The concept of need plays a significant but still relatively unexplored role in philosophy. In September 2003 The Royal Institute of Philosophy funded a conference held at Hatfield College, Durham, England, where philosophers from around the world devoted an enjoyable weekend to further exploration.1 In everyday political life, scepticism about the importance of needs seems to be abating, perhaps reflecting an increased confidence among needs-theorists, grounded in years of painstaking analysis and argument on the margins of mainstream philosophy. This increased confidence freed participants at the conference to work less defensively and more constructively, and to extend their depth and range of their work. One happy result is that new aspects of the philosophy of need are identified and explored in this volume.

Aristotle’s account of human needs is valuable because it describes the connections between logical, metaphysical, physical, human and ethical necessities. But Aristotle does not fully draw out the implications of the account of necessity for needs and virtue. The proper Aristotelian conclusion is that, far from being an inferior activity fit only for slaves, meeting needs is the first part of Aristotelian virtue.

The concept of need plays a significant but still relatively unexplored role in philosophy. In September 2003 The Royal Institute of Philosophy funded a conference held at Hatfield College, Durham, England, where philosophers from around the world devoted an enjoyable weekend to further exploration. In everyday political life, scepticism about the importance of needs seems to be abating, perhaps reflecting an increased confidence among needs-theorists, grounded in years of painstaking analysis and argument on the margins of mainstream philosophy. This increased confidence freed participants at the conference to work less defensively and more constructively, and to extend their depth and range of their work. One happy result is that new aspects of the philosophy of need are identified and explored in this volume.

In this introduction I highlight three topics that struck me as central concerns at the conference. I don't claim that my topics exhaust important concerns in the philosophy of need, or that the developments I identify are by any means the only or most important ones to have occurred in recent years. My aim is simply to highlight topics discussed at the conference which may be of wider interest.

Several speakers would tackle aspects of a topic in their papers, and questions and discussion would return to each of these topics again and again. The first topic is the mistakes that are involved in neglecting need. What are those mistakes, exactly?

Aristotle's account of human needs is valuable because it describes the connections between logical, metaphysical, physical, human and ethical necessities. But Aristotle does not fully draw out the implications of the account of necessity for needs and virtue. The proper Aristotelian conclusion is that, far from being an inferior activity fit only for slaves, meeting needs is the first part of Aristotelian virtue.

Aristotle on Necessity

The core concept of necessity, for Aristotle as for us, is of ‘that which cannot be otherwise’. This concept plays a useful role in all sorts of different contexts. We say ‘it must be’ about things we must do in order to achieve our ends, things we must do because something or someone requires it, things that must be the case because something else is the case, things we must believe if we believe the things we already do. We might experiment with metaphysical applications of this idea of what cannot be otherwise, as when we say ‘there must be a God’, or ‘good must triumph over evil’, or ‘there must be a reason for this’. Once you start to look, necessities are everywhere. Aristotle took this homely notion of necessity for granted. He talks in the Prior Analytics, for example, of the way that some things belong to others ‘necessarily’ (29b29–32a17), and he does not distinguish between ‘logical’ necessity and ‘metaphysical’ or ‘physical’ necessity.