Le présent article se propose, pour rendre hommage à l'admirable travail du Pr Martial Gueroult sur l'Éthique de Spinoza, non de tenter une revue critique qui manquerait inévitablement d'ampleur et de précision, mais d'examiner un point important de la doctrine: instruit par les analyses du commentateur, nous voudrions présenter quelques réflexions complémentaires sur la délicate question des rapports de la Substance et des Attributs.

In the days when the Great Central and the Midland ran competitive services from Leicester to London, I agreed to meet your train when you came up from Leicester. “It arrives at 12.5”, you said in your letter. But you neglected to mention which station, and only on the morning of your journey did each of us realize that this matter had been left open. You intended to travel from Leicester Central, it being more convenient for you than London Road, and you supposed that I would be able to infer your intention by consulting Bradshaw, and noting a 12.5 arrival from Leicester at Marylebone.

I want to discuss a doctrine and a concept in theory of knowledge which has various manifestations from at least the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. The concept is that of direct or immediate cognition, the doctrine says that only what is like mind can be directly or immediately present to mind. This doctrine raises the question of how we can know things other than ourselves and our experiences: the concept of direct presence most usually had the consequence of making our knowledge of the world indirect, uncertain, or impossible. The directly present must in some way inform us about the indirectly present.

A Qualitative concept of selective dyadic confirmation — not Scheffler's and Goodman's —can be readily defined piggy-back upon the qualitative concepts of dyadic confirmation and dyadic disconfirmation as follows:

Dl ‘E selectively confirms H’ = df ‘E confirms H and E disconfirms H1 for every H1 that is a contrary of H relative to E’.

Récemment, dans The Problem of the Criterion, Roderick M. Chisholm distinguait deux stratégies visant à résoudre le problème du cercle vicieux, à savoir, celle des «particularistes» pour lesquels il faut d'abord établir ce qu'on sait, partant, formuler les criteres de la connaissance et celle des « méthodistes » qui entendent établir d'abord les critères de la connaissance, partant, son étendue. Voici done notre problème formulé, puisque Chisholm considère Descartes comme un exemple de stratégic «méthodiste» et Thomas Reid ainsi que G.E. Moore comme des exemples de stratégie «particulariste», ces derniers illustrant d'ailleurs la stratégie «la plus raisonnable». Dans le cas de Reid cependant, on verra que même s'il se livre à une critique de la démarche cartésienne, la tentative de réponse au problème du cercle vicieux est chez lui aussi de type «méthodiste», dès lors, susceptible d'une circularité comparable à celle qu'il reproche à Descartes.

Le problème que nous allons tenter de résoudre dans cet article pourrait être énoncé succinctement de la façon suivante: comment convient-il d'interpréter ce titre de Méditations sur la philosophie première que Descartes a donné au petit livre dans lequel il expose sa métaphysique. Ce titre peut en effet être interprété de trois façons, dont deux, à tout le moins, diffèrent sensiblement. Ce titre peut désigner, d'une première manière, les résultats de la recherche à laquelle s'est effectivement livré le penseur, ces résultats s'énonçant alors sous la forme d'un ensemble de thèses ou de propositions philosophiques dont le contenu renvoie à autre chose qu'à l'activité de pensée qui les a produites. D'une seconde façon, cependant, le terme de méditations peut désigner cette activité elle-même et, dans ce cas, les Méditations constitueraient moins un ensemble d'énoncés théoriques à caractère véritatif que la description d'un processus de recherche et de découverte plus ou moins réussi.

This paper is in two parts. I begin the first part by presenting a brief resume of an account of Hume's Section “Of Personal Identity” which I offered at length in a paper first published twenty years ago. I shall then try to respond to some criticisms of my interpretation of that Section. The authors of these criticisms consider that Hume's account of personal identity is less sceptical and more defensible than I suggested it is. The purpose of responding to these criticisms is not, I trust, that of protecting an ego: this would be an objective that would be uniquely inappropriate in such a context. It is rather to look again at some difficult but important problems in Humean exegesis. In the second part of the paper I turn to some criticisms that are commonly levelled against Hume, and which I have been inclined to subscribe to myself in the past. I do not think that a proper assessment of these criticisms depends upon accepting or rejecting the reading of Hume that I have tried to defend in the first part, so the two parts of the paper are largely independent of each other. I now incline to believe, however, that the criticisms I shall deal with in the second part are criticisms to which Hume has, or could find, quite plausible answers.

« La «théorie des idées» de Platon est un essai pour résoudre ce problème et mon opinion est qu'elle est un des essais les plus réussis faits jusqu'ici. La théorie qu'on défendra dans ce qui suit est largement platonicienne, avec simplement les modifications que le temps a montrées nécessaires.» (Problems of Philosophy, 1912, cité d'après l'édition de 1946, p. 91).

Studying some familiar truth-conditions, I shall detail the role they play in elementary logic and inquire into our grounds for holding them true. I shall discharge the first of these assignments with a good deal of assurance, but the second with far less; to my mind, (1) below mirrors our use of ‘and’, (6) our use of ‘every’, (8) our use of ‘necessarily’, etc. pretty accurately, but little evidence to that effect has ever been supplied, and — disturbingly enough — many take exception to the conditions under study.

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.

Logicism is the doctrine that mathematics is reducible to logic. It is usually presented in two theses: (1) Every mathematical concept is definable in terms of logical concepts. (2) Every mathematical theorem is deducible from logical principles. In this paper, I am not concerned with the truth or falsity of (1) and (2). Rather, I am concerned with the underlying philosophical system. Logicism is connected with the names of Frege, Russell (and Whitehead). But the logicism which is familiar to most philosophers is not the original logicist system of Russell. Instead, we read either Russell's later Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy or articles by Carnap and Hempel. My purpose in this paper is to return to the original logicist system of Russell. This system, at least in essentials, lasts through the publication of the First Edition of Principia Mathematica. I believe that examination of this system will shed light on why certain difficulties arose in later logicism, including the logicist views of the Logical Empiricist movement. Further, the issues are closely connected with general doctrines on the nature of philosophical analysis.

There are a number of dimensions to the realism-nominalism controversy. The topics of debate comprise: necessary connections and causality, dispositions and counterfactuals, space and time, the existence of abstract entities and mathematical objects, the existence of the theoretical entities of science. On all these except the last, Sellars takes a non-realist line: and on all these except the last, I agree with him to the extent that I presently have an opinion on them. But Sellars is a scientific realist, encapsulating this realism in the dictum: “to have good reason for holding a theory is ipso facto to have good reason for holding that the entities postulated by the theory exist” ([2], p. 91).

There seem to be as many interpretations of the Theaetetus (Tht.) 201c–210b as there are scholars who care to interpret it. This, of course, is not surprising. As Cherniss well puts it,

the fascinating and perplexing history of Platonic interpretation…has been so largely a series of insistently charitable efforts on the part of Western philosophers and their acolytes, each to baptise Plato in his particular faith — having shriven him first, of course, by interpreting the heresies out of his works.

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.

Leibniz said that space and time are well-founded phenomena. Few readers can make much literal sense out of this idea, so I shall describe a small possible world in which it is true. I do not contend that Leibniz had my construction in mind, but I do follow Leibnizian guidelines. The first trick is to reverse the maxim that every monad mirrors the world from its own point of view. Points of view, and hence a space of points, can be constructed from a non-relational account of the perceptions of each monad. But we cannot fabricate space alone. We must build up laws of nature simultaneously. We must also employ a measure of the simplicity of the laws of nature. Moreover we require that, in a literal sense, the perception of each monad is a sum of its Petits perceptions. The identity of indiscernibles, in its application to space, is an automatic consequence of this construction. Although I shall examine only one possible world, there is a general recipe for such constructions, in which none of the above elements can be omitted. This is a striking illustration of the way in which the many different facets of Leibniz's metaphysics are necessarily inter-connected.

The usual argument to show that Causal Determinism entails that our actions are determined by factors at no time under our control is defective. Though repairs suggest themselves, none are both plausible and obviously adequate. I substantiate these claims in turn.

Today we tend to think that such diverse entities as facts of nature, mathematical propositions, and plans for action call for different kinds of accounts. Facts of nature require explanations, mathematical propositions demand proof, and plans for action call for justification. Though explaining, proving, and justifying all count as intellectual activities, it would be alien to most modern frameworks to envisage a general scheme within which these activities would be interrelated, and common denominators established. Still, such a program is hardly unreasonable since all three activities involve understanding. One wants to understand nature, one wants to understand mathematical propositions, and one wants to understand plans for action.

J'endoctrine, nous endoctrinons: voilà des expressions qu' on n'entend pour ainsi dire jamais; le fait même de les énoncer rendrait impossible l'acte qu'elles désignent, puisque la condition essentielle de tout endoctrinement est de se dissimuler.

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.

Philosophers have traditionally decried vagueness as an unmitigated evil, and natural scientists have consistently agreed with them. Nevertheless, as I hope to show, the vagueness of scientific terms has some important advantages for the theories in which these terms figure. In so arguing I do not mean to put the best face on some unpleasant facts or to make a virtue out of a necessity. I shall begin, however, by arguing that on some contemporary accounts of scientific language the vagueness of many scientific terms is unavoidable; if it is unavoidable then lamenting it is futile, and justifying it is idle. I shall go on to argue that, independent of these accounts, the advantages of exactness attained can sometimes be substantially outweighed by the disadvantages of vagueness foregone.