The writing of these essays was scattered over nearly two decades, and they were addressed to many different sorts of audiences. They exemplify my general preoccupations with three areas of philosophy: philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and what I call the philosophy of society. The first essay, which gives the title to the volume, was written for the American Philosophical Association as part of the centennial issue of the Association's proceedings. It is a revision of an article originally written for the Royal Society in a volume which discussed the future of various scientific and academic subjects in the twenty-first centuty. In a sense, the real introduction to this volume is Chapter 1, because in it I state my general conception of philosophy and its future and the articles which follow exemplify that general conception.

The second essay, “Social ontology: some basic principles,” originally appeared in the journal Anthropological Theory, in a special issue dedicated to my account of social ontology. Following this lead-off article, there were a series of other articles together with replies by me. My aim in this article, as in earlier and later work, is to give an account of the fundamental structure of social reality. I argue that the basic social mechanism, the glue that holds human society together, is what I call “status functions,” functions that can be performed only in virtue of collective acceptance by the community that the object or person that performs the function has a certain status, and with that status a function that can be performed in virtue of that collective acceptance and not in virtue of the physical structure of the object or person alone.