In some of his last publications, R. G. Collingwood takes the position that problems in philosophy are not eternal. Such a denial, in the context of the controversies concerning the overall interpretation of Collingwood's work, is significant for at least two reasons: it seems to suggest an “atomistic” view of the history of philosophy on Collingwood's part, perhaps one that resembles that of the history of science as offered in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Also, the denial seems to reverse Collingwood's earlier views which insisted on a philosophia perennis, and this would support those who maintain that at some point Collingwood's thought underwent a “radical conversion”.

On s'émerveille souvent devant l'envergure de la méthode et de l'érudition de Max Weber. On rappelle fréquemment que, dans l'oeuvre de celui-ci, d'étroites relations existent entre les différentes composantes. On cherche trop peu à montrer comment ce savoir se fait encyclo-pédique et quelle est la nature de ce rapport entre les parties. Nombreux sont les ouvrages (ordinairement fidèles et utiles) qui affirment l'interdépendance des constituantes de la pensée wébérienne mais qui, néanmoins, en extraient quelque fragment (à des fins souvent justifiables et éclairantes) ou la divisent en morceaux—les juxtaposant sans jamais pouvoir vraiment les ressouder les uns aux autres—quasiment toujours en reprenant le découpage de Weber lui-même. On aperçoit bien les diverses branches de la réflexion wébérienne; on réalise qu'elles ont un tronc commun; on descend rarement jusqu'à la racine. Dans ces profondeurs, on découvre que la théorie verstehen doit ses réalisations à une conception d'une simplicité exagérée de la rationalité grâce à laquelle la raison s'allonge démesurément.

La connaissance est traditionnellement envisagée comme un processus mettant en rapport un sujet et un objet. Le processus peut être doublement orienté selon que l'on considère la réception de l'information par l e sujet, ou la représentation de l'objet qui peut avoir différentes modalités, parmi lesquelles je compte l'assertion de quelque chose quant à l'objet. Je schématise ces deux orientations de la façon suivante:

(1) I (O,S) = K1

(2) R (S,O) = K2

Prendre connaissance d'un manuel de mathématiques, être ébloui par une lumière vive, n'est pas identique à résoudre un problème de mathématiques, ou à savoir que la voiture qui vient en face n'a pas mis ses feux de croisement. Il y a bien lieu de distinguer deux types de connaissances: K1 et K2; je ne me préoccuperai pas de la question générale de l'identité des éléments de chacune et j'utiliserai les mêmes symboles S et O.

In a recent series of papers, Donald Davidson has put forward a challenging and original philosophy of mind which he has called anomalous monism. Anomalous monism has certain similarities to another recent and deservedly popular position: functionalist cognitive psychology. Both functionalism, in its materialist versions, and anomalous monism require token-token psychophysical identities rather than type-type ones. (Token identities are identities between individual events; type identities represent a stronger claim of identities between interesting sorts of events.) Both deny that psychology can be translated into, or scientifically reduced to, neurophysiology. Both are mentalistic theories, allowing psychology to make use of intentional descriptions in its theorizing. Anomalous monism uses a belief/desire/action psychology; cognitive science makes use of information-bearing states. But these similarities must not be allowed to conceal an essential difference between the two positions. Cognitive psychology claims to be a science, making interesting, lawlike generalizations for the purpose of explaining mental activity. Anomalous monism denies that psychology is a science by denying that psychological laws can be formulated. Davidson has other ideas for psychology connected with his work on meaning and truth. Hence, the title of one of his essays on anomalous monism is “Psychology as Philosophy”.

Basic to Richard Wollheim's theory of art in Art and Its Objects is the proposition that “art is, in Wittgenstein's sense, a form of life”. This sense of the expression “a form of life” (“ein Lebensform”) is elusive; Wittgenstein uses it only a few times in his Investigations, leaving such mysteries as how to interpret the famous gnomicism, “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life.” Wollheim's way of dispelling some of the mystery is to draw two fairly sharp implications from the thought that art is a form of life. It implies that artistic social institutions neither dominate artists in virtue of the stuffs and processes that they sanction and accredit, nor suffer them to work within languages or media which are arbitrary. I will be denying both implications.

Une hypothèse fondamentale avancée par Searle et Vanderveken dans Foundations of Illocutionary Logic est que la force illocutionnaire est un élé;ment essentiel de la signification conventionnelle. La signification conventionnelle, qui est une propriété d'énoncé, s'oppose en gros ici à la signification intentionnelle, qui est une propriété prédiquée aux locuteurs. J'aimerais questionner certaines des motivations qui sont susceptibles de nous amener à accepter ce point de vue.

In the spirit of Frege's gripping opener in “Ueber Sinnund Bedeutung”, one can equally well say that the concept of existence challenges reflection; for how can one deny that Pegasus exists without presuming existence? After all, such claims can be informative, for they could be false. Consequently, one might argue, they must say something about something. Thus, they succeed in being, in a back-handed, paradoxical way, existence statements of a sort. This problem is very old; it is Plato's problem of non-being. Frege's solution to the problem is also well known.

Aristotle's account of phantasia in De anima, III, 3, occurs at a critical juncture of his inquiry into the nature and properties of the soul. Having just completed a long discussion of sensation (II, 5-III, 2), and wishing now to turn to a consideration of the power of thought (nous), which he regards both as distinct from and as analogous to sensation, he suggests that an explanation of phantasia is necessary at this point, since there is no thought without phantasia, just as there is no phantasia without sensation.1 But while this sketch of a complex dependency among the soul's cognitive powers makes clear the importance of phantasia and the need for some explanation of it, the intermediate place of phantasia in the discussion and the incidental way in which it is introduced are indications that Aristotle does not treat it for its own sake, but rather is compelled to turn to a consideration of it by the exigencies of the subject-matter at hand. The analysis of sensation, the characteristic power of animals, could, it seems, be adequately carried out with little reference to phantasia, even though Aristotle is elsewhere led to stress the closeness, and even, in some respect, the identity of these two powers; the discussion of thought, on the other hand, and specifically of the human thought which is Aristotle's concern in De anima, III, 4–8, apparently requires a special preliminary treatment of phantasia.

This is a highly interesting book, and one that is, in its own way, most important. The Structure of Experience is well written and effectively argued. It shows Gordon Nagel to be a rigorous and independent thinker who is as well acquainted with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as he is with modern analytic philosophy. Because he has been successful in avoiding “to presuppose a background in Kant studies”, the book can indeed “be read by anyone interested in perception, cognition, or the philosophy of mind” (vii). In fact, it is to be recommended as an introduction to recent epistemology as well as to Kant. And this is perhaps as it should be, as the study of Kant has deeply influenced the broader developments of contemporary philosophy. P. F. Strawson, Jonathan Bennett, Richard Rorty, and Barry Stroud, to name only a few of the best-known figures, all developed their own views in conscious dependence upon and/or opposition to Kant. Since Nagel is firmly rooted in this tradition, his book may be taken as a contribution to both the study of Kant and the discussion of contemporary philosophieal issues.

Norman Kemp Smith began his famous work on Hume by reminding us how difficult Hume is: not difficult to follow paragraph by paragraph, but difficult to interpret as a whole. He then went on to try to remedy this situation by offering an overall interpretation that essentially reversed the dominant reading of Hume as a sceptic, and argued instead that he is a naturalist—a thinker who views our beliefs, as well as our moral commitments, as products of the instinctive and passionate natures with which we are endowed. On this view, the key Humean text is the famous pronouncement that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions; for it is in his account of the passions that we must find the basis of the natural history of our cognitive and moral commitments. This lends a systematic unity to Hume's thought, by making his epistemology and his ethics offshoots of his psychology of the emotions. It also allows Kemp Smith to emphasize the importance of the influence on Hume of the work of his older contemporary Francis Hutcheson.

« L'égalité, parce que la liberté ne peut subsister sans elle … » réclamait Rousseau. Lorsqu'il pense la Révolution, tout philosophe politique voudrait tenir tous les bouts de la chaîne qui relie l'éthique au politique. L'ouvrage récent de Kai Nielsen, qui propose la thèse de l'égalitarisme radical comme nerf du processus d'institution de la cité juste, ne manque précisément pas de se confronter aux problèmes concomitants des relations entre égalité et liberté. Le philosophe albertain s'y montre comme à l'accoutumée cet humaniste sensible et généreux dont la « raison et la pratique » sont orientées par l'idéal égalitaire. Le credo (belief) fondamental auquel il nous dit souscrire: « the interests of every one matter and matter equally », serait pour Nielsen comme le postulat indispensable à la relance du contrat social démocratique. Etre un égalitariste radical signifierait, si j'ai bien compris les implications de son discours, que Ton s'engage dans la cause du bien, que l'on croit à l'homme socialiste, vertueux et perfectible de même qu'au renouvellement des rapports sociaux dans l'équité. C'est aussi et surtout soutenir la force émancipatoire de l'égalité civile, sociale et politique, ou, autrement dit, dans les termes de Nielsen, supputer que l'égalité des conditions, conçue tout ensemble «comme un but et comme un droit», une fois inscrite dans les structures, dans les institutions sociales, déterminera la véritable liberté, celle de tous et de chacun au sein des rapports intersubjectifs et sociaux. Enfin, c'est penser que ce concept d'égalité ainsi réévalué jouerale rôle de condition nécessaire et suffisante pour changer le moi, le monde et la vie. Equality and Liberty est un vivant plaidoyer en faveur de la dignite morale autant que de l'efficace socialiste d'un modèle politique, l'égalitarisme radical, tel que Nielsen se le représente.