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Abstract

I am very grateful to Mr Graham Macdonald for conceiving the plan of this volume and for the trouble which he has taken to put it into effect, and I am pleased and honoured by the interest which his chosen contributors have displayed in my work. Nearly all of them have been in regular contact with me for many years and I have surely learned more from their writings and conversation than they can have learned from mine. It will be seen that they differ quite widely in opinion not only from me but also among themselves, but we are in sufficient sympathy to make discussion profitable. Unfortunately I have not enough space to reply to each essay in detail or even to attempt in a more general fashion to cover all the interesting points that they raise. Instead I shall take advantage of the fact that the essays mainly concentrate upon a limited number of philosophical themes, with which I have indeed been principally concerned, and I shall make a fresh effort to elaborate these themes in the light of the foregoing discussions of them. The topics to which I shall devote myself are severally those of perception, induction, essentialism, personal identity, and verification in company with metaphysics.