In his recent article, “A Philosophy of Wonder”, Howard Parsons launched an investigation into the nature of wonder, a subject that is of the highest importance, not only for making philosophy relevant to the present condition of man and society, but also for expanding and integrating philosophic disciplines. With care and sensitivity, he marked out the main sources of evidence for understanding wonder as a phenomenon, distinguished some of its leading features, and most important, showed that analysis of this essential structure of consciousness might illuminate a host of other phenomena in psychology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and religion.

It is not difficult to sympathize with the strong impulse among philosophers to attempt to explain, justify, and even define moral concepts in factual terms. For without some kind of grounding in the facts of human nature, we may be quite perplexed concerning what relevance moral concepts have to our actual decisions, actions, and social relationships. Put another way, without grounding moral concepts in facts we may be quite puzzled as to the connections between principles and practice, between the ideal and the actual. The history of ethical theory contains several serious efforts by various philosophers to provide factual grounding for moral concepts, efforts which we cannot here take up.

Gregory Kavka has recently highlighted, and attempted resolution of, a possible problem with Hobbes's views on state-of-nature co-operation. The problem, having to do with whether it is rational to abide by one's agreements in what appear to be prisoner's dilemma (PD) or PD-like situations, can provisionally be summarized in this way: A covenant of mutual trust is an agreement in which both parties are required to discharge their covenantal obligation, in sequence, at some time after the contract is made (WM,3,14,120–121,124). Hobbes seems to affirm that it is not rational in the state of nature for covenant-parties who have to perform first—first-parties—to keep their agreements, although it is rational for second-parties to do so if first-parties have already performed. These views on the rationality of contract-keeping generate the symmetry enigma: precisely what is the asymmetry between the situations of first-parties and second-parties in the state of nature that makes it irrational for first-parties to do the cooperative thing but rational for second-parties to do so?

These words were written by a preacher-theologian of grey hairs and very great learning: “‘In the fullness of time’ God sent forth his Son, a pre-existent divine Being, who appears on earth as a man. He dies the death of a sinner on the cross and makes atonement for the sins of men… What a primitive mythology it is, that a divine Being should become incarnate, and atone for the sins of men through his own blood” Since 1941, when those wartime words were written, Dr. Bultmann has checked his inclination to apply the term “myth” in wholesale fashion, but his demythologizing works continue to be widely quoted, and their claims can still produce annoyance in the reader and plain uncertainty over what to make of the term “myth”, with its unmistakable smell of something not wanted. In this paper I want first to look into Bultmann's use of that word, and then, by remembering some things from the history of philosophy, to replace that uncertainty if possible with a smile of recognition.

L'effort principal de Merleau-Ponty, au début de son cheminement philosophique, consiste à amener l'expérience perceptive à l'expression de son propre sens.

Pourquoi fallait-il commencer par le retour à l'expérience perceptive? Pour deux raisons qui finalement n'en font qu'une, mais dont la première fut plus explicitement reconnue par Merleau-Ponty au moment où il décida de consacrer ses thèses au problème de la perception. Il lui était évident, dès les années 1933–1934, que la perception est une forme d'expérience particulièrement mutilée et faussée par les philosophies d'inspiration criticiste qui l'interprétaient «comme une opération intellectuelle par laquelle des données inextensives (les «sensations») sont mises en relation et expliquées de telle sorte qu'elles finissent par constituer un univers objectif». Il est clair déjà que cette interprétation intellectualiste se base, par un côté, sur la conception empiriste des «sensations», et que la critique de l'intellectualisme devra être tout à la fois une critique de l'empirisme.

Recent defenders of Philippa Foot, such as Michael Thompson and John Hacker-Wright, have argued that it is a mistake to think that Foot aims to justify a substantive conception of human soundness and defect. Instead, she relies on the acceptance of certain groundless moral norms to underwrite her views about what is characteristically human. I maintain that this is a weakness and that the Footian-style proponent of natural normativity needs to provide a story about how we might achieve justified self-confidence regarding moral norms. In this paper, I offer a coherentist model for doing so, thereby addressing the justification gap.

In recent papers Fred Sommers and Michael Lockwood have independently argued that the distinction between the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of identity (henceforth: the IP-distinction) is not well-founded. This claim is somewhat obscure since, on the theories they advocate, it is not only still possible to distinguish between the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of identity, but important to do so on pain of turning good arguments bad. Sommers' way of putting it, namely that we don't need identity, is no better. Of course we don't need identity since, in second-order quantification logic, identity is definable in terms of predication. Perhaps the best way of putting their point is by means of Sommers' claim (op. cit. p. 500) that identity statements can be formalized by monadic relations. We can therefore mark the IP-distinction by the essentially polyadic nature of identity.

A sustained challenge to the view that artworks are physical objects relates to the alleged inability of physical objects to possess representational properties, which some artworks clearly do possess. I argue that the challenge is subject to confusions about representational properties and aesthetic experience. I show that a challenge to artwork-object identity put forward by Danto is vulnerable to a similar criticism. I conclude by noting that the identity of artworks and physical objects is consistent with the insight that attending exclusively to the object's individual physical properties may prevent us from grasping the nature of the work.

ABSTRACT : Definitions of cooperative action usually provide sufficient rather than necessary conditions. I here define a minimal form of cooperation, which encompasses mass actions, such as demonstrations. Intentional, epistemic, strategic and teleological aspects, mainly obtained from a weakening of pre-existing concepts, are discussed. I also emphasize the key role played by game theoretic concepts in the definition of joint action. Finally, I claim that rationality is a necessary condition of minimal cooperation, whereas classical analysis merely sees rationality as a possible or desirable characteristic.

The goal of this article is to reveal the primal role played by “use” in Spinoza's Ethics. Contrary to appearances, the concept is not linked only to passivity; it is an essential feature of the reinforcement of virtue toward wisdom. Considering that Laurent Bove's analyses of habit within the realm of imagination leave aside the links with adequate knowledge, this article offers an extension of his interpretation in a completely new direction. The new elements are, above all, a demonstration of the place of “use” in the texts where the shift from passivity to activity is concerned, and a new interpretation of intuition in the example of the discovery of the fourth proportional number. In this example, it is argued that intuition is simply a mechanical habituation to truth, thanks to the repetition of acts of reasoning.