Depuis la parution de la Théorie de l'agir communicationnel, la question du droit et de la rationalité juridique a occupé une place de plus en plus importante dans l'itinéraire philosophique et sociologique de Jürgen Habermas. Déjà repérable dans l'œuvre maîtresse de 1981, cette réflexion s'est poursuivie avec le cours Law and Morality professé à l'Université Harvard en 1986, pour trouver son point d'orgue en 1992 avec la publication de Faktizität und Geltung, ouvrage tout entier consacré à la théorie juridique et politique et qui forme désormais la pièce maîtresse de la pensée de Habermas sur ce thème. On peut invoquer deux motifs pour expliquer cet intérêt marqué et relativement récent pour la philosophic du droit.

Body theory is the work of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and other scholars in the past twenty to twenty-five years that explicitly focuses on the body, especially on sexuality and gender. The body is seen as an ideological surface on which history and politics inscribe their truths. It is, in short, a corporeal epistemology standing in opposition to all the old cognitive epistemologies (e.g., Descartes, Locke, and modern analytic thought as a whole). Régimes of power are known through the way they oppress, manipulate, and construct the human body. Body theory includes the work of Michel Foucault, Thomas Laquer, and feminist scholars such as Hélène Cixous, Laura Mulvey, and Elaine Showalter. This work is carried on, by and large, in the methodological atmosphere of a constructivist notion of gender, sexuality, social ideas, and the self.

Thirty years ago, Duncan Forbes published a short review, which, amongst other things, challenged the view that towards the end of his life David Hume turned Tory. Forbes's subsequent study of Hume's politics showed that, when strictly applied, ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ failed to capture the philosophical import of Hume's writings about politics and even of his semi-detached involvement with the politics of his time. If one took Hume at his own word, “sceptical whiggism”—a kind of moderate and scientific-minded appreciation of the relative superiority of modern commercial polities, and, in Britain, of the Hanoverian régime—was a more appropriate description of what Hume's political writings were about. It also avoided the invidious problem of whether Hume should be regarded as a liberal or a conservative.

La philosophie de Charles Taylor a récemment fait l'objet de plusieurs critiques mettant en question tant l'ontologie morale proposée par Taylor que le modèle politique qu'elle soutient. Par exemple, O. Flanagan a souligné les difficultés posées par le fait de concevoir les agents moraux comme devant nécessairement procéder à des évaluations fortes. D. Weinstock a défendu l'idée que les institutions politiques libérales que critique Taylor sont en réalité plus propices au développement de cette capacité d'évaluation forte que la poursuite d'un bien commun par le biais des institutions politiques dont les communautaristes sont généralement vus comme les défenseurs. Pour sa part, Will Kymlicka a soutenu que contrairement à ce qu'affirme Taylor, la philosophie morale contemporaine ne nie pas l'existence de distinctions qualitatives et qu'elle centre la moralité sur le respect des besoins des autres pour permettre à chacun de réaliser son intérêt prémoral pour la bonne vie.

Kant and the Experience of Freedom rassemble les articles de Paul Guyer consacrés à l'esthétique de Kant depuis 1982 et un certain nombre de textes inédits qui vont jusqu'à 1991. Il s'agira certainement d'un jalon important dans l'interprétation de l'esthétique de Kant et des questions philosophiques qui y sont apparentées. Le virage qu'y prend l'auteur par rapport à son livre célèbre de 1979, Kant and the Claims of Taste, est également impressionnant. Moins dépendant des débats qui prédominaient dans l'esthétique de l'époque, il ne s'agit plus tant pour Guyer d'essayer de dégager le noyau normatif de la théorie kantienne du goût et d'en faire valoir la cohérence et la légitimité, que d'interroger les rapports multiples et complexes qu'entretiennent l'esthétique et la moralité chez Kant, dans la Critique de la faculté de juger et au-delà.

Wittgenstein est mort en 1951 et on attend toujours une édition de ses œuvres complètes. Ce n'est qu'en 1994 que sont parus, accompagnés d'un volume d'introduction à l'ensemble du projet d'édition de la main du directeur de publication, Michael Nedo, les deux premiers d'une série de quinze volumes, les Wiener Ausgabe, qui reproduiront l'intégralité des écrits de Wittgenstein, de son retour à Cambridge en janvier 1929 à la première version du Big Typescript en 1933, avec index et concordances. D'après le catalogue établi par Georg Henrik von Wright, il s'agit des articles suivants: MS 105 à 114 et 153 à 155, TS 208 à 218. Ces deux premiers volumes reproduisent les manuscrits écrits entre janvier ou février 1929 et l'été 1930, soit les MS 105, 106, 107 et 108. Ils constituent l'aboutissement d'une véritable saga entourant l'œuvre posthume de Wittgenstein, dont il vaut la peine de rapporter ici quelques-uns des faits marquants.

Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers's target in Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is “gender feminism.” Her aim is to convince us that gender feminists are anti-intellectual opportunists who deliberately spread lies about the incidence of date rape (chap. 10), domestic battery (Preface, chap. 9) and about the general state of male-female relations in America (chaps. 1, 9 and 11), thereby generating fear and resentment of men (chap. 2), all so that they may secure vast amounts of government funding and high-paying jobs in the academy (chaps. 4, 5 and 6). Because gender feminists are condescending to and contemptuous of the “average woman,” they lack a grass-roots constituency (p. 22). Nonetheless, they are powerful enough to be feared. Gender feminists have managed to dupe the U.S. Congress (chap. 8), and an otherwise sceptical press literally eats out of their hands (p. 15). Gender feminism is also a leading cause of the weakening of the American university (p. 52), and has “made the American campus a less happy place” (p. 112).

These two books are Volumes 1 and 2 of a three-volume work; the projected third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, has yet to be published. In the first volume, Warrant: The Current Debate, Plantinga surveys the current chaos in epistemology stemming from the breakdown of classical foundationalism and examines critically the efforts of several contemporary philosophers to introduce some order into the field, most particularly Roderick Chisholm, William Alston, John Pollock, Laurence BonJour and, to a lesser extent, others such as Richard Foley, Fred Dretske and Alvin Goldman. In this volume, Plantinga is trying not only to put out of play the views he rejects but also to provide the reader with anticipations of his own views in Warrant and Proper Function. Although there is an immense amount of overlap between these books, and there is much cross-referencing, they are not continuous; each can be read entirely independently of the other. Even should, through some misfortune, the projected third volume fail to be written, these two volumes are certain to stand for a long time as exceptionally important works. Warrant and Proper Function, in particular, is likely to generate a veritable Niagara of Ph.D. theses in a field many had come to see as having reached the point of diminishing nits.

Perfectionism is an ambitious and thoroughly engaging work in which Thomas Hurka sets out to formulate and defend a normative ethical theory that “is of sufficient depth and generality to be … the basis of all moral claims” (p. 32). Beginning with an axiology, Hurka proposes that the development of the properties constitutive of human nature is intrinsically good, and his fundamental moral principle enjoins us to promote the greatest development of the nature of all humans at all times.

Social and political topics of public concern shift and reconfigure themselves with volatility as well as speed in contemporary life. Issues ignite and arouse constituencies of response, in alliance and opposition, with a quite uncertain degree of predictability, even if with periodicities and a detectable routing circuitry about which it is easy to become cynical, or at least fatigued. Something burns, now, among us; and we would prefer not to think much about the fact that it, or a close relative, burned a year and a half before—sometimes even more recently—in other places more plausibly a fountain and fundament of currents of Western cultural life. The issues must feel real; they must be seen as urgent, abstract matters of right and wrong, shocking disclosure, heroic resistance, without reference to anywhere else than here and anyone else but us.

Wendy Donner's The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy is an important and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of literature seeking to rescue Mill's practical philosophy from the rather lowly place it occupied in the estimation of many philosophers earlier this century, and to present him as a philosopher whose views form a coherent, systematic whole that can still contribute significantly to numerous moral and political debates. The book proposes an interpretation of the whole of Mill's practical philosophy, and attempts to reveal how aspects of Mill's thought, hitherto considered incompatible, actually mutually support one another. At the same time, Donner sets many of Mill's positions in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophical debates, and finds that on a number of important issues, his thought stands up rather well against more recent work.

In The Practice of Punishment, Wesley Cragg sets out a systematic “restorative” theory of criminal punishment. For him, restorative justice identifies the goal of punishment as “the resolution of disputes to which criminal offenses give rise in ways designed to sustain confidence in the capacity of the law to fulfil its legitimate functions on the part of victims of crime and the public at large” (p. 9).

It is now over 15 years since Hilary Putnam first urged that we take the “narrow path” of internal realism as a way of navigating between “the swamps of metaphysics and the quicksands of cultural relativism and historicism” (1983, p. 226). In the opening lines of the Preface to Realism with a Human Face, a collection of Putnam's recent papers edited by James Conant, Putnam reaffirms his allegiance to this narrow path, unmoved by Realist murmurings from the swamps and laconic Rortian suggestions that only the quicksands are a proper metaphilosophical abode for those willing to confront our lack of epistemological and metaphysical foundations. If there are changes to be discerned in these writings, Putnam avers, they pertain only to the burden allotted to different considerations in the overall economy of his argument: “It might be said that the difference between the present volume and my work prior to The Many Faces of Realism is a shift in emphasis: a shift from emphasizing model-theoretic arguments against metaphysical realism to emphasizing conceptual relativity” (p. xi).

The title of this critical notice is provoked by a remark Professor Armour makes in Chapter IX, “Metaphysics and the Resolution of Conflict,” of Being and Idea. If we become Spinozists, “Perhaps the concept of God will emerge clearly and orient our lives, or perhaps, on the other hand, we will be able to see how to make God go away and leave us alone” (p. 98). As the title indicates, I shall argue here that Armour's book achieves the latter, and not the former, end.

It may seem that there is no need to review such a well-known book. This is the second edition of Peter Singer's text, Practical Ethics. The first edition has been widely used and influential; indeed for many it defines the field of applied ethics. The field is lucky; rarely is such popular work so carefully argued, so factually well informed and so well written. In addition, it is unusual for the author of a basic text to be so daring. Peter Singer deserves credit for placing the interests of animals and famine victims on the agenda of applied ethics, and for making that agenda so prominent in public fora. But it behooves us to scrutinize carefully the power of definitive works as well. What sets the agenda is, for that very reason, more difficult to assess critically.