This paper attempts to take a new look at the famous Lewis Carroll paradox about Achilles and the Tortoise. It examines in particular the connections between Lewis Carroll's regress argument for logical inferences and a similar regress for practical inferences. The Tortoise's point of view is espoused: no norm of reasoning or of conduct can in itself “make the mind move,” only the brute force of belief can. This conclusion is a Humean one. But it does not imply that we renounce altogether the normative force of such principles of reasoning as modus ponens. Connexions with the Wittgensteinian rule-following problem are indicated.

One of the most prominent themes of recent political philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, has been the challenge which the cultural and moral diversity of modern Western societies poses for traditional liberal theories of justice. Given that these theories, in their classical formulations, either ignored the issue of social heterogeneity, or operated on the tacit assumption that the societies to which they would be applied were essentially homogeneous, what changes should a new appreciation of diversity impose upon both the content and the pattern of justification of theories of justice? Philosophers have been far from unanimous in their answers to this basic question. Some, like Will Kymlicka, have argued that recognizably liberal, autonomy-based justificatory arguments should lead us to change our view of liberalism's content, in that it should now incorporate collective rights to the traditional repertoire of individual rights. Others, like Iris Young, have argued that a real recognition of “difference” should lead to the wholesale abandonment of the liberal framework. Still others have argued that it is the manner in which liberalism goes about justifying normative principles that ought to be rethought, given the “fact of pluralism.” The disagreements on moral and political issues which are constitutive of modern societies have led some to argue that we can no longer hope to justify substantive principles deductively on the basis of general moral propositions taken as axiomatic. Authors who follow this line have argued that, in order not to tread on the moral or cultural toes of a diverse citizenry, liberal justification must ultimately reduce to the outcome of certain deliberative procedures. In radically plural societies, justified norms of social interactions are those to which people in conversation with one another would agree.

John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind comprises two related projects. The first is to show that philosophy of mind since Descartes has been not merely false, but obviously false. The materialist tradition—as Searle encapsulates behaviourism, type and token identity theories, functionalism, Artificial Intelligence, and eliminativism—consists of more or less crazy positions, with a crucial shared trait: they “leave out” the mind, the very thing they were to explain. Searle's second concern is to sketch his own theory of mind, a “common-sense” view that is, he claims, obviously true, and thus is a sharp departure from the madness of the various received views of this century.

L'objet principal de l'ouvrage d'Aristote intitulé Réfutations sophistiques est la théorie de la réfutation apparente, c'est-à-dire de l'argumentation qui, se développant dans le cadre d'un échange dialectique, masque quelque erreur. Aristote propose une taxinomie des réfutations apparentes d'après laquelle elles se rangent en deux groupes: celles qui relèvent du langage et celles qui n'en relèvent pas. Dans le premier groupe tombent six types de réfutation, l'homonymie, l'amphibolie, la liaison, la séparation, la forme de l'expression et l'accent; dans le deuxième l'accident, la conséquence, l'ignorance de la réfutation, la fausse cause, l'interrogation multiple, la pétition de principe et la confusion de l'absolu et du relatif. Il s'agit de la fameuse table des treize paralogismes ou fallaciœ que la tradition a consacrée. Dans le cadre de ces treize types de sophisme le texte d'Aristote nous offre la discussion de maints exemples parmi lesquels certains étonnent pour leur difficulté, d'autres pour leur trivialité.

Paul Churchland does not open his latest book, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, modestly. He begins by announcing, “This book is about you. And me … More broadly still, it is about every creature that ever swam, or walked, or flew over the face of the Earth” (p. 3). A few sentences later, he says, “Fortunately, recent research into neural networks … has produced the beginnings of a real understanding of how the biological brain works—a real understanding, that is, of how you work, and everyone else like you” (p. 3). The implicit identification here of “me and you and everyone” with “the biological brain” might lead an uncharitable reader to view Churchland's book as “Eliminativism for the non-specialist,” that is, as an attempt to popularize the view of the mindbody problem with which, among his professional peers, Churchland has long been identified. However, I think that such a reading would be uncharitable. He is, of course, frequently sceptical about the utility of folk psychology, but in this book he is much less concerned to disparage folk psychology as a failed theory (by contrast with, for example, the arguments in Churchland 1979) than to urge the more modest view that the more we understand the brain, the better we shall be at helping those whose brains are damaged in ways that interfere seriously with the fulfilment of their lives. Hence, I am inclined to take him at his word when he says in the Preface that “The book is motivated first of all by sheer excitement over the new picture that is now emerging … [and] … also by the idea that this is information that the public needs to know” (p. xi). What excites Churchland so, at least overtly, is not the negative thesis he has defended elsewhere that folk-psychological terms fail to refer; his enthusiasm is mainly reserved for the positive thesis that minds are, essentially, interacting assemblies of recurrent neural networks. It is therefore this positive thesis, and Churchland's defence of it, that I will assess in the following discussion.