Four years ago, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada asked Professor T.H.B. Symons, an historian and a former President of Trent University, to undertake a study of “the state of teaching and research in various fields of study relating to Canada at Canadian Universities.” The first two volumes of his report have now been published under the title To Know Ourselves. In his Preface, the President of the AUCC observes that few reports commissioned by his organization have been more eagerly awaited by the university community. That is the ideology of Cloudcuckooland. In reality that community, except that part of it that comprises deans and their assistants and the assistants to the assistants of deans, awaits no report of any body with eagerness: it awaits them rather as our forefathers looked forward to the annual descent of the passenger pigeon, and believes that reading and writing reports unfits a person for teaching and scholarship. But this report is one that takes notice of what we are doing and not doing and urges us to change our ways, and the aspects of our practice it considers are ones which in any case a responsible teacher will from time to time pass under review. Others will read the report, if we do not, and will ask themselves and us how we stand on it: it will become part of the background against which we are judged. So it seems fitting to use this occasion to say something about the report, “Though for no other cause, yet for this: that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream…”. It is the occasion, and no skill or interest of the speaker, that determines the subject; for by an unhappy accident the office that goes with this address is filled this year by one who has concerned himself less with public policy than any of his recent predecessors. But if the occasion thus leads the speaker to mouth ignorant and disconnected platitudes instead of philosophizing to some purpose, that in itself may serve either to point Professor Symons' moral or to exemplify the bad effects of reports on academic life.

Le principe de non-contradiction a depuis très longtemps étéreconnu comme le principe le plus fondamental de la pensée rationnelle. II est facile de l'énoncer sous sa forme symbolique: – (P.–P). Ce principe pose que quelqu'un ne saurait affirmer en même temps une proposition et sa négation. Pour que ce principe ne demeure pas une exigence vide, il faut en outre que l'on puisse déterminer avec précision quelles sont les conditions de son application. Cette détermination des conditions d'application d'un principe commence par la recherche des moyens par lesquels il est possible de démarquer, dans le champ de son application, ce qui en respecte l'énoncé de ce qui n'en respecte pas l'énoncé. Or si rien n'est plus facile que de formuler un précepte, rien, appa-remment, n'est plus difficile que de tracer une ligne nette entre ce qui se conforme au précepte et ce qui le transgresse. Bien qu'il soit l'assise la plus profonde de nos raisonnements, le principe de non-contradiction ne fait pas exception à ce constat. Son énoncé fait sans doute l'unanimité mais il est assez rare que l'on s'accorde, en dehors des disciplines formelles, sur ce qui constitue l'occurrence d'une contradiction. Cet accord sur ce qui constitue ou non l'exemple d'une contradiction m'apparaît faire défaut d'une façon particulièrement marquée en philosophic Cette situation pose un double problème.

Il semble que, surtout dans les pays de langue anglaise influencés par un idéal industriel, un assez grand nombre de phi-losophes, nouveaux Pygmalions sans le savoir, aient caressé le rêve pourtant glacial d'une logique toute mécanique, qui organiserait le savoir en se substituant à la pensée. Le désir de transporter en philosophie les victotres sans réplique du calcul et de la technicité, où le génie humain se dissimule mais se sent sûr de soi comme un dieu, le culte de l'objectivité rationnelle joint au scepticisme sur l'Esprit et à ce genre d'aversion qu'on pourrait appeler misopsychie, car il s'y mêle la crainte de l'erreur et l'antipathie pour les royaumes du coeur ou de l'imaginaire, ont contribué à enfanter et à répandre, entre autres choses, ce nouveau « rêve de pierre » hélas sans beauté! Que serait une « science sans conscience »? N'est-ce pas là une notion aussi contradictoire, et même dont 1'objet s'avère plus radicalement impossible, que celle d'un carré-rond? Néan-moins quand on parcourt la litterature contemporaine sur le sujet, on serait en droit de conclure qu'un assez grand nombre de philosophies, qui cependant passent leurs journées ou leurs veilles à s'in-terroger sur les conditions de la science, ont cessé de se le demander.

Keith S. Donnellan and, independently, Saul Kripke have presented counterxamples to that fregean theory of proper names associated with Strawson, Searle and others. As well, Donnellan has put forward a rival theory to the Fregean one. It is not fully worked out, and is obscure; but it is not empty and, in contrast to Kripke's positive account of names, is not meant to be a mere “picture”.

I think I am not alone in being troubled on whether existen-tial self-verifyingness and performative self-verifyingness are really two distinct concepts, or what the difference exactly between them is supposed to be as they are utilized by Hintikka in his celebrated analysis of Descartes' cogito argument. My attempts to classify and clarify some permutations on these concepts may therefore be of general interest, given the acknowledged importance of Hintikka's analysis.

One of the greatest difficultiess in the understanding Hegel is the notorious obscurity of his terminology. Even a sympathetic reader faces the problems that in seeking clarification of one term he is led to another which is equally obscure and which often presupposes an understanding of the first. But Hegel himself described the structure of his system as circular and stressed the contextual nature of his terminology. Indeed, he insisted that only a philosophy which is so structured could be worthy of the name “science.” The difficulty in understanding Hegel is thus not merely a terminological one. It is primarily the difficulty of understanding why Hegel conceived philosophical science as he did, and why the problems which confront Hegel's enterprise arise in the first place. For unless we can make the problems of the Hegelian philosophy our own, in the minimal sense of understanding why they arise, our appreciation of Hegel will be limited to “the repetition and inspired variation of Hegel's theses or their criticism from a distance which blurs their structures.” What is needed is an “unscientific” introduction to Hegelian science which provides insight into the motivation for Hegel's standpoint precisely because it does not presuppose it. Hegel himself suggested that such an introduction could be found in scepticism. However, Hegel declined to provide a sceptical introduction to science on the grounds that it would be unscientific. For Hegel, the path to science was already science.