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

‘Pure curiosity’ is a wish for understanding, not a wish for mere information. When we think of knowledge as valuable in itself we are always assuming something about the kind of understanding that underlies and connects the various pieces of information to form a coherent world view. That view cannot come from science alone because it involves a

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.

Thus the Enlightenment notion of physical science was imperialistic from the outset. From its birth, the idea of this science was associated with two strangely ambitious claims, infallibility and the formal unity of the whole of thought.

We do better to talk organically of our thought as an ecosystem trying painfully to adapt itself to changes in the world around it.

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

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

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

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.