Si les interprétations de ce qu'il est convenu de nommer la « dernière philosophie » de Heidegger sont aujourd'hui monnaie courante, non sans risque d'inflation parfois quand on les lie sans précaution à l'engagement politique de l'auteur de Sein und Zeit, personne pourtant n'avait jusqu'ici pris le risque d'aborder la question controversée du « tournant » de front. Les différences évidentes entre un Heidegger I, parti de la phénoménologie pour revenir à une « ontologie fondamentale », et relevant encore à ce titre de la philosophie, et un Heidegger II, voué désormais à une « autre pensée » réfractaire à l'élaboration conceptuelle, sinon à une sorte de mysticisme poétique, paraissent si tranchées à la plupart des commentateurs qu'ils entérinent sans plus attendre une telle division. Celle-ci a d'ailleurs été accréditée par l'auteur lui-même qui, le premier, mentionna l'existence d'un « tournant » (Kehre) de sa propre pensée, en termes réservés toutefois, sinon énigmatiques.

Sir J. C. Eccles nous propose dans The Self and Its Brain une théorie ternaire et interactionniste fort controversée dont il avait déjà posé les bases auparavant.

La présente réflexion vise l'examen du bien-fondé neuropsychologique des principales thèses de cette théorie, à la lumière de données cliniques récentes dont l'auteur ne semble pas avoir su tirer toutes les conséquences.

David Gauthier's impressive new book, Morals by Agreement, attempts to resuscitate something like Lockean natural rights on an essentially Hobbesian basis—a project eminently worth doing, if it can be done. Hubin and Lambeth offer some interesting criticisms of his project, and as they also raise some fundamental questions about the character and derivation of rights, it is important to see whether those criticisms hold up. I wish to comment on the one I think to be most crucial.

L'interet de Habermas pour la modernité dont traite son dernier livre, le tourne vers les travaux de Foucault. Celui-ci aurait mis en évidence, dès l'Histoire de la folie, ce qu'il y a de nouveau sous le ciel de la rationalité moderne. Dans plusieurs chapitres consacrés à Foucault (les chapitres 9 et 10 en entier, une partie du chapitre 11, et quelques références dans les chapitres 3, 4 et 12), Habermas esquisse une critique qui s'inspire substantiellement des travaux de Fink-Eitel (1980), Fraser (1981), Honegger (1982), Rippel et Münkler (1982), Dreyfus et Rabinow (1983) et de Honneth (1985). Cette critique est radicale et prend pour cible la présumée théorie du pouvoir de Foucault, les impasses où conduisent les instructions méthodologiques qu'il entend observer pour reconstruire l'histoire recente des sciences humaines, ainsi que les thèses au sujet du rapport entre les pratiques discursives et les pratiques non discursives, plus exactement les dispositifs de pouvoir dans lesquels les sciences humaines se trouvent intégrées. Bien que Foucault n'ait jamais développé une telle théorie (philosophique) du pouvoir et qu'il dise n'avoir jamais voulu l'élaborer, on doit constater avec Habermas que le thème du pouvoir est pourtant omniprésent, et que le concept de pouvoir doit ëtre considéré comme une notion centrale dans son oeuvre.

L'épistémologie de Kant, dont le but principal est d'expliquer la possibilité des jugements synthétiques a priori, est une épistémologie du point de vue du sujet ou (comme on pourrait la désigner aussi) «à la première personne»: le «sujet connaissant», dit Kant, «…compare, lie ou sépare [les] représentations et travaille … la matière brute des impressions sensibles pour en tirer une connaissance des objets…». C'est l'esprit, ou le moi pensant, comme il le soutient aussi, qui construit à partir des impressions reçues des sens (le «divers» de la sensibilité) une représentation objective de l'univers en soumettant les phénomènes à ses formes a priori et à ses catégories. Mais de quelle nature peut être ce «moi» qui connaît? Est-il possible d'en dire quelque chose? Pour lui, «nous n'avons ni ne pouvons [en] avoir la moindre connaissance…». Le «je» du «Je pense», comme on le lit dans la déduction transcendantale des catégories, doit pouvoir «accompagner toutes mes représentations…», mais il ne peut être pour lui-même un objet de connaissance ou de représentation parce que «je ne saurais connaître comme objet cela même [le sujet] qu'il me faut supposer pour connaître en général un objet…».

Central to our conception of courage is the idea of bearing up under formidable circumstances or acting in the face of a grave risk to oneself. Let us call this feature the condition of formidable obstacles. Everyone agrees that this much is characteristic of courageous behaviour. After that, however, there is considerable disagreement regarding two other issues in particular. Is courage a virtue, by which Walton means (52–55): Is a courageous act always one which the agent justifiably believes serves a moral or noble end? Is a courageous act necessarily one where the agent has to overcome fear in order to act? The correct approach to answering these two questions and, more generally, to constructing an account of courage is to canvass a wide range of real-life cases which are (widely) regarded as courageous. This is the approach which Douglas Walton takes in his fascinating book Courage: A Philosophical Investigation. His very nuanced discussion of courage is rich with examples.

In Part 1 of this paper I will define a sense of “person” which is importantly connected with ordinary notions of personhood. It is a consequence of my definition that each person exemplifies a specific “egoicity”. In Part 2 I will argue, on the basis of empirical facts about monozygotic (“identical”) twins, that egoicity is not determined by bodily constitution. In Part 3 I will conclude with a brief discussion of implications for The Mind-Body Problem.

The latest book by one of Canada's most distinguished philosophers has been in the works for some time. So it is fitting that the Canadian Philosophical Association should have devoted a special symposium to David Braybrooke's Meeting Needs in our 1987 annual meeting. An earlier version of the review that follows was presented at that symposium and has benefitted from some replies from Braybrooke. As one might have expected, as we parted company after that symposium, we still had some fundamental disagreements.

Thomas' remarks raise some interesting questions about the courage and cowardice of soldiers who happen to be fighting on the wrong side. These are interesting and complex questions of moral philosophy in their own right, and I did not feel that it was appropriate in Courage to dwell on them in too much detail. However, Thomas should have read more closely before declaring that “Walton does not even consider” cases of whether actions “on the part of the Axis soldiers would count as courageous”. For there is a substantial discussion in Courage of the case of the actions of Field Marshal Erwin Rommell for which he was decorated in both World Wars. But Thomas is surely right that further discussion of other cases of this type will help to advance our understanding of problems in ethics of courage.

The main purpose of this paper is to argue, against the formalist or hypothetico-deductivist approach now dominant, that God or substance is for Spinoza a discovery, or indeed a kind of revelation. In both TdlE and Ethics, Spinoza affirms substance as the outcome of a search for salvation. He could not have held that a postulate or presupposition, even if thought necessary, can save man through abstract entailment. Indeed, salvation depends on “the quality of the object to which we cling with love”, the object being “the eternal and infinite thing” (TdlE 8–10).

In the etiology of teleological functions, what role can be played by accidental occurrences? Douglas Ehring's essay “Accidental Functions” constructs a theory of ideological functions which makes it possible for objects to have functions even when their causal origins are due entirely to accident—be they natural functions (the function of the heart) or artifact functions (the function of a watch). Ehring constructs this view on the basis of a set of putative counterexamples aimed largely at the theories of Enc and Adams. Both of these theories block the attribution of ideological function to structures with entirely accidental causal histories—accidental in origin and in the way their effects are causally sustained.

Can x need y without our being in a position to conceptualize y? Nothing, given ten seconds thought, is easier to show. Every man, woman, and child from the beginning of the human race needed Vitamin C as one ingredient in the minimum provisions for their food. It was only in this century, however, that people arrived at the concept of Vitamin C and became able to assert the need for it. On the record, we may expect more such discoveries.

The Anthropic Principle, in use by physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists, is currently under consideration by philosophers. This principle, in its various forms, appeals to man's existence as a constraint on our determination of natural laws and natural constants, as a principle of prediction, and, in its strongest form, as a principle of explanation which sanctions an argument for the universe being a product of design. What I shall endeavour to show here is (1) how this principle, in its various forms, is used in furthering our understanding of cosmology, and (2) why this principle cannot be used as a principle of explanation.

This is the first volume in the Collected Papers which deals exclusively with Russell's non-technical writings and, chronologically, it is the immediate successor of volume 1. Volumes 2 through 7 cover roughly the same span of years as volume 12 (1902–1914) but are devoted to his technical writings on mathematics, logic and philosophy. Of this group, however, only volume 7 has so far been published. The contents of volume 12 are intended to show two contrasting sides of Russell's highly complex character: the contemplative (but nonacademic) side and the active. The latter is much easier to delineate and much more widely known. During 1904, Russell rose to defend traditional Liberal principles of free trade and to assail the British government's protectionist proposals for tariff reform. His various articles, book reviews, critiques and letters to editors are gathered here. Three years later, he campaigned for election to Parliament from Wimbledon as the Women's Suffrage candidate against a staunch anti-suffragist. The outcome was never in doubt, not even to Russell, since Wimbledon was a safe seat for the Conservatives, and in the end Russell lost by a margin greater than 3-to-l, but his fight had been vigorous and had managed to gain national attention.

This is a book about laws. Not, however, about the laws of which we learned in science classes at school: “scientific laws”. It is rather about those universalities which govern the world of facts, what Swartz calls “physical laws”—although this language is slightly misleading because the term is intended to cover the living as well as the non-living world. Of course, it may well be that a scientific law (like Boyle's law) does capture the essence of a physical law, but not necessarily or (apparently) usually. A physical law by definition can never be false, whereas (as Michael Scriven pointed out some years ago) almost paradoxically nearly all (if not all) scientific laws are false.

Anyone interested in the development of analytic philosophy will likely find Russell's Theory of Knowledge a work of great importance in itself; but anyone who, in addition, is fascinated by scholarly mystery and the psychology of philosophers will certainly regard its publication at last, nearly three-quarters of a century after Russell abandoned it unfinished—principally because of the young Wittgenstein's virulent criticisms—as an event nothing short of momentous. Theory of Knowledge may well have played as important a role in Wittgenstein's early work (from the Notebooks to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) as the Tractatus itself did in his later writings—each representing for Wittgenstein an attitude, a philosophical method, and above all a theory of propositions, against which he was driven to react. But it would be a sad irony if renewed interest in Wittgenstein's early work were to eclipse all over again the very piece of writing which helped move him to creative rebellion. Unlike the two previous volumes in the Collected Papers (numbers 1 and 12), which broaden rather than deepen our knowledge of his philosophical growth, Theory of Knowledge deserves to become a standard text in Russell studies. It contains crucial material not found elsewhere in his writings and hence it fills a gap—ironically,, a gap Russell himself created—in what we know of his thought in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I, when his career at Cambridge was at its apogee.

In Patterns of Moral Complexity, Charles Larmore describes three related ways in which moral and political theory are more complex than is often allowed. He objects to three parallel simplifications: that moral decision making largely consists in the application of rules to particular situations; that the ideals by which we are guided in our personal (private, social) lives should also do service as political ideals, a simplification which he calls “expressivism”; and that there is but a single source of moral value (that we must be either consequentialists, or deontologists, or endorse the “principle of partiality”). Against these simplifications he argues in a sort of Aristotelian way for (1) the centrality of judgment in moral reasoning; (2) for the liberal principle that the state should not strive to express our highest personal ideal; and (3) for the, I suppose eclectic, view that partiality, deontological reasons, and consequentialist reasons all have a place in moral reasoning and that therefore the moral person may well be caught in conflicts that present him or her with tragic choices. These are the three “patterns of moral complexity” that the title of the book refers to.

In 1974, George Grant delivered the Josiah Wood lectures at Mount Allison University on the theme English-Speaking Justice. The lectures, first published in 1978, have been republished, and a volume of later essays on somewhat related themes has recently appeared. Grant's work offers an impressionistic but deep challenge to the conception of justice in modern moral thought and practice, a challenge paralleled, in interesting and important ways, by concerns about morality raised in the writings of such persons as Alasdair MacIntyre, Bernard Williams, and, perhaps more surprisingly, J. L. Mackie. In this review, I want briefly to expound Grant's treatment of justice, to exhibit its relationships to other disquieting accounts, and to suggest some of the resources available to contractarian moral theory for lightening what for Grant is a terrifying darkness.

En plus d'être partout présente dans l'expérience et le discours ordinaires, la culpabilité a fait l'objet des discours traditionnels que sont le discours religieux et le discours philosophique. Voici qu'avec Freud et la psychanalyse apparaît dans notre culture une interprétation qui se veut nouvelle de ce spectre qui hante notre vie individuelle et collective. Quelle est donc l'originalité et la fécondité de cette approche? Quelle place occupe la culpabilité dans la théorie psychanalytique? Comment sont conçus dans cette perspective les rapports et les différences entre se sentir coupable, se sentir inférieur, éprouver de la honte et éprouver de l'angoisse? Sur chacun de ces problèmes, J. Goldberg analyse et discute les principales thèses avancées par la psychanalyse depuis sa fondation jusqu'à nos jours. Voilà un livre extrêmement riche, subtil et complexe. Il n'est pas aisé d'en faire brièvement état sans le trahir, d'autant plus qu'il se déploie dans le double registre de la clinique et de la théorie métapsychologique. Notre souci premier ici sera de montrer à des philosophes en quoi la psychanalyse se différencie du discours philosophique ou religieux. Si notre présentation de cet ouvrage se veut néanmoins une étude critique de type philosophique, c'est par les questions épistémologiques qu'elle pose et non par une confrontation des théories de Goldberg avec une théorie philosophique de la culpabilité.

In Chapters 10 and 11, I was privileged to act as amanuensis to a visiting Martian and to transcribe his lectures which, the truth be told, embodied views remarkably similar to my own. Ruse, in a playful vein, wonders “why this Martian would go to British Columbia to do philosophy”. I must admit that I do not really know the answer. I can only speculate that it might be for the same reasons that so many philosophers in Eastern Canada have applied for teaching positions here in Canada's Sun Belt.