“Think of our world,” writes Robert Nozick, “as a novel in which you yourself are a character.” As we shall see, this is easier said than done. In that case, would the project be worth the effort? Yes, says Alexander Nehamas. In Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Nehamas suggests that we would have a better grasp of some hard doctrines of Nietzsche's, if we accepted literary texts as providing a model for the world, and literary characters as yielding models of ourselves. The idea is intriguing, in part because Nietzsche presents difficulties, and in part because it has some of the alluring obscurity of Nozick's playful charge. In what follows, however, I shall argue that Nehamas's proposals about Nietzsche and literature are not particularly helpful, that Nietzsche's doctrines remain hard to grasp even after we have considered the nature of literary texts, and that Nehamas himself is misled by ambiguities connected with literary characters and the fictional worlds they inhabit.

One reaction to the theory of moral responsibility Hume presentsis that the theory cannot be reconciled with his remarks about the self in Treatise, Book One. Hume declared a self or person to be nothing but a bundle of transient perceptions, arguing further that there is no one perception that continues invariably the same at any two moments of time. It would follow from such a view that, since one and the same bundle cannot logically exist at two distinct moments, and hence a person at t1 is distinct and different from a person at t2, it is logically impossible, even unjust, to ascribe responsibility to a person at a later time for, say, a moral crime committed at a previous time. The reason is that the individual to whom responsibility will be ascribed is the successor of the criminal and not the criminal himself. But since this runs counter to our moral practices of making accountable the perpetrators of crimes, Hume would therefore have to give up or at least revise his theory of the self if he is to discuss intelligibly the issue of individual moral responsibility.

The concept of a society is central to several areas of philosophy, including social and political philosophy, philosophy of social science and moral philosophy. Yet little attention has been paid to the concept and we do not have an adequate philosophical account of it. It is a concept that is difficult to explain systematically, and it is subject to distortion or simple-minded attacks whenever it plays a major role in a philosophical theory. Methodological individualists have raised metaphysical or ontological concerns about the idea that there are such things as societies, and other philosophers have found the concept of a society to be unacceptably vague. For these reasons, I believe it worthwhile to devote this essay to an attempt to explain the concept.

Le XIVe siècle allemand a vu l'apparition et le développement d'une forme de philosophie autonome, fortement influencée par le péripatétisme grécoarabe, mais s'orientant de façon croissante vers le néoplatonisme le plus authentique: celui de Proclus. Si la transition de l'aristotélisme à la «théologie platonicienne» a connu son point culminant dans le Commentaire des Éléments de théologie de Berthold de Moosburg, elle a été préparée par une série de décisions philosophiques, acquises pour l'essentiel chez Albert le Grand. L'objet du présent article est de montrer comment la théorie albertinienne de la contemplation philosophique, avec ses notions spécifiques de «conjonction» et d'«intellect acquis», a servi de point de départ à la reviviscence de l'idéal antique de sagesse contemplative qui caractérise l'école dite «de Cologne», de Dietrich de Freiberg à Berthold lui-même, en passant par Maitre Eckhart.

On ne peut penser le politique dans sa consistance propre sans dépasser de quelque manière la perspective abstraite de l'individu. Il faut s'élever à la vue d'une totalité qui ordonne en son sein les rapports des individus qui, livrés à leur spontanéité, tendent naturellement à s'approprier le propre d'autrui, à l'assujettir à leurs fins. Mais il y a aussi dans la volonté humaine une profondeur raisonnable qui lui permet de se vouloir dans le tout c'est-à-dire dans le respect de l'égale liberté d'autrui et de vouloir le tout lui-même par-delà la médiation instrumentale qu'il représente par rapport à la simple protection de l'individu. La loi de l'État limite les totalités individuelles, spontanément errantes et violentes, et par là rend possible leur cohabitation dans un monde commun. En effet, la loi qui limite l'usage anarchique de mes forces contraint également autrui et, de ce fait, me protège. Mais, avant Hegel, Rousseau exalte aussi l'intégration différenciée des individus, l'unité substantielle et réfléchie du corps politique. L'égoïsme éclairé de l'individu ne peut suffire à cimenter l'unité politique, il faut faire appel à un mobile éthique plus élevé, l'amour de la patrie qui, seul, peut susciter à la limite le mori pro patria.

Dès son origine, la réflexion philosophique sur le droit a été confrontée questions du raisonnement juridique et du rapport du juge à la règle. Ces questions engagent celle du rôle de la Raison dans l'agir humain (moral, politique et juridique) et done ultimement celle du statut de la Raison.

Le renouveau actuel de la philosophie du droit et de la réflexion sur le jugement juridique s'inscrit dans le cadre du nouvel essor du débat philosophique sur la Raison.

On sait le tollé qui entoura vers le dernier quart du XVIIIe siècle la publication du Système de la nature de d'Holbach (1770), le nombre de «réfutations» qui surgirent de toutes parts pour pourfendre le livre outrageant vite apparu comme la véritable bible du matérialisme moderne. Pourtant, parmi les critiques du Système celui qui se détache comme le champion incontestable, car le plus implacable du point de vue de la force théorique et tout aussi systématique ou virulent que son adversaire, n'est qu'un modeste abbé: l'abbé Bergier, remarquablement bien au fait des idées de la nouvelle philosophie et de ses progrès. Bergier conduit méthodiquement une réfutation des thèses ontologiques, morales et politiques de son adversaire en les sapant au niveau des principes d'abord et en dégageant ensuite leurs conséquences pernicieuses par rapport à l'ordre existant.

It is becoming a commonplace in philosophical literature that physicalism need not be reductive. Non-reductive physicalism seems on the face of it to be a contradiction in terms. Some critics have called the idea of a physicalism without reduction “cheap materialism.” It is, of course, possible to quibble about who has the right to be called a physicalist and to play a game of “more physicalist than thou.” However, it would be more fruitful to develop a non-reductive version of physicalism and show that it retains something of the heart of the physicalist tradition while abandoning the reductionist program. John Post's Faces of Existence is just such a project. Post calls his position non-reductive physicalism. It might also be called Post-physicalist, post-dualist, post-relativist, post-everything. After Post, not much remains the same. While in many ways still just a sketch, Faces of Existence does attempt to do justice both to what he takes to be the basic intuitions of physicalism while jettisoning the reductionist program. There is no attempt to prove the truth of non-reductive physicalism in this book. The primary goal is to demonstrate the logical compatibility of a minimal physicalism and a non-reductive pluralism. Along the way we get an attempt to combine realist truth and the relativity of interpretation, to defend the objectivity of values, and to demonstrate the compatibility of some kind of theism with non-reductive physicalism.

In W. H. Walsh's widely read book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1951) there is set out a distinction which became virtually classic, or canonical, between two kinds of philosophy of history. On the one hand, there is critical philosophy of history, which investigates, in what is supposed to be a more or less neutral and objective way, the actual practices of historians, with a view to determining their methods, the character of their cognitive and explanatory claims, resemblances to other kinds of inquiry, differences, and other matters of allied type. Critical philosophers of history are supposed to have a relation to their subject at least similar to that of philosophers of science to theirs. Walsh approved of critical philosophy of history, and pointed to directions of its future progress. On the other hand, there is speculative philosophy of history, which seeks to give philosophie content and structure to the actual course of history, typically, world history. This was the sort of thing engaged in by people like Hegel, and Auguste Comte, and Spengler and Toynbee; Walsh did not approve of it at all. Walsh's distinction, and similar if different perspectives on it, appear among other places in William Dray's Philosophy of History and in articles on philosophy of history in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

In 1498 Cajetan published a short book, On the Analogy of Names, which is often regarded as a masterly summary of Aquinas's doctrine of analogy. It opens in the very first paragraph with an attack on three views of the concept of being (ens): first, that it is a disjunction of concepts; second, that it is an ordered group of concepts; and third, that it is a single, separate concept which is unequally participated by substances and accidents. A number of questions immediately spring to mind. Why are concepts being discussed when analogy is said by Cajetan to be a theory of language? What is meant by ‘concept’? Who held the views under attack and why? So far as I can tell, the extensive literature on both Aquinas and Cajetan offers no satisfactory answers to these questions.

In his paper “Fanciful Arguments For Realism,” Alan H. Goldman offers what he terms a “local case” argument as part of a more general defence of “semantic realism” against the anti-realist manoeuvres of Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam. Semantic realism, here, is the thesis that sentences in a natural language L may have content that transcends any verification or assertability conditions associated with these sentences by competent speakers of L: an adequate semantics, the realist maintains, must equate the content of an assertoric sentence with its realist truth-conditions. Goldman contends that his local case argument demonstrates both the need to accord a central role to a realist conception of truth in an account of linguistic meaning, and the manner in which we acquire such a conception. He further maintains that the argument cannot be countered by any of the strategies that anti-realists are wont to deploy against “global case” arguments for realism (“evil demon” and “brain in a vat” scenarios, for example), and that, given the local case argument, we can recognise the fallacy in such anti-realist strategies and thereby rehabilitate the global case arguments that a full-blown semantic realism requires. I argue that Goldman's local case cannot fulfil its intended function in the overall economy of his argument, and that his strategy for defending semantic realism is fundamentally flawed. In so doing, I attempt to curb the realist's flight of fancy before it leaves the ground.

La confrontation Kant/Wittgenstein qui se dessine ici n'a pas pour objectif principal de présenter les doctrines des deux auteurs. Il s'agit plutôt de marier ces pensées qui ne le désirent pas, de profiter de la confrontation pour faire avancer le débat. Quel débat? Contrairement à I'ordre historique, il tire son origine de Wittgenstein: comment faut-il comprendre les prorèmes que soulève Wittgenstein, les interdits qu'il pose (bien que la grammaire n'«interdise» rien)? Certaines de ses affirmations ne peuvent tout simplement pas être des jugements analytiques, aurait dit Kant (en admettant que Wittgenstein n'aurait jamais prétendu énoncer autre chose que des jugements analytiques). Nombre de ses «remarques grammaticales» (et déjà les Erklärungen du Tractatus) ne sont évidemment pas des tautologies (puisqu'elles rendent nécessaire une réflexion), et la question se pose au moins de savoir comment elles sont possibles comme jugements analytiques.

Humpty-Dumpty affirmait que les mots signifiaient exactement ce qu'il lui plaisait qu'ils signifient, «ni plus, ni moins». Il a parfois des défenseurs chez les chercheurs qui se sont penchés sur le problème de la non-littéralité (Beardsley, 1962, 1978; Black, 1979). On peut cependant affirmer qu'ur locuteur, s'il utilise non littéralement des expressions qui ont ure signification conventionnelle, ne peut en changer à volonté la signification pour leur faire signifier exactement ce qu'il a l'intention de signifier. Par exemple, quelqu'un qui fait une métaphore ne peut changer la signification des expressions qu'il utilise. C'est la thèse que je défendrai au cours des prochaines pages. On verra aussi quelles intentions devrait avoir un locuteur qui signifierait non littéralement quelque chose.

La thèse de l'indétermination de la traduction de W. V. O. Quine est certainement une des thèses les plus controversées de la philosophie du langage. Le présent article explique en quoi consiste cette thèse et examine les liens qu'elle entretient avec la thèse de la sous-détermination des théories scientifiques. La première section montre comment la thèse de l'indétermination de la traduction découle de la conception behavioriste du langage de Quine. Les sections suivantes exposent deux façons de dériver la thèse de l'indétermination: par le holisme et le vérificationnisme dans la section 2 et par la thèse de la sous-détermination dans la section 3. La section 4 précise la formulation de la thèse de la sous-détermination proposée dans «On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World» et la section 5 expose les critiques exprimées par W. Bechtel (1980) à propos de cette formulation. Ces critiques témoignent d'une mauvaise compréhension de la position de Quine et j'essaierai de montrer en quoi elles sont fautives. La section 6 traite des deux façons de dériver la thèse de l'indétermination, à la lumière des modifications apportées à la formulation de la thèse de la sous-détermination. Enfin, la section 7 s'intéresse aux questions de fait (facts of the matter) relatives à la sous-détermination des théories et à l'indétermination de la traduction.

Duns Scotus's famous proposition was first attacked in a short polemical treatise attributed to Thomas of Sutton. By the time of Ockham, the proposition was known as the propositio famosa, so called by Walter Chatton, Ockham's colleague at Oxford and London, who defended it against Ockham's lengthy critique. At Paris, during the same period, it was called the propositio vulgata and was used approvingly by Francis of Meyronnes, Peter of Navarre and Durandus St. Pourçain. This “famous proposition” was so controverted because on it depended the acceptance, with Duns Scotus, or the rejection, with Ockham, of theology as a strict, propter quid science. As its detractors and defenders must have realized, it also struck at the heart of the divergent philosophical outlooks of Duns Scotus and Ockham. For all of this, Duns Scotus's famous proposition and its history have all but escaped notice.

Two of the best currently practising scholars of Ockham, Marilyn Adams and Paul Spade, seem to have accepted a reading of Ockham's ontological program which, although it contains much that is uncontroversially correct, attributes to Ockham a reductionist view that is on my interpretation of his works far too radical to be genuinely Ockham's. Their reading runs as follows. So far as entities go, Ockham accepts only particular substances and some particular qualities. Aristotle's categories, according to Ockham, are not 10 broad classes of radically different sorts of things, but rather are classes of non-complex terms arranged roughly according to the kinds of questions they can be used to answer. When we look at these terms we find that those in the category of substance and some in the category of quality are not definable by some longer expression synonymous with them but simply signify each of the members of a certain class of substances or qualities. These terms are said to be absolute. But other terms (some in the category of quality and all in the other categories, whether abstract or concrete) can either be replaced by a definition that is synonymous with the term defined or can be interpreted as making “exponible” the sentences in which they occur. These terms are all said to be connotative. It is in principle possible to reword all the sentences in which these connotative terms appear so that the only categorematic terms left are absolute terms from the categories of substance and quality.

Pensons aux divers énoncés qui peuvent être composés à partir d'un ensemble fini ou dénombrable d'énoncés atomiques à l'aide de, disons, ‘˜’ et ‘&’; soit A n'importe lequel de ces énoncés; et soit l'ensemble SA des composantes atomiques de A. La valeur de vérité de A dépend évidemment des valeurs de vérité de certains membres de SA (tous les membres de SA dans plusieurs cas, mais seulemént certains d'entre eux dans d'autres cas). En effet, si (i) aux valeurs de vérité Vrai et Faux sont substitués les entiers 1 et 0, respectivement; (ii) la valeur de vérité VVV(˜A) d'une négation ˜A est 1–VV(A); et (iii) la valeur de vérité VV(A & B) d'une conjonction A & B est min(VV(A), VV(B)), alors la valeur de vérité de A s'avère être une fonction numérique des valeurs de vérité de certains membres de SA. Et les fonctions de valeurs de vérité (c'est-à-dire les fonctions dont les arguments sont des énoncés du type en question, et dont les valeurs sont les entiers 1 et 0) sont dites, à titre de résultat, récursivement définissables.

Human rights claims rely on both utilitarian and deontological perspectives of the moral universe. The persuasiveness of these claims depends on the extent to which they resonate harmoniously with a person's other moral opinions. If these opinions cannot be grounded in a larger structure of ra-tionally defensible moral principles, differences of opinion cannot be satis-factorily resolved. When this happens, action protective of rights —about which there may be not only different but diametrically opposed opinion — will be hard to achieve.

John W. Danfor's position in David Hume and the Problem of Reason is refreshing and insightful but may be disturbing to those holding a more traditional view of Hume. The approach taken is highly accessible to those outside of the narrower circle of Humean scholarship; as well it is challenging to those who specialize in Hume's philosophy. I find that I am in general agreement with the overall thrust of Danford's work, which puts Hume's epistemological interests in the context of his political and ethical ones. Hume is cast in a conservative light, as reviving ancient philosophical attitudes to counter the brashness and thoughtlessness of the modern revolutionary thought of Descartes and Hobbes and the traditions following them.