ABSTRACT : The scientific character of theology was hotly debated among theologians of the 13th and 14th century. In what follows I expound the singular views of Hervaeus Natalis, a thinker who lived in the first quarter of the 14th century. According to him, the solution to this problem lies in the notion of abstraction. I offer a historical and philosophical analysis of his position based on the first French translation of a significative portion of one of his Quodlibets. I made the translation from my own edition of its Latin text.

ABSTRACT: Cheryl Misak has offered a pragmatic argument against a position she calls “scientific transcendentalism.” Scientific transcendentalists hold that truth is something different from what would be believed at the end of inquiry; more specifically, they adhere to a correspondence theory of truth. Misak thinks scientific transcendentalists thereby undermine the connection between truth and inquiry, for (a) pragmatically speaking, it adds nothing to truth and inquiry to ask whether what would be the results of sufficiently rigorous inquiry are really true and (b) they can only accept it as an article of faith that inquiry leads us to truth. I defend “scientific transcendentalism” against Misak’s objections.

ABSTRACT : In Radical Enlightenment, J. I. Israel gives no attention to the critique of religion expounded by Hume in the second half of the 18th century. Nevertheless, Hume, in elaborating his criticism from the methodological standpoint of the “Moderate Enlightenment”, that of experience, provides an original foundation to the critique of religion in the context of “Radical Enlightenment”. What is more, the conclusion of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion leads one in thinking that “Radical Enlightenment” might have been caught in the net of theological dialectic in its opposition to Christianity.

ABSTRACT: Despite offering many formulations of his controversial indeterminacy of translation thesis, Quine has never explored in detail the connection between indeterminacy and the conception of meaning that he had supposedly derived from the work of Peirce and Duhem. The outline of such a conception of meaning, as well as its relationship to the indeterminacy thesis, is worked out in this paper; and its merits and implications are assessed both in the context of Quine’s own philosophical agenda, and also with a view to a very different approach to meaning and understanding exemplified by the work of Gadamer.

ABSTRACT : This paper contributes to explor the historical background of contemporary conceptualism. It suggests that a step forward toward a more promising understanding of this historical background can be made if we focus, not on the much-discussed, controversial position of Kant, but rather on the straightforward position of some main representatives of classical neo-Kantianism. My main hypothesis is that criticisms of Kant’s transcendantal aesthetics coming from Paul Natorp (1854–1924) and Bruno Bauch (1877–1942) may be regarded as a significant historical source for the so-called “content” conceptualism (especially in McDowell’s version), insofar as they imply that the contents of perception are conceptual contents.

ABSTRACT: There is an intuitive distinction between knowing someone in a detached manner — impersonally — and knowing someone in a more intimate fashion — personally. The latter seems to involve the specially active participation of the person known in a way that the former does not. In this paper I present a novel, communication account of knowing someone personally that successfully explains this participation. The account also illuminates the propositional and testimonial character of the personal knowledge of persons, the conditions of limited transferability to which such knowledge is subject, and its distinctly meaningful role in everyday life. I conclude by considering a worry about self-knowledge that arises on the communication account.

RÉSUMÉ : Il existe une distinction entre connaître quelqu’un de manière détachée, de façon impersonnelle, et connaître quelqu’un de façon plus intime, de façon personnelle. Cette dernière relation, au contraire de la première, semble impliquer la participation particulièrement active de la personne connue. Dans ce texte, je présente une nouvelle analyse de la connaissance intime de quelqu’un qui est fondée sur la communication et explique de manière satisfaisante une telle participation. Cette analyse éclaire aussi la nature propositionnelle et testimoniale de la connaissance intime des personnes, les limites de la transférabilité d’une telle connaissance et son rôle significatif unique dans la vie quotidienne. Je conclus en examinant un problème touchant la connaissance de soi qui surgit dans l’approche communicationnelle.

ABSTRACT: I argue that mathematical norms are real. Semantic norms, including mathematical norms for adding, are governed by social practices of undertaking and attributing meaning, and this fact has obscured the objectivity of norms from view. However, a conception of human normativity that takes as its starting point that humans are part of the world undercuts the misconception that our practices are not sufficient to ground real meaning.