In this paper I propose we read David Hume's view of meaningful discourse, or his theory of meaning, as an aspect of his theory of politics. I will argue that readings which ignore the political dimension are incomplete and distort Hume's position. When I use the word ‘political’ in the Humean context, however, it means something similar to what we mean by the term ‘social’; in the Humean context ‘politics’ is inclusive of the narrow sense taken by political science in its study of regular partisan politics and governance structures. My proposal is similar to the social-context or social-constructivist interpretations of commentators such as Pall Ardal, Donald Livingston, and Nicholas Capaldi. A political reading also stresses the importance of social context in our understanding of Hume, and agrees with the social-context argument that there is a social or political dimension to intellectual life which Hume hints at but does not address directly in Book 1 of the Treatise.

On assiste aujourd'hui à un renouvellement et à une intensification du questionnement juridique, lesquels ne vont pas sans susciter une interpellation de la réflexion philosophique par le droit. Plusieurs motifs concourent à cette situation (développement technique, inflation de l'individualisme et des particularismes, crise de l'État et donc de l'autonomie des appareils juridiques, domination du droit international par certains États-Nations, etc.). Cette interpellation de la philosophie est le signe d'un besoin d'élucidation, d'éclaircissement et de nouvelles délimitations conceptuelles, au sein d'une situation historique où les schèmes traditionnels d'interprétation du droit font sentir leurs insuffisances.

The problem of induced pro-attitudes is simply this: why is action which ultimately issues from pro-attitudes such as desires, volitions, and goals, induced by techniques such as direct manipulation of the brain, hypnosis, or “value engineering,” frequently regarded as action for which its agent cannot be held morally responsible? The problem is of interest for several reasons. Ferdinand Schoeman, for instance, believes that the problem poses a resolvable but challenging predicament for compatibilists: if agents can be held morally responsible for actions that are causally determined, then why should actions that result from induced pro-attitudes be regarded as paradigmatically unfree actions for which agents cannot be held morally accountable? Robert Kane exploits the problem to launch a libertarian attack on compatibilists. He says that a covert non-constraining controller controls the will of another agent by arranging “circumstances beforehand so that the agent wants and desires, and hence chooses and tries, only what the controller intends.” Kane claims that compatibilist accounts of freedom cannot distinguish between cases in which an agent behaves freely and those in which an agent falls prey to the covert non-constraining control of some other party.

God, by definition, is all-powerful, all-good, all-wise, and all-knowing. Therein lies a problem for the theist, of course, for every one of these attributes has been the subject of fierce debate. In this paper I want to return to the debate by introducing a new problem for the idea that anyone could have the kind of perfect knowledge God is supposed to have. What distinguishes my problem from others is that the sort of knowledge it focuses on is self-knowledge, hence knowledge of a particularly intimate kind. My claim is that God cannot have infallible knowledge of at least some of his own perfections, in particular his being all-wise or ideally rational. Such ignorance is not only inconsistent with the usual conception of God's omniscience, given that whatever knowledge God possesses is traditionally thought to be be a priori and infallible, but, more importantly, is inconsistent with the fundamental idea that God at least knows infallibly or incorrigibly that he has what it takes to be God: qualities such as omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and supreme wisdom. In short, my claim is that God must have a deep “blindspot” about his own nature, something which is inconsistent with a traditional picture of that nature.

Wittgenstein écrit dans les Recherches philosophiques: «Pour une large part des cas d'emploi du mot “signification” — bien que ce ne soit pas pour tous les cas — on peut l'expliquer ainsi: la signification d'un mot est son usage dans le langage» (PU, §43). Le slogan «La signification, c'est l'usage» a servi de signe de ralliement à toute une génération de philosophes (les praticiens de l'«analyse linguistique» ou de la «philosophie du langage ordinaire»), mais la question de savoir quel sens lui donne Wittgenstein — mise à part celle de savoir quel sens il avait pour ces philosophes — pose encore un problème aujourd'hui.

Body theory is the work of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and other scholars in the past twenty to twenty-five years that explicitly focuses on the body, especially on sexuality and gender. The body is seen as an ideological surface on which history and politics inscribe their truths. It is, in short, a corporeal epistemology standing in opposition to all the old cognitive epistemologies (e.g., Descartes, Locke, and modern analytic thought as a whole). Régimes of power are known through the way they oppress, manipulate, and construct the human body. Body theory includes the work of Michel Foucault, Thomas Laquer, and feminist scholars such as Hélène Cixous, Laura Mulvey, and Elaine Showalter. This work is carried on, by and large, in the methodological atmosphere of a constructivist notion of gender, sexuality, social ideas, and the self.

Wittgenstein est mort en 1951 et on attend toujours une édition de ses œuvres complètes. Ce n'est qu'en 1994 que sont parus, accompagnés d'un volume d'introduction à l'ensemble du projet d'édition de la main du directeur de publication, Michael Nedo, les deux premiers d'une série de quinze volumes, les Wiener Ausgabe, qui reproduiront l'intégralité des écrits de Wittgenstein, de son retour à Cambridge en janvier 1929 à la première version du Big Typescript en 1933, avec index et concordances. D'après le catalogue établi par Georg Henrik von Wright, il s'agit des articles suivants: MS 105 à 114 et 153 à 155, TS 208 à 218. Ces deux premiers volumes reproduisent les manuscrits écrits entre janvier ou février 1929 et l'été 1930, soit les MS 105, 106, 107 et 108. Ils constituent l'aboutissement d'une véritable saga entourant l'œuvre posthume de Wittgenstein, dont il vaut la peine de rapporter ici quelques-uns des faits marquants.

Wendy Donner's The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy is an important and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of literature seeking to rescue Mill's practical philosophy from the rather lowly place it occupied in the estimation of many philosophers earlier this century, and to present him as a philosopher whose views form a coherent, systematic whole that can still contribute significantly to numerous moral and political debates. The book proposes an interpretation of the whole of Mill's practical philosophy, and attempts to reveal how aspects of Mill's thought, hitherto considered incompatible, actually mutually support one another. At the same time, Donner sets many of Mill's positions in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophical debates, and finds that on a number of important issues, his thought stands up rather well against more recent work.

The title of this critical notice is provoked by a remark Professor Armour makes in Chapter IX, “Metaphysics and the Resolution of Conflict,” of Being and Idea. If we become Spinozists, “Perhaps the concept of God will emerge clearly and orient our lives, or perhaps, on the other hand, we will be able to see how to make God go away and leave us alone” (p. 98). As the title indicates, I shall argue here that Armour's book achieves the latter, and not the former, end.