Charles Taylor's well-known essay, “Atomism”, criticizes libertarian theories of rights like Nozick's that make individual rights independent of any duties to belong to, support, or obey the law in the society in which those rights are to be enjoyed. Taylor argues that if one grounds rights to important liberties on the human capacity for autonomy, this commits one to the view that the development of autonomy in oneself and others is morally obligatory. Further, Taylor argues that most people cannot develop autonomy in the absence of a certain sort of social and political environment. Hence, if it is morally obligatory to try to develop autonomy in oneself and others, it is also obligatory to belong to, support, and give obedience to those institutions which create the environment in which autonomy can be developed.

In this paper I will combat the claim that concrete matter can exist independently of objecthood. This view is a denial of the Aristotelian principles that only particular objects (primary substances) exist apart (independently), and that as a condition of concreteness, matter must have acquired form. For, it propounds that matter can be concrete and general.

In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams offers an unsettling critique of modern moral philosophy, a critique that calls for a radical reorientation that would have us start again leaving behind much or most or what has been done from the time of the flowering of classical philosophy. However, like moral philosophy itself, Williams' critique reaches beyond the theoretical to matters of practical concern. Moral philosophy since the time of Socrates has endeavoured to answer the question, “How should one live?” (1). Williams' critique is unsettling not simply or primarily because it implies that philosophy has much less to contribute to answering this question than Socrates and most philosophers since his time have thought. Rather, it is unsettling because it implies that Socrates' view that an unexamined life is not worth living, together with his assumption, shared by most moral philosophers since his time, that determining how one should live requires that one step back and reflect on the values governing one's life (19ff.), is either seriously misleading (110 and 116) or mistaken (168).

In a famous passage in volume three of Capital, Karl Marx distinguishes between a “realm of freedom” and a “realm of necessity”. The passage has attracted attention as seeming to register a dismal perception by Marx of the productive labour that will be necessary even under communism. “Dismal perception” is G. A. Cohen's verdict in his lucid essay “Marx's Dialectic of Labour”. Cohen has now softened the charge to “a somewhat gloomy perception”. But he continues to hold that the passage reveals Marx viewing even post-capitalist labour “as bound always to be unsatisfying”, a marked shift from Marx's optimistic 1840s view that under communism labour would be unalienating. The debate has recently been joined by James Klagge, who has argued against Cohen (and others) that the volume three passage does not disclose a shift in view, and so does not register a “deep pessimism” or “negative appraisal” by Marx of post-capitalist labour.

When the history of philosophy is painted in broad strokes, the philosophy of Descartes is generally regarded as the major watershed between classical and modern outlooks. Although Descartes himself was more concerned with epistemology and metaphysics than with axiology, his successors have generally drawn as an axiological corollary of his metaphysical bifurcation of reality the thesis that all final or intrinsic values, if they exist at all, exist only in the domain of conscious subjects, or at the very least as relata dependent upon such subjects. These subjects may indeed extend beyond humankind to include gods or beasts or even, according to the speculative flights of some, the “occasions of experience” of Whiteheadian panpsychists or the universal mind of the idealists. The common denominator of all these accounts, however, is that values essentially depend upon human or quasi-human entities, i.e., conscious, experiencing subjects. This post-Cartesian thesis is in marked contrast to the axiological realism of the classical world of Plato and Aristotle, which concurs with large segments of common sense in finding objects to exist with their axiological properties independently of human and similar subjects. The Cartesian legacy in axiology has been to encourage the exploration of human values and experiences of value while creating a moratorium on the investigation of subject-independent values.

Le présent article veut (1) montrer que la théorie qualitative de la vérisimilarité exposée par Karl R. Popper dans Conjectures and Refutations et Objective Knowledge est compatible avec sa méthode des conjectures, corroborations et réfutations; (2) faire voir pourquoi cette théorie apparaît néanmoins trop forte d'un point de vue intuitif; (3) montrer comment le système poppérien permet de contourner la preuve formelle présentée par Pavel Tichy en 1974 à l'encontre de la théorie qualitative de la vérisimilarité; (4) proposer une nouvelle définition de la vérisimilarité qui apparaisse non seulement logiquement fondée, mais plus intuitivement acceptable et davantage liée à la méthodologie poppérienne que la définition originelle.

A distinction is drawn in “Matter and Objecthood” (henceforth MO) between two analyses of the status of matter vis-à-vis structured objects—between what is presented as a straightforward “two-level” analysis, and a putatively “deeper”, more dubious “three-level” analysis which the author believes to be posited by “Some Questions of Ontology” (henceforth SQO). It is at this “third level” (whatever it might be) that the dubious category of the “concrete non-particular” is said to be located.

C'est avec la grammaire générative (cf. Chomsky, 1966) que la discussion sur les rapports entre l'analyse linguistique et le rationalisme est devenue particulièrement abondante, en même temps qu'elle devenait une affaire idéologique concernant un large public. En présentant sa Cartesian Linguistics comme un chapitre dans l'histoire du rationalisme, Chomsky a prétendu avec éclat que: (i) il y aurait une tradition rationaliste ayant des idées précises sur le langage, liée aux thèses cartésiennes et à la grammaire générale de Port-Royal; (ii) la grammaire générative reprendrait cette tradition et lui apporterait une confirmation définitive. De manière générale, la validité historique des thèses de Chomsky a été contestée avec succès par les historiens: qu'il s'agisse de l'idée d'une linguistique cartésienne (Salmon, 1969; Aarsleff, 1982), de la prédominance du rationalisme aux dix-septième et dix-huitième siècles (Joly, 1977 et 1985), de l'identité de démarche entre Port-Royal et la grammaire générative (Pariente, 1975, 1985), voire même de la définition du rationalisme classique (Cooper, 1972 et la réponse dans Chomsky et Katz, 1975).

For some time there have been arguments in favour of the claim that “free markets” are necessary for a proper account of distributive justice. Traditionally the arguments have come from two quarters. On the one hand markets are recommended for reasons of efficiency. This fits into a utilitarian argument claiming that market economies best promote the greatest good when compared to the alternatives. On the other hand there is a libertarian argument claiming that only free markets are consistent with individual liberty. Neither of these arguments have been met with widespread support. However, Ronald Dworkin has offered an argument supporting markets that breaks new ground. He argues that market economies have the considerable virtue of treating people as “equals” with respect to their preferences for goods and careers. This fits well with his larger claim that social justice in economics and politics requires treating people as equals.

How does Quine argue to the indeterminacy of translation? It has always been hard to tell, but one construction goes like this: A fact is determinate only if it is empirically determinable, for empirical evidence under-determines truth about the trans-empirical; theory is underdetermined by data. Therefore, facts about the unobservable, facts of theory, are indeterminate. A fact about the meaning of a person's sentence is only determinate if it is empirically determinable. The meaning of a person's sentence is empirically determinable only if it is empirically determinable under what conditions he assents to it. The meaning of a person's sentence about something unobservable is determinable only if it is determinable what unobservable events are occurring whenever he assents to a sentence supposedly about the unobservable. It is not empirically determinable what is going on in the unobservable realm whenever someone assents to a sentence supposedly about the unobservable. Therefore it is undeterminable what a person's theory sentence means. Therefore what it means is indeterminate.

Le ressurgissement de la notion de droits de l'homme, à la faveur notamment du printemps polonais de 1980, restera sans doute l'un des traits les plus marquants de la décennie qui s'achève. L'on pourrait trouver son équivalent proprement philosophique dans l'audience croissante qu'ont su trouver des penseurs tels que Jürgen Habermas et K. O. Apel pour leur projet d'élaboration d'une nouvelle morale universaliste, à partir des principes de l'éthique kantienne. En effet, tant les droits de l'homme que ces théories morales inspirées de Kant ont en commun une même exigence d'universalité qui les voue à un niveau élevé d'abstraction, obtenu en libérant les principes invoqués de la réalité substantielle dont ils sont issus et sur laquelle ils ont, en définitive, à s'exercer. C'est ce qui fait de ces droits une politique de la déclaration et de ces théories morales une éthique du discours.

In outline, at least, the major argument of David Gauthier's, Morals By Agreement is quite clear: it is rational to acquire a disposition to moral behaviour with those similarly disposed because having it gives one the highest practically attainable utility in interactions with them. Once one has acquired such a disposition, a disposition which constrains one's individual maximization of the satisfaction of one's preferences (i.e., a Constrained Maximizer or “CM” disposition), it is rational to act morally towards similar agents. He thus takes himself to have constructed from instrumental rationality alone, a justification of voluntary compliance with moral principles. He appears to have shown that it is instrumentally rational for free and uncoerced agents to perform moral actions.

Recent literature on the Young Hegelians attests to a renewed appreciation of their philosophical and political significance. Important new studies have linked them to the literary and political currents of their time, traced the changing patterns of their relationships with early French socialism, and demonstrated the affinity of their thought with Hellenistic theories of self-consciousness. The conventional interpretative context, which focuses on the left-Hegelian critique of religion and the problem of the realisation of philosophy, has also been decisively challenged. Ingrid Pepperle emphasizes instead the centrality of practical philosophy, notably Hegel's dialectic of objectification, arguing that Bruno Bauer in particular derives from this a doctrine of autonomy with politically revolutionary implications.

Three hundred and forty-one years ago, on Saturday September 19, 1648, at eight a.m., Blaise Pascal's Great Experiment took place. Following Pascal's explicit instructions, his brother-in-law Florin Périer took two identical glass tubes and filled them with mercury. He inverted the tubes and submerged the open end in a bowl containing an inch of mercury. Thus he set up two Torricellian baroscopes in the garden of the Minim Monastery, at the base of the Puy-de-Dôme, one of the highest mountains in central France. The height of the mercury in each tube was carefully measured and marked on the glass. The measurements, which were identical, were recorded. One device was left in place, as a control baroscope, with an observer. The other was dismantled.

Si elles ne manquent pas de bienveillance, les Quatrièmes Objections formulées par Antoine Arnauld comptent parmi les plus rigoureuses et les plus pénétrantes qui aient été opposées aux Méditations de Descartes. On sait d'ailleurs en quelle haute et chaleureuse estime Descartes tint, dès lors, le jeune théologien.

In everyday language, “objectivity” is an important normative term. It signifies that in our demeanour, in our judgments, in our attitudes, there is more at stake than just what we want in and of ourselves as isolated individuals. Whoever is called upon to moderate the presidential debate must be “objective”; that is, he or she must give each participant a fair hearing and fair treatment. It is not appropriate for such a moderator to take sides or to use the position to pay off personal scores. Now we know that this moderator will have his or her own personal political convictions, and that he or she may well dislike one, or both, of the candidates. However, we would all agree that this is not the time or the place to settle old scores. That would show a lack of “objectivity”.

If there were a list of subjects about which it seems that there is definitely no more to be said—or that even if there were, nobody would want to hear it anyway—then surely the topics of ideology, in general, and ideology in Marxist theory, in particular, would have to rank very near the top. Diffusing outwards from Western Marxism's postwar preoccupation with the mechanisms of capitalist hegemony, the concept has now become virtually ubiquitous in the humanities and social sciences. Yet we feel reluctantly impelled to add one more paper to this already overflowing pile, hoping to catch readers' attention even as reflexive ennui glazes over their eyes. For a (though not, we trust, the only) virtue of the thesis we are going to propose is its originality in relation to the contemporary spectrum of opinion. If we are right, then, in one of Marx and Engels' main uses of the expression “ideology” they were not referring to ideas at all, but to the social superstructure itself. Even on purely scholarly grounds, it would be of some interest that so many commentators could have missed this meaning of “ideology” in texts as thoroughly scrutinized as these have been. But more importantly, if our analysis is correct, then certain very famous passages in the Marxist corpus (such as the 1859 “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and parts of the Critique of the Gotha Programme) have been misinterpreted for decades.

David Gauthier's recent and elegant Morals by Agreement sets itself the task of deriving morality from the non-moral premises of the theory of rational choice. Gauthier uses the device of a social contract to demonstrate the rational basis of a morality emphasizing rights against force and fraud, private property and the keeping of contracts. Gauthier's social contract is supposed to demonstrate the basis of a morality that is both categorical and enforceable. If his argument is successful, it will demonstrate both the demands that morality may rightly make on each of us, and the moral demands that we may rightly hold each other to.

Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language has enlivened recent discussion of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Yet it is quite possible to disengage his interpretive thesis from its supporting argumentation. Doing so leaves one with an intriguing sceptical argument which Kripke first powerfully advances, then tries to halt. But contrary to the impression his argument may leave, Kripke's solution and the position it concedes to the Sceptic are deeply allied. Here I shall demonstrate their common assumption, and on that basis argue that Kripke's solution begs the Sceptic's question. Furthermore, I believe we can live with the Sceptic. The sceptical argument can be turned into a reasonable contribution to a kind of nominalism in the philosophy of meaning and truth.