… [T]he question “valuable to what end?” is one of extraordinary complexity. For example, something obviously valuable in terms of the longest possible survival of a race (or of its best adaptation to a given climate, or of the preservation of its greatest numbers) would by no means have the same value if it were a question of developing a more powerful type. The welfare of the many and the welfare of the few are radically opposite ends.

There is no question that genetic engineering in many forms… will come about. It is a general rule that whatever is scientifically feasible will be attempted. The application of these technics must, however, be examined from the point of view of ethics, individual freedom and coercion. Both the scientists directly involved and, perhaps more important, the political and social leaders of our civilization must exercise utmost caution in order to prevent genetic, evolutionary and social tragedies.

Even philosophers who are unsympathetic to Thomistic philosophy generally agree that Etienne Gilson is one of the important philosophers of this century. Those who have had the privilege of meeting or hearing Gilson also know him as a man of charm, wit, and integrity. These qualities, combined with his erudition, have made Gilson one of the intellectual leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. And there is probably much truth to the claim of his student, Pégis, that, “[N]on-Catho1ic readers have seen in him a ‘liberal’ Catholic scholar, which is a remarkable tribute…”. I have long been an admirer of Gilson's work, and so I was deeply disturbed and saddened by certain passages about Jews and Jewish philosophy in Gilson's autobiographical book, Le Philosophe et la Théologie. The remarks to which I refer are in the second chapter of this book, which has been translated into English by his daughter, Cécile; and were they the remarks of a minor professor, they would not merit any attention whatsoever. But because they are the remarks of a wise man, of one of the most influential thinkers of the century, they merit a consideration which for one reason or other they have not as yet received. My aim here is to show that certain of Gilson's views on Jews and Jewish philosophy are misconceptions; and though what I say here is mainly intended for Roman Catholic readers, some of the points I make will also be of interest to non-Catholics.

Behaviour which is said to be motivated primarily or exclusively by unconscious desires and beliefs has created especially troublesome problems for action theorists. Those philosophers who have been captivated by the reason-cause, explanation description distinctions have tended to construe “neurotic” behaviour as something very much apart from “normal” behaviour, — something so different that neurotics, on such a theory, seem to be turned from actors or agents who do things into victims who are compelled by “causes” to “act” (to move?) in ways that are unconnected with their conscious mental lives. R. S. Peters argues, for example, that “Freud thought his explanations relevant only to phenomena which can hardly be called actions in that they seem either to have no point or conscious objective or to fall short of standards of correctness.” Peters takes the behaviour of a married man who suddenly makes an advance to a choir boy as illustrative: “It is because things seem to be happening to him that it is appropriate to ask what made, drove, or possessed him to do that. The appropriate answer in such cases is in terms of a causal theory.” So Freud, Peters has it, appeals to unconscious motivation only in cases where the purposive rule-following model breaks down. To behave neurotically, then, is not, on this interpretation, to act at all.

Dans la seconde partie de son Prologue au Commentaire du premier livre des Éléments d'Euclide, Proclus, un néo-platonicien du Ve siècle après J.-C., a donné sur Platon un jugement qui semble avoir été accepté d'une façon assez unanime par les anciens, lorsqu'il écrit: «Après eux [Hippocrate de Chios et Théodore de Cyrène] vécut Platon qui fit prendre aux Mathématiques en général, à la Géométrie en particulier, un essor immense, grâce au zèle qu'il déploya pour elles, et dont témoignent assez ses écrits tout remplis de discours mathématiques, et qui, à chaque instant, éveillent l'ardeur pour ces sciences chez ceux qui s'adonnent à la philosophie». Les historiens modernes de la géométrie grecque ont dû nuancer ce jugement de Proclus, allant même jusqu'à parler de légende à propos des prétendues découvertes géométriques de Platonz. De fait, il semble que l'essor des mathématiques et de la géométrie au IVe siècle av.

Quelle est la structure du désir et comment le petit d'homme en vient-il à éprouver le désir pour un objet? Freud s'était posé la question et la théorie du complexe d'Oedipe était une pièce essentielle de sa réponse. R. Girard estime que Freud s'est trompé et que la théorie du désir mimétique, elle, fournit une solution au problème. Je retiendrai trois thèses centrales de la théorie de Girard. Après les avoir situées dans leur contexte pour en saisir correctement le sens, je dirai en quoi, à mon avis, ces thèses ne répondent pas à la question de Freud. Je distinguerai trois moments dans la formation du sujet désirant, moments que je mettrai en rapport avec la structuration de la psyché. À la situation oedipienne, il faut opposer un temps pré-oedipien et un temps post-oedipien; ce dernier implique la résolution de l'Oedipe. Je montrerai que le concept d'étayage permet à Freud de comprendre la genèse du désir à partir du besoin tout en marquant la spécificité du désir par rapport au besoin. Au dire de Girard, Freud a pressenti la nature mimétique du désir. L'usage qu'il fait de la notion d'identification le montre bien. Mais cette intuition n'arrive pas à porter tous ses fruits car Freud soutient par ailleurs une thèse qui contredit la première, à savoir que la libido est directement fixée sur la mère.

In his essay “Brains and Behavior” in Analytical Philosophy, edited by R. Butler, 2nd Series, Blackwell, 1965), Putnam has contended that Logical Behaviourism is not merely dead, its corpse has become olfactorily unattractive. For, says Putnam, while the translatability of mentalistic terms into the vocabulary of overt behaviour is no longer a live issue, innocent philosophers are still being corrupted by sinful urges of a Logical-Behaviouristic sort, namely, (a) suspicion that statements relating behaviour to mental events may be more than just synthetic, and (b) the possibility that the translatability thesis breaks down purely and simply through a mismatching of vagueness in the way, e.g., that a statement about baldness fails at translation into a statement about the number of hairs on a person's head merely because of the inherent vagueness of the term ‘bald’. But while the latter version of neo-Logical-Behaviourism can be dismissed with a curt reminder of what has been learned about the observational irreducibility even of dispositional terms, I remain unconvinced that propositions linking mental and behavioural events are wholly devoid of analytic support.

In a Recent article [9], Alexander Rosenberg attacks the “manipulative” view of causation as being unilluminating and as being beset with difficulties. As a proponent of that view [3], I have felt it necessary to take up cudgels in its defence.

Rosenberg's criticisms are directed at Gasking's version of this view [5]. Gasking's recipe for causation is, “one says ‘A causes B’ in cases where one could produce an event of the A sort as a means to producing one of the B sort” (p. 485). Here it is taken for granted that we have general manipulative techniques for producing events of the A sort and that this is implicitly assumed when one speaks of A as a cause. There is one qualification to this formula for causes which arises from the necessity for individuating processes, namely, that, for A to be the cause of B, it must not always lead to B (for then the technique for producing A would also be a B-producing one), but only in special cases.

This interesting volume (published by Yale University Press, 1974) offers sustenance to almost all who have an appetite for the problems of practical reason. As the Proceedings of the First Bristol Conference on Critical Philosophy, it contains the five papers presented there, with the remarks of commentators and, in three cases, replies. First, the bill of fare.

Roderick Chisholm opens with “Practical Reason and the Logic of Requirement”, about which I shall say no more than to quote the beginning of G.E.M. Anscombe's comment: “It is characteristic of Professor Chisholm to carry one always by a succession of small harmless-looking moves which then suddenly enable him to pull out some large kicking rabbits like a conjurer operating with a hat. This time he has produced the large kicking rabbits, but the initial movements do not seem as unsuspicious as usual.” (pp 17–18) Those who like what Chisholm does, will find fine detail in his paper, the comments, and his reply; unfortunately, for me Professor Chisholm's rabbits have the disconcerting invisibility of Harvey.

Frege: Philosophy of Language (Duckworth, London: 1973; xxv, 698) has been heralded as Michael Dummett's long-awaited magnum opus on Frege. Actually, however, as the author himself tells us, it is only the first of a two-volume series devoted to Frege's philosophy of language and his philosophy of mathematics respectively.

The book itself has been long in preparation, the writing of it having been interrupted for several years. This fact could not help but leave some marks on the organization and content of the various chapters. Still, all in all, it presents a remarkably interesting and provocative whole. It is topical, rather than purely genetic in approach, dealing with various fundamental features of Frege's philosophy of language in some 19 chapters; e.g., with his sense-reference distinction, his theory of assertions, his conception of the nature and place of truth-values, propositions and thoughts, his views on quantification and identity, the nature of proper names, his polemic about explicit vs. implicit (contextual) definitions, his theory of incomplete (predicative) expressions, and the like. However, the historical needs of the reader are also well-served.