The object of this paper is, as the title implies, to investigate the relation of Plato’s thought to natural science. More especially, it is intended to examine the widely held view that Plato’s influence, owing to the character of his beliefs, was necessarily and positively unfavourable to the development of natural science, as we know it at the present day.

The stream of books and papers devoted to the bearing of modern physics upon philosophical problems is apparently endless. Nevertheless, I am, I think, safe in asserting that the relations between physics and philosophy are still far from satisfactory. If, then, I venture to add one more paper to the stream, it is not because I believe that I am in a position to succeed where so many have failed, but because I have a suggestion to offer which, while it has not hitherto to my knowledge been made, would, if it could be accepted, throw some light upon one aspect of the vexed question of the status of the physical world.

According to Spinoza, the categories of good and bad—in fact, all categories of value—are relative. The only valid category is that of substance; value as distinct from reality has no genuine meaning. Spinoza’s attack on valuation is based on two sets of arguments, one rationalistic and scientific, the other religious and theological. We will consider each in turn.

There are many possible ways of approach to philosophy, and there is also an impossible one, though one that has often been tried. That the philosopher can somehow spin his philosophy out of what he finds inside himself; that he has some private internal source of information in virtue of which he can decide what the Universe must be, without needing to take the trouble to look at it, is a belief that dies hard. But it is now dying, if not dead, so that it is hardly necessary to refute it in detail. It should suffice to say that anybody who cherishes the belief will not find anything to interest him in what follows. I shall simply assume that the philosopher is, what we all are to some extent, a spectator of the world and of man's life in it and a commentator on what he sees. Where the philosopher differs from others is in the kind of interest he takes in the facts, not in the kind of facts that are there to be interested in.

It is fairly clear that, when I say “I like this” and “This is good,” I do not mean the same thing. Even though I should reverse the position of the two relata in my expression of the former proposition and state the non-symmetrical relation intended in the equivalent form, “This is liked by me” unidiomatically or, in good English, by “This pleases me,” the meaning of what I assert would not be logically equivalent to “This is good.” True, it is certain that, if I actually believe the latter, I also believe the former; this must please me in some way: I approve of it. Here, however, we have only one-sided implication, not equivalence; B implies A, but A does not imply B.

CAN actions be right irrespective of the motives from which they come? Can an action be right though coming from a bad or an ‘indifferent’ motive?

Until the very recent days of the Turkish Republic, when every effort is being made to adopt the ways of Western civilization, it has been the picturesque and wellnigh universal custom for shops to carry on their walls small placards, usually framed, and these placards have contained in beautiful Arabic writing verses from the Quran, traditions of Muhammed, rhymed and unrhymed sayings which have for generations been passed down from father to son. Coffee-houses, barber shops, booksellers, grocery stores, pharmacies, candy stores, fruit-stands, private houses even, all have decorated their walls with more or less artistically copied bits of wisdom from the past. In general there is no record of the authors or sources from which the sayings have come. They reflect in some measure also the thought of Turkish society as that thought has been passed on through the centuries. In order to get a picture of social relationships in the old Ottoman state it will perhaps be of value to study these texts and learn what we can from them of the social life and ideals of everyday folk in Constantinople from the earliest days down to the period which is just passing. There was a close relationship between these mottoes and their owners. The mottoes reflected in the first place the life philosophy of those who wrote them, and they served to mould the attitude toward life of successive generations. Not only religious belief, but attitudes toward the world and its problems, toward methods and standards of business dealing, are all touched upon in these texts.

N. Abbagnano has made a wide and exhaustive study of the philosophy of William of Ockham. He has tried to withstand the tendency, generally prevalent in the history of philosophy, to consider Ockham's personality as balanced between the old scholastic and the modern philosophy, and his works as a strange medley of formal subtleties and of profound intuitions born of genius. He has tried to represent him as a thinker with decided leanings towards the modern era, the initiator not so much of nominalism as of English empiricism, and therefore the precursor of Locke and Hume. To carry out his task he was necessarily obliged to dwell on the more positive and reconstructive part of Ockham's writings, neglecting those parts where the Franciscan doctor hesitates and gropes among the old discussions of scholastic formalism. This tends to spoil the balance of the historical reconstruction; but at the same time it must be granted that the newer and more positive parts revealed by Abbagnano's shrewd analysis have an impressive modern trend, not composed of sporadic ideas and vague anticipations, but forming a coherent and organic whole.

Since ‘dialectical’ materialism was proclaimed in Soviet Russia to be the only true conception of reality, the red philosophers found themselves in a worse plight than ever. They have now to guard against the pitfalls of ‘mechanistic’ materialism on the one hand, and of idealism on the other; and as by ‘idealism’ Soviet writers mean almost anything opposed to their own views, it is easy enough to detect traces of it hi any thinker. The wide field thus opened for mutual recriminations, accusations of deviating from ‘the general line of the Party,’ etc., makes any genuine philosophical work even more difficult than it was two or three years ago. There is a marked decrease in the number of philosophical publications. According to the Knizhnaya Letopis (a U.S.S.R. weekly bibliographical survey), all that has appeared in the philosophical line during the last six months of 1932 is a new translation of Spinoza's Letters, a reprint of an old translation of his Ethics, and a few dozen small textbooks on dialectical materialism, published by various schools, such as the Leningrad School of Engineering, the Leningrad Electro-Mechanical School Combine, and so on. The editorial board of the journal Psychology, which has existed for some years, announces that their programme “is entirely determined by Lenin's principle of observing party considerations in scientific work”; they are resolved “to champion the heritage of Marx and Lenin and to assign psychology a practical part in the building up of a socialist state.”