both a principle of justice and a principle ofcommunity or social solidarity. As a principle of justice it is offeredas a corrective to the particular forms of unequal distributions ofgoods that can result from market transactions, and as a principle ofcommunity or social solidarity as a corrective to the possessiveindividualism taken to be the corollary of a market order.

This lecture is divided, roughly, into three parts. First, there is a general and perhaps rather simple-minded discussion of what are the ‘facts’ that social anthropologists study; is there anything special about these ‘facts’ which makes them different from other kinds of facts? It will be useful to start with the common-sense distinction between two kinds or, better, aspects of social facts; first—though neither is analytically prior to the other—and putting it very crudely, ‘what people do’, the aspect of social interaction, and second, ‘what—and how—people think’, the conceptual, classifying, cognitive component of human culture. Now in reality, of course (and perhaps not so ‘of course’; people do tend to think of them as separate ‘things’), these two aspects are inextricably intertwined. But it is essential to distinguish them analytically, because each aspect gives rise to quite different kinds of problems of understanding for the social anthropologist. We shall see that the problem of how to be ‘objective’, and so to avoid ethnographic error, arises in both contexts, but in rather different forms in each.

In their article ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Beardsley and Wimsatt raised problems about the legitimacy of certain critical practices. These problems, raised again in later writings and intensively discussed in recent years, remain unsettled and this lecture is intended to throw light upon them.

It is generally agreed by historians of modern thought that, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, philosophers in the German-speaking world identified and defined a type or species of knowledge whose peculiar independent status had hitherto been largely overlooked. It was developed, clarified, and, with a sharpened awareness of its unique possibilities, made to work in practice above all by Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert and their numerous followers; and, to a degree, also by Max Weber. The general name by which it was, and is, most often referred to is ‘Verstehen’—understanding. It has to be admitted that it was from the first, and remains to this day, a highly problematic and hotly disputed concept. Positivists, materialists, behaviourists and monists of all kinds—all those whose ideal is a single structure of organized systematic knowledge—have tended to view it with deep suspicion, and even to deny its existence altogether, claiming that it is wholly illusory and doomed to disappear before the inevitable advance of positive scientific method. However that may be, it will not be my purpose in this paper to enter into these difficult controversies. It may indeed be that no watertight definition of it is possible; that its putative boundaries with other forms or types of knowledge are vague and shifting; and even that there is no ultimate discontinuity in principle between it and the knowledge we gain from other spheres of research and investigation.

I am, naturally, greatly honoured to have been invited by the Royal Institute of Philosophy to organize and conduct their lecture series on American Philosophy. It has been an interesting if trying experience, and I must say that the process of organizing it has given me a special respect for the patience and administrative capacities of those who have the task year in year out. Of course there were special difficulties in the way of importing so many people from the United States (especially since the Institute does not have the funds needed to bring them over), but if the series was to be on American Philosophy—whatever that is—it seemed especially appropriate that the lectures be given predominantly by Americans who have made a special study of the subject— again, whatever that is. We may, of course, end with the conclusion that there is no such distinctive subject, and that the name ‘American Philosophy’ is as nominal as a name can be, but that, we should note, is something to be found out, not a conclusion dictated in advance.

Seeing is, or affords, a certain sort of awareness – visual – of one's surroundings. The obvious strategy for saying what one sees, or what would count as seeing something would be to ask what sort of sensitivity to one's surroundings – e.g. the pig before me – would so qualify. Alas, for more than three centuries – at least from Descartes to VE day – it was not so. Philosophers were moved by arguments, rarely stated which concluded that one could not, or never did, see what was before his eyes. So much for the obvious strategy. It occurred to almost no one to object that this could not be right. Frege did, but no one noticed. Austin, finally, did away with that conception of good faith in philosophy which had allowed such a thing to pass, and then with those arguments themselves. Until then, philosophy was deformed. Robbed of the obvious approach, a Drang set in to gaze inward, hoping to find what it really is to see in what enabled sensitivity to pigs, or in its byproducts. Gazing inward can be science, but often merely poses as it. It can be difficult to disentangle actual science (or at least empirical fact) from mere preconception pretending to its rigour. Most nowadays feel rid of the grip of those barriers to the obvious approach. But, as we shall see, many so feel wrongly. The Drang still misshapes their thought. I aim here to identify the Drang at work; thereby, I hope, to rid us of it.

In several great religions God is thought of as an agent or active individual exalted in principle above other agents, the supreme creative and controlling power. But, however exalted, the deity is still, in spite of what Tillich and others say, an individual being, somehow analogous to a human person. Indeed, man is said to be created in the divine image. Without this analogy religion loses an essential trait. Not only in faiths derived from Judaism, but also in Zoroastrianism, and even in much Hinduism and some Buddhism, the analogy plays a central role.

The categories of reason and faith are often contrasted. When reason gives out, we are told that we have to rely on faith. Such exhortations are made particularly in the context of religion. When for instance, we face some personal tragedy which may well seem inexplicable, we are told that faith can help us through it. Very often faith is referred to in a vacuum. Presumably faith in God is usually meant, but all too often God drops out of the picture, and it seems that all we need is faith, not faith in anything or anyone, but just faith. We are thus encouraged to add what seems to be a magic ingredient to our lives, which can transform everything. Perhaps at the back of such thinking lies some Calvinist notion of the corrupt character of human reason. As a result it may seem that we cannot rely on our judgment, which is the product of the fallen and sinful nature of humanity. Instead we must depend on ‘faith’ which may, or may not, be given us by the grace of God.

The scholastic mode of intellectual enquiry has been looked down upon in Western philosophical circles over the last few centuries, not least because of the central role of authorities shaping the reasoning that takes place and because of the fine distinctions and disputational mode of discourse it employs. The scholastic approach is, however, a prime example of philosophy as therapeia, of intellectual inquiry and reflection concerned with the healing transformation of human life, with what kind of knowledge and behaviour brings about human happiness. The scholastic approach is motivated and determined by consideration of what the final human goal might be and what are the means to achieve it. Authorities are important because they tell us about the goal and means. Distinctions and disputation are important because they help us learn in a way that transforms our minds and actions.

T. W. Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is fifty years old. Its disconcerting darkness now seems so bound to the time of its writing, one may well wonder if we have anything to learn from it. Are its main lines of argument relevant to our social and philosophical world? Are the losses it records losses we can still recognise as our own?

Philosophy of mind is, and for a long while has been, 99% metaphysics and 1% epistemology. Attention is lavished on the question of the nature of mind, but questions concerning how we know about minds are discussed much less thoroughly. University courses in philosophy of mind routinely devote a lot of time to dualism, logical behaviourism, the mind/brain identity theory, and functionalism. But what gets said about the kinds of evidence that help one determine what mental states, if any, an individual occupies? Well, Skinner's puritanical disdain for postulating mental states gets raked over the coals, the problem of other minds gets solved by a perfunctory invocation of the principle of inference to the best explanation, and the Turing test gets discussed, mainly in order to emphasize that it can lead to mistaken answers.

In 1989 Oxford University Press launched a new programme of monographs in moral philosophy entitled the ‘Oxford Ethics Series’. Given that the series' editor is Derek Parfit it is unsurprising that the books published to date feature rigorous analysis and argumentation regarding the nature of reasons and requirements. Perhaps by way of intended commitment to this profile, the following brief statement appears on the cover of the first volume (Shelly Kagan's The Limits of Morality): ‘The books in the series will contain philosophical arguments about morality or rationality. The aim will be to make undeniable progress’.

Professor Parkinson in his lecture on ‘The Translation Theory of Understanding’ (pp. 1–19 above) discusses two stages in the development of a false but influential tradition which he finds common to Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Professor George Steiner's After Babel. He is not, of course, alleging any direct historical influence of the one on the other; neither is he principally addressing Steiner's book as a whole, but rather the account of understanding upon which it appears to be founded. I should like to take his paper as the starting-point for my own, but begin from a somewhat broader view than he does of the legacy of Locke. With Parkinson's constructive position I have no quarrel, and I shall not address myself directly to it.

The homologies of process within morphogenetic fields provide some of the best evidence for evolution—just as skeletal and organ homologies did earlier. Thus, the evidence for evolution is better than ever. The role of natural selection in evolution, however, is seen to play less an important role. It is merely a filter for unsuccessful morphologies generated by development. Population genetics is destined to change if it is not to become as irrelevant to evolution as Newtonian mechanics is to contemporary physics. (Gilbert, Opitz, and Raff 1996, 368)

It has been said that the tendency to make use of examples drawn from literature in discussing problems in moral philosophy is not only dangerous, but needless. Dangers there certainly are, but these have little to do with the reasons offered for the needlessness of such examples. Examples drawn from literature, it is said, introduce an unnecessary complexity into one's philosophising. Indeed, as Peter Winch has pointed out, according to ‘a fairly well-established … tradition in recent Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy … it is not merely permissible, but desirable, to take trivial examples. The rationale of this view is that such examples do not generate the emotion which is liable to surround more serious cases and thus enable us to look more coolly at the logical issues involved’, and it carries the implication that ‘moral concerns can be examined quite apart from any consideration of what it is about these concerns which makes them important to us’.

African philosophy today is a complicated and dynamic discipline. This presentation will concentrate on two topics that are currently of special interest. One concerns the meaning of the term ‘communalism’ when it is used to express a defining characteristic of Africa's cultures. The other concerns the reactions on the part of African philosophers and scholars to the movement that has come to be known in Western academia and culture as ‘feminism’.

In this lecture, I want to convey some ideas about linguistic communication which will probably be found not only unfamiliar, but also difficult to grasp at a first encounter. Perhaps I am being too ambitious in so short a compass. At any rate, my only hope of success is to work within closely defined limits, to concentrate more upon expounding these suggestions than upon detailed justification of them, and to say as little as possible about the shortcomings of alternative proposals which are current. The references which I cite have also been rather narrowly selected. As to the limits of this discussion, it will be confined to linguistic communication, as effected by the use of sentences. This is not to deny that there are non-linguistic forms of communication, both between men and between other animals, nor that there are other units of linguistic communication than the sentence; I have taken only what seems most typical of human communication, in order to make the task manageable.

The chapter will argue that the way current enthusiasm for moral enhancement is articulated in the extant literature is itself morally problematic. The moral evaluation (and ultimately disapproval) of the discourse will proceed through three stages. First, we shall look at the chequered history of various societies’ attempts to cast evil, character, and generally undesirable behaviour, as biological problems. As will be argued, this is the larger context in which moral enhancement discourse should be understood, and abuses in the recent past and present should therefore be highlighted. Second, it will be argued that, given moral functioning's profoundly contextual and responsive qualities, any notion of a fine-grained, powerfully efficacious moral enhancement is both unrealistic and, actually, incoherent. Since enthusiasts’ hopes are unrealistic and incoherent, such enhancement would not even be capable of providing the transformative ends that supposedly justify the sometimes extreme prescriptions set forward. Finally, the chapter concludes with the claim that moral enhancement enthusiasm actually serves to trivialise the evils of this world, and not only to trivialise the hard-won efforts required to diminish and overcome such evils, but to misdirect attention away from the real hard work that needs to be done in facing such evils.

In the first section of this paper I draw, on a purely conceptual level, a distinction between two kinds of reasons: content-related and attitude-related reasons. The established view is that, in the case of the attitude of believing something, there are no attitude-related reasons. I look at some arguments intended to establish this claim in the second section with an eye to whether these argument could be generalized to cover the case of preferences as well. In the third section I argue against such generalizations and present a case in favour of accepting attitude-related reasons for preferences. In the fourth section I present an objection to which I react in the fifth section where I try to strengthen my case for attitude-related reasons for preferences. Finally, I discuss and reject criticisms raised by two opponents of the view defended here.