Some years ago, in the course of a general critique of what has sometimes been referred to as the covering law theory of explanation, I made the claim that perfectly satisfactory explanations can often be provided by indicating only one or a few necessary conditions, where we remain ignorant of the sufficient conditions, of what we nevertheless claim to understand. What seemed to me one identifiable type of such explanations I called “explaining how-possibly,” because it was a type more naturally (...) given in response to the question how it could be that a certain thing happened than to the more familiar question why it did so. In the present paper I propose to review certain objections to this thesis which have come to my attention in the interval, and to make such concessions as these seem to require. In fact, the concessions will be minor, since the general thesis still seems to me quite defensible. (shrink)

Introducing students to the core philosophical issues surrounding modern physics and the ideas, which have shaped our current understanding of the subject, the book is based on lectures by H. W. Watson and sets out to illuminate and implicate the inextricably entwined nature of philosophy and physics and the importance of logic.

W. H. Walsh; XII—Historical Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 217–236, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

W. H. Walsh; I—The Presidential Address: Moral Authority and Moral Choice, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 1–24.

W. H. Walsh; I—The Presidential Address: Moral Authority and Moral Choice, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 1–24.

W. H. Walsh; I—The Presidential Address: Moral Authority and Moral Choice, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 1–24.

W. H. Walsh; XII—Historical Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 217–236, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

Philosophy of history is not a subject which has hitherto attracted much attention in this country. Preoccupation with the methods and achievements of the natural sciences, and distaste for the sort of rationale of history as a whole which Hegel and others offered under the title in the early nineteenth century, have served to make most British philosophers accord its problems only the most casual recognition. It is therefore all the more interesting to find an English writer of unusual powers (...) both of argument and expression, who was himself an historian of distinction in his special field, devoting a large part of his philosophical thinking to the problems of historical knowledge and their wider implications. Unfortunately, R. G. Collingwood was not able to begin the major work on philosophy of history, to writing which, as we are told in the introduction to the present book, he had looked forward for twenty-five years, until his powers were seriously affected by bad health, and he did not live to complete it. But though the full results of his thinking on the subject are lost, we are now able, thanks to the skilful work of his friend Professor T. M. Knox, to study what is in effect an extensive interim report on it. Professor Knox has produced The Idea of History largely on the basis of lectures which Collingwood prepared in 1936, supplemented by two essays already published which date from the same period and a certain amount of material from the unfinished Principles of History written in 1939. (shrink)

This essay amounts to a commentary on some of the leading doctrines of the Analogies of Experience, whose main contention I take to be that we should not be in possession of a unitary time-system unless certain things were true, and indeed necessarily true, of the world of experienced fact. A unitary time-system is one in which all temporal ascriptions—all dates and durations—are directly relateable; it makes sense inside such a system to ask of every supposed happening whether it preceded, (...) followed or was simultaneous with anything else which is taken to happen. Kant assumes, obviously correctly as it seems to me, that the temporal system we have at least purports to be unitary in this way. He also assumes, again as I see it uncontrovertibly, that statements assigning dates to events or durations to processes are intended to say something about the objective world, instead of to record what particular persons happen to feel. We do contrast real with apparent duration, but it is the former which necessarily occupies our primary attention, for only if we first fix the real position of some things in the temporal process can we speak effectively of the apparent position of other things. The real, here as elsewhere, is the normal, the apparent the deviant, and you cannot understand the deviant until you grasp that from which it deviates. Our chief aim in operating a system of temporal concepts must accordingly be to say what objectively is the case. (shrink)

What is the Critique of Pure Reason about? The terminology of the work is so perplexing, its argument so obscurely expressed, that the ordinary reader may be forgiven if he puts it down at the end very much in the dark as to what it all means. He will have seen that in it Kant has attempted to establish certain conclusions: the subjectivity of space and time, the existence and objective validity of a number of a priori concepts or categories, (...) the falsity of the arguments used to defend the metaphysical system most widely favoured in German learned circles in the eighteenth century; but though he has grasped all this he may yet have failed to make sense of the work as a whole. It is the old story of not seeing the wood for trees; and in this case the fault is more excusable than in most, for the individual trees each demand so much attention and are so difficult to get round that it is all too easy to forget the very existence of the wood. At the worst, one may think that there is no wood at all; only a miscellaneous aggregate of individual trees which have nothing to do with each other. (shrink)

The sequence from ideal state to tyran I ny contained in Books VIII-IX of the Republic constitutes neither history nor philosophy of history, but rather completes Plato's overall theory of politics, dealing, like every theoretical science, with simplified or pure cases, and narrated purely for dramatic effort. Popper's view that Plato was fundamentally an historicist is incorrect. Plato makes no straightforward comments on philosophy of history. Perhaps, like many Greeks, he surveyed history pessimistically, but he did not propound an iron (...) law of decay. As a social scientist Plato held that there are laws of political change without supposing the course of history is unalterably fixed. (shrink)