Seventeenth century discussions of materialism, whether favorable or hostile towards the position, are generally conducted on a level of much less precision and sophistication than recent work on the problem of the mind-body relation. Nevertheless, the earlier discussions can still be interesting to philosophers, as the plethora of references to Cartesian arguments in the recent literature makes clear. Certainly the early development of materialist patterns of thought, and efforts on both the materialist and immaterialist side to establish fundamental points in the philosophical analysis of mind, have considerable historical interest at the present time. This paper attempts to clarify the significance of some of leibniz's views in connection with the materialist thesis. I do not have in mind his rather notorious parallelism, though some of the points made below bear indirectly on the character of this position (or perhaps on the question whether he held it consistently). Instead, I will examine his approach to arguments against materialism.

In a recent article (1972) I gave reasons for attributing to Mill a restricted view of the demands of morality, according to which no conduct would be prima facie wrong unless it was harmful to others. This interpretation of Mill raises the problem of reconciling such a view of morality with the principle which Mill calls the Principle of Utility. I tried to show that a reconciliation was possible by invoking the reminder, for which we are indebted to Alan Ryan (1965, 1970) and D. P. Dryer (1969), that Mill conceived of the Principle of Utility as a very abstract principle, and said that it governed not just morality but the whole of the Art of Life. I concluded that, whatever the subject matter of Mill's Principle of Utility might be, it was not the rightness and wrongness of actions.

After he had rejected much of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein, upon at least one occasion, still “thought that in the Tractatus he had provided a perfected account of a view that is the only alternative to the viewpoint of his later work”—a perfected account: that is to say (at least) a well-knit, coherent one. It seems to me that this merit must be denied the whole account presented in the Tractatus and I would like to explain why.

The Tractatus holds that every true or false proposition is analyzable as a truth-functional compound of elementary propositions. It further holds that elementary propositions are completely independent of one another. “The simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts the existence of a state of affairs” (4.21).

My aim in this paper is to show how confusion and unclarity about reasons for action (reasons for doing) has led to serious error in ethics and the philosophy of action, and to try to set matters right. In Part I I set out what reasons for doing are, and try to make clear the distinction between reasons as justifying actions and reasons as motivating them. In Part II I try to show how, even in the ideal situation of successful and correct deliberation, a justifying reason is never identical with a motivating one, since they are two quite different sorts of thing. However a motivating reason and what one takes to be a justifying reason may be the same. In Part Ill I show how failing to make these distinctions leads to paradoxes and absurdities in the philosophy of action. It emerges that a related distinction must be made between wanting, valuing, and being valuable.

My discussion of duress falls into three parts. In part I of the paper, I argue chiefly that Xings done under duress remain clear cases of action, and that they are special cases of acting for a reason. In part II, I propose a five-point analysis of acting under duress. In part III, I examine how duress operates as a defence. I maintain that duress is sometimes an excuse and sometimes a justification for conduct, although I further argue that nevertheless it would not be unreasonable to classify duress as an excuse.

I am not sure how confident we can be about our knowledge of the meaning of a sentence, but I am sure that we should be much less confident than we often are about the meaning of a word or non-sentential expression. This paper is an attempt to whittle away our confidence about word-meaning, and it is to this end that I investigate the meaning of the word ‘know'. But the point of the investigation is to show that it is not enough to investigate just the meaning of a word. We must investigate the syntax as well, something that philosophers have often ignored. A theory of meaning must be closely tied to a theory of syntax, and for one to be acceptable the other must be acceptable as well. A theory of language must be an integrated theory, and hypotheses about syntax and meaning stand or fall together.

This is yet another study of Mill's ‘proof’ of utilitarianism, and since the topic is by now rather shop-worn I should state right off what new form I hope to give to it. Mill argues from the premise that each person desires his own happiness to the conclusion that the general happiness is desirable. To be more precise, he argues that one's own happiness is the only thing that any person desires as an end, and from this he moves to the conclusion that the general happiness is that state of things which should be promoted. It is not necessary at the outset to accept this as the correct rendering of Mill's argument; it is part of my object to show that it is.

A Ia suite de ses trois grandes Critiques, Kant a publié, en 1793, La religion dans les limites de Ia simple raison. Ce livre commence par l'affirmation d'un principe mauvais au plus profond de l'homme, d'un “mal radical” qui est le fait de notre moi intelligible lui-même et qui permet à l'auteur d'accuser l'humanitē tout entière. Le péché originel dans une philosophie rationaliste, voilà qui ne va pas de soi. Goethe écrivait déjà: “Kant, après avoir consacré une longue vie d'homme à nettoyer son manteau philosophique de bien des préjugés malpropres, l'a ignominieusement souillé avec Ia tache infamante du mal radical pour engager les chrétiens aussi à en baiser l'ourlet”. Sans chercher des mobiles aussi bas, on peut s'étonner en effet que l'homme de Kant, l'homme sujet transcendantal et volonté autonome, soit aussi l'homme coupable, le pauvre pécheur de Ia théologie chrétienne.

One of the intriguing features of the semantic theories proposed by Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz is that they attempt to provide a criterion for semantic anomaly. Ostensibly, the criterion would enable one to determine when a phrase is semantically absurd or incongruous even in cases where the phrase appears to be grammatically proper. For example, phrases such as ‘spinster insecticide’ and ‘female uncle’ would be marked as anomalous in the semantic theory even though they seem grammatically on a par with ‘gaseous insecticide’ and ‘unemployed uncle’.

Recently, however, a number of criticisms have been raised concerning the theoretical devices that Fodor and Katz supply for marking such anomalies. In this essay I want to examine these criticisms and suggest a modification of the theories which would answer the critics on this point and, at the same time, significantly enhance the explanatory power of the theories.

So many times have we heard it told and even recounted it ourselves, that the tale of Descartes’ metaphysical adventure is something we can slip our philosophical feet into without feeling the slightest pinch. The story, or perhaps, only its plot, is this: Descartes, in order to discover whether anything is certain, attempted to doubt everything; though he succeeded in casting at least a shadow of doubt on vast areas of belief, happily one item, though only one, emerged from the inquiry in a respectable condition, indubitable. The remainder of the tale relates how he proceeded to deduce truth after truth from that single original certainty.

Can general terms stand as logical subjects? viz., following Professor Geach's exposition of subject and predicate, can general terms ever occur as an expression which is such that it can be said to stand for something that the sentence S (in which it occurs) is about, S itself being formed by attaching a predicate to that expression? Frege, in ‘On Concept and Object’, contended that no ‘concept’ could stand as the reference of a grammatical subject, in view of the essentially predicative nature of the ‘concept’, and, as for Frege a concept is what is expressed in language by a general term, no general term can stand as a logical subject.

Although there has been considerable interest recently in statements that have been described as pragmatically inconsistent or self-defeating (for example, the statement ‘I do not exist’), the notion of pragmatic inconsistency has not been clearly defined and little attention has been paid to the relation between the assertion of these statements and the statements themselves. Hintikka [1] and Nakhnikian [2], for example mention that ‘I do not exist’ cannot be asserted without pragmatic inconsistency, but they are concerned mainly with belief statements that are pragmatically inconsistent rather than with the assertion of them. In doing so they have missed an important point—that it is the characteristics of statements that cannot be asserted without pragmatic inconsistency that render other statements pragmatically inconsistent.

In this paper, I want to discuss the recent attempts by Professor John R. Searle to cast doubt on the traditional empiricist distinction between fact and value. Searle's first attack on this distinction was made in 1964 in his now classic article, “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’.” In that paper, he presented what he claimed to be a counter-example to the thesis that statements of fact may not entail statements of value. Searle's argument aroused much controversy and inspired many attempted refutations, but Searle apparently found none of these convincing, for a few years later he published a revised version of his paper as the last chapter of his book, Speech Acts. The new version includes his replies to many of the objections which had been made to his thesis up to that time. It also includes, in the main body of the book, a theory of language which is supposed to provide the theoretical underpinning explaining why his original paper presents a genuine counter-example to the position he is attacking. It is the Speech Acts version of Searle's thesis which I want to consider here.

There is still considerable debate among commentators about the extent to which Descartes intended to, or actually did, exercise the principle of methodic doubt. Basically, the debate is about the import of the word “all” in the opening sentence of the synopsis of the Meditations: “In the first Meditation I set forth the reasons for which we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things … ” (HR 1, 140; AT 7, 12). A. K. Stout and Willis Doney have argued that the thing to be doubted is all knowledge to the extent in which memory plays a role in it. They attempt to show that Descartes is looking for a guarantee for the reliability of memory rather than for, say, a guarantee for the reliability of all clear and distinct ideas. Most commentators do not restrict methodic doubt in this way. For example, Alan Gewirth has recently suggested that sometimes Descartes even doubts the cogito.

Les considérations physiologiques sont étrangères, en tant que telles, au projet de l'Ethique, et sans doute, à l'ensemble des préoccupations philosophiques de Spinoza. Au début de Ia seconde partie de l'Ethique, Spinoza précise clairement: “j'expliquerai seulement ce qui peut nous conduire comme par la main à la connaissance de l’ Arne humaine et de sa béatitude suprême”. Pourtant, le livre ne laisse pas de contenir une révision intéressante du modèle mécaniste que Descartes appliquait à l'explication du corps humain; il contient surtout une hypothèse sur Ia structure organique, qui, nous le croyons, a joué un rôle de modèle pour un certain type de théorie de l'être vivant. Ce type de conception se trouve d'abord dans l'iatromécanisme de Boerhaave et de ses disciples au XVIIIe siècle, mais les séquelles en sont identifiables jusque dans Ia philosophie biologique contemporaine.

In recent times it has become fashionable to emphasize the role of conceptual change in the (philosopher's) history of science. To judge from recent writers (Feyerabend 5-9, Kuhn 18), every significant theoretical change in science is first and foremost a revolution in scientific concepts—a conceptual revolution. According to this view, every level of experience is affected by each fundamental theoretical change: physical theory, experimental practice and even perceptual experience. The Aristotelian patrician who watched the sun sink beneath the horizon not only had different beliefs (theory) about the phenomenon but actually saw something different from the Newtonian gentleman who saw the horizon rise above his eye-sun line, and the Einsteinian professional who saw the sun's varying geometrical relations to the world light-geodesics on which successive temporal stages of his eye world-line lay. Moreover, such is the completeness of the conceptual-experiential shifts undergone in a fundamental scientific change that it is impossible to meaningfully discuss the one theory within the confines of the other or, indeed, to provide any systematic, cumulative comparison of successive theories.

Philosophers often contrast personal authority to authority vested in offices. Some such distinction is traditional and sometimes useful. But it does not provide us with an exhaustive classification of the types of authority, for there is a third type of authority that I shall argue is more fundamental than these two. Let us start with the types marked out by the usual distinction.

Consider first the sort of authority illustrated by the following sentences:

1. (1) Smith is an authority on physics.

2. (2) Smith has (some) authority as a physicist.

3. (3) Smith's views (utterances) on physics have (some) authority.

4. (4) O.K., I believe you—after all, you're the authority on physics!

A person is an authority in virtue of possessing extensive knowledge of a field or subject-matter. There seem to be no limits on what the field or subject-matter can be—for instance, one can be an authority on trivia.

Searle’s famous attempt at what might loosely be called deriving ought from is has received much critical attention; but the main lines of attack on his attempt have been (as Searle himself has shown) irrelevant, mistaken, or otherwise defective. I shall here offer an account of what, I feel, really centrally has gone wrong with his attempt. I shall use the version of the derivation attempt which is found in Searle’s book, Speech Acts.

The attempted derivation has, as its important steps, the following statements:

1. S uttered the words, “I hereby promise to perform A for you, H.”

2. S promised to perform A for H.

3. S placed himself under a (prima facie) obligation to perform A for H.

4. S is under a (prima facie) obligation to perform A for H.

5. S ought (prima facie) to do A for H.