“There's one thing certain,” said a historian of my acquaintance when he heard the title of this paper, “that's a problem which would never perturb a working-historian.” He was wrong: a working-historian first drew it to my attention; and in one form or another it raises its head whenever historians discuss the nature of their own inquiries. Yet in a way he was right. His mind had turned to the controversies of epistemologists, controversies about “the possibility of knowledge”; historians, he rightly felt, do not trouble their-heads about such matters.

If we ask what are the problems which have to be dealt with when the subject of art is being discussed in a philosophical manner, we shall no doubt receive a variety of answers: but there will be in one respect a considerable measure of agreement, viz. that the main problem consists in discovering (a) what is the common property in all works of art which distinguishes them from things that are not works of art, and (b) what is the common property in all good works of art which distinguishes them from bad or mediocre ones. Certainly an immense amount of labour has in the past been devoted to this purpose. Recent philosophical practice, however, has implied some dissatisfaction with this type of approach, and the purpose of this article is to try to show that the dissatisfaction is justified.

Among the manifold tendencies that contributed to the philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century was a revival of Greek atomism. The ancient particulate theories of nature had been rediscovered by way of Lucretius and Diogenes Laertius in the fifteenth century and later scholars explored the principles of Democritus and Epicurus.

It is one of the objects of what is sometimes called “general theory of value” to study all sorts of value judgments or (what would be a better name for them) evaluational judgments. But what the sorts of evaluational judgment are is a question that has so far by no means been settled. There are only two kinds of evaluational judgment that are universally recognized and that have well–established names, the ethical or moral, and the aesthetic. Another pair that have sometimes been mentioned are the prudential and the economic. The object of this paper is to direct attention to still another, quite distinct, sort of evaluational judgment which we commonly make, to give judgments of this sort a name, and to characterize them in a provisional way.

Justification of beliefs can be spoken of from two points of view. In ordinary life it consists in giving reasons of a kind which will be accepted as good under normal circumstances. I know that my friend is still in the garden, because I was talking with him there a few moments ago, and I have not seen him come out. We can sometimes give reasons for our reasons, but there is a limit to this. For the most part we do not go beyond common-sense considerations.

In his interesting discussion of Mr. C. B. Martin's Mind article “A Religious Way of Knowing,” Mr. W. D. Glasgow (PHILOSOPHY, July i957);“Knowledge of God”), agrees with Martin that emotions and feelings are part of what we call an aesthetic experience, and also that emotions and feelings are part of what we call a religious experience. “In this sense, at any rate,” Glasgow writes, “there is an analogy between aesthetic experience and religious experience. But...” he goes on, “are aesthetic statements more than statements about emotions and feelings? Are statements about religious experience anything more than statements about emotions and feelings? A person could accept the analogy and yet maintain that for him aesthetic judgments have an objective reference. In this case the analogy confirms rather than destroys the existential claim of the theologian.”

I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. My third thesis is that the differences between the wellknown English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.

I begin with some elementary observations about assertion. In spite of recent criticisms of philosophers who have been too ready to take the subject-predicate indicative sentence as the standard form of assertion, there is no doubt that this form of sentence does represent something very fundamental about assertion. To put the matter in a rough-and-ready way: if we are to assert anything at all, it seems obvious that we must first draw our listener's attention to something that we propose to talk about, and then, when we have secured his attention, go on to say something about that to which we have drawn attention.