A Philosopher’s Character

Gareth Evans, 7 February 1980

Moore was one of the outstanding British philosophers of this century. He lived a rather uneventful life, almost entirely in a university setting: as Paul Levy writes rather wistfully in the...

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Sexual Nonconformism

Peter Laslett, 24 January 1980

We are apt to think of authoritarianism in emotional and sexual life as pre-eminently Victorian. It was an outcome, we tend to believe – if indeed we think of it historically at all –...

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Strange Loops

James Lighthill, 24 January 1980

Mathematicians have always prided them selves on being poised half-way between the arts and the sciences. On the one hand, mathematical theorems share with artistic works the features of beauty...

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People as Actors

J.Z. Young, 24 January 1980

We often read attacks on linguistic philosophy as an arid, inhumane and unproductive academicism. It is refreshing to find a sustained and ingenious attempt to build a whole theory of human...

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It was for services ‘to exports and ecology’ that Sir James Goldsmith was nominated for a peerage, and then demoted to a knight by the Scrutiny Committee, in what is bitterly...

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Ryle Remembered

Bernard Williams, 22 November 1979

Gilbert Ryle, who died in 1976, was for many years a professor of philosophy in Oxford. He was a man of genially military appearance, with a knobbly, cubic head; rather soldierly in speech and...

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Human Nature

Stuart Hampshire, 25 October 1979

Biology​ as a guide to ethics has been an intellectual fad of the last decade, and Mrs Midgley is trying to restore a sense of proportion. Sociobiology has had its home principally in the...

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