to be done in terms of 'intersubjective communication, this being the original and genuine medium of our understanding'. The participants would mostly agree, no doubt, adding perhaps that it was easier said than done. For the reader who was not there, the format is irritating. Symposiasts get some ten pages each, chairmen about eight and discutants about a dozen. The discussions are fragmentary and may well cause some of those seeing the gist of their remarks in cold print to blush. Ten pages are cramping to the principals, who have gallantly tried to bear the whole philosophical enterprise in mind, and it proves impossible either to sketch work on one coast for the benefit of the other or to argue a substantive point without begging a string of questions or to provide enough for bridging purposes. I give this reckoning reluctantly, while applauding the attempt. In setting the price at £5, the publishers perhaps concur.

Philosophers have not been sceptical only about metaphysics or religious beliefs. There are a great number of other beliefs generally held which they have had at least as much difficulty in justifying, and in the present article I ask questions as to the right philosophical attitude to these beliefs in cases where to our everyday thought they seem so obvious as to be a matter of the most ordinary common sense. A vast number of propositions go beyond what is merely empirical and cannot be seen to be logically necessary but are still believed by everybody in their daily life. Into this class fall propositions about physical things, other human minds and even propositions about one's own past experiences based on memory, for we are not now ‘observing’ our past. The phenomenalist does not escape the difficulty about physical things, for he reduces physical object propositions, in so far as true, not merely to propositions about his own actual experience but to propositions about the experiences of other human beings in general under certain conditions, and he cannot either observe or logically prove what the experiences of other people are or what even his own would be under conditions which have not yet been fulfilled. What is the philosopher to say about such propositions? Even Moore, who insisted so strongly that we knew them, admitted that we did not know how we knew them. The claim which a religious man makes to a justified belief that is neither a matter of purely empirical perception nor formally provable is indeed by no means peculiar to the religious. It is made de facto by everybody in his senses, whether or not he realizes that he is doing so. There is indeed a difference: while everyone believes in the existence of other human beings and in the possibility of making some probable predictions about the future from the past, not everybody holds religious beliefs, and although this does not necessarily invalidate the claim it obviously weakens it.

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Kant's Moral Philosophy. By H. B. Acton. (London, Macmillan, 1970, pp. 71. Papermac, 50p). - Kant: The Philosophy of Right. By Jeffrie G. Murphy. (Philosophers in Perspective: ed. A. D. Woozley, London, Macmillan, 1970. Pp. 186. 50p). - Volume 47 Issue 180

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Josiah Royce. The Problem of Christianity. Pp. 412. (Originally published by Macmillan Co.1918, reissued by Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968, with new introduction by ProfessorJohn E. Smith.) 90s. - Volume 5 Issue 2

A little while ago I thought the ontological argument dead and buried beyond any possible hope of resurrection and no philosophical event has caused me much greater surprise than its revival by a member of the very linguistic school to whose line of thinking it seemed most alien and who were held to have given it its quietus once for all. I am tempted to welcome any relapse into metaphysics by a member of this school as being some sign of grace, but on this issue I must for once take sides with the prevailing tradition against at least this kind of metaphysics. Let me make clear, however, what it is I am combating. The term ‘ontological argument’ has been used for arguments which its original supporters would certainly not have recognised as theirs. It has been used for instance to stand for the claim that it is an essential presupposition of thought that what we must think is true of the real, a claim which could not be used to prove the existence of God unless we had available another proof that we really must think that God exists. It has been used for kinds of ‘idealist’ arguments which I do not want to discuss here. It has been used for the argument that the idea of a perfect being cannot be explained as derived from any other idea and must therefore be explained as produced in us by a being who really is perfect, an argument which appears in Descartes side by side with the ontological argument but which he carefully distinguishes from it.