Foucault appears now and again in the work of Charles Taylor, but fleetingly, almost hauntingly. This is not surprising because Taylor and Foucault share many ideas and yet remain starkly opposed. This is especially true of Taylor's most recent work, his monumental Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. In it he is characteristically brilliant, in the sense that he attempts to illuminate a great many things all at once. Foucault is mentioned here and there in that work, along with a great many others. However, I would claim that Foucault's presence is much more sustained than the index would have us believe. In fact, one might say that Foucault is the shadow cast by Taylor's brilliance.

Thomas Hurka derives rights to punish from what I will term the Libertarian Rights Principle, which is “that there is really only one natural right, namely the equal right of all persons to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for other persons, and that all other natural rights are species or instances of the right to liberty.” These rights to punish, he says, (1) extend only to punishing violators of rights, never to “punishing” the innocent; (2) extend only to punishing for violations pursuant to intentions publicly announced prior to these violations; (3) are subject to the “upper limit qualification” (p. 652) that a permissible punishment for the violation of a right cannot be an act that would violate a more important right (i.e., a punishment that would infringe on a liberty more important than the one infringed upon in the violation); and (4) are subject to the “minimum necessary qualification” (p. 653) that a punishment p for violating a right r is not permissible if a punishment p' that would, were it permitted, violate a less important right than would p, would protect r as effectively as would p.

Les recherches poursuivies par les membres de l'école de Francfort depuis la seconde moitié des années quatre-vingt se signalent primordialement par l'intérêt porté au problème général des conditions d'application de l'éthique de la discussion (Diskursethik) au domaine du droit et de la politique. En témoignent les recueils publiés récemment par Karl-Otto Apel, en particulier Diskurs und Verantwortung (1988) et Zur Anwendung der Diskursethik in Politik, Recht und Wissenschaft (1992), ainsi que l'ouvrage volumineux de J. Habermas consacré à la théorie du droit, Faktizität und Geltung (1992). Bien que non définitive, cette orientation de recherche n'en est pas moins suffisamment élaborée à l'heure actuelle pour permettre une évaluation. Le but du présent article sera plus spécialement de soumettre à un examen critique la voie de solution propre apportée par Apel à ce problème. Une thèse centrale sera défendue: celle suivant laquelle les difficultés que présente l'application de l'éthique communicationnelle au monde du droit et de la politique ne peuvent être entièrement solutionnées dans le cadre restreint de la théorie morale, mais exigent la transition à une théorie du droit et de la démocratie.

Traditionally, one of the primary obstacles for physicalist accounts of the mind has been the apparent contrast between the intrinsic nature of our experiences and the intrinsic nature of the brain states with which they are allegedly identical. For instance, the intrinsic nature of an itch seems quite different from that of any electro-chemical state or event in the brain.

For the last 40 years or so the is/ought gap, the fact/value distinction and the naturalistic fallacy have figured prominently in ethical debates. This longevity, however, has had an adverse side effect. So familiar have they become that they—and their respective rationales—have tended to become blurred. It is the purpose of this paper to explain why they should be kept distinct.

This book is presented as “a study in ethno-metaphysics,” an exploration of the worldview of Canada's Native peoples. In offering this as a work of philosophy rather than of cultural anthropology or Native spirituality, authors Rabb and McPherson take as their point of departure anthropologist A. I. Hallowell's claim that a cultural worldview is a “cognitive orientation” from which a set of metaphysical claims might be deduced—even if it is not consciously recognized as such by those who live within it (p. 3). In other words, the guiding premise of this work is that something recognizable and significant as a metaphysical theory can be massaged out of the cultural belief-systems of Canada's Native peoples.

Le concept au centre du dernier ouvrage d'Otfried Höffe publié en français est celui d'impératif catégorique juridique. Höffe souhaite, en effet, approfondir son apologie des principes juridiques catégoriques déjà developpée dans son précédent ouvrage La justice politique en éclaircissant ses sources kantiennes. Alors que dans l'ouvrage de 1991 la figure tutélaire de Kant était restée en retrait, Höffe a voulu expliciter son rapport à Kant ét montrer la façon dont la réflexion contemporaine sur le droit et le politique devrait elle-même se dire kantienne.

Daniel Dennett's theory of mind divides into two parts: a theory of mental content, which is provided by his intentional systems theory, and a theory of consciousness, the latest presentation of which is brought together in an exciting recent work, Consciousness Explained. This book, combined with his 1987 The Intentional Stance, constitutes the third execution of Dennett's overall program, the first two being Content and Consciousness (1969) and Brainstorms (1978). Consciousness Explained is a veritable treasure of fascinating ideas, fresh perspectives and striking illustrations, many of which are sure to be much discussed by philosophers in years to come.

Traditionnellement, une théorie de la signification doit rendre compte à la fois des conditions de vérité des phrases des langues naturelles et des relations évidentes qu'entretiennent le langage et la pensée. À ce titre, le paradigme frégéen est un modele du genre. Une phrase y est dite exprimer une pensée, laquelle lui sert de valeur cognitive et a une valeur de vérité. Différentes occurrences d'une même phrase expriment une même pensée. Si cette phrase a une occurrence dans un contexte d'attitude propositionnelle, elle réfère à la pensée qu'elle exprimerait en contexte ordinaire. La théorie de la référence directe a fait voler en éclats cette image aussi simple que claire de la relation entre langage et pensée. C'est sur cet arrière-plan que prend place le livre de François Récanati, Direct Reference. Une bonne partie des efforts de l'auteur est en effet consacrée à rétablir des liens aujourd'hui étiolés.

The commonalities of Douglas Walton's Slippery Slope Arguments and James Davies's Ways of Thinking are obvious: both are written by Canadian philosophers; both lie within the broad field of informal logic; and both make appeals in support of dialogical reasoning. But there the similarities end. The former is the work of a prolific author writing a treatise focussing narrowly on one topic within informal logic; the latter is the product of a newcomer to book-writing, and his is a textbook intended for beginning students.

It would be hard to deny that there is some modal doctrine in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, for the Tractatus contains the standard semantics for the classical propositional calculus and the standard semantics is modal. Moreover, the work makes serious use of modal concepts, especially that of a possible state of affairs (möglich Sachverhalt). Given the centrality of this notion, it is curious that commentators have so readily ignored the modal aspects of the Tractatus Raymond Bradley's excellent, full-blown study of Wittgenstein's early modalism is, therefore, all the more welcome as a corrective.

Norm and Nature: The Movements of Legal Thought, by Roger Shiner, is an intricate book with the perhaps surprising thesis that the outstanding problem in legal philosophy, the conflict between positivism and natural law, is irresolvable. The controversy is doomed to a never-ending cycle because “sophisticated positivism follows from positivism's difficulties with simple positivism … anti-positivism follows from sophisticated positivism's difficulties with simple positivism; [and] simple positivism follows from positivism's difficulties with anti-positivism” (p. 281). For legal theory, then, an understanding of law is simply an understanding of why legal theory is thus “condemned to endless dialectic” (p. 324). And the reason is found in the nature of law itself and the perennial tension between, on the one hand, certainty and procedure and, on the other, flexibility and substance.

Collected readings on journalism and the mass media truly abound, from surveys to case studies, so another volume needs some justification. Elliot D. Cohen says his collection is needed because there is a dearth of good writing on philosophical issues in journalism. Cohen should know. As editor of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy, he has been a crusader for the philosophy of journalism.