Recent breakthroughs in the history and sociology of science have begun to help us to appreciate the vast complexity and intricate character of empirical endeavours in the sciences. The days when philosophers could blandly gesture towards “observation statements” or “falsification,” as if they were some readily understood phenomena or set of procedures, are gone, happily. This does not mean we can merely use the Duhem-Quine thesis as a shibboleth, however: we are now much more sensitive to immense difficulties in establishing viable claims to replication (Chen 1994) or establishing the absence of selectivity bias, or convincing others of adequacy of experimental controls. Yet, even so, I would still assert that modern science studies, with only a very few exceptions, have ignored the problem of the constitution of error in the context of precision quantitative measurement. While rather broad claims have been made concerning measurement by Hacking, Cartwright, Franklin and others, none goes so far as to examine the actual manipulation of the numerical data. More distressingly, in the areas of economics and economic methodology, we have not even got so far as have the researchers in science studies. This fact alone should provide grounds for scepticism about the claim in Cartwright (1989) that philosophy of scientific inference has something to learn from the history of econometrics.

Ily a un problème de la raison dans la pensée berkeleyenne. Il n'a guère été débattu jusqu'ici.

Deux éléments importants peuvent être invoqués à ce sujet. D'une part, on a cru longtemps que Berkeley était un empiriste. Plusieurs le croient toujours. De nombreux penseurs anglophones soutiennent cette thèse. Or des études assez profondes ont permis de dégager certains aspects structuraux de la pensée de Berkeley.

The immediate infinite mode of extension is one of the more mysterious elements of Spinoza’s ontology. Despite its importance to Spinoza’s metaphysical system, Spinoza tells us very little about this mode. In the effort to make some progress on this question, I examine three prominent hypotheses about this mode’s identity: the Force Interpretation, the Nomic Interpretation, and the Kinetic Interpretation. I argue, first, that both the Force Interpretation and the Nomic Interpretation are subject to a number of serious objections. Second, I argue that in spite of scholars’ claims to the contrary, the Kinetic Interpretation is a live option.

Anyone who has worked at proving theorems of intuitionistic logic in a natural deduction system must have been struck by the way in which many logical theorems “prove themselves.” That is, proofs of many formulas can be read off from the syntactical structure of the formulas themselves. This observation suggests that perhaps a strong structural identity may underly this relation between formulas and their proofs. A formula can be considered as a tree structure composed of its subformulas (Frege 1879) and by the normal form theorem (Gentzen 1934) every formula has a normalized proof consisting of its subformulas. Might we not identify an intuitionistic theorem with (one of) its proof(s) in normal form?

After a presentation of the main onto-theological theses contained in the Liber de causis, the author explains how they were received and interpreted by Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant in their respective commentaries on the short treatise “de primis causis rerum.” Starting from a mistranslation of the word “yliathim,” Thomas “injects” into the De causis his own doctrine of the distinction between being and essence. As for Siger, while he is often regarded as an adversary of Thomas Aquinas, his ideas about the ontological difference between the Prime Cause and the created beings are on the very lines of the Thomasian lecture of the Liber de causis.

This article deals with Michel Foucault's 1977–79 lectures on political economy. In the first part, we highlight his views on the market, which is equated to a social device instrumental in governing individuals so that they are induced to allow the ruler to reach his goal, which is providing security to the population. In the second part, we consider together Foucault's and Weber's views on the economy, since Foucault's concept of technique of the self is similar to Weber's concept of life conduct, which is central in his sociology of religion. This opens the way to a history of the modern economic behaviour considered as a form of ascetism.

The possibility of knowledge attributions across contexts (where attributor and subject find themselves in different epistemic contexts) can create serious problems for certain views of knowledge. Amongst such views is subject-sensitive invariantism—the view that knowledge is determined not only by epistemic factors (belief, truth, evidence, etc.), but also by non-epistemic factors (practical interests, etc.). I argue that subject-sensitive invariantism either runs into a contradiction or has to make very implausible assumptions. The problem has been very much neglected but is so serious that one should look for alternative accounts of knowledge.

This article argues that Quine's holistic and naturalized semantics provides an inadequate account of the foundations of logical expressions and misrepresents the internal structure of theories. By considering a Quinean model of theoretical revision, I identify the status and foundation holism provides to the propositions of logic. I contend that a central tenet of Quinean holism—the Revisability Doctrine—cannot be held consistently, and that the inconsistencies surrounding it mark a series of pervasive errors within naturalized holism. In response, I propose that semantic theories must reflect the different linguistic functions of different types of expressions and the specific relationships that individual concepts within a theory or language have to one another.

Contemporary writing on human action sometimes distinguishes a presentoriented form of intentionality from a future-oriented form. Tense is then invoked mainly for a classificatory purpose, with little regard in this context to whether it may not have analytical (and therefore closer) connections with intentionality in general. That merits some surprise, in view of the crucial role assumed, in current debate between A- and B-theories of time on the subject of tense, by a wider intentionality that extends to cognitive and other mental states. In the wider context there is room for an interesting antithesis between analyses of the temporal in terms of intentionalistic concepts and retroanalyses that go the other way.

Depuis la parution de la Théorie de l'agir communicationnel, la question du droit et de la rationalité juridique a occupé une place de plus en plus importante dans l'itinéraire philosophique et sociologique de Jürgen Habermas. Déjà repérable dans l'œuvre maîtresse de 1981, cette réflexion s'est poursuivie avec le cours Law and Morality professé à l'Université Harvard en 1986, pour trouver son point d'orgue en 1992 avec la publication de Faktizität und Geltung, ouvrage tout entier consacré à la théorie juridique et politique et qui forme désormais la pièce maîtresse de la pensée de Habermas sur ce thème. On peut invoquer deux motifs pour expliquer cet intérêt marqué et relativement récent pour la philosophic du droit.

C'est un thème husserlien que je veux traiter dans mon exposé, un thème qui relève de la philosophie husserlienne de la logique. Celui de la «Mannigfaltigkeitslehre» ou doctrine de la multiplicité. J'exposerai brièvement ce thème et j'essaierai ensuite d'en donner une version moderne qui soit à la fois une critique et un renouvellement des intentions de Husserl.

Malgré les critiques de toutes sortes dont elle fut et dont elle est encore l'objet, la grammaire transformationnelle est devenue en vingt ans, sous l'impulsion de Noam Chomsky, le paradigme dominant de la linguistique contemporaine. Et, bien sûr, l'incroyable rapidité de cette ascension s'est accompagnée de nombreuses crises de croissance. Linguistes, philosophes et psychologues, ainsi amenés à s'interroger sur les fondements épistémologiques de cette étrange discipline, se sont heurtés à de redoutables énigmes métathéoriques: de quel domaine factuel la linguistique est-elle la science? les grammaires sont-elles empiriquement falsifiables? quel rôle l'intuition du locuteur – et singulièrement celle du linguiste – joue-t-elle dans l'élaboration et la confirmation de la théorie? quelle relation y a-t-il entre règles et lois? quel est le rapport théorique de la linguistique à la psychologie, à la sociologie, à la neurophysiologie? … Ces questions et d'autres semblables ont donné lieu ces dernières années à une étonnante profusion de livres et d'articles, où, à propos d'une discipline particulière et d'exemples précis, sont discutés, souvent en profondeur, tous les principaux problemes de l'épistémologie contemporaine.

It has often been remarked that the dramatic element of the Platonic writings is unique in philosophy, and there have been many attempts to account for its presence. Recently there has been a greater tendency to see it as more than mere ornamentation or naturalism, as an essential element in understanding the philosophy of the dialogue. The one unquestionably authentic statement by Plato on philosophical writing is in the Phaedrus where Socrates, who wrote no philosophy, is made to criticize treatises because, among other things, a treatise “rolls everywhere, equally to those who understand it and to those for whom it is not fitting, and does not know to whom it should speak and to whom not” (275e). Plato, who did write philosophy, wrote no treatises, and it is reasonable to expect that he regarded the dialogue form which he employed as free from the objections to treatises.

Most of the readers of Frege's first Logical Investigation, “The Thought,” have been convinced that, according to Frege, the sense of ‘I’ was a private one, that an I-thought was a private thought. But it is not the case: the famous Fregean distinction between private representations and public thoughts seems an explanation and a generalization of the I-thought problem as much as an anti-Cartesian repetition of the Cartesian Second Meditation. Frege's position concerning indexical thoughts is that they are public thoughts, for the sense of an indexical expression is not related to private representations but to some semiotical aspects of the public context of its utterance.

One of the central problems in philosophy since Kant has been that of the possibility of a science of human culture. Dilthey, Croce and Collingwood devoted their energies to this task, in an atmosphere marked by an intense hostility between positivists, who represented the tradition of naturalism and historicists, who represented the tradition of humanism. The positivists, led by Comte, Buckle, Mill and Taine, argued for a science of man modelled on the prevailing methods of the natural sciences. Typical of this approach was the attempt by the English historian T. H. Buckle:

to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquiries for the different branches of the natural sciences.

In the following pages I should like critically to consider certain aspects of John Dewey's thought as set forth for the most part in Experience and Nature. In particular, I should like to discuss the conceptions of being and of philosophieal reflection which underlie his delineation of human agency as located in nature and as essentially characterized by reference to the problematic. I select these ideas both because they concern something fundamental philosophieally and because one can see in Dewey's development of them both the strength and weakness of his philosophieal reflection.