The Harvard Review of Philosophy

This paper’s main aim is to discuss the relations between our duties and moral aims at different times, and between different people’s moral aims and duties. The paper is unfinished because it was written as part of an intended chapter in the third volume of my book On What Matters, and I later decided to drop this chapter. That is why this paper asks some questions which it doesn’t answer. But though this paper does not end with some general conclusions, it defends some particular conclusions.

The basic elements in the ontology of human civilization are status functions. Those are functions that can be performed not in virtue of physical structure alone but only in virtue of collective acceptance by the community of a certain status. Money, property, government and marriage are all examples of status functions. Status functions are all created by repeated applications of the same logical operation, in a preliminary formulation: X counts as Y in context C.On examination it emerges that all status functions are created by a certain kind of representation that has a logical form of a speech act that I call a “Status Function Declaration.” These are explained.This lecture was delivered without notes and the current publication is very informal. I hope the reader will forgive the informality.

The ideas of expression and expressiveness have been central to Stanley Cavell’s writing from the beginning, joining themes from his more strictly philosophical writing to the role of human expression as projected in cinema. This paper explores a thread running through several different parts of his writing, relating claims he makes about the photographic medium of film and its implications for the question of expression and expressivity in film There is an invocation of notions of necessity and control in the context of cinema that should be understood in the context of related ideas in his writings on Wittgenstein and others. The paper pursues some thoughts about the power of the camera, the themes of activity and passivity in expression, and the human face as the privileged field of such activity and passivity.

The term “asshole” might be of interest to philosophers for several reasons. It displays the power of philosophy to expose the implicit structure of ordinary thought. It suggests why we should not be able to answer certain skeptics on their own terms. It corroborates the idea of an “internal” connection between moral judgment and motivation. And it raises doubts about expressivism where it has the best chance of being true.

In this essay I record some thoughts about my book An Essay on Free Will, its reception, and the way analytical philosophers have thought about the free-will problem since its publication 30 years ago. I do not summarize the book, nor am I concerned to defend its arguments—or at least not in any very systematic way. Instead I present some thoughts on three topics: (1) The question ‘If I were to revise the book today, if I were to produce a second edition, what changes would I make?’; (2) Aspects of the book I should like to call to the attention of readers (aspects that, in my view, readers of An Essay on Free Will, have been insufficiently attentive to); and (3) The course of the discussion of the problem of free will subsequent to the publication of the book.

Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on music, when brought together and then related to his similarly scattered remarks on culture, show a deep and abiding concern with music as a repository and conveyer of meaning in human life. Yet the conception of meaning at work in these remarks is not of a kind that is amenable to brief or concise articulation. This paper explores that conception, considering in turn (a) the relational networks within which musical meaning emerges, (b) what he calls a discernible “kinship” between composers and styles, (c) the embodied character of musical content, (d) the close and too-little-appreciated intricate connections between our capacity to make sense in music and in language (and the frequent dependence of the former on the latter) and the interaction of the musical theme with spoken language, and (e) music as a culturally-embedded phenomenon that is, as he said of language, possible only in what he evocatively, if too briefly, called “the stream of life.”