It is incorrect to construe Hume as a Pyrrhonian sceptic. Or so I have argued elsewhere. To the contrary, Hume in fact offers a detailed defence of the thesis that the norms of scientific inference, that is, the “rules by which to judge of causes and effects”, are reasonable rules to follow in forming our beliefs. Conforming to these rules in its formation of causal beliefs is a strategy the understanding employs in order to satisfy the end of curiosity (T271). Science is reasonable because, so far as we can, within our fallible limits, discover, it is the strategy of belief formation that is the best means of achieving our end of truth, insofar as the latter is, within our fallible limits, attainable.

Le présent essai examine d'abord les notions newtoniennes d'espace et de temps absolus en elles-mêmes et dans leurs relations réciproques, puis ensuite dans leurs rapports avec d'autres notions connexes comme celles de lieu et de mouvement, en prenant pour base le Scholium qui fait suite aux définitions formulées au début des Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis. La seconde partie analyse les arguments et precédés utilisés par Newton pour identifier des mouvements absolus, et prouver ainsi que de tels mouvements existent. La troisième partie montre en quel sens il faut entendre que ces mouvements sont « absolus », et pourquoi on ne peut en tirer une preuve ultérieure de l'existence d'un temps et d'un espace absolus et subsistants.

In the aftermath of emotivism and behaviourism, cognitivist theories of emotion became current in both philosophy and psychology. These theories, though varied, have in common that emotions require propositional attitudes such as beliefs or evaluations. Accordingly, cognitivist theories characterize emotions themselves with features of such attitudes, including syntax, semantic meaning, and justifiability.

Otto Neurath est intéressant à plus d'un titre. En premier lieu, il a joué un rôle central dans le développement institutionnel du mouvement dénommé « empirisme logique » dont certains interprètes ont considerablement réduit l'étendue et tronqué les thèses. En second lieu, intellectuellement, il occupe une place importante dans les réflexions épistémologiques et politiques d'avant la seconde guerre mondiale, comme en temoigne le fait que Karl Popper le prenne pour cible dans La logique de la découverte scientifique ou Friedrich Hayek dans La route de la servitude. En troisième lieu, il est, comme le note Popper, l'incarnation d'une approche épistémologique originale (Popper, 1944–45, 165–166).

The term “ontology”, as is well enough known, is of seventeenth-century vintage. According to current research, it first appears in the year 1613. By the end of the century it had waxed firm in common recognition. Through the influence of Christian Wolff in the following century, the eighteenth, it quickly became standard in the school tradition for the science of being in general, the science of being qua being. In its morphology the term showed clearly enough that it was meant to designate a science that bore upon being in the widest range of the notion. In that tenor it was described at the time as metaphysica de ente, philosophia de ente, doctrina de ente, or entis scientia, in the sense that “being” denoted its proper subject matter (objectum proprium) more correctly than did “metaphysics”.' Accordingly, it was intended to imply that “being”, tout court, was to be regarded as the object of a philosophical science quite as “soul”, for instance, played the role of object for psychology.

Dans des notes de 1941, publiées en annexe à son cours sur Schelling, Heidegger met en relief trois significations bien distinctes du titre Sein und Zeit. Ce titre serait, en premier lieu, le nom d'un événement dans l'être lui-même; ensuite, le mot d'ordre d'une méditation au sein de l'histoire de la pensée; enfin, le titre d'un traité qui tente un parcours de cette pensée. L'ouvrage intitulé Etre et temps doit done être distingué de la « nécessité » qu'indiquent l'événement et la méditation historiale Sein und Zeit. Quatorze ans après sa publication, Sein und Zeit est devenu un événement de l'être lui-meme ainsi qu'une balise de l'histoire de la pensée occidentale. La projection, apparemment présomptueuse, de Etre et temps dans l'histoire de l'ětre reléve-t-elle de l'auto-interprétation tardive du second Heidegger ou etait-elle déjá à la racine de l'oeuvre de 1927, le chef-d'oeuvre philosophique du vingtième siècle? Dequel droit, plus généralement, le titre d'un livre peut-il se déclarer événement de l'être? Afin de répondre à de telles questions, il faut, bien sûr, avoir compris, ou entrevu, ce que signifie la formule Sein und Zeit. Titre assurément énigmatique, même s'il ne se constitue que de vocables très familiers. « Etre », « temps », « et »: autant de mots que nous employons tous les jours, sinon dans toutes les phrases. Mais « être et temps »? Quel est le sens d'un titre pareil? Cette étude se propose d'esquisser une réponse à cette question en cernant l'horizon des questions délimité par ce titre en 1927 en vue de saisir pourquoi, depuis les bases posées dans Sein und Zeit, ce titre en est venu à circonscrire un événement de l'être et un tournant de la philosophie.

In his recent book, Harm to Others, Joel Feinberg addresses the question whether a person can be harmed after his or her own death, that is, whether posthumous harm is a logical possibility. There is a very strong tendency to suppose that harm to the dead is simply inconceivable. After all, there cannot be harm without a subject to be harmed, but when death occurs it appears to obliterate the subject thus excluding the possibility of harm. On the other hand, there is an inclination to believe that harmful events can indeed occur posthumously. As Aristotle observed, “a dead man is popularly believed to be capable of having both good and ill fortune—honour and dishonour and prosperity and the loss of it among his children and descendants generally—in exactly the same way as if he were alive but unaware or unobservant of what was happening”. Feinberg sides with Aristotle on this issue and develops an intriguing theory purporting to show how posthumous harms are possible. My intention in this paper is to argue that Feinberg's account meets with such serious difficulties that we must either develop an alternative theory or agree with those who claim that death logically excludes the possibility of harm. I shall begin in §2 with a brief sketch of Feinberg's provocative theory. This will be followed in §3 by my comments and criticisms. Section 4 will close with suggestions about where Feinberg's account goes wrong and how it might be repaired.

In this paper I propose to examine a notion often used in assessing the morality of war: “innocence”. Assessments of innocence within this context range from Nagel's straightforward working definition of ”currently harmless”, to Richard Wasserstrom's painstakingly legalistic assessment, to Anscombe's definition and discussion of innocence and responsibility.

One major part of Representing and Intervening is completely without blemish. In it we find Ian Hacking busy puncturing received opinions about science in his usual lucid and engaging style. If you think, for instance, that scientists decide what exists by passively observing the passing show, Hacking has news for you. Similarly, if you think that experiments exist just to test theories, or that science begins and ends with theories, or that within science as practised there is even any univocal rendering of the term “theory”, you are equally on the verge of surprise.

From the time of Reid through Coleridge to T. H. Green, Hume was interpreted as a sceptic and as a wholly negative philosopher. And from their perspective such an interpretation no doubt makes some sense, given the vested interest in religion and the absolute of the idealists: from that perspective it is an essential part of a positive position that it take one beyond the realm of ordinary objects known by sense experience to a realm of entities that transcend that world of everyday life. That interpretation lingers on, like bad jokes, to retail in Philosophy 100 classes. On the other hand, in an age where the demand that one have access to a transcendent entity is less insistent, it has become possible to challenge the orthodox reading of Hume. The first to do this was Norman Kemp Smith, who argued that, while Hume was a sceptic, he in fact also had a positive view, not to be sure that of Reid & Co., but that of a naturalist, that is, one who holds that our beliefs, and our moral commitments, are none of them rational, none of them products of reason, but rather are products of our instinctive and passionate natures. This interpretation continues to have important defenders such as Popkin and Stroud. More recently, however, some scholars have gone further and argued that there are good senses in which Hume is not a sceptic, and that he constructs a case that our instinctual beliefs are not only natural but also rational. Major works defending this reading of Hume as a naturalized epistemologist are those of Livingston and Jones. The Kemp Smith interpretation has, however, found a major new defender in John Wright's The Sceptical Realism of David Hume.

In “Gentle Murder, Or The Adverbial Samaritan”, James William Forrester presents what he describes as “the most powerful version yet put forward” of Lennart Åqvist's Good Samaritan paradox in deontic logic. Forrester suggests that the paradox may make it necessary to reject the standard deontic inference principle

(where “r” is an index for any source of obligation). This desperate conclusion, as Forrester acknowledges, would imply that all of standard deontic logic “must be in a bad way”. But Forrester's “paradox” is not nearly so deep or intractable as he maintains.

Forrester claims to have shown that a contradiction can be derived from a set of two apparently innocuous moral (or legal) rules together with standard deontic logic (SDL), a principle for adverbial detachment, and a statement of fact. Let l be a system of laws that has the following as immediate consequences:

(1) It is obligatory* that Smith not murder Jones.

(2) It is obligatory; that, if Smith murders Jones, then Smith murders Jones gently.