In this paper I propose we read David Hume's view of meaningful discourse, or his theory of meaning, as an aspect of his theory of politics. I will argue that readings which ignore the political dimension are incomplete and distort Hume's position. When I use the word ‘political’ in the Humean context, however, it means something similar to what we mean by the term ‘social’; in the Humean context ‘politics’ is inclusive of the narrow sense taken by political science in its study of regular partisan politics and governance structures. My proposal is similar to the social-context or social-constructivist interpretations of commentators such as Pall Ardal, Donald Livingston, and Nicholas Capaldi. A political reading also stresses the importance of social context in our understanding of Hume, and agrees with the social-context argument that there is a social or political dimension to intellectual life which Hume hints at but does not address directly in Book 1 of the Treatise.

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.

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.

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

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.

My aim is to defend a peculiar epistemic version of the particularity thesis, which results from a sui generis combination of what I call the ‘singular relational view’ and what I call the ‘relativistic content view.’ Particulars are not represented as part of putative singular content. Instead, we are perceptually acquainted with them in the relevant sense that experience puts us in direct perceptual contact with them. And the content of experience is best modelled as a propositional function, that is, the content of a complex predicate that is true or false only relative to some circumstances of evaluation.

Imagine this sequence of events. I am at the wheel of my car at an intersection, waiting for the lights to change. Suddenly, a stranger runs out of the bank building at the corner, makes his way into the car, puts a gun to my head and orders me to drive off, on the double. Eventually there's a chase and we are caught.

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.

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.

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.

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the role that Hegel’s concept of essence (Wesen) played in the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, two of the primary figures in the canon of classical American philosophy. It elaborates on Robert Stern’s discussion of Hegel and Peirce by claiming that the second book of Hegel’s Logic, entitled “The Doctrine of Essence,” can be understood as Hegel’s attempt to account for the experimental and turbulent character of human experience, a character that Peirce would term “Secondness.” While Pierce remained dissatisfied with Hegel’s relative neglect of Secondness, Peirce recognized the importance of this attempt in the yearly years of the twentieth century, with the help of the Josiah Royce’s detailed understanding of Hegel.

Charles Taylor begins his essay “Kant's Theory of Freedom” by stating that in the last three centuries people have sought recognition, equality and justice as corollaries of “liberation”. The process, he says, “has been punctuated, and partly shaped, by paradigm statements by major thinkers …. Among these statements, Kant's has been very important. It marked a crucial step on the way.” Similar sentiments are expressed by Hayek, Rawls and others.

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.

For a variety of reasons, the AIDS epidemic is forcing a thorough reassessment of many of the standards by which the terminally ill and other medical patients are treated by health-care systems throughout the world. This has generally been a good thing. It has provided needed motivation for public policy-makers to take seriously a range of health-care issues that have often been downplayed, ignored, or debated with vigour only within the relatively mute pages of the academic journals of health-care professionals, philosophers, law professors and others. Issues such as euthanasia, testing for dangerous communicable diseases, palliative care, and even important general questions about the distribution and availability of health-care resources have been pushed toward the front of the public health-care agenda largely because of the impact of AIDS. And it is fair to say that these matters are often being addressed with an urgency and sensitivity that would be absent without the political impetus that was unleashed along with this disease. One of the most controversial issues that has arisen concerns access to experimental therapies by the terminally ill. As is the case in other areas, the political forces generated by the AIDS tragedy have created an opportunity for productive review of policies and practices that undoubtedly deserve scrutiny and reform. However, my aim in this paper is to urge caution on some of the advocates of reform. I will argue that many recent proposals to enhance access to experimental therapies by the terminally ill rest on philosophically unsupportable grounds and pose an unjustifiable threat to the public interest in finding safe and effective therapies for terminal illnesses.