Is it absurd to believe that, in the absence of bodily continuity, personal identity could be retained? Bernard Williams argued for an affirmative answer to this question partly on the basis of a well-known thought experiment. Some other philosophers, including D. Z. Phillips, have accepted, or appear to have accepted, Williams’ conclusion. Yet the argument has the consequence of dismissing as absurd the sorts of reincarnation beliefs which, within their proper contexts, have a meaningful role in the lives of many millions of people. Drawing upon philosophical work by David Cockburn, and also on anthropological studies concerning reincarnation beliefs, this paper questions the extent to which ostensibly meaningful beliefs can be deemed unintelligible in the absence of careful attention to their cultural contexts.

1. ‘How do we know the material world?’, ‘What is it to know the material world?’, ‘In what ways is knowledge of the material world like and in what ways is it unlike other sorts of knowledge?’

We know how we know the material world and what it is to know the material world and in what ways such knowledge is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge. But a man who knows what poetry is like and how it is like and unlike prose may ask ‘What is poetry?’, and a mathematician who knows what it is like to do mathematics may ask ‘What is mathematics?’ It is in a rather like way that we ask ‘What is knowledge of the material world?’ The ways in which knowledge of the material world is like and unlike other sorts of knowledge are familiar to us but we wish for a still better grasp of these likenesses and unlikenesses.

Walter Burleigh in his c. 1323 De Puritate Artis Logicae Tractatus Longior considers a counterexample to hypothetical syllogism. The paradox implied by Burleigh's inference has come to be known as the problem of the ass (asinum), or, more prosaically, ‘You are an ass’. The argument states: ‘If I call you an ass, then I call you an animal; if I call you an animal, then I speak truthfully; therefore, if I call you an ass, then I speak truthfully’. Burleigh's paradox is reconstructed and formalized for purposes of critical analysis, in which the putative counterexample is ultimately shown to involve a fallacy of equivocation.

Anthony Quinton's ‘The Trouble with Kant’ (Philosophy, Vol. 72, no. 279, January, 1997, pp. 5–18) claims to expose radical faults in Kant's epistemology which are not pointed out ‘in the many commentators (he) has studied’ (p. 17). The faults are, initially, that Kant is a ‘wild and intellectually irresponsible arguer’ (p. 5), and finally that Kant's account of a priori intuitions and concepts is erroneous (p. 16). Quinton suggests that his objections are new, but the truth is that they, and the supposedly Kantian views against which they are directed, have formed a frequent response in commentators from Hegel to Strawson. The ‘wild and irresponsible arguer’ charge is, after all, a commonplace among the ‘fighting Kant tooth and nail’ commentators, though it remains to be shown that Kant is markedly worse than other philosophers of the same period. And the central claim against which Quinton directs his assault, that we impose a spatio-temporal-categorial framework on the manifold of sensation (pp. 5 and 7), has provoked fierce and extensive hostility. Throughout his article Quinton assumes an interpretation of Kant's claim in which his task is to show how our minds construct a common, objective, reality from a spatio-temporal-categorial synthesis ‘by applying a piece of mental apparatus ... to ... a manifold of sensation’ (p. 5). The familiar objections to a ‘coloured spectacles’ interpretation of Kant's account of space and time, and Strawson's initial rejection of the ‘imaginary subject of transcendental psychology’ (Bounds of Sense (London; Methuen, 1966) p. 32) belong to the same tradition.

In this paper I develop a critique of Kantian ethics, and more precisely a critique of a particular conception of moral reasoning. The fundamental assumption that underlies the conception that I am targeting is that to justify (morally or otherwise) an action is (perhaps with an ‘all things being equal’ clause) to settle its value, in such a way that all rational participants would have to acknowledge that value. As an alternative to the Kantian conception, I propose a conception in which the basic unit of moral reasoning is not an action but rather what I call an ‘ethical position’—where an ethical position is where, at any given moment and with respect to the matter at hand, you stand, and where moral reasoning consists in the articulation of ethical positions.

(I) Whenever we speak with someone in everyday life, when we write a letter or read a novel, we are said to use natural language. We have a historically given language like English or French; we consider familiar things and events; and we use the language more or less as most members of the same community use it.

In her paper ‘Is it True What They Say About Tarski?’, Susan Haack argues that Popper is wrong to regard Tarski's theory of truth as a correspondence theory of truth. For, she says:

… Tarksi does not present his theory as a correspondence theory. In fact Tarski explicitly comments that the correspondence theory cannot be considered a satisfactory definition of truth. And later he observes that he was ‘by no means surprised’ to learn that, in a survey carried out by Naess, only 15 per cent agreed that truth is correspondence with reality, while 90 per cent agreed that ‘It is snowing’ is true if and only if it is snowing (p. 324).