Abstract

Every philosophical belief has its presuppositions; no philosopher can operate without them. Some of mine are these: that the expression of a thought and the thought expressed are distinguishable but inseparable; that one’s thought about something and one’s feeling about that something are distinguishable but inseparable; that we humans have a nature but that it consists of psycho-physical dispositions, or capacities, of such vaguely defined sorts and limits that, from a spectator’s point of view, I eschew a priori pronouncements about what human beings can or cannot do and await developments, and that, as an agent, I act in the spirit of Sartre’s self-creating chooser. In short, and skipping the refinements—failures of philosophical nerve—a person, a human being, a philosopher is what he does.