Au § 45 de la Critique de la facultè de juger, Kant écrit: «La nature était belle lorsqu'elle avait incontinent l'apparence de l'art; et l'art ne peut être appelé beau que lorsque nous sommes conscients qu'il s'agit bien d'art, mais qu'il prend pour nous l'apparence de la nature». Ce qui semble à première vue n'être qu'un simple «paradoxes Gedankenspiel» nous convie au contraire à l'un des problèmes les plus intéressants de la troisième Critique: celui du rapport entre la beauté de l'art et celle de la nature. L'intention de la présente analyse est de préciser l'importance de ce rapport dans l'économie et dans l'articulation générale de cette œuvre. Comment devons-nous comprendre cette sorte de «chassé-croisé» entre l'art et la nature? Est-ce que, par exemple, l'affirmation qui déclare que l'art ne peut être beau que s'il apparaît comme nature possède, aux yeux de Kant, le même statut philosophique que celle qui dit que la nature pour être belle doit apparaître comme art? En somme, est-ce que d'après Kant la relation entre les belles formes naturelles et les beaux produits de l'art en est une de réciprocité?

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.

In early life, the philosopher, theologian and scientist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) wrote extensively on moral matters. One of the extant early documents written in Boyle's hand deals with the morality of our treatment of non-human animals. In this piece (probably written about 1647) Boyle offered a number of arguments for extending moral concern to non-human animals. Since the later Boyle routinely vivisected or otherwise killed animals in his scientific experiments, we are left with the biographical questions, did his views change, and if so, why? as well as with the philosophical questions, what were his arguments and how good are they?

In this paper I propose we read David Hume's view of meaningful discourse, or his theory of meaning, as an aspect of his theory of politics. I will argue that readings which ignore the political dimension are incomplete and distort Hume's position. When I use the word ‘political’ in the Humean context, however, it means something similar to what we mean by the term ‘social’; in the Humean context ‘politics’ is inclusive of the narrow sense taken by political science in its study of regular partisan politics and governance structures. My proposal is similar to the social-context or social-constructivist interpretations of commentators such as Pall Ardal, Donald Livingston, and Nicholas Capaldi. A political reading also stresses the importance of social context in our understanding of Hume, and agrees with the social-context argument that there is a social or political dimension to intellectual life which Hume hints at but does not address directly in Book 1 of the Treatise.

On assiste aujourd'hui à un renouvellement et à une intensification du questionnement juridique, lesquels ne vont pas sans susciter une interpellation de la réflexion philosophique par le droit. Plusieurs motifs concourent à cette situation (développement technique, inflation de l'individualisme et des particularismes, crise de l'État et donc de l'autonomie des appareils juridiques, domination du droit international par certains États-Nations, etc.). Cette interpellation de la philosophie est le signe d'un besoin d'élucidation, d'éclaircissement et de nouvelles délimitations conceptuelles, au sein d'une situation historique où les schèmes traditionnels d'interprétation du droit font sentir leurs insuffisances.

Traditionally, the problem of defeating scepticism about the rationality of morality is that of showing that every morally required act is rationally required. Little or no direct attention has been paid to whether we must also show that it is rational for the agent to have and act from the morally appropriate motive, whatever that may be. This is not to say that philosophers have entirely ignored the issue of motives; a fair number—Kant and Aristotle come to mind—are concerned in part with the kind of motive agents ought to have and from which they ought to act. But the link to scepticism has not been clearly made. At issue is whether scepticism is fully defeated if we show that every morally required act is rationally required, even if we leave it possible that a fully rational person who performs the act just “goes through the motions” in doing so.

In Morals by Agreement, David Gauthier convinced many of us—including Peter Danielson, author of Artificial Morality, the latest successor to MA—that morality can best be understood as a set of intramental, strategic responses to patterns of otherwise dilemmatic, game-theory-reducible interactivity. More particularly, Gauthier and Danielson are of a mind that: (a) characteristic of our interactive circumstances are the Prisoner's Dilemma and its cognates; (b) these are circumstances in which our pre-moral, straightforward maximizing (SM) disposition fares considerably worse than (virtually any species of) “constrained maximization” (CM)—the latter being the dispositional essence of morality—and (c) it should not surprise us, therefore, that (or, at least, if) selective pressure has rendered most of us just so morally (i.e., CM) disposed. In short, what Danielson calls the “fundamental” justification for morality—that is, one “that does not appeal to any of the concepts of [morality itself]” (AM, p. 19)—is that: conventional wisdom notwithstanding, nice guys—though, adds Danielson, not necessarily the nicest guys—finish first!

Could John Locke defend his view that the knowledge we acquire in intuition and demonstration is infallible, and should he try to defend it? Peter Schouls thinks the project is unviable, and I think Schouls is right. But I also think Locke should not even bother trying. I shall elaborate on the argument that he could not defend the view, indicate why I think he should abandon infallibility, given his other views, and then investigate what he might usefully say about knowledge and certainty if he were persuaded to abandon it.

Derek Parfit is surely right when he says, at the beginning of Reasons and Persons, that many of us want to know what we have most reason to do. Several theories attempt to answer this question, and Parfit begins his discussion with the best-known case: the Self-interest Theory, or S. When applied to actions, S claims that “(S2) What each of us has most reason to do is whatever would be best for himself, and (S3) It is irrational for anyone to do what he believes will be worse for himself” (Parfit 1984, p. 8). Objections to this theory are of many kinds, and in the first part of his book Parfit examines the objection that S is, in various ways, self-defeating. One such objection is that S implies we sometimes cannot avoid acting irrationally, but Parfit claims it is not a good objection to S that it has this implication. I disagree. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the objection in more detail (section 1), and then to argue that each of Parfit's responses to the objection is inadequate (sections 2, 3 and 4).

At the beginning of his section “Of Miracles,” Hume mentions an argument of Dr. Tillotson. The doctrine of “the real presence” seems contradicted by our senses. We see a piece of bread, but are asked to believe it consists in the substance of the body of Christ.

The problem of induced pro-attitudes is simply this: why is action which ultimately issues from pro-attitudes such as desires, volitions, and goals, induced by techniques such as direct manipulation of the brain, hypnosis, or “value engineering,” frequently regarded as action for which its agent cannot be held morally responsible? The problem is of interest for several reasons. Ferdinand Schoeman, for instance, believes that the problem poses a resolvable but challenging predicament for compatibilists: if agents can be held morally responsible for actions that are causally determined, then why should actions that result from induced pro-attitudes be regarded as paradigmatically unfree actions for which agents cannot be held morally accountable? Robert Kane exploits the problem to launch a libertarian attack on compatibilists. He says that a covert non-constraining controller controls the will of another agent by arranging “circumstances beforehand so that the agent wants and desires, and hence chooses and tries, only what the controller intends.” Kane claims that compatibilist accounts of freedom cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent behaves freely and those in which an agent falls prey to the covert non-constraining control of some other party.

By his definition of them, David Gauthier's co-operative constrained maximizers are not necessarily unsharing and disposed to exclude straight maximizers from benefits of their co-operation. Here is Gauthier's full and exact account, his official account, of constrained maximization.

God, by definition, is all-powerful, all-good, all-wise, and all-knowing. Therein lies a problem for the theist, of course, for every one of these attributes has been the subject of fierce debate. In this paper I want to return to the debate by introducing a new problem for the idea that anyone could have the kind of perfect knowledge God is supposed to have. What distinguishes my problem from others is that the sort of knowledge it focuses on is self-knowledge, hence knowledge of a particularly intimate kind. My claim is that God cannot have infallible knowledge of at least some of his own perfections, in particular his being all-wise or ideally rational. Such ignorance is not only inconsistent with the usual conception of God's omniscience, given that whatever knowledge God possesses is traditionally thought to be be a priori and infallible, but, more importantly, is inconsistent with the fundamental idea that God at least knows infallibly or incorrigibly that he has what it takes to be God: qualities such as omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and supreme wisdom. In short, my claim is that God must have a deep “blindspot” about his own nature, something which is inconsistent with a traditional picture of that nature.

La théorie du choix social qui s'est développée durant les dernières décennies, notamment dans la ligne des travaux d'Arrow (1951) et de Sen (1970, 1982), ne s'est pas seulement soldée par une série de résultats négatifs exprimés dans les théorèmes d'impossibilité d'Arrow, de Sen et d'autres; ses notions centrales ont aussi été utilisées de manière fort variée au point que cette théorie souffre aujourd'hui d'un déficit important qui se traduit par de multiples indéterminations conceptuelles.

Donald Davidson considère qu'une théorie de l'interprétation doit être radicale, c'est-à-dire qu'elle ne doit présupposer aucune connaissance de la langue à interpréter. Cette exigence repose sur l'idée suivante: si une théorie de l'interprétation pour une langue L présuppose une certaine compréhension de L, alors elle perd son pouvoir explicatif et échoue à rendre compte de ce qui permet la compréhension de L. L'interpr'tation radicale a l'avantage de nous forcer à rendre explicite ce qui est à l'œuvre dans le processus d'interprétation du comportement verbal d'autrui. Elle nous permet aussi de nous concentrer sur la nature des données empiriques qui rendent possible la communication. Il importe de noter que Davidson ne veut aucunement suggérer qu'un interprète compétent de L connaϊt ou possède une théorie de l'interprétation pour L: la théorie set plutôt à donner une description de sa compétence.

Jack and Jill have both applied for the same entry-level position at a local university. After interviewing the leading candidates, the members of the hiring committee agree that both Jack and Jill have all the necessary qualifications for appointment to the position. Both have the required education and training. Both have strong letters of recommendation from their Ph.D. supervisors and from their current employers. Both are similarly experienced and both are potentially capable of making important future contributions to their chosen discipline. The members of the hiring committee also agree that Jack and Jill are superior to all other applicants for the position. In short, in the judgment of the hiring committee, they are the two best qualified candidates and both meet their potential employer's expectations concerning a successful applicant. Yet neither Jack nor Jill is clearly superior to the other.

Wittgenstein écrit dans les Recherches philosophiques: «Pour une large part des cas d'emploi du mot “signification” — bien que ce ne soit pas pour tous les cas — on peut l'expliquer ainsi: la signification d'un mot est son usage dans le langage» (PU, §43). Le slogan «La signification, c'est l'usage» a servi de signe de ralliement à toute une génération de philosophes (les praticiens de l'«analyse linguistique» ou de la «philosophie du langage ordinaire»), mais la question de savoir quel sens lui donne Wittgenstein — mise à part celle de savoir quel sens il avait pour ces philosophes — pose encore un problème aujourd'hui.

Is it somehow a requirement of justice that we meet people's needs? So, for instance, do people in need of certain goods necessary to sustain life deserve help from those not (similarly) in need because this is a requirement of justice?

If there is one aspect of David Gauthier's program for a contractualist morality that has been most sceptically received, it is his view that instrumentally rational agents would choose to adopt a disposition that would in turn constrain their future choices. Instead of remaining “straightforward maximizers” caught in a suboptimal state of nature, they would become “constrained maximizers” who could avoid prisoner's dilemmas (PDs) by engaging in conditional co-operation. Apart from the fact that Gauthier's entirely prescriptive orientation leads him to omit any specification of the mechanism through which this might be accomplished, serious doubts have been raised about the adequacy of the argument that he offers in support of adopting constrained maximization.

Les rapports de la philologie et de l'herméneutique ont toujours constitué un problème d'une redoutable complexité. Ce sont en effet les mêmes textes qui ont engendré à la période moderne le développement de la pensée de l'interprétation et les méthodes de la critique. L'espoir de parvenir à la formulation satisfaisante et définitive du sens d'un texte se trouve constamment différé par la production incessante d'interprétations nouvelles, qui utilisent souvent les ressources de la philologie pour se constituer et qui entrent en rivalité avec les précédentes. On peut se réjouir de ce caractère immarcescible du procès de l'interprétation, on peut aussi déplorer les échecs répétés de la philologie à le freiner. Il y a en effet quelque légitimité à affirmer que la philologie travaille ultimement contre l'herméneutique, c'est-à-dire contre le déploiement infini de l'interprétation.