The values that a person holds may be personal or political depending on whether they are considered in relation to the individual or to society. Apart from moral virtue, examples of personal values include friendship, knowledge, beauty etc. and examples of political values, justice, equality and liberty. This article will outline some current ideas relating to the first group – personal values. It will begin by looking at the kinds of thing that have value and finish with a look at some of the theories that attempt to describe what value is. Reference will be made solely to Western sources although it is recognised that many, if not all, of the values discussed may be universal. Introduction It is only in the last hundred years or so that the subject of value has become a subject of study in its own right, though the subject builds on the work of such earlier thinkers as Plato, Immanuel Kant and Jeremy Bentham. A new field of enquiry called "axiology" (from the Greek axios meaning "worth"), defined as "the philosophical study of goodness or value", began to emerge at around the beginning of the twentieth century, and its significance lay in extending the scope of the term "value" into fields other than traditional ethics. R.H.Lotze, F.Brentano and G.E.Moore have been cited as early proponents of the subject, and to Moore is attributed the important distinction made between intrinsic and instrumental value, that is, between things that have value in themselves and things that might lead to something of value. Examples of recent articles which introduce the subject include Mark Schroeder's Value Theory, Elinor Mason's Value Pluralism and Michael Zimmerman's Intrinsic and Extrinsic Value. Schroeder defines axiology as being "primarily concerned with classifying what things are good", and, in accepting that there might be a number of things that can be valued or called good, he asks is there, underlying these, just one or is there more than one fundamental intrinsic value. Mason outlines two ways in which values have been considered in relation to one another: the first is called "monist", which maintains that there is just one intrinsic value to which all other values are auxiliary; and the second is called "pluralist", which maintains that there are many kinds of value and that the most important of these are irreducible to one another. Typical of the first school were the Utilitarians, such