In Part I of this paper I attempt to present, in more or less summary fashion, some well-known difficulties in the concept of deontic morality (i.e. the moralty of duty, obligation, what is morally wrong, and what one morally ought to do), as shown by certain features of deontic moral discourse. I make no great claims for originality here, although perhaps there may be some virtue in the presentation and ordering. In any case, Part I is a necessary preliminary to Part II, where I attempt to defend the rationality of and the necessity for deontic language against some recent (direct and indirect) attacks.

Recent advances in physics render a reconsideration of the Place of Mathematics in the Interpretation of the Universe particularly timely. On the one hand, we have the introduction of non-euclidian geometry, which has given rise to much controversy informed or otherwise; on the other hand, we find mysterious forms of mathematics, invented to cope with the quantum difficulties, which so far have escaped metaphysical investigation or criticism. It would seem most desirable that these modes of interpreting reality should be examined from the broader philosophical point of view.

It is notorious that great philosophers are apt to be misunderstood. Controversy rages about their work, and sometimes they are credited with completely contradictory views. Consider the sharply contrasted opinions of Plato's political thought by Sir Karl Popper, on the one hand, and G. C. Field and H. B. Acton on the other.

In Process and Reality Professor A. N. Whitehead formulates a Cosmology which embodies a resolute attempt to combine in one philosophical synthesis a scientific account of Concrescence with a metaphysical explanation thereof in terms of Creativity.

A newcomer to the writing of this survey quickly learns (though not quite quickly enough for his first venture) that they do not serve who only sit and wait. The expectation, in other words, that the year's major books of French philosophy will arrive unsolicited, is not fulfilled. Instead one is faced with a miscellaneous set of publications covering such varied topics as Jewish mysticism, cybernetics and a translation from Spanish of a primer of political economy. I must therefore beg readers to be indulgent enough to pay for my first lesson, promising them that henceforth I shall bestir myself and forage.

‘There is a moral right to secede.’It is not, perhaps, always entirely clear what Buchanan means with his reference to a right to secede, and that is a matter we shall have to deal with in due course, but, anyway, the claim that there is a moral right to secede is a good deal more complex than is apparent from Buchanan's ground-breaking work and involves a number of assumptions that need to be gone into if Buchanan's work is to be built on. Many other people, too, seem to assume such a right, especially in the context of discussions of an alleged right to self-determination. My main concern in this paper is with the self that might be self-determining and with what it must be like if it is to have a right. My conclusion is that, though there are many important questions to raise about secession, they are not, outside the case of federations, questions about a right to secede; a right to secede has bearing only in the least interesting cases

In an essay on ‘The Notion of Cause’ reprinted in Mysticism and Logic (and which constituted the presidential address to the Aristotelian Society in the year 1912) Russell argued ‘that the word ‘cause” is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable’.1 His argument here to the effect that ‘cause’ is not a central concept in science, as philosophers have thought it, is reminiscent of Norman Campbell's statement in Physics: The Elements (1920) and in What is Science? (1921).

In his greatest work (The Republic) the greatest thinker of his era, if not of all time, Plato, writing in one of the greatest, if not even the greatest epoch in the intellectual, artistic, and literary history of mankind, held up a mirror not only to his own age but to every age, not least our own, in the glowing radiance of his unsurpassed genius. This essay is an attempt to look on the world around us with his searchlight. Addressing on this subject a select company of educated and intelligent men and women, I discovered that several of them had attempted but had failed to read through The Republic. They could not see the wood for the trees, lost their way, and gave up the guest.