L'hédonisme axiologique a une longue histoire en philosophie. Pourtant, il garde une mauvaise réputation qui lui vaut d’être parfois écarté sans ménagement de la discussion philosophique. Cet article se propose de défendre l'hédonisme axiologique en exposant les principaux arguments en sa faveur et en répondant aux principales critiques et confusions dont il fait l'objet. Une attention particulière sera portée aux arguments établissant la spécificité du plaisir et du déplaisir par rapport à toutes les autres choses — amitié, savoir, justice, etc. — dont on pourrait argumenter la valeur finale.

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.

In this article, I explore how we can expand the project of Buddhist feminism by drawing on Chinese Yogācāra philosophy. With a focus on the writings of Xuanzang (c. 602–664) and his disciple Kuiji (632–682), I investigate how the Yogācāra theory of consciousness can be read as a gendered account of non-duality. The term ‘Yogācāra dialectics’ is thus coined to describe this theory of non-duality that highlights fluidity and transformability. As I will argue, Chinese Yogācārins developed the dialectics of gender by means of which they were able to subtly erode sexism in premodern times.

I want to consider a much-disputed reading of a certain critical area of Plato's Sophist. It is widely agreed by most commentators that in this text, between 255E and 259E there occurs a refutation of Parmenides' dictum that “one cannot say that which is not”, and that this is followed by an application of the foregoing discussion to the problems of sentiential falsity. (For a partial list of commentators, see bibliography.) It is also generally agreed that Plato uses the Form, The Different, for this purpose. What is not generally agreed upon is how Plato uses The Different.

Since some moral philosophers take inspiration from David Hume, and some think that there are moral questions to do with the relative status of the two sexes of humans, it is worth looking to Hume for assistance on this topic. His opinions are not explicit, for nowhere, to my knowledge, does he openly address the Woman Question. Nevertheless, I find that he exposes himself in three places. Consider them in turn.

John Locke, in his Essay, poses the following problem:

It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge, therefore, is real only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the reality of things. But what shall be here the criterion? How shall the mind, when it perceives nothing but its own ideas, know that they agree with things themselves?

Modern philosophy, if it has not settled any other of the chronic disputes that have troubled the history of the subject, appears to have decided once and for all the question of synthetic a priori principles. Logical analysis has demonstrated that synthetic propositions are empirical while a priori propositions are analytical and notational. Nevertheless, a broader survey of the contemporary philosophical scene reveals that the strict meaning of the expression “modern philosophy” above should be rendered “philosophers of one of the current schools of philosophy”. For contemporary European philosophers have not abandoned the notion of synthetic a priori principles altogether. They have modified without abandoning Kant's Copernican discovery of the laws of nature in the human mind. There are, to be sure, two ways of viewing the situation. Either logical analysis has overlooked certain unique phenomena and thus has failed to comprehend the arguments which take their description as premises, or existentialism has persisted in the use of an inadequate logic. The purpose of this paper is to test this issue and in doing so to explore the psychological roots of the idea of synthetic a priori principles. The means adopted is a critical study of the existentialist theory of emotion which claims to have discovered a previously unrecognized basis for synthetic a priori principles in the phenomenelogy of human existence.

Qualia epiphenomenalism is the view that qualitative properties of events, such as the raw feel of tastes or painfulness, lack causal efficacy. One common objection to qualia epiphenomenalism is the epistemic argument, which states that this loss of causal efficacy undermines our capacity to know about these epiphenomenal qualitative properties (Sterjnberg, 1999; Watkins, 1989). A number of rejoinders have been offered up to insulate qualia epiphenomenalism from the epistemic argument. In this paper I consider and ultimately reject two such replies, namely, the common underlying cause reply and the appeal to physical-effect epiphenomenalism.

In this paper, we consider the ‘mere-difference’ view of disability, a popular strategy amongst disability theorists and advocates. This view is nicely summarized by Elizabeth Barnes, who claims that disability is “a natural part of human diversity [and] something that should be celebrated” instead of something to be pitied or cured (2014). We find Barnes’s defence of the view problematic, argue that there are significant philosophical problems with the mere-difference view if it is intended as an accurate account of disability, and suggest that there are worrisome consequences if it is used as a politically strategic overstatement.

An Acquaintance of mine decided, in the late 1950s, to become an officer in the U.S. Navy, until he discovered a Navy regulation stating that ugly men would not be accepted as officer candidates. Surely there is something suspicious about such a policy. Yet, in a time when people are so conscious of the many forms of discrimination — race, colour, sex, age, religion — it is somewhat surprising that little serious attention is given to the practice of what I shall call ‘aesthetic discrimination against persons’, discrimination on the basis of appearance or looks. It is true that, in recent years, some social scientists have conducted research leading them to the conclusion that human beings prefer and esteem good looking people over plain or ugly ones (a conclusion the truth of which has been known for thousands of years prior to its ‘proof’). A few of these researchers have even been willing to venture moral opinions on the subject.

This is a Big Book from one of Canada's preeminent philosophers. It aims at nothing less than to define what characterizes modernity, and then to tell us what is wrong with it. Like many a Big Book, it is predictably full of interesting things, and equally predictably disappointing, not to say feeble, in some of the central theses for which it argues. But then what more, in philosophy, can we really expect? It's what we tell our students: you don't have to be right, and you don't have to make me agree with you, but you do have to produce interesting arguments and show that you have thought seriously about the issues.

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the relationship between the claim that zombies are logically/metaphysically possible and the position that phenomenal consciousness is epiphenomenal. It is often taken that the former entails the latter, and that therefore any implausibility in the notion of conscious epiphenomenalism calls into question the genuine possibility of zombies. Four ways in which the zombist might respond are examined, and I argue that two—those most commonly encountered—are inadequate, but the others—one of which is rarely formulated and the other new—are more forceful. The upshot, nevertheless, is that the zombist may indeed face an unwelcome commitment to conscious epiphenomenalism.

Thanks largely to Daniel Dennett, I am a recent convert to what many will regard as the shocking hypothesis that qualia do not exist. This admission is not quite a confident sighting of that rarest of philosophical birds, an unequivocally sound and valid argument. For one thing, I have, like many, been frustrated by and suspicious of philosophers' use of qualia for some time, and have often wished them dead (the qualia, not the philosophers); so I was an easy mark. More to the point, I was persuaded by Dennett without being persuaded by his arguments. This is not intended as a confession of a Kirkegaardian penchant for preferring to believe the conclusions of bad arguments. Dennett enabled me finally to kick qualia out of my private (now public) ontology by providing, in the later sections of his “Quining Qualia” (Dennett 1988), an alternative conceptual vocabulary for talking about the contents of perceptual and reflective experience that genuinely makes no appeal, surreptitious or otherwise, to qualia. Furthermore, Dennett's most general motivations for banishing qualia—the convictions that there is no compelling evidence for them, that they serve no reliable explanatory purpose and that the hypothesis of their non-existence dissolves some otherwise wrenching philosophical dilemmas—are the right ones, and his paper made this clear to me. However, I feel the need to quine qualia again for myself, because I want them to stay dead, and am afraid that, due to some infelicities in his argument, Dennett has only wounded them.

L'intentionnalité pose aux philosophes qui se réclament du matérialisme ou du physicalisme deux problèmes complémentaires qui sont les deux faces d'une même médaille. Premièrement, peut-on naturaliser l'intentionnalité? Deuxièmement, les propriétés intentionnelles des représentations sont-elles causalement efficaces? Un moteur peut-il être sémantique?

Philosophers, like ordinary people, are likely to retain practices long after the conditions which justified them have disappeared. At a recent philosophical convention, subtle arguments concerning abortion appealed to intuitions about exceedingly odd cases and allegedly widely agreed upon intuitions (that I doubted were shared by many reflective people). Such appeals to intuitions, especially about particular cases, are quite common among philosophers. Yet, during this century the traditional theoretical bases for such appeals to intuitions have generally been abandoned. New theoretical bases have been developed, but they are of dubious soundness, and even if sound, do not support the appeals to intuitions so commonly made in applied ethics. Perhaps critics of such appeals to intuitions have failed to capture the bit of good sense that is likely to underlie a widespread practice among intelligent and reflective people that seems to outlive its justification.