Galileo and his fellowers discovered, and subsequent centuries have amply confirmed, that you get much better predictions by thinking of things as masses of particles blindly bumping each other than by thinking of them as Aristotle thought of them — animistically, teleologically, anthromorphically. They also discovered that you get a better handle on the universe by thinking of it as infinite and cold and comfortless than by thinking of it as finite, homey, planned, and relevant to human concerns. Finally, they discovered that if you view planets or missiles or corpuscles as point-masses, you can get nice simple predictive laws by looking for nice simple mathematical ratios. These discoveres are the basis of modern technological civilization. We can hardly be too grateful for them. But they do not, pace Descartes and Kant, point any epistemological moral.

Richard Rorty sings in the antifoundationalist chorus. His song equates the rise of foundationalist epistemology with the professionalization of philosophy. The discordant notes he finds in the foundationalist score become, as a consequence, subversive of philosophy as an autonomous discipline.

Nonetheless, the most salient feature of Rorty's recent book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is that it is by a professional philosopher, for professional philosophers and about the future of philosophy as a profession. The early chapters of the book are polished pieces of professional philosophical prose addressed to issues which have provoked interest in recent years among members of academic philosophy departments. They represent efforts to undermine foundationalist epistemology even in some of its currently fashionable guises as philosophy of language.

Can one mistrust one's own belief? Wittgenstein says ‘No.’ He remarks: ‘One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.’

It is natural to think that this is not meant merely as a remark about our psychological abilities or inabilities; viz., that one can not, as a matter of psychological fact, help but trust one's own belief. Rather, one is inclined to take it as a ‘grammatical remark’ to the effect that it makes no sense to speak of trusting or mistrusting one's own belief.

In this paper, I will argue against a way of approaching the issue of Judicial discretion that finds its clearest exposition and highest development in recent works by Ronald Dworkin. I will argue that this approach is too narrow, and that it ignores a kind of Judicial discretion whose existence has been maintained by Jurists with discretionist sympathies, and which is philosophically significant. The kind of discretion it ignores raises the issue of the Justification of adjudication as clearly as does the kind of discretion that it recognizes. Moreover, discussion of the kind of discretion ignored is in some respects the natural starting place for a discussion of Judicial discretion in general.

We are often told that there is a striking and important difference between ancient Greek moral philosophy and modern moral philosophy. Whereas the moderns emphasize principles of right action and what a person is obligated to do, ancient moral philosophy is concerned with character and what it is to be a good, that is, a virtuous human being. For the Greeks, virtue was not a matter of making our actions conform to a specific code of conduct or to the moral law. Instead, it was a matter of being in the right psychological state. This idea is explicit in Socrates’ famous claim that knowledge is sufficient for virtue: once we know that virtue is an indispensable means to the final good of eudaimonia, we will choose virtue.

In 1972 Gilbert Ryle published a eulogy to Meinong's theory of objects:

Since that time, the firm of Routley, Routley, Chisholm and Parsons has vigoruously defended Meinong's theory. Are they advocates for a dead client?

The basic idea motivating this paper is that something can be done intentionally even when it is not done with the intention of doing it. An implication of this idea is that the distinction between doing what one intends and doing something as a foreseen avoidable consequence of doing what one intends cannot be used to exonerate agents for misdeeds.

My immediate purpose here is to illustrate these points and show how they pertain to the morally relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia, and to the exoneration of God for the production of evil. In particular, I shall try to show, first, that the American Medical Association's recent attempt to distinguish between active and passive euthanasia is seriously defective. Second, I shall try to show that a popular version of the so-called Free Will Defense of God for Evil is also seriously defective.

Most compatibilists have sought to defend their view by means of an analysis of the concept of ‘can’ in terms of subjunctive conditionals. Keith Lehrer opposes this analysis; he nevertheless embraces compatibilism. In a recent paper he has proposed a novel analysis of the concept of ‘can’ within the framework of possible-world semantics. The paper has provoked considerable discussion. In it Lehrer claims that he demonstrates the truth of compatibilism (p. 241). Others have claimed that this is not so, but at least one commentator has asserted that Lehrer's analysis strongly supports compatibilism. In this section I shall give a brief exposition of relevant portions of Lehrer's account of ‘can’ and then in the next section I shall seek to show that it fails to render compatibilism any more plausible than incompatibilism. Indeed, I shall seek to show that, if one of Lehrer's primitive concepts (the concept of an ‘advantage’) is understood as it seems it should be understood, then there would seem to be good reason to believe that his analysis supports not compatibilism but incompatibilism.

Selon Charles Perelman, la logique, étude des moyens de preuve, a été, dans le prolongement du rationalisme cartésien, progressivement réduite à la logique formelle, étude des techniques démonstratives des mathématiciens. Corrélativement, le champ du rationnel a été considérablement rétréci, et les moyens de preuve utilisés dans les sciences humaines ont été mis au rencart. La raison est devenue incompétente dans tousles domaines qui échappent au calcul, les abandonnant aux forces irrationnelles, aux instincts, à la suggestion, à la violence. Refusant cette dichotomie entre la raison calculatrice et l'irrationnel, Perelman, à la recherche d'une voie intermédiaire, découvrit non pas ce qu'il escomptait, c'est à dire une logique des Jugements de valeur, mais la rhétorique. Celle-ci de nos Jours, est tombée en désuétude. Si l'on veut la rani mer, c'est des Anciens qu'il faut s'inspirer: d'Aristote surtout, mais aussi de Platon. C'est à ce dernier que nous voulons consacrer les pages qui suivent.

At a conference on ‘Leisure in Canada,’ held more than a decade ago at Montmorency in Quebec, a participant observed that ‘practically all writers on the subject take Aristotle as the point of departure in discussing leisure but seldom seem to move from that point.’ At first sight this statement may seem surprising. How is it to be understood? Certainly recent writers on leisure do in fact list Aristotle's conception as one of the significant positions on it.

In a paper entitled ‘Reviving the Logical Connection Argument,’ James Otten attempts to revive the Logical Connection Argument (LCA), which is intended to refute the causal thesis. Otten distinguishes two versions of the causal thesis. The general causal thesis:

(G) W1 … Wn are certain of S's wants, and W1 … Wn cause A,

and the restricted causal thesis:

(R): W is S's want to perform A, and W causes A.

Richard Feldman in ‘Actions and De Re Beliefs’ attacks ‘latitudinarian’ accounts of de re belief in terms of de dicta belief, including those defended in print by one or the other of us. Feldman's case against latitudinarian views rests on the claim that such accounts do not allow de re attitudes an explanatory role they obviously can fulfil.

It is commonly said that ethical disputes either involve disagreements of fact or disagreements of principle and that while disagreements of fact can be overcome by rational means, disagreements of principle cannot. The difficulty is supposed to be this: for an argument to be rationally persuasive it must appeal to premises already accepted by the person to be persuaded, and if the premises include the principle in question then they will not be acceptable to that person; however, if the premises do not include the principle in question the argument cannot succeed because the conclusion can only validly be inferred from premises which do include the principle in question. While this doctrine is appealing to philosophers who find the idea of ultimate disagreement in ethics comforting, it is a visciously skeptical view which can be generalized to cover all systematic areas of human knowledge. As ‘disagreements of principle’ can appear in almost any domain of human inquiry, the hidden cost of this doctrine is terribly high.