Austin duncan-jones' philosophical writings

Abstract

W HEN the Editor asked me, immediately after Duncan-Jones' death last year, to write something about him for the journal of which he was initiator and first editor, I decided that the tribute to him most appropriate for a philosophical journal would be to publish a list of his philosophical writings, preceded by a short commentary upon this body of work. My long friendship with DJ made me confident that this would be the kind of 'obituary' in ANALYSIS which he would most prefer. The bibliography published here is almost entirely the work of Dr. Richard Duncan-Jones, who prepared it from his father's papers: we believe that it is reasonably complete. My share in preparing this article has been to read again all of DJ's publications (except the five book reviews)-this, though a labour of love, has been a most pleasant one, due to the consistent felicity of DJ's literary style-and to write what follows upon his philosophical works. Originally I had intended to write something upon each of his articles, since every one contains at least one important point upon which DJ had something interesting to say. But the list turned out to contain thirty-seven items (references to which will be given by numerals in heavy type); so I have to confine myself here to commenting on those of his writings which seem to me most significant, either in their own right or as locating his place in the history of recent philosophy. The majority of DJ's writings are either directly on ethics or on subjects such as intention, freedom, choice, whose principal interest to him was their ethical relevance. But most of his earlier papers, and the last long article which he wrote, are on general philosophical and logical topics; and I will comment on some of these first. Duncan-Jones' first Aristotelian Society paper (3) discusses the alleged universal-particular distinction and maintains that 'one can give a full account of the elements of any object without saying anything about particulars' (3, 74). A universal, for DJ, is 'something which can have instances' (3, 70), and a specific fact is an instance of the combination of two or more universals. These universals include a space reference and a time reference; so DJ is able to meet the standard objection to an analysis of facts into universals-that such an analysis will not allow for the difference between two facts each containing the same set of universals-by denying that there can be two such facts. In a subsequent note (4) he restates his doctrine without putting so much weight upon the notion of having an instance. Duncan-Jones was writing at a time when a visual sense-datum was taken as the paradigm example of a 71