In a series of experiments done in wartime Nazi Germany, inmates of the Dachau concentration camp were exposed to cold by being immersed in ice water, or kept outside in freezing temperatures; their responses were measured, and various techniques were used in an attempt to revive them. The immediate application of these hypothermia studies was to the war effort, to try to protect or save soldiers exposed to cold water or air. An account of the procedures and results of these experiments was written by an American officer, Major Leo Alexander, on the basis of his post-war discovery of documents and interviews in Germany. These reports reveal the ghastly and abominable details of the experiments.

Recent scientific work in British Columbia has caused some ethical debate when it consulted the Alexander report and used some of the Nazi experimental data. The scientists in the Hypothermia Unit of the University of Victoria, unsurprisingly but reassuringly, have no intention of repeating the Nazi atrocities, and condemn them. The current controversy concerns the morality of their using the Alexander data in their study. This out-of-the-way case has some small intrinsic interest; but its consideration leads to broader concerns.

The weather can be very cold at Dachau concentration camp, but Dachau was apparently not cold enough for some Nazi purposes. A camp doctor named Rascher wrote to Heinrich Himmler in February 1943, asking to be transferred to Auschwitz to continue his experiments—which involved freezing live prisoners. The letter reads: “Auschwitz is more suitable [than Dachau] as it is colder there and the camp itself is much larger, thereby attracting less attention to the test persons, who tend to scream while freezing.”

Pour ceux qui entreprennent de parler de la liberté, la conception grecque constitue une référence quasi inévitable. Mais si les uns l'invo-quent avec nostalgie comme un modèle, d'autres s'efforcent au contraire d'en exposer les limites ou la spécificité. C'est que la notion elle-même de «liberté grecque» continue à être l'objet de controverses; et il n'est pas étonnant que les interprétations proprement philosophiques des doctrines s'en ressentent directement. On peut sans doute trouver à ces divergences plusieurs explications: la difficulté intrinsèque du sujet et les passions qu'il suscite presque immédiatement, la diversité des domaines et des auteurs concernés, les choix philosophiques des interprètes, notamment.

TIT FOR TAT (TFT) is the familiar strategy of returning like for like, good for good, bad for bad. Recently Robert Axelrod has shown this rule to be remarkably effective in promoting co-operation among egoists.1Nevertheless, it has been morally denigrated, most notably in the Sermon on the Mount but also by the modern patron of TFT, Anatol Rapoport:

Of the contingent strategies, Tit-for-tat elicits consistently the most cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Obviously, it would be fatuous to interpret this result as a vindication of the “eye-for-an-eye” principle. The success of Tit-for-tat may be no more than that of a simple reinforcement schedule in à two-choice situation, devoid of ethical overtones.

Suppose that two nations A and B each possess a nuclear arsenal and are rational utility-maximizers. Suppose further that B has some interest in provoking A, possibly by attacking her with nuclear weapons. In the hope of preventing this from happening, A informs B of à conditional intention on her part to retaliate against B with nuclear weapons should B in fact attack A. By doing so A attempts to lower the probability of B's attacking A by increasing B's estimate of the conditional probability of A's retaliating once provoked. Problematic deterrent situations are those in which (1) B prefers to attack A without retaliation, (2) A prefers most of all that she not be attacked, and (3) A prefers an attack-with-no-retaliation scenario to an attack-with-retaliation scenario. Feature (3) is à result of the fact that A prefers to minimize nuclear devastation, i.e., A would herself be worse off retaliating than not retaliating to an attack. Now, if B knows all of this to be the case then A's expression of a conditional intention to retaliate will not in fact deter B from attacking, since A is rational and will not act contrary to her own best interests. B has no reason to fear A's retaliation and therefore B has no reason not to attack. Deterrence, it seems, is an irrational policy among fully rational actors. This is one version of the so-called paradox of deter-rence. If expressing a conditional retaliatory intention is the best way for A to ward off an attack, then the paradox can be strengthened as follows: It is rational for A to intend to act irrationally.

Nous savons bien aujourd'hui que, dès l'Antiquité, le Corpus Aristoteli-cum a été constitué, mis en ordre et commenté de manière à faire ressortir, en tout, la cohérence des doctrines du Stagirite, dont ses écrits, tels qu'il nous les a laissés, ne portaient pas la marque évidente. Le sentiment que ce travail de mise en forme, poursuivi par la tradition, devait avoir oblitéré quelque chose de la nature de la pensée aristotélicienne conduisit à soulever la question qui sert d'intitulé à la présente étude.

In Putnam's theory of reference, an historical component and an indexical one both play some part in establishing the extension of terms, although in “The meaning of ‘meaning’” it is not altogether clear just how important he believes the historical element to be. He seems to be much more interested in its indexical component, which he believes plays more or less the same role in his theory as rigidity does in Krip-ke's. In this paper, I will look more closely at these two elements and see what sorts of roles they could play in a theory like Putnam's. A theory of the extensions of general terms will emerge which differs from Putnam's in some important respects. It does, however, have some similarity with a recently published theory of Matthen's, but the arguments are different. I will also outline a theory of essences and kinds, which is based on this modified version.

Le professeur Pelletier de l' Université Laval propose dans cet ouvrage une traduction nouvelle du premier traité de 1'Organon aristotélicien, habituellement désigné par le titre Catégories. Le changement dans le titre exprime certes plus qu'un choix arbitraire de traduction; il va de pair avec une interprétation de ce qui est en jeu dans la théorie des «catégories». Si ce changement devait être suivi, il entraînerait une réécriture de chapitres importants de l'histoire de la philosophie, ancienne et moderne. Je doute cependant que ce tournant soit pris, car, comme nous le verrons à l'instant, il ne s'impose nullement.

One stands in awe of this book, and of its display of erudition, acumen, wit, elegance, taste, and uninhibited failure to suffer fools gladly. Michael Tanner in lectures at Cambridge in 1961 remarked of the then recently published Aesthetics by Monroe Beardsley that in a sense one did not need any other book in aesthetics. Now, one will be sorely tempted to say exactly the same thing about TTTA. The claim would in either case be a mistake. To understand, however, the reason why in either case the claim would be a mistake, and to understand why it would in the case of Sparshott's book be a mistake for a reason very different from that for which it would in the case of Beardsley's book be a mistake, will be to understand Sparshott's consummate and unrepeata-ble achievement in TTTA. I shall return to this topic explicitly at the end of this review, though implicitly I shall never leave it.

Contemporary philosophers have laboured long and hard over the “is-ought” problem (Can moral judgments be derived from purely factual judgments?) and the definition of “moral” (Can moral judgments be derived from purely factual judgments with the addition of à definition of morality?). As a result, it is something of an intellectual shock to find Peter Singer informing the philosophical community that their efforts have been in vain. The importance of Singer's criticism has not gone unnoticed. And others have made the central claim of Singer's criti-cism, but not with such force and clarity.

In à recent issue of Dialogue, Leo Groarke attempts to defend the claim that Parmenides was committed to an atemporal reality.

He argues like this:

(1) In the Parmenidean dictum “[It] is and cannot not be” (B2.4), “is” means “exists”, and is in the present tense (536).

(2) (According to Parmenides) there is nothing that fails to exist (536).

(3) It follows from (1) and (2) that “the past is not” and “the future is not” (537).

(4) If the past and future are not, then the present is not. “All three tenses go down the drain together” (538), and so reality is atem-poral.