Many would consider the lengthening debate between moral realists and anti-realists to be draw-ish. Plainly new approaches are needed. Or might the issue, which most broadly concerns realism in relation to normative judgments, be broken down into parts or sectors? Physicists have been saying, in relation to a similarly longstanding debate, that light in some respects behaves like waves and in some respects like particles. Might realism be more plausible in relation to some kinds of normative judgments than others?

I am reluctant to add to the many definitionsof modernity, or to encourage the belief that definitions matter. Nevertheless, a changecameintothe worldwhenpeoplebegantodefinethemselves as modern—as in some way 'apart from'their predecessors, standing to them in some new and self-conscious relationship. And this couldserve as a definitionof modernity:as the conditionin which people provide definitions of modernity. For there is a great differencebetween living in history—which, for rational beings, is unavoidable—andlivingaccordingtoan idea ofhistory, and of one's own place within it.

Here are some kinds of reasons for taking an action to have been morally right.

(1) It was done out of a good intention or a pure good will on the part of the agent, or was owed to a virtue of hers.

(2) It issued from the agent's moral perception or intuition with respect to a situation, not from the application of a general principle or from calculation of the consequences of possible actions.

(3) Although it would give rise to distress or worse, the action was one of integrity, autonomy, or self-concern, perhaps in accord with the agent's aversion to killing by her own hand, or true to her life-hope to achieve a success on her own.

New B-Theorists of language, while conceding the untranslatability of tensed sentences by tenseless sentences, deny that the ineliminability of tense implies the reality of tensed facts. Thus, New BTheorist Nathan Oaklander explains,

For a variety of reasons, ... recent defenders of the tenseless view have come to embrace the thesis that tensed sentences cannot be translated by tenseless ones without loss of meaning. Nevertheless, recent detensers have denied that the ineliminability of tensed language and thought entails the reality of temporal properties. ... Tensed discourse is indeed necessary for timely action, but tensed facts are not, since the truth conditions of tensed sentences can be expressed in a tenseless meta-language that describes unchanging temporal relations between and among events.

To those who think that an institution must be a function of its history it must seem a considerable anomaly that when universities were first set up in the Middle Ages their main aim, apart from being communities of scholars, was to produce theologians, lawyers and doctors of medicine. For arts and what then had some connection with what we now know as science, as incorporated in the traditional seven liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, followed by arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, were thought of as merely propaedeutic to the study of theology, law and medicine. Those seven liberal arts occupied the student during the course for the B.A., which gave the licence to teach, and some students went no further than that. But the main concern of a university lay in what happened after the B.A., in the attainment of a mastership or in what was in effect the doctorate in one of the three areas which I have mentioned before. Indeed, in some universities, particularly those in the south of Europe, the B.A. was given only scant attention and only lip service was given to the idea of liberal arts.

In order to by-pass immaterial historical bickering I shall stipulatively mean by ‘Radical Millianism’ just this much more than what Katz in his recent article in The Philosophical Review, ‘Names without Bearers’ (for short, NWB), means by the unqualified term, ‘Millianism’; namely, whereas Katz means by ‘Millianism’ that theory of proper names (proper nouns) which holds that proper names (nouns) ‘have no linguistic meaning,’

1. Legend has it that as Mozart lay dying, a stranger dressed in black entered the room. Without saying word, he walked to the death-bed, removed the manuscript sheets of the Requiem on which the composer had been working until his final hours, and departed. This was not as you might have thought an envoy from beyond—but the servant of a certain Viennese nobleman, Count Walsegg zu Stuppach. The Count was in the habit of commissioning music anonymously, and having it played in his palace as though it were his own. In extremis he was collecting the score for a forthcoming soirée.

Christabel Bielenberg must be one of the few people to have sought out an appointment with the Gestapo. An Englishwoman married to a senior German civil servant, she was determined somehow to free her husband, who was being held in the aftermath of the 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler. As she related it on Desert Island Discs, her success in facing down the forbidding official who eventually received her owed to the sight of a uniformed female officer leaning over one of the reception desks and repeatedly slapping a rather gracious old man across the face. ‘All of a sudden my fear vanished and I was filled with pure rage.’ For it was in that condition that she entered the interviewing room. Reflecting on this decades later, she opined majesterially, ‘I don't think it possible to have two intense and opposite emotions simultaneously.’

Anti-vivisectionists charge that animal experimenters are speciesists—people who unjustly discriminate against members of other species. Until recently most defenders of experimentation denied the charge. After the publication of The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research in the New England Journal of Medicine, experimenters had a more aggressive reply: I am a speciesist. Speciesism is not merely plausible, it is essential for right conduct .... Most researchers now embrace Cohen's response as part of their defense of animal experimentation. Cohen asserts that both rights and utilitarian arguments

If one thinks of intentions as entities of some sort, states or dispositions, for example, it should eventually strike him that there are peculiar difficulties with the idea. For example, he will have trouble counting his intentions. In a particular situation, we ask someone, ‘What are you going to do about that? And this?’ And his answer might be, ‘My intention is to pay that, and, as for this, my intention is to ignore it.’ But of course he may have said, ‘My intention is to pay this and ignore that.’ For this reason and, as we will see, others, there is no such thing as a complete list of intentions that a person has. If someone told us, ‘I have just eight intentions at present’, we would think he was joking, even though he intends to do eight things—grade papers, meet a class at nine, and so on. And if we ask; ‘What are you going to do today?’, he may answer that he has a class at nine, office hours at two, and lunch already scheduled. But even though he has more to do today than yesterday, he would hardly tell us, ‘I am afraid I have more intentions today than I did yesterday.’

McDowell's Mind and World is a commentary on a traditional, dualist, epistemology which puzzles over, and offers accounts of, a fundamental division between mental, subjective items, and nonmental, objective items in experience. The principal responses to that tradition which McDowell considers are those of Davidson's coherentism, Evans's form of realism, and Kant; but it is Kant's famous B75 text which occupies centre stage:

‘Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer; Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind’. (Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind).

Contemporary moral philosophy rightly gives an important place not only to theories of right action, but to the nature and value of our interpersonal moral attitudes, including such reactions as resentment, admiration and forgiveness. Whilst these concerns have always been of interest to theologians and psychologists, their philosophical importance partly derives from wider concerns about the nature of persons. The recent resurgence, for instance, of retributivist theories of punishment, which are finding favour among many philosophical writers, largely bases itself on the idea that a range of ‘participant reactive attitudes’ (to borrow P. F. Strawson's phrase) is both socially indispensable and morally legitimate. In this web of interpersonal responses is forgiveness, which cannot properly be examined without discussion of other responses such as indignation, anger and even hatred.