According to Wittgenstein, philosophical puzzles are due to deep prejudices about language. In this collection of essays, in honour of Rush Rhees, philosophers investigate the hold such prejudices have on us in a number of closely related areas of philosophical enquiry.

W. H. Sheldon has recently remarked that philosophical naturalism of the type propounded by John Dewey and his followers boils down to materialism in a new guise. Of course, any effort to relate human experience to the physical world within which it arises is open to the general charge of “materialism.” But naturalism can be called “materialistic” in a more specific sense if it tends to pass cavalierly over those aspects of experience upon which older philosophers have based a sharp (...) contrast between experience and nature. This, I take it, is the primary complaint against recent naturalism, and it has its roots, I believe, in the influence of modern psychological theory upon philosophical thought. (shrink)

In a series of lectures on minds and persons, I am going to take advantage of the occasion to ask what kind of person should one be if one has a philosophical mind. I ask the question because it is itself a philosophically contentious issue. Indeed, I shall be offering answers in a climate which is generally hostile to them. I want to aise the issue in three contexts: first, in relation to questions which have been treated epistemologically, but which (...) I think belong to logic; second in relation to miracles; and third in relation to moral convictions. I shall spend most of my time on the first context. (shrink)