At the beginning of Book X of his last work The Laws Plato turns his attention from violent and outrageous actions in general to the particular case of undisciplined and presumptuous behaviour in matters of religion: “We have already stated summarily what the punishment should be for temple-robbing, whether by open force or secretly. But the punishments for the various sorts of insolence in speech or action with regard to the gods, which a man can show in word or deed, have to be proclaimed after we have provided an exordium. Let this be it: ‘No one believing, as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the gods has ever yet performed an impious action willingly, or uttered a lawless word. Anyone acting in such a way is in one of three conditions: either, first, he does not believe the proposition aforesaid; or, second, he believes that though the gods exist they have no concern about men; or, third, he believes that they can easily be won over by the bribery of prayer and sacrifice” (§ 885B).

I feel most flattered by the careful attention which Dr. Roger Smook has devoted to my paper “Is There a Case for Disembodied Survival?” and I am duly grateful to him.

We certainly agree that the most important thing in his reply is his response to my challenge “to show: (a) that there can be a coherent notion of an incorporeal personal being, and (b) that a being of this sort could significantly be said to be the same person as he was when he was a creature of flesh and blood” (p. 139). Smook's response runs: “By a conscious being (henceforth abbreviated ‘CB’) I understand any entity which has an ongoing conscious life of however rudimentary a sort …. I begin by assuming 1.

(1) During my lifetime most of the discussion of punishment in British philosophical journals has started from an article first published in 1939. Thirty years later this was reprinted, along with a selection of eleven of the most substantial subsequent contributions, to form a volume which has since served to introduce further student generations to The Philosophy of Punishment. In that seminal paper the late John Mabbott — whom it was later my good fortune to have as one of my tutors — proposed “to defend a retributive theory of punishment, and to reject absolutely all utilitarian considerations from its justification”.

His initial claim perhaps sounded bolder, or rasher, than it was. For Mabbott in his second paragraph explained: “The question I am asking is this. Under what circumstances is the punishment of some particular person justified, and why?” After giving and defending his retributive answer to this question Mabbott turned to the “distinction between abolishing injustice in punishment and abolishing punishment altogether”. While still insisting that “punishment is a corollary of law breaking …” he went on to allow that “considerations of utility come in on two quite different issues. Should there be laws, and what laws should there be? … The choice which is the essential prius of punishment is the choice that there should be laws”.

1) Just so soon as I was asked to send in a final, revised version of my “Retrospect and Prospect, Retribution and Deterrence” for eventual publication, it became obvious to me that all the alterations or additions which I wanted to make were alterations or additions in response to the “Comments” by Igor Primoratz. But, if I were to make the changes which I now believe to be necessary, in that original paper, then those Comments would be left in the air — apparently provoked by nothing at all. So instead I present my afterthoughts here, appropriately, as what they are, Responses to his Comments.

First, and urgently, we need to introduce a distinction between justifying (in general) and justicizing (in particular).

In a preceding article, Phillip E. Johnson notes that ‘famed atheist philosopher Antony Flew’ has announced that he has ‘converted to philosophical theism (though not to Christianity or any other specific religion, at least as yet), on the basis of scientific discoveries and related reasoning, which [have] convinced him that there is an intelligent designer of the natural universe’. Here, Flew sets out his position more clearly.

In Issue 6 of Think, Adam Swift argued for the abolition of private schools. Here, Antony Flew responds, arguing that an alternative and no less meritocratic solution might be to bring back state-funded grammar schools.

Antony Flew asks what might lie beyond the big bang, and questions the assumption that we must choose between two options: either God created it, or it popped into existence for no reason.

The general moral decline widely perceived to be in process in both the UK and the USA is no doubt the effect of many causes. The present paper attends to only one, the de-moralization more or less unintentionally encouraged by the working of the machinery of the welfare state, and then further encouraged by a deliberate and systematic de-moralization of that machinery. It attempts to undermine a main assumption supporting that de-moralization, and thus contribute to the campaign for re-moralization waged in recent years by, among others, the Social Affairs Unit (SAU) in London and like-minded think-tanks in the USA.

‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ It is with this seminal sentence that Leszek Kolakowski begins his great work on The Main Currents of Marxism: its Rise, Growth and Dissolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). Both the two terms in the predicate expression are crucial. It is most illuminating to think of Marx as originally a philosopher, even though nothing in his vastly voluminous works makes any significant contribution to philosophy in any academic understanding of that term. It is also essential to recognize that for both Marx and Engels philosophy was always primarily, indeed almost exclusively, what they and their successors called classical German philosophy. This was a tradition seen as achieving its climactic fulfilment in the work of Hegel, and one which they themselves identified as a main stimulus to their own thinking. Thus Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, claimed that ‘The German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy’.

The present paper is an attempt to show that Kolakowski's contention is fundamentally correct. But Part I begins by distinguishing, as here he does not, two very different senses of ‘freedom’. In one freedom is a possible but not a necessary condition and objective of human activity: it is a condition which may or may not obtain on particular occasions; and an objective which particular people may or may not choose to pursue. In the other freedom is indeed inescapably ‘rooted in the very quality of being human’. So the remainder of Part I is devoted to the elucidation of this second sense, and to showing that any study of human behaviour which is to deserve the diploma description ‘science’ must start by recognizing rather than denying this definitive fact of our nature. It is argued that no one would be able even to understand such a denial unless they were equipped with premises sufficient for a demonstration of its falsity. Part II goes on to make an example of a widely read work by a leading behavioural scientist. The author starts by insisting, contrary to the contentions of Part I, that any true science of human psychology must presuppose the truth of that denial. He then proceeds to make it clear that, in consequence, he himself places no value upon freedom in the first sense.

The performance which follows, like Caesar's Gaul, falls into three parts. Part I consists in a sympathetic and reconstructive criticism of Sir Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957). Part II offers a somewhat less sympathetic critique of the critique of Popper offered in E. H. Carr's Trevelyan Lectures What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961; and since Pelicanned). Finally, in a shorter Part III, there will be some conclusions concerning what sociologists and historians can and cannot hope to discover about necessities and impossibilities in human affairs.