ABSTRACT: As Smith freed moral philosophy from former control bodies (the Church, the state), the Scottish philosopher opened the field for a scientific political economy. In his Adam Smith. Philosophie et économie (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1990, p. 45), Jean Mathiot asked : «Should then one wonder that his [Smith’s] audacious stand became the historical grounding stone for political economy, then bringing recognition as an objectively-grounded field of knowledge?» Mathiot’s text and thought have been little debated to this day; this essay is meant to fill that gap, in particular with regard to the history of Smith’s reception in France. Mathiot sought to understand better the “impartial spectator” using a new character whom he claimed Smith was implicitly sketching, and whom he called “the impartial laborer”. To Mathiot’s mind, from the Theory of moral sentiments (1759) to the Wealth of Nations (1776), the link is nothing else than Smith’s own philosophy.

In some of his last publications, R. G. Collingwood takes the position that problems in philosophy are not eternal. Such a denial, in the context of the controversies concerning the overall interpretation of Collingwood's work, is significant for at least two reasons: it seems to suggest an “atomistic” view of the history of philosophy on Collingwood's part, perhaps one that resembles that of the history of science as offered in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Also, the denial seems to reverse Collingwood's earlier views which insisted on a philosophia perennis, and this would support those who maintain that at some point Collingwood's thought underwent a “radical conversion”.

Une propriété décisive du langage quant à la fiabilité de l'expression des pensées, est sa disposition à créer des noms propres auxquels ne correspond aucun objet. Cela n'a pas de conséquences sérieuses quand cela arrive dans la fiction que tout le monde comprend comme telle. Il n'en est pas de même quand cela arrive dans un exposé qui se prétend strictement scientifique. Un exemple particulièrement singulier est ici la formation de noms propres sur le modèle de «l'extension du concept ‘a’», ainsi, «l'extension du concept d'étoile fixe». En vertu de l'article défini, cette expression semble désigner un objet. Linguistiquement parlant, cependant, il n'y a pas d'objet qui puisse être ainsi désigné.

David Gauthier once said that the social contract offers ‘the only game in town’ if we hope for a rational morality. I argue that he’s correct. Morality consists of rules notionally directed at everyone everywhere. Only individual people are rational, and they have varying interests. The social contract proposes principles that everyone would, in view of their social and environmental circumstances, agree to as constraining their separate pursuits of their ends. There is no other rational way to understand morals, and so it is indeed the only game in town.

In this reply to Frank Jankunis’s paper, “Overall and Larmer on Miracles as Evidence for the Existence of God,” I discuss the concept of miracle as a violation of natural law. I argue that, if a miracle were to occur, it would be an epistemic, ontic, and moral evil, and hence evidence against the existence of a perfect God.

Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe is the most significant event in Anglo-American aesthetics in many a year, and joins a small pantheon of landmark books such as Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Walton's aim is to provide a comprehensive account of the representational arts—literature, drama, cinema, painting, drawing, sculpture—from both the generative and the receptive points of view. That is to say, he attempts to explain how representations are fashioned, what their representational status consists in, how representations are apprehended and what the experience of them characteristically involves. Inthese aims he is to my mind enormously, if not completely, successful.

Dans les débats suscités par les écrits de Thomas Kuhn, je me suis intéressée au caractère habituellement non thématisé d'une objection levée contre sa théorie des paradigmes, ainsi qu'au caractère ambigu de la réfutation que lui apporte Kuhn. L'objection porte sur le rapprochement abusif que la théorie des paradigmes opérerait entre l'homme de science et l'homme ordinaire, comme si pour Kuhn la science relevait du bon sens. De son côté, et en dépit de la fréquence de ses références à l'homme ordinaire, Kuhn déclare que cette interprétation de sa théorie n'est pas pertinente.

Tom Stoppard is justly praised by many for what are perceived as his technical skills as a dramatist—his wit, his seriousness, his mastery of parody and pastiche (the “country house” detective story in RIH and J, Shakespeare in RGD, Wilde and Joyce in T), his impressive control of dramatic structure (the overlapping of two dramatic worlds and the world of the audience in RIH, the use of a carefully elaborate set in J). Stoppard earns his place as a giant of modern drama from these qualities. They, however, are not what concern me here. His plays are also in various ways riddled with philosophy. My purpose in this paper is to examine the claim that he is a philosopher's dramatist, rather than a dramatist's dramatist or an ordinary thinking man's dramatist. I am not concerned with how far Stoppard himself as a matter of biographical fact may wish to make this claim, although Stoppard has made no secret of his fascination with Philosophy. I make the claim myself in order both to offer an interpretation of certain dramatic texts and to raise certain questions about philosophical method. I hope to show that to understand certain ways in which Stoppard's plays are philosophical is to appreciate something profound about the way in which philosophy and drama are akin—that is, I hope to make critical and (meta-) philosophical points, not historical or biographical points.

There are two basic ways in which the phenomenon of learning is explicated in the Platonic dialogues: First, by means of an analogy with vision, and second, by arguing that the acquisition of knowledge is really anamnesis (recollection). The analogy with vision is the more common of the two and occurs throughout the dialogues. The passage in the Republic comparing the sun and the good (508c-509b) is the best known instance of this approach to the clarification of learning. The basic point of this explication is that the mind, like the eye, in order to discover truth must be turned in the right direction and be trained to apprehend and distinguish the characters of the objects it beholds. In this context, the acquisition of knowledge is clearly a discovery of that which was not previously known, just as the man who escapes from the cave sees what he had not previously seen (Republic, 514a-516c), and at the end of the ascent of the heavenly ladder one “begins to see” what he has not seen before (Symposium, 211b 8).

That Wittgenstein in the Tractatus likens logic to geometry has been noticed; however, the extent and force of the analogy he develops between logical form and a broadly Kantian account of geometry has not been sufficiently appreciated. In this paper, I trace Wittgenstein's analogy in detail by looking closely at the relevant texts. I then suggest that we regard the fact that Wittgenstein develops his account of logical form by analogy with a Kantian account of geometry as evidence for the bold thesis that Wittgenstein belongs within a Kantian epistemological tradition. Finally, I supply two small pieces of the interpretive puzzle needed to support the larger thesis: first, evidence that Wittgenstein's concern with logical form involves a crucial epistemological component; second, a sketch of how Wittgenstein's account of logical and mathematical knowledge can be viewed as continuing a Kantian tradition.

Les représentants de l'École autrichienne sont ici mis sous la même bannière pour autant seulement qu'ils ont été unanimes à revendiquer pour les postulats de l'économie pure, les «lois exactes» (Menger) de la théorie économique, c'est-à-dire de la théorie marginale de l'utilité, un statut particulier en ce sens qu'ils tenaient pour impossible, voire absurde ou simplement inutile de soumettre les postulats en cause à des tests empiriques. L'apriorisme dont ils se réclament, fait à juste titre la marque de commerce de l'École marginaliste autrichienne; Menger en a fourni les principes, von Mises la justification, et Rothbard s'est occupé de propager la doctrine de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique.

In “Gentle Murder, Or The Adverbial Samaritan”, James William Forrester presents what he describes as “the most powerful version yet put forward” of Lennart Åqvist's Good Samaritan paradox in deontic logic. Forrester suggests that the paradox may make it necessary to reject the standard deontic inference principle

(where “r” is an index for any source of obligation). This desperate conclusion, as Forrester acknowledges, would imply that all of standard deontic logic “must be in a bad way”. But Forrester's “paradox” is not nearly so deep or intractable as he maintains.

The overall objective of my current researches is to formulate and defend a variant of contractarian moral and social theory. Only a contractarian theory is, I claim, compatible with—and indeed required by—the theory of rational choice. I say “a variant” of contractarian theory because, for reasons I sketch in my paper “The Social Contract as Ideology”, there is a deep danger inherent in contractarian theory, the danger that it may be supposed that all human relationships are to be rationalized as contractual. The prevalence of this view—and it is, I believe, increasingly prevalent—would return us to the natural condition of humankind envisaged by Thomas Hobbes, the war of all against all. But this is contractarianism carried to excess; I want to argue, although assuredly not here, that satisfaction of a contractarian requirement is not only rationally necessary, but also necessary if our moral and social practices are to yield that true and complete human sociability integral to any life worth living, and fundamental to a community of free and equal persons.

A popular strategy for resolving Kim's exclusion problem is to suggest that mental and physical property tropes are identical despite the non-identity of the mental and physical properties themselves. I argue that mental and physical tropes can be identified without losing the dispositional character of mentality only if a dual-character hypothesis regarding the intrinsic characters of tropes is endorsed. But even with this assumption, the causal efficacy of the wrong dispositions is secured.

The doctrine of emergent evolutionism has been before the philosophical world for over fifty years, but there are several reasons why another look at it may be opportune. In the first place, the concept of emergence has been analysed with considerable precision during recent decades so that its meaning is more evident now than when it was first introduced. Secondly, new versions of evolutionary theory have made their appearance in this period, and the extent to which they support or undermine the notion of emergence needs to be investigated. Thirdly, the semi-popular writings of Teilhard de Chardin have shown how much vitality evolutionary ideas have in the present intellectual climate. Yet these writings also show how much confusion will be engendered if the treatment is not philosophically adequate, and especially if it fails to grapple with the concept of emergence. Hence it may be useful to look afresh at this whole subject.

In his essay “Brains and Behavior” in Analytical Philosophy, edited by R. Butler, 2nd Series, Blackwell, 1965), Putnam has contended that Logical Behaviourism is not merely dead, its corpse has become olfactorily unattractive. For, says Putnam, while the translatability of mentalistic terms into the vocabulary of overt behaviour is no longer a live issue, innocent philosophers are still being corrupted by sinful urges of a Logical-Behaviouristic sort, namely, (a) suspicion that statements relating behaviour to mental events may be more than just synthetic, and (b) the possibility that the translatability thesis breaks down purely and simply through a mismatching of vagueness in the way, e.g., that a statement about baldness fails at translation into a statement about the number of hairs on a person's head merely because of the inherent vagueness of the term ‘bald’. But while the latter version of neo-Logical-Behaviourism can be dismissed with a curt reminder of what has been learned about the observational irreducibility even of dispositional terms, I remain unconvinced that propositions linking mental and behavioural events are wholly devoid of analytic support.