Gordon Graham

The understanding which a philosopher has, can have, or ought to have of the work of his predecessors cannot be historical in character. Collingwood is right about evidence and the nature of historical understanding. But what a philosopher wrote is not evidence of his thought, it is his thought. The ideas and doctrines of past philosophers are not themselves in the past and do not therefore belong to a special period of the past. Philosophic ideas cannot be said to be in time at all. Different interpretations of particular passages are strengthened or weakened by the citation of matters of historical fact, just as they may be by linguistic or literary knowledge. Such a clarification may enable us to resolve the question of the consistency of a passage with the rest of an author's work, but it does not destroy the philosophic character of the question

This essay is a critical exploration of certain key elements in modernity's self-understanding – pluralism, secularism, the morally neutral state, and the the harm conditoin as a principle of law. Careful examination of all these elements reveals deep confusion about how they are to be understood. The picture that emerges is one in which modern society's self-image diverges dramatically from the reality, and critque of this self-image uncovers a pressing need for a reappraiasal of the values that are commonly thought to underlie the contemporary Western world

For a long time theories of history of the speculative sort have been out of favour. Accounts of the whole sweep of human history, like Hegel's, or even of more limited historical cycles, like Spengler's or Toynbee's, have been found much too grand for the workaday historian and have smacked too much of apriorism for post-positivist philosophy. Consequently, few take them seriously or treat them as more than fanciful aberrations which may serve as useful examples of how not to proceed in history or philosophy

This essay explores the major conflict between doing the best for indigents requiring health care and not unfairly imposing burdens on those who pay for that care through cost-shifting. The author argues that there is in fact no dilemma or conflict of duties presented here, but only because the doctor's concern with justice in bearing the burden of health care requires a system within which different levels of health care are available and in which indigent care is provided in a manner that minimizes the cost of providing that care.