Plusieurs L'Ont déjà dit. Marx, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Skinner, par exemple, l'ont affirmé d'une façon ou d'une autre. On peut toutefois se demander s'ils l'ont vraiment pense, ou si, plutot, ils ne voyaient pas comment il serait possible á l'homme d'intervenir dans le cours du monde. Personne ne semble avoir voulu pousser tres loin, ni tres longtemps, 1'interrogation et la recherche a ce propos, avec le resultat qu'on s'en tient a des affirmations — tout au plus a des croyances — sur la possibilité ou, au contraire, l'impossibilité que l'homme intervienne dans le monde physique, psychologique, ou social, pour le changer.

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic (what is semantically important may not be important), and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis (advanced in [2] and [3] and in Chisholm [15]) – which implies the inadequacy of classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data.

In this paper, I will attempt to interpret Plato's concept of knowledge as he presents it in the very end of Book V of the Republic. An adequate interpretation of Plato's concept of knowledge must be able to account coherently for the following, (I) According to Plato, knowledge is not a state of mind, but an ability or power of the mind (δύναμις) and is therefore, formally analogous to sight (477C ff.). This analogy is presented explicitly and in great detail in the famous ‘similes of light,’ the Sun, Divided Line, and Cave passages of Books VI and VII. (2) Cognition, for Plato, comes in degrees from clearer to less clear (478C, 509D, 511 E). (3) Finally, knowledge is related in a special way to being (thus, it is said to be ἐπἱ τᾦὂντι 477A, B, 478A).

«L'homme peut-il vivre et se faire vivre sans autre institution que celle de la parole? peut-il se faire dans la communication quotidienne et les discours régulateurs de la distribution des moyens de survie, peut-il se faire tel qu'il n'ait plus besoin de la ‘sagesse’ de normes étrangères à lui-même»? Cette question, posée au sein d'une pragmatique de la parole qui se veut indissociablement une pragmatique de la vie, définit une attitude délibérément opposée à une «construction» affective, cognitive et régulative de l'homme inconsciemment ou consciemment réglée sur le modèle d'une construction scientifique et technique du monde.

L'Ambitieux Projet du professeur John Rawls dans son important ouvrage intitulé «A Theory of Justice» consiste essentiellement dans l'élaboration d'une théorie de la justice qui prétend offrir une «solution de rechange viable» aux doctrines traditionnelles de la justice représentées par l'utilitarisme, l'intuitionisme, les théories contractuelles, etc …, mais une théorie qui, en méme temps, se présente comme une tentative pour «généraliser et porter a un plus haut niveau d'abstraction la theorie traditionnelle du contrat social telle que representee par Locke, Rousseau et Kant», de telle sorte qu'elle puisse parer aux objections les plus decisives qui ont ete faites a l'endroit de ces diverses formulations de la theorie contractuelle. En procédant ainsi, Rawls estime pouvoir offrir une approche systematique au probléme de la justice qui soit non seulement une alternative a 1'utilitarisme traditionnel, mais une synthése supérieure et plus valable pour une sociéte démocratique en méme temps qu'une approche de la justice sociale qui puisse servir de contrepartie ou de succedane a la perspective de Marx.

The Principle that freedom is necessary for moral responsibility (hereafter referred to as “the freedom principle”) has received a variety of explications, but few philosophers have doubted that in some plausible sense it is true. However, two philosophers have recently challenged it using very different but equally ingenious arguments. J.F.M. Hunter has provided the more obviously direct attack in arguing that considerations of freedom as such are in no way relevant to assessments of moral responsibility. Harry Frankfurt has directed his fire at the version of the freedom principle which says that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. Both Frankfurt and Hunter point out the significance of their arguments for the determinism/moral responsibility debate: if there is no freedom requirement for moral responsibility, then even if determinism threatens freedom, it does not follow that determinism threatens moral responsibility.

Is there a problem about justifying deduction? Why shouldn't there be? There is, after all, a direct analogue of Hume's dilemma for induction which applies, presumably with equal force, to deduction: We cannot justify deduction inductively since it would be far too weak to say, what such a justification could at best say, that usually when the premisses of a valid deductive argument are true, then the conclusion is true as well. But neither can we justify deduction deductively, because such ajustification would be circular. This much, it seems to me, is enough to think the issue worth raising. But if there is a genuine concern here, it is safe to say that few philosophers have paused long to worry about it. One of the reasons for this is that with the exception of Sextus Empiricus, J.S. Mill and a few others, philosophers have not been willing to entertain the notion that there is, or even that there could be, anything drastically wrong with deductive reasoning.

Descartes Published the Latin text of his Meditations in 1641 and its French translation, by the Due de Luynes, in 1643. There have been many subsequent editions of this version, the most recent being that of M. André Robinet and Mile Anne Becco. In addition to the original text, this edition contains a more or less complete index, a mini-concordance, and some other valuable statistical information. In this brief study we use this index as the basis for an investigation of some of the conceptual ties in this historically important and still very controversial work.

In part II of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Cleanthes maintains that the similarities between the works of nature and those of human contrivance, namely, the presence of means to ends relations and a coherence of parts, are sufficient to enable us to reason analogically to the conclusion that the cause of the design of the world resembles human intelligence. Philo objects to this on a number of grounds. The basis of his objections is to be found in his claim that the world does not bear a 'specific resemblance' to machines of human contrivance, i.e., there are not enough similarities between the world and machines to enable us to classify the world as a machine of a certain type, and therefore we are unable to proceed analogically to a similarity in the causes of the design of the world and machines. According to Philo, without such a specific resemblance, to establish the origin of the design of the world from intelligence requires seeing God and his product constantly conjoined (Hume's official account of how we learn what causes what); since we have never seen ‘worlds formed under our eyes’ we are unable to rule out alternative principles of design – both those whose effects we have observed on earth, and others whose influence is not found within the world itself. In short, Philo's criticisms of Cleanthes' argument show that he has misgivings about the evidence which the argument utilizes: he holds that more is needed besides the mere presence of means to ends relations and a coherence of parts before we are justified in postulating intelligence as the cause of design.

Despite Decades of scholarly attention certain sections of Kant's first Critique have proved recalcitrant to received readings, canonical interpretations are impossible to come by. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the literature on Kant's treatment of causality in the Second Analogy, where there exists a controversy of many years standing about the success of Kant's arguments in favour of what has come to be known as ‘the causal principle’. For example, contemporary Kant scholars of stature no less than Lewis White Beck and W.H. Walsh argue that Kant offers a uniquely persuasive case for causation. Other interpreters claim that the materials of the Second Analogy fail utterly to provide what is needed to vindicate judgements of cause and effect in a way that would satisfy the sceptic about causation.2 Thus the despairing conclusion of one recent review of the literature on the Second Analogy:

It is possible that there lurks somewhere in the pages of the Critique of Pure Reason a convincing reply to Hume's sceptical doubts about the causal principle. But no such reply has yet been brought to light.

Malgré les critiques de toutes sortes dont elle fut et dont elle est encore l'objet, la grammaire transformationnelle est devenue en vingt ans, sous l'impulsion de Noam Chomsky, le paradigme dominant de la linguistique contemporaine. Et, bien sûr, l'incroyable rapidité de cette ascension s'est accompagnée de nombreuses crises de croissance. Linguistes, philosophes et psychologues, ainsi amenés à s'interroger sur les fondements épistémologiques de cette étrange discipline, se sont heurtés à de redoutables énigmes métathéoriques: de quel domaine factuel la linguistique est-elle la science? les grammaires sont-elles empiriquement falsifiables? quel rôle l'intuition du locuteur – et singulièrement celle du linguiste – joue-t-elle dans l'élaboration et la confirmation de la théorie? quelle relation y a-t-il entre règles et lois? quel est le rapport théorique de la linguistique à la psychologie, à la sociologie, à la neurophysiologie? … Ces questions et d'autres semblables ont donné lieu ces dernières années à une étonnante profusion de livres et d'articles, où, à propos d'une discipline particulière et d'exemples précis, sont discutés, souvent en profondeur, tous les principaux problemes de l'épistémologie contemporaine.

«…le point le plus important, voyez-vous, c'est que le professeur soit plein de dignité et à une certaine distance de l'élève… Done, je suis assis au fond de la salle le plus loin possible de la porte; à lextérieur de la porte (qui est fermée) est assis un domestique; àl'extérieur de la porte extérieure (qui est egalement fermée), est assis un sous-domestique; dans l'escalier à mi-étage, est assis un sous-sous-domestique; enfin dans la cour est assis l'élève.

Ira Brevis furor, said the Latins: anger is a brief bout of madness. There is a long tradition that views all emotions as threats to rationality. The crime passionnel belongs to that tradition: in law it is a kind of “brief-insanity defence.” We still say that “passion blinds us;” and in common parlance to be philosophical about life's trials is to be decently unemotional about them. Indeed many philosophers have espoused this view, demanding that Reason conquer Passion. Others — from Hume to the Emotivists — have appeared to reverse this hierarchy (“reason is and ought to be nothing but the slave of the passions).” But those philosophers who refuse to join in the general denigration of emotion as irrational usually share the presupposition that the role of rationality is limited to the calculation of means. In so far as emotions (often confused with desires) are concerned with the determination of ends, they remain, on this view, beyond the pale of rationality. Modern decision theorists have worked out schemes to assess the rationality of desires, as well as actions, against the background of beliefs and other desires.1 But these schemes leave no room at all for emotions, except, by implication, as disrupters of the rational process.

In this paper I bring together and discuss claims that David Lewis has made in Counterfactuals, and in “Causation,” and explore a number of difficulties which the views of these two works make for each other. If these difficulties are as serious as I suggest, they will require revision or rejection of the view of causation that Lewis defends.

L'Utopie est le «negro spiritual» des intellectuels de l'Occident moderne. J. Ellul.

Je me propose de brosser ici, à grands traits, une sorte de petite histoire raisonnée de l'utopie. Bien entendu, elle ne peut être que trop rapide. Néanmoins, les quelques jalons que je pose peuvent, je crois, guider un itinéraire jusqu'au renouveau actuel de Futopisme par delà la mort de l'utopie.

A very material question has been started concerning abstract or general ideas, whether they be general or particular in the mind's conception of them. A great philosopher [Dr. Berkeley] has disputed the receiv'd opinion in this particular, and has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them. As I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters, I shall here endeavour to confirm it by some arguments, which I hope will put it beyond all doubt and controversy.

In a recent article “Abortion and Simple Consciousness' (Journal of Philosophy, V. LXXIV, N. 3, pp. 159–172), Werner S. Pluhar puts forward the following view:

A few words of explanation are in order. The reasoning can, I think, be summed up as follows: If one thinks that being conscious is what gives beings rights (and this seems to be a fairly common idea), then what justifies preferential treatment for humans as opposed to sentient members of other species? The fact, or so the answer goes, that humans have a higher degree of consciousness than do members of other species. But human fetuses do not have a higher degree of consciousness than, say, adult dogs. What justifies preferential treatment of human fetuses as opposed to adult dogs? The fact that human fetuses have a higher potential for reaching a higher degree of consciousness than do adult dogs. The liberal who holds that future generations have rights, e.g., to a healthy environment, thereby holds that merely potentially conscious beings have rights. If we have a right to life, then future generations also have that right. But fetuses are no less potentially conscious beings than unconceived future generations. So even a liberal must concede that if we have a right to life, fetuses have a right to life, and that it is at least prima facie wrong to destroy them by abortion.

En 1903, Bertrand Russell publie The Principles of Mathematics, ouvrage qu'il présente dans la préface comme le premier de deux tomes consacrés à une impressionnante entreprise de fondement des mathématiques. Cet ambitieux projet comportait, en fait, deux objectifs distincts qui, selon l'auteur, étaient complémentaires. L'un d'eux, qui était le but ultime, était de montrer «que toutes les mathématiques pures ont exclusivement à voir avec des concepts définissables en termes d'un très petit nombre de concepts logiques fondamentaux et que toutes ses propositions sont déductibles d'un trés petit nombre de principes logiques fondamentaux (…)».

Consider the following argument.

(i) ‘Fa’ and ‘a’ (or ‘-Fa’) are contradictories.

(ii) So one or other of ‘Fa’ and ‘a’ must be true.

(iii) Now ‘Fa’ entails ‘(x)Fx’,

(iv) And ‘a’ entails ‘(x)x’,

(v) So one or other of ‘(x)Fx’ and ‘(x)x’ must be true.

(vi) But both of ‘(x)Fx’ and ‘(x)x’ say there is something.

(vii) So, either way, there is something, i.e. something exists.

In her recent paper, “Belief, Values and the Will,” Trudy Govier raises several interesting and challenging points. Most interesting is her conclusion that it is at least logically possible for a person to believe something “simply in virtue of having taken that decision,” i.e., by fiat. In otherwords, it is possible to believe something by an act of will.