In their History of Canadian philosophy, The Faces of Reason, Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott introduce the concept “philosophical federalism” to describe a tendency shared by many of the early Canadian idealists, a willingness to attempt to understand and accommodate philosophical positions opposed to their own. In this paper I wish to examine the relationship this concept bears to another one, which many still regard as merely an Utopian ideal, that of world federalism.

I argue that Quineans who are sceptical about the analytic/synthetic distinction should be equally sceptical about the distinction between verbal and factual disputes. I develop an objection to the distinction between verbal and factual disputes, derived from objections to the analytic/synthetic distinction. I then explain what the resulting scepticism consists in. Ultimately, such sceptics should agree that there is a distinction between verbal and factual disputes, but think that it cannot perform certain philosophical tasks.

This article addresses two main concerns: first, the relation between the truth/falsehood and purity/impurity criteria as applied to pleasure, and, second, the status of our pleasures of learning. In addressing the first, I argue that Plato keeps the truth/falsehood and purity/impurity criteria distinct in his assessment of pleasures and thus leaves room for the possibility of hybrid pleasures in the form of true impure pleasures and false pure pleasures. In addressing the second issue, I show that Plato's view is perfectly able to accommodate an understanding of our pleasures of learning as pure pleasures even if such pleasures are preceded by awareness of a lack (ignorance).

Central to the Empiricist conception of matter and epistemology is the distinction between the primary and secondary properties. This distinction is part of the apparatus needed to formulate and answer the question «What aspects of perceptual information yield true knowledge of reality?” Correlatively, the distinction enables the reconciliation of the commonsense and scientific conceptions of matter in the fundamental Lockean tenet that matter possesses only the primary qualities.

In light of recent legal decisions affording more than two parents to Canadian children, we consider whether there is any moral reason for limiting the number of parents a child can have to two. We look at several traditional arguments for this position and find that they fail to justify it. We also consider an argument inspired by Brighouse and Swift’s work on the goods of parenting and find that while it brings up important points, it is not strong enough to support a limit of just two parents. We conclude with some thoughts about how else the notion of parenthood could be helpfully separated from traditional notions.

ABSTRACT: In his recent collection of essays, Language, Truth and History (2005), Donald Davidson appears to endorse a philosophy of language which gives primary importance to the notion of the speaker’s communicative intentions, a perspective on language not too dissimilar from that of Paul Grice. If that is right, then this would mark a major shift from the formal semanticist approach articulated and defended by Davidson in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). In this paper, I argue that although there are many similarities between these two thinkers, Davidson has not abandoned his earlier views on language

David Miller argues that national identity is indispensable for the successful functioning of a liberal democracy. National identity makes important contributions to liberal democratic institutions, including creating incentives for the fulfilment of civic duties, facilitating deliberative democracy, and consolidating representative democracy. Thus, a shared identity is indispensable for liberal democracy and grounds a good claim for self-determination. Because Miller’s arguments appeal to the instrumental values of a national culture, I call his argument ‘instrumental value’ arguments. In this paper, I examine the instrumental value arguments and show that they fail to justify a group’s right to self-determination.

In this paper, I argue that John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson's ‘process manifesto’ is ironically more sympathetic to descriptive metaphysics than to revisionary metaphysics. Focusing on their argument that any process philosophy automatically slides into Whiteheadian obscurantism if it does not just rest content with revealing the problematic features of ordinary language, I argue that their position occludes a logical space, one in which revisionary metaphysics is articulated without any Whiteheadian obscurantism and involves no dereliction of critical/revisionary orientation. I argue that key features of the respective critical social ontologies of Judith Butler and Talia Mae Bettcher occupy such a logical space.

I argue against Harbin's claim that aesthetic judgements, for Kant, are not normative. By focusing on the systematic nature of Kant's Critical philosophy, I show that aesthetic judgements, like judgements in the theoretical and practical domains, must be normative, though such judgements display a distinct kind of normativity, which is expressed in their subjectivity, indeterminacy, and affectivity.

I raise questions about Chakravartty's voluntarism about stances: supposing that we recognize a hierarchy of stances, voluntarism might be at once true (in an ultimate sense) but misleading when it comes to the practical tenability of pursuing certain debates in the philosophy of science, such as the debate about scientific realism or how to ‘naturalize’ metaphysics.

Some philosophers see an analogy between simulation and experiment. But, once we acknowledge some similarities between computer simulations and experiments, can we conclude from them that simulations generate empirical knowledge, as experiments do? In this paper, I argue that the similarities between simulation and experiment give the scientist at most the illusion that she is conducting an experiment, but cannot seriously ground the analogy. However, it does not follow that experiments are always epistemologically superior to simulations. I analyze the cases when simulations and experiments equally yield new empirical knowledge.

According to a representational theory of phenomenal consciousness (RTPC), the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is completely exhausted by its representational content. Some considerations suggested by Christopher Peacocke raise an important problem for the RTPC. In his recent book Consciousness, where he defends a version of the RTPC, Christopher Hill argues that to solve Peacocke’s problem, visual qualia must be identified with “visual appearances” understood as relational properties of external objects. I raise two problems for Hill’s solution and I suggest an alternative way of understanding visual qualia as visual appearances.

In this paper, I will attempt to interpret Plato's concept of knowledge as he presents it in the very end of Book V of the Republic. An adequate interpretation of Plato's concept of knowledge must be able to account coherently for the following, (I) According to Plato, knowledge is not a state of mind, but an ability or power of the mind (δύναμις) and is therefore, formally analogous to sight (477C ff.). This analogy is presented explicitly and in great detail in the famous ‘similes of light,’ the Sun, Divided Line, and Cave passages of Books VI and VII. (2) Cognition, for Plato, comes in degrees from clearer to less clear (478C, 509D, 511 E). (3) Finally, knowledge is related in a special way to being (thus, it is said to be ἐπἱ τᾦὂντι 477A, B, 478A).

This has been a great century for logic and the foundations of mathematics. Ewald's excellent sourcebook is a welcome addition to the literature on the exciting developments of this and the past two centuries. The richness of the material on which Ewald is drawing is shown by the fact that he has assembled a broad and representative selection without once duplicating anything to be found in the famous sourcebooks of van Heijenoort and Benacerraf/Putnam.

Logicism is the doctrine that mathematics is reducible to logic. It is usually presented in two theses: (1) Every mathematical concept is definable in terms of logical concepts. (2) Every mathematical theorem is deducible from logical principles. In this paper, I am not concerned with the truth or falsity of (1) and (2). Rather, I am concerned with the underlying philosophical system. Logicism is connected with the names of Frege, Russell (and Whitehead). But the logicism which is familiar to most philosophers is not the original logicist system of Russell. Instead, we read either Russell's later Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy or articles by Carnap and Hempel. My purpose in this paper is to return to the original logicist system of Russell. This system, at least in essentials, lasts through the publication of the First Edition of Principia Mathematica. I believe that examination of this system will shed light on why certain difficulties arose in later logicism, including the logicist views of the Logical Empiricist movement. Further, the issues are closely connected with general doctrines on the nature of philosophical analysis.

At the beginning of the third Section of the Groundwork, Kant appears to state the synthetic a priori proposition which it is the business of that Section to justify. It is: “An absolutely good will is one whose maxim can always have as its content itself considered as a universal law.” I shall contend that a consideration of Kant's use of analytic method shows that he is committed to regard this proposition not as synthetic, but rather as analytic. Hence, I shall contend that his statement of the proposition to be justified in the third Section is a slip, which hinders the study of the third Section and which, therefore, requires a textual emendation. Kant, I claim, does not attempt to justify this proposition but another.

En parlant des rapports entre la Nouvelle Rhétorique et la France, Pierre-André Taguieff décrivait la situation comme celle d'un rendez-vous manqué. En parlant des rapports entre la philosophie pérelmanienne et la philosophie anglo-saxonne, il faut surtout parler de rendez-vous clandestins. Car dans l'ensemble, ces rendez-vous divers sont d'autant plus évidents (en termes pérelmaniens, interrogeables) qu'ils témoignent sans doute de l'influence réelle d'une philosophie. D'une philosophie dont on retrouve, dans le milieu anglo-saxon, un «air de famille» mais sans que Chaïm Perelman ne soit expressément nommé.