On ne retient plus guère aujourd'hui le nom de T. Campanella parmi les philosophes qui ont compté à l'aube du XVIIe siècle. Cet ardent défenseur de Galilée, longtemps emprisonné pour la hardiesse de ses propres idées, a cependant joué un rôle non négligeable dans l'avènement d'une philosophie naturelle affranchie des traditions aristotéliciennes. Je voudrais attirer ciaprès l'attention sur quelques-unes de ses positions qui semblent avoir été prises en compte par Leibniz dans l'élaboration de sa première physique.

Dans son célèbre article de 1950 «Computing Machinery and Intelligence», Alan Turing suggère qu'un critère d'intelligence pour une machine serait qu'elle puisse se faire passer pour un interlocuteur humain. Ce test, appelé «Test de Turing», a été critiqué par John Searle, qui a remis en cause sa pertinence en s'appuyant sur une expérience mentale connue sous le nom de l'argument de la chambre chinoise (Chinese Room Argument). L'expérience tend à montrer que l'intelligence artificielle au sens propre du terme est impossible, parce que les symboles manipulés par les programmes de prétendue «intelligence artificielle» (IA) sont dépourvus de signification. L'intentionalité propre à certains êtres vivants peut seule faire naître le sens. L'imitation d'un comportement intentionnel ne le peut pas. Le test de Turing serait done insatisfaisant, parce qu'il ne permettrait pas de distinguer les systèmes intentionnels de systèmes qui ne le sont pas, et que par conséquent il ne permettrait pas de distinguer l'intelligence authentique (intentionnelle) de la simulation de l'intelligence (non intentionnelle).

This article raises two questions about Robert Myers and Claudine Verheggen's terrific book, Donald Davidson's Triangulation Argument: A Philosophical Inquiry. The first question, concerning the first part of the book, is whether, starting from the assumption that a solitary individual cannot have thought contents, we can show that adding another individual to the picture cannot resolve the problem. The second question, concerning the second part, is whether a more sophisticated, decision-theoretic, Humean about the pro-attitudes can respond to the objections to the simple Humean view, and whether Davidson was not in fact just such a sophisticated decision-theoretic Humean.

Aristotle discusses character in four contexts: ethics, poetic theory, the study of rhetoric and zoology. What he means by character is different in each of these cases, but not radically different. He always uses it as a device to explain actions or behavioural patterns: in animals, in people, and in fictional people. The similarities between the character exhibited by different species, moral character, and tragic character have gone unexamined. As a result, the notion of character as explanatory, and the possibilities and limitations of explanation by means of character are still undetermined.

One cannot determine whether a book is a work of political philosophy merely by glancing at its contents. Heidegger's Being and Time is a case in point. It offers no discussion of the topics which are commonly thought to constitute political philosophy—the state, the nature of law, human rights, and so on. But particular themes such as these reflect in large part the actual conditions which prevailed at certain times and places, fourth-century Athens and seventeenth-century England, for example, so they must not be thought to constitute an outline of the eternal problems of political philosophy. When a philosopher embarks upon a new line of thought at a different time and under novel circumstances, he may find himself instituting a new vocabulary for the problems of the human community.

One of the central features of Kant's moral theory is the sharp distinction he draws between the moral Tightness (legality) of actions and their moral worth or goodness (morality). As we know from the first pages of the Groundwork, the rightness of an action is determined by the conformity of the agent's maxim to the categorical imperative; the moral goodness or worth of an action is determined by the agent's motives, by whether the agent acted from the motive of duty or from some other (non-moral) empirical motive. Morally good actions must be morally right, according to Kant, whereas morally right actions are not necessarily morally good.

Whether or not men have free choice is a question which arises within two distinct moral contexts. At issue in the one is their ability to decide among genuine alternatives; in the other their ability to do what they think they ought to do although their desire to perform their duty is weaker than their desire to do otherwise. The former has to do with moral decision; (he latter with moral effort. Although the two are distinct they are not unrelated. For in any moral decision a fully conscious, or rather self-conscious agent, will always take into account the likelihood of his effort succeeding in action and this will have an important bearing on the decision he makes.

In the far-off days before the first World War, the British journal Mind was full of articles by writers who thought of themselves as “Neoidealists”. So when the enfant terrible of the groves of Academic Oxford in that generation—a “pragmatic Humanist” by the name of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller—played his most notorious practical joke upon his colleagues by publishing a mock-issue of the journal (under the title Mind!) he offered as a frontispiece “A portrait of the Absolute in the pink of condition”. Beneath a pale-pink semi-transparent tissue (which, except for its colour, was quite normal for the photographic plates in Victorian memoirs) one found a printed frame that embraced a perfectly blank white sheet of paper.

Le manuscrit sur la Critique de la philosophie de l'État de Hegel fédigé par Marx à l'été de 1843 est demeuré inconnu de la tradition marxiste jusqu'en 1922, date ou le savant russe, David Rjazanov, l'a decouvert dans les archives du Parti Social-Démocrate à Berlin. Dans l'édition critique allemande de Dietz, le texte occupe 130 pages. II s'agit d'un texte ardu, difficile, voire meme rébarbatif. Marx recopie les paragraphes 261–313 de la Philosophic du Droit de Hegel pour en faire une critique détailléè, quelquefois brillante, souvent obscure et nebuleuse. Le texte peut etre divisé en quatre parties: la critique de la conception générate de l'État (Par. 261–274), la critique de la monarchic (Par. 275–286), du pouvoir exécutif (Par. 287–297) et du pouvoir legislatif (Par. 298–313). Mais comme l'écrit Marx dans une lettre en date du 5 mars 1842 à Arnold Ruge «le fond en est la réfutation de la monarchie constitutionnelle comme une chose bâtarde, contradictoire et qui se condamne elle-même». Notre propos prendra appui sur la premiere partie du texte, mais les conclusions auxquelles nous arriverons pourront s'étendre a l'ensemble du manuscrit.

On First view there seem to be many possible instances of knowers who lack knowledge of their knowledge. A self-deceiver seems capable of knowing his own faults without knowing that he knows them. A philosopher seems capable of knowing that there are physical objects around him without knowing that he has such knowledge. Deep-rooted insecurity seems capable of preventing a mathematician from knowing that he has just made a genuine discovery. A child seems capable of acquiring knowledge before acquiring the concept ‘knowledge’ and hence before being able to know that he knows.

Genuine ethical subjectivism is a kind of logical autism, uncurable by distinctions. It is, roughly put, that attitude according to which duty is discoverable by introspection. What I wish to call pseudo-subjectivism is more akin to an anxiety neurosis. It is a more common disturbance than the genuine form of the disease, but, happily, is easily cured without recourse to clinical treatment, by therapy than can be self-administered in the privacy of one's study. Every man his own analyst. Pseudo-subjectivism is an anxiety syndrome associated with the view that one ought to do what one thinks one ought to do. The cure consists in becoming reassured that this need not be genuine subjectivism at all. The purpose of this paper is to provide that reassurance.

Annas’ virtue ethics faces the Circularity Objection. She claims that a just soul is disposed to doing just acts. If a just soul is defined neither in terms of right acts nor rules, then the Circularity Objection is circumvented. Drawing upon Korsgaard’s recent work, it is shown that Annas’ argument faces anew the Circularity Objection. Then, I examine Annas’ fresh attempts to avert the Circularity Objection by appealing to the community of the virtuous. I argue that this move does not save her theory from either relativism or the Circularity Objection.

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.

George Berkeley and Martin Buber are philosophers whose views one might not expect to find being discussed in one and the same essay. Nevertheless, in what follows I hope to show that a comparison of their epistemologies reveals substantial similarities, both methodological and doctrinal. The ground for such a comparison lies in the religious orientation of these two very different philosophers. It is an orientation each has emphasized more than once, both in his philosophical and in his less formal writings.

Most books defending the position now know as “libertarianism”, the thesis that government ought to confine itself only to the most minimal functions of preventing or punishing force and fraud, can be dismissed with little scruple as the work of cranks. And some have already done so with this one as well: but wrongly. It is clearly the work of a person of extraordinary brilliance, penetration, and learning, possessed of a pungent style and an uncommon flair for paradox and counterexample. Those who are inclined to reject it out of hand because its conclusions will seem incredible might also bear in mind that its author is a man to whom his colleague John Rawls (whose conclusions do seem very credible to many) has expressed gratitude and indebtedness. At any rate, I propose to take the work with complete seriousness. And after all, should there not be considerable attraction i n the view that the only enforceable duty is that of respecting the freedom of our fellows as completely as possible? Surely it behooves us to see just why this will not do, if it won't; and no better opportunity for examining the view has arisen than that provided by the publication of this book.

Moral realists face an epistemological challenge: they must explain why many judgments that are likely to be (mind-independent) moral truths are those it would be evolutionarily adaptive to hold. Is it a coincidence? Do evolutionary forces track these truths? Third-factor explanation is the strategy most commonly adopted by moral realists to explain this striking correlation. In this article, I argue that it does not allow them to meet the challenge.

This article offers a contribution to the study of Leibniz's thought on possibility and existence based on a reconstruction of the evolution of Kant's thought on these notions in Nova dilucidatio (1755), Beweisgrund (1763) and Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781–1787). Its aim is to shed light on Kant's debt to Leibniz and to show that only the critical turn could make them diverge on this question through a twofold opposition on epistemology (the role of experience) and ontology (the eclipse of God).