Stephen Mulhall

What makes David Wootton think that the ‘mysterious mathematics’ of conjoined twins raises questions which ‘have been ignored by philosophers’ (LRB, 22 July)? The moral dilemmas presented by such cases have been extensively debated in the field of applied ethics, usually as part of broader discussions about organ transplants, euthanasia, abortion and the treatment of severely disabled people....

What makes David Wootton think that the ‘mysterious mathematics’ of conjoined twins raises questions which ‘have been ignored by philosophers’ (LRB, 22 July)? The moral dilemmas presented by such cases have been extensively debated in the field of applied ethics, usually as part of broader discussions about organ transplants, euthanasia, abortion and the treatment of severely disabled people....

James Wood is breathtakingly confident about his grasp of the notion of metaphor; but his grasp of the relationship between representations and reality is tenuous in the extreme at least, if his own analogies are anything to go by.He manages to ruin the perfectly good point that claims made with words might nonetheless refer to realities independent of language by comparing the relation of words and...