So wrote the man who owed his whole career to the devoted, intelligent, educated encouragement of Mesdames de Warens, d’Épinay, and others, in the book (Émile) whose main theme is the need for complete freedom in the education of boys. As for equality, that too, he said, was solely a male affair. ‘Woman is made to submit to man and to endure even

When the sages of the Enlightenment deposed God and demystified Mother Nature, they did not leave us without an object of reverence. The human soul, renamed as the individual – free, autonomous, and creative – succeeded to that post, and has been confirmed in it with increasing confidence ever since. Though it is not now considered immortal, it is

De Tocqueville, when he invented the word ‘individualism’, was talking about a pervasive change in the entire American social attitude, not a limited element that had happened to prevail over a given set of rivals.

They are abstractions, terms arrived at by cutting up the continuum of history in particular ways in order to bring out particular aspects of what has been happening. And these ways are not arbitrary or imposed by natural selection but deliberate. To use such words is already to have taken a position on questions about what is important there.

Clearly it has the great advantage of treating human life as part of nature, not as something mysteriously set apart from it. It celebrates our continuity with the world we spring from rather than trying nervously to disown it. That continuity is a central fact of life.

The Europeans did three things which set them far apart from most other peoples at most other times and places. Between 1500 and 1700 they set sail in tall ships and colonised the far corners of the globe. They made stunning strides forward in the sciences. And they executed tens of thousands of people, mainly women, as witches.11 The attack of

The philosophical conclusion that emerges here is that conscious thought has a legitimate and essential place among the causal factors that work in the world. It is not a spooky extra but a natural process. In a species such as ours, it is an integral part of normal behaviour. Descartes was wrong to export it to a metaphysical ghetto. Our inner

the official demise of behaviourism. I suggested earlier that, when we encounter claims to intellectual austerity, such as this one, we should always look for the pay-off. Here, that is not hard to find. It is both convenient and flattering for psychologists to regard other people as mechanisms and themselves as the freely-acting engineers

Reductive psychologisers like Hobbes did not see that there could be objective facts about subjective experience, that an appearance is itself a fact, and that some appearances – for instance the experience of pain or grief, delight or trouble of mind – can be centrally important parts of the facts that affect us. These things do not just appear to