In G. K. Chesterton&s The Man Who Was Thursday, we encounter that intriguing individual, the philosophical policeman. His job is at once bolder and more subtle than that of ordinary policemen. Rather than arresting thieves or common or garden criminals, he goes to ‘artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists’, he reads books of sonnets to discover crimes about to be committed, he traces ‘the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime’.

Was there such a person as Lewis Carroll? An affirmative answer is suggested by the thought that Lewis Carroll was Charles Dodgson, and since there was certainly such a person as Charles Dodgson, there was such a person as Lewis Carroll. A negative answer is suggested by the thought that in arguing thus, the two names ‘Lewis Carroll’ and ‘Charles Dodgson’ are being inappropriately treated as though they were completely on a par: a pseudonym is, after all, a false or fictitious name. Perhaps we should say instead that there was really no such person as Lewis Carroll, but that when Charles Dodgson published under that name, he was pretending that there was, and further, pretending that the works in question formed part of the literary output of this pretendedly real individual. Whether or not this is correct for the case of ‘Lewis Carroll’, I will be suggesting that an account of this second style–a fictionalist account, for short–is appropriate for at least a good many pseudonyms. We shall get to reasons why it might nonetheless not be especially appropriate in the present case in due course: one advantage of the ‘Lewis Carroll’/‘Charles Dodgson’ example, such qualms notwithstanding, is that everyone (likely to be reading this) is familiar not only with both names but with which of them is the pseudonym. Another is that, as we shall have occasion to observe below, Dodgson himself had some interesting views on this particular case of pseudonym(it)y.

The concept of rights is among the more thoroughly examined in political philosophy. Nonetheless, it remains ontologically elusive and morally problematical. In the form of an allegedly natural endowment bequeathed by the Stoic philosophers, it was famously dismissed by Bentham as ‘nonsense on stilts’. Chiefly by way of natural law theory and versions of Kantian moral philosophy rights arise at once from the presupposed autonomy of rational beings and from certain duties others have to beings of such a kind. Within this tradition it is argued that morality itself is grounded in the autonomy of rational beings and that whatever overrides this autonomy converts such beings to instrumental means. Accordingly, there is a basic right to be regarded as a moral being and it is this right that generates or is foundational for the rest. Debate continues, of course, on such questions as to whether autonomy per se either logically or morally requires dutiful respect and whether rationality per se is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for autonomy itself.

What are the groundrules in the philosophy of art? What criteria of adequacy should we use for assessing theories of art?

This paper is partly to get rid of some irritation which I have felt at the quite common tendency of philosophers to elucidate (for example) ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks red’. For a relatively recent example see, for example, Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, ‘An Objectivist′s Guide to Subjectivism about Colour’. However rather than try to make a long list of references, I would rather say ‘No names, no pack drill’. I have even been disturbed to find the use of the words ‘looks red’ that I am opposing ascribed to me by Keith Campbell in his useful article ‘David Armstrong and Realism about Colour’. I am not saying that such talk is necessarily wrong. Talk of ‘looks red’ may be a way of harmlessly referring to the behavioural discriminations with respect to colour of a human percipient. Where it is dangerous, at least to those of us who wish to argue for a broadly physicalist account of the mind, is that it may have concealed overtones of reference to epiphenomenal and irreducibly psychic properties of experiences. Moreover even if it does not do so it may be fence sitting on this issue and liable to misinterpretation.

We set ourselves ends and strive to achieve them. We hope that their attainment will improve our condition. The closer we get to our goals, the happier we feel. Paradoxically, however, when we finally do achieve them our joy is sometimes diminished. We have a sense of insignificance and emptiness, and we feel that in attaining our goal we have lost the meaningfulness and balance we experienced while we were striving towards it. In some ways, it seems to us, the struggle is more gratifying than the achievement of the end.

McTaggart′s father and mother were both members of a prosperous Wiltshire family, the Ellises: in fact they were first cousins, and this inbreeding may account for his premature death from a circulatory disease to which several Ellises succumbed. The Ellises were of yeoman stock, and had enriched themselves by West Indian enterprises; they had risen in the social scale via the practice of law. It is rather reminiscent of the The Forsyte Saga, a saga, as Galsworthy said, of the Sense of Property.

When I first came across Robert Nozick′s Philosophical Explanations I was struck by the purity of his justification of punishment. Most latter-day retributivists are crypto-utilitarians, claiming to find some sort of benefit in penalties, even if it is only symbolic. Nozick too sees punishment as symbolic, but not as having any necessary utility. Paradoxically, perhaps, he is one of the few retributivists who insists that it matters what the offender makes of his penalty. Even more interesting is the importance he attaches to the analogy between retribution and revenge. Most retributivists are at pains to distance themselves from vengeance: but not Nozick.

V. Alan White and Gertrud Walton have published responses to my note on Einstein's simultaneity Gedankenexperiment, in which I present a version of the argument free of the flaws to be found in that given by Einstein. White thinks I go too far, that no reformulation is necessary; Walton, that I don't go far enough, and that i the inconsistencies in Einstein's exposition are ‘irreconcilable’. I r shall try to explain why I think both are mistaken.

In Sartre and the Drug Connection, Carole Haynes-Curtis claims that previous commentators on the philosopher's writings have failed to recognize the significance of the impact of a mescalin experiment on Sartre's early philosophical perspective. ‘The residual effects of this nightmarish experience’, Haynes-Curtis claims, ‘haunted him for many years to come’, and was essentially the result of Sartre undergoing what, in modern parlance, is sometimes called a ‘Bad Trip’. (SDC 87)