Like Professor Manser (January 1983) I felt moved to comment on D. Z. Phillips's article on Sartre (‘Bad Faith and Sartre's Waiter’ (January 1981)); and the editor thoughtfully suggested that we should exchange our comments. We both agree, I think, that Phillips's concern over Sartre's alleged unfairness to waiters has led him to be unfair to Sartre, but whereas Manser is concerned to pursue in general terms the questions of sincerity and commitment I am more concerned to see the example, and the implications that Sartre draws from it, as showing the kind of writer he was and the view of the world that he held. It is this context that seems to me to be lacking in Phillips's article. He thinks that Sartre is unfair to waiters by over-simplifying their attitudes to their jobs, the ways in which they behave when doing them, and the satisfaction that they derive from them. He draws out of these specific comments some more general criticisms of the way in which Sartre over-simplifies the problems of choice: how much of our total personality we express in any particular choice that we make; and the degree of commitment that individual choices involve. All this is very reasonable, but he does not really get to grips with Sartre's concern.

In her well-known paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (Philosophy, 1958) G. E. M. Anscombe makes the following assertion: ‘he [Sidgwick] thinks that humility consists in underestimating your own merits—i.e. in a species of untruthfulness’. I should like to show that this is not so.

McTaggart's argument for the unreality of space, unlike his argument for the unreality of time, has nothing to do with token-reflexives. The argument for the unreality of time depends on the contention that there would be no time if there were no facts whose descriptions essentially contain temporally token-reflexive expressions such as ‘now’, ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’. According to Michael Dummett, McTaggart was right not to make an analogous claim about space

Prominent among the principles put forward by Professor Bernard Williams in ‘The Idea of Equality’ were that for every difference in the way men are treated a relevant reason should be given and the proper ground of the distribution of medical care is ill health. Prominent among his conclusions was that we are confronted with an irrational state of affairs where wealth functions as a necessary condition for receiving medical care. In ‘The Idea of Equality Reconsidered’ Philosophy (January 1973) 85–90), I argued that, on his principles alone, this conclusion though correct was one-sided.

God's public image has perennially suffered from the apparent botch He has made of Creation, or our portion of it, at any rate. “What's so good about God”, people ask, “when He permits volcanoes in Lisbon, famines in Ghana, earthquakes in San Francisco?” Why is there always, in fact, whichever way we bite it, a worm in the apple?