One of the most frequently recurring debates about practical reason concerns the roles of reason and the passions in explaining human motivation and behaviour. The debate focusses on two related questions: (1) Are desires necessary in explaining human motivation and behaviour? (2) Can reason suffice to motivate an action?

La notion d'« auto-identité absolument contradictoire » du penseur japonais Nishida constitue le fondement de sa philosophie. Élaborée entre 1925 et 1945, elle permet d'établir une comparaison avec la philosophie occidentale puisqu'elle rejoint un thème privilégié en philosophie comparée, celui de la contradiction.

Dans le paradigme russellien (Russell, 1905), les termes dénotants ou termes quantifiés (Neale, 1990) comme «plusieurs hommes», «quelques hommes», «tous les hommes», sont analysés à l'aide de quantificateurs, de variables, de prédicats et de connecteurs logiques à l'intérieur de phrases complètes exprimant des propositions générales. Les descriptions définies comme les descriptions indéfinies y sont aussi traitées comme des termes quantifiés.

In his recent book, Liberalism, Community and Culture, Will Kymlicka defends collective rights for some minority groups—and particularly for indigenous peoples in North America—by trying to show that (1) secure cultural belonging is of great value, and (2) rights to protection and autonomy for minorities, including some collective rights, are justified by the special disadvantages some minorities face in enjoying secure cultural membership. Kymlicka defends these claims from within a liberal perspective that draws heavily on Rawls and Dworkin and that denies that groups are independent sources of moral claims. In this paper I am mainly concerned with how to defend the first of these claims, which I shall call the “Value Thesis.” One reason for being interested in the justification of the Value Thesis is that some version of it is a key part of most arguments for minority and collective rights. Another reason is that the Value Thesis is important to communitarians who frequently base their claims about the importance of community on the value of belonging.

Le concept de responsabilité vient généralement et spontanément à l'esprit de la plupart d'entre nous quand il est question d'action humaine. Il est surprenant pour cette raison que dans l'histoire de la philosophie de l'action, particulièrement l'histoire récente, la responsabilité ait été tenue autant à l'écart des discussions. En effet, après avoir joué chez les philosophes de la première génération suivant Wittgenstein, comme Hart (1949), Melden (1956, 1961), Chisholm (1965) et Rayfield (1972), un rôle important, le concept de responsabilité a été, semble-t-il, progressivement évacué des débats en philosophie analytique de l'action. Évidemment, l'action est encore affaire de responsabilité, puisque toute action peut être en principe sujette à une évaluation normative. Mais c'est le processus par lequel on en vient à évaluer la responsabilité d'une action qui ne semble plus faire partie des préoccupations des philosophes de l'action. Ceux-ci considèrent en général que de telles attributions devraient rester du resort de l'éthique ou du droit et n'ont rien à voir avec l'entreprise de la philosophie de l'action contemporaine qui, a bien des egards, se definit tout d'abord comme une extension de la philosophie de l'esprit.

Environmental issues are high on today's political agenda. Why we have landed in our present undesirable, and possibly even dangerous, situation and how we should act differently in the future, are questions central to our time. Max Oelschlaeger joins the current debate on both these questions. As historian he examines the roots of our environmental problems and looks, in some detail, at the history of wilderness as an idea. As philosopher he outlines some of the principal positions taken by eco-philosophers towards wilderness and its preservation; he also presents his own views.

Confrontations With the Reaper is a brilliant philosophical investigation into the nature and value of death. In what follows, I adumbrate the contents of the book and then turn to some critical discussion.

Richard Gale, noting the “startling resurgence of theism within philosophy during the past thirty years or so” (p. 2) led by William Alston, Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, concludes that “there is need for a return visit from Hume's Philo.” But fans of Philo may be disappointed with the present version. To be sure, Gale as Philo possesses both the wit and the critical acumen to make him a worthy successor to the original. What is lacking, however, is the animus and the scornful rejection of biblical religion which so notably motivated both the original Philo and his creator.

Although legal positivism is still a position to be reckoned with, the fact that philosophers of law are again talking about “natural rights” indicates that positivism is no longer to be taken for granted. One result of this movement is an incipient interest, among English-speaking philosophers, in Kant's theory of rights as presented in The Doctrine of Right, Part I of The Metaphysics of Morals. For the past two decades German Kant scholars have been analyzing and commenting on The Doctrine of Right; but Mulholland's book is, to the best of my knowledge, the first systematic treatment of the theory in English. It is, on the whole, a helpful introduction to the subject, which should be of interest not only to Kant scholars but also to contemporary legal, political and social philosophers.

In Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought, Robert McRae alleges a flat “contradiction” (McRae 1976, p. 30) at the heart of Leibniz's doctrine of three grades of monads: bare entelechies characterized by perception; animal souls capable both of perception and of sensation; and rational souls, minds or spirits endowed not only with capacities for perception and sensation but also with consciousness of self or what Leibniz calls (introducing a new term of art into the vocabulary of philosophy) “apperception.” Apperception is a necessary condition of those distinctively human mental processes associated with understanding and with reason. Insofar as it is also a sufficient condition of rationality, it is not ascribable to animals. But apperception is a necessary condition of sensation or feeling as well; and animals are capable of sensation, according to Leibniz, who decisively rejected the Cartesian doctrine that beasts are nothing but material automata. “On the one hand,” writes McRae, “what distinguishes animals from lower forms of life is sensation or feeling, but on the other hand apperception is a necessary condition of sensation, and apperception distinguishes human beings from animals” (McRae 1976, p. 30). “We are thus left with an unresolved inconsistency in Leibniz's account of sensation, so far as sensation is attributable both to men and animals” (ibid., p. 34).

Anyone preparing to work through Catherine Wilson's important 1989 book, Leibniz's Metaphysics, would be well advised to go back for another look at Bertrand Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, for it is this book that provides the foil and the context for much that Wilson has to say. In particular, the preface to Russell's first edition stresses the very points regarding both methodology and content on which Wilson will disagree most vigorously with her predecessor.