Four years ago, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada asked Professor T.H.B. Symons, an historian and a former President of Trent University, to undertake a study of “the state of teaching and research in various fields of study relating to Canada at Canadian Universities.” The first two volumes of his report have now been published under the title To Know Ourselves. In his Preface, the President of the AUCC observes that few reports commissioned by his organization have been more eagerly awaited by the university community. That is the ideology of Cloudcuckooland. In reality that community, except that part of it that comprises deans and their assistants and the assistants to the assistants of deans, awaits no report of any body with eagerness: it awaits them rather as our forefathers looked forward to the annual descent of the passenger pigeon, and believes that reading and writing reports unfits a person for teaching and scholarship. But this report is one that takes notice of what we are doing and not doing and urges us to change our ways, and the aspects of our practice it considers are ones which in any case a responsible teacher will from time to time pass under review. Others will read the report, if we do not, and will ask themselves and us how we stand on it: it will become part of the background against which we are judged. So it seems fitting to use this occasion to say something about the report, “Though for no other cause, yet for this: that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream…”. It is the occasion, and no skill or interest of the speaker, that determines the subject; for by an unhappy accident the office that goes with this address is filled this year by one who has concerned himself less with public policy than any of his recent predecessors. But if the occasion thus leads the speaker to mouth ignorant and disconnected platitudes instead of philosophizing to some purpose, that in itself may serve either to point Professor Symons' moral or to exemplify the bad effects of reports on academic life.

Lawrence H. Davis (1977, 1985) has formulated and defended a version of the argument from symmetry for the non-iterated Prisoner's Dilemma that attempts to show that under certain conditions the rationally prescribed course of action in this game is co-operation. The argument runs as follows below. (I have prefixed a ‘D’ to each of Davis's numbers here, and in subsequent references, in order to avoid confusion as I refer to his points.)

On commémore assez couramment la naissance ou la mort d'un savant, qui sont deux événements contingents, étrangers à la valeur de l'homme, bien que le premier ait rendu cette valeur possible quant à la manifestation, et que le second l'ait rendue d'autant plus précieuse qu'il en a souligné la fragilité.

Paul Valéry a dit que «les grands hommes meurent deux fois, une fois comme hommes et une fois comme grands ». De Claude Bernard, on peut dire que l'année 1965 a confirmé sa survie comme grand, près d'un siècle après sa mort comme homme (1878), car ce qui fut célébré, au Collège de France, dans un Colloque à la fois historique et scientifique, c'est le Centenaire d'un grand livre. Commémoration done au plein sens du terme, puisqu'en identifiant un homme et son œuvre, la postérité ressuscitait le premier en reconnaissant et en proelamant la présence stimulante et agissante de la seconde dans l'univers de la culture.

La réflexion philosophique sur le phénomène de la contrainte a été fortement marquée par l'analyse qu'en ont donné Aristote et saint Thomas. Cette analyse classique établit un critère très général de la contrainte mais n'aborde pas des questions plus spécifiques, telles que la distinction entre une tentative de contrainte et un avertissement ou la différence entre une offre et une tentative de contrainte. Ces distinctions, qui sont loin d'être évidentes (pour autant que I'on creuse quelque peu le sujet), présentent un intérêt non négligeable pour quiconque est amené à réfléchir sur des matières impliquant les relations humaines, tel le philosophe moral, le théoricien du droit, le sociologue ou l'économiste. Par exemple, peut-on dire que l'administration des contributions exerce une contrainte sur les contribuables en leur envoyant leur note d'imposition comportant un avertissement de payer dans les dix jours qui suivent la reception? Le détenteur d'un monopole — une société de distribution d'eau par exemple — contraint-il ses clients lorsqu'il augmente ses prix ou bien ne fait-il que changer les termes de son offre? Ce genre de questions ne peut pas recevoir de réponse dans l'analyse classique vu le niveau trap général de celle-ci.

In 1931, writing in a personal journal, Wittgenstein enumerated the names of those thinkers whom he deemed to have been his most important intellectual influences. He makes the strong claim that these are thinkers whose seminal ideas he has taken over, further elaborated and incorporated into his own work. Here are the names he lists in their order of appearance: Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa. At the time of the first publication of this list in Culture and Value, those familiar primarily with the most widely read and influential writings on Wittgenstein and his philosophical influences, Norman Malcolm's Memoir (including Von Wright's introduction) and Toulmin and Janik's Wittgenstein's Vienna, would most likely have been surprised by the inclusion of Spengler's name. His is the only one on the list that does not appear in either book. Every other thinker named is not only mentioned as an influence on Wittgenstein in one or the other work, but some of the purported details of that influence are offered. And the appearance of Spengler's name is doubly surprising, given the relatively low esteem in which his work is generally held. Of the others listed, perhaps only Weininger fails to emerge as a respected figure.

La linguistique saussurienne paraît avoir exercé, spécialement au cours des années 1951 à 1954, une influence assez considérable sur la pensée de Merleau-Ponty. Un travail de portée plus générale nous ayant amené à mesurer l'importance de la chose pour Pensemble de l'œuvre de ce philosophe, nous allons seulement essayer ici de prećiser un peu le rôle d'une telle influence en nous appuyant sur une analyse de l'interprétation de Saussure par Merleau-Ponty.

Dans la Phénoménologie de la Perception, celui-ci avait déjà consacré un chapitre à l'étude de la parole conçue comme gesticulation ou expression corporelle. Quand, en 1953–54, il abordera le Problème de la Parole, dans un cours au Collège de France, c'est à Saussure lui-même qu'il attribuera des vues assez voisines: “Le cours cherchait à illustrer et é étendre cette notion saussurienne de la parole comme fonction positive et conquérante.

Suppose that we have negative, natural rights to our lives, liberty, and possessions and that these rights are absolute or indefeasible. Then at best only minimal states will be legitimate, where such are states that restrict their activities to the enforcement of the basic rights of individuals and the like. (Indeed, it is possible that no actual states, minimal or not, will be legitimate.) Such appears to be the consequence of absolute natural rights. When made aware of these implications of absolute natural rights, many philosophers deny their existence. In the absence of a convincing defense of absolute natural rights, the defense of the minimal state thereby loses force.

There are at issue here, I believe, two related questions: What is an adventitious idea for Descartes, and what is the relation between the understanding and the senses? Miles asserts that there is an adventitious idea of body but that it consists only of the proper sensibles, i.e., colours, sounds, tastes, odours, etc. Only these are given through the senses. Extension is not included in the adventitious idea, but is given only to the understanding. I take this to mean also that the modes of extension, figure, motion and magnitude, are not given through the senses either, since the thought of them presupposes extension. Against this I would say, however, that there are passages in which Descartes seems definitely to be including extension and its modes in what is given through the senses. In Meditation III when he introduces the notion of the adventitious idea it is as one which seems to be produced by external bodies. In his ideas of corporeal things he finds a few which he clearly perceives: extension, figure, relative position and change of positions. His ideas of the other qualities are confused and obscure. In MeditationVI he undertakes to examine the nature of sense, and to enquire whether from those ideas which are apprehended by this mode of thought— “or the mode which I entitle sensing (sensum)” —he could derive any certain proof of the existence of corporeal things. First he perceives by the senses that he has a body. “And outside myself, in addition to the extension, figure and motion of bodies, I sensed (sentiebam) in them” (AT VII, 74f.) hardness, heat, lights and colours, scents and sounds. At the end of the Principles of Philosophy in treating of the senses Descartes says that nothing in external things can be apprehended by us through sense except their figure, size and motion (IV. 198, AT VIII-1, 321). And later he remarks that we observe size, figures and motions by several senses, e.g., by touch, sight and hearing; “we also distinctly imagine and understand this. This cannot be said of other things that come under our senses, such as colours, sound and the like, which are perceived not by several senses but by single ones; for their images are always confused in our minds, nor do we know what they are” (IV. 200, AT VIII-1, 323).

The relation of will to belief is an issue of perennial philosophical and religious interest. Most of the classical accounts of religious belief, both ancient and modern, have accorded the will an important, if not the decisive, role. In the philosophy of mind, the issue has traditionally been one of the major dividing lines, some philosophers arguing a position near that of Descartes, that the will is a constituent element of belief, others siding with Spinoza and Hume, arguing that it is not. But what really is the issue? Much recent discussion of belief and will has been devoted to the question whether we can believe at will apart from any sort of evidence—what has been called belief by fiat. While it may be that this is the most natural interpretation of the claim that belief is based on will, it is certainly not the only one. What is more, most of those who have argued for the importance of the will in belief have never really asserted it. No doubt, one can glean statements from their writings that seem to suggest it; but with due allowance for rhetorical excess, a careful reading of their positions will, I think, show that they were really dealing with other issues. What I hope to accomplish in raising again the issue of will and belief is to advance and defend a set of claims that gets at these other issues. Throughout, my concern will be primarily with religious beliefs, and this not simply out of personal and professional interest, but because the issues I want to discuss arise more clearly (though by no means exclusively) in relation to beliefs of this sort.

In her recent paper, “Belief, Values and the Will,” Trudy Govier raises several interesting and challenging points. Most interesting is her conclusion that it is at least logically possible for a person to believe something “simply in virtue of having taken that decision,” i.e., by fiat. In otherwords, it is possible to believe something by an act of will.

In a Recent paper to The Joint Session of the AristotelianSociety and Mind Association Professor Neil MacCormick makes some interesting observations about the nature of promises and the source of the obligation to keep them. He rejects the view that an act can count as a promise only because a certain practice exists in a society. One may on the contrary well understand what promises are and know how to make them without there being any special convention making possible the speech act of promising which amounts to no more than …“an utterance of the speaker's about his own future conduct which is essentially characterized by the speaker's intending his addressee to take it as being intended to induce the addressee to rely upon the speaker's taking the action in question.” One needs no special rule to explain why promise-breaking is wrong for …“the fact of the addressee's reliance on the promisor is sufficient ground for asserting that the promisor has an obligation to keep his word.” To bring home the point, MacCormick contrasts promising with divorcing by the simple utterance of 'I divorce thee, I divorce thee.' This is intelligible as an act of divorcing only by presupposing a convention that allows a divorce to be effected in this way. In performing the act by the appropriate formula the person is invoking the conventional rules that must obtain in the society if the act is to be successful. Searle, we are told, fails to see that promises are quite different in that they …“are explicable in terms of an intention to bring about a specific perlocutionary effect, and an intention that that intention be recognized” It is neither here nor there to point out, as Searle does, that ‘I predict’ and ‘I intend’ like ‘I promise’ tend to create expectations for the effect a promise is intended to achieve is reliance and not simply an expectation.

Twardowski's On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894) is one of the most influential works that Austrian philosophy has left to posterity. The manuscript Logik (1894–1895) supplements that work and allows us to reconstruct Twardowski's theory of judgement. These texts raise several issues, in particular whether Twardowski accepts propositions and states of affairs in his theory of judgement and whether his theory is acceptable. This article presents Twardowski's theory, shows that he accepts states of affairs, that he has a notion of proposition, and that his theory is interesting and sophisticated.

ABSTRACT: In this paper I argue that John McDowell’s objections to Philipa Foot’s ethical naturalism do not justify a rejection of her views, but only clarifies what we can defensibly take from her position. Moreover, his comments suggest a way in which Foot’s naturalism may help to secure the realism McDowell defends in his own work. In seeing how Foot’s naturalism can reassure us of the reality of ethical reasons, we can understand how McDowell needs something like Foot’s naturalism in order to redeem his own realist aspirations for ethics.

One of the main problems that Paul Horwich’s Minimalist theory of truth must face is the generalization problem, which shows that Minimalism is too weak to have the fundamental explanatory role Horwich claims it has. In this paper, I defend Horwich’s response to the generalization problem from an objection raised by Bradley Armour-Garb. I also argue that, given my response to Armour-Garb, Horwich’s proposal to cope with the generalization problem can be simplified.

The distinction between crimes that involve wrongs in themselves and crimes that are wrong because the law makes them so has long puzzled theorists. This essay argues that the distinction, while getting at something real, is based on a mistake. That mistake is made both by those who see moral wrongness as a necessary condition for criminality and by those who believe merely making something illegal is sufficient to make it criminal. Neither is correct. Rather, what makes something a criminal wrong is that it involves a violation of a law that has been justified in terms of “public reason.”

What explains first-person authority? What explains the presumption that an utterance is true when it is a sincere intelligible determinate first-person singular simple present-tense ascription of intentional state? According to Rockney Jacobsen, self-ascriptions each enjoy a presumption of truth because they are systematically reliable. They are systematically reliable because they are typically both truth-assessable and expressive. Such self-ascriptions, if sincere, are certain to be true. This article presents a defence and a critique of Jacobsen's theory. It is argued that the purported prevalence of expressive self-ascriptions is at best contingent. This contingency cannot explain why self-ascriptions are necessarily authoritative.

One of the striking characteristics of contemporary moral philosophy is the speed with which philosophers in the English-speaking world have jettisoned their reluctance to address concrete ethical problems and dilemmas and have plunged into the field of applied ethics. No less interesting is the impact that the work of some of the more noted of them has had outside of strictly philosophical circles. One need only to mention John Rawls or H. L. A. Hart to make the point. It is no longer difficult to prove that these same trends are deeply entrenched amongst Canadian philosophers. A further parallel is suggested by the fact that a Canadian philosopher, George Grant, has also had a substantial impact on recent Canadian thought. The appearance of a parallel, however, is illusory. For while applied ethics certainly has its practitioners in Canada today, and while it is widely recognized that both American and British philosophers have had a substantial and philosophically respectable impact on their respective societies, there seems widespread resistance to the idea that philosophical reflection has a role to play in the development of a distinctive understanding of Canadian society. And there is widespread scepticism in professional philosophical circles in Canada that the work of George Grant is of genuine philosophical interest, whatever his popular reputation.

I Shall offer a realist theory of perception which in an important sense is neither direct nor representational nor causal.

Let us say that we directly perceive something if perceiving it enables us to know of its existence without having evidence of its existence. In this sense, direct perception allows us to have “direct knowledge” of what we perceive. For example, I see after-images directly, since I can know of their existence without having visual evidence of their existence. I do not have to look at them with my eyes. Granted, I do need evidence in order to know that they are after-images; but not in order to know of their existence as colours or shapes. Also, I do have to see them in order to know that they exist. But this is not a condition of having evidence. It is only a condition of their existence, which in turn is a truth condition of my knowing.

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.