La linguistique saussurienne paraît avoir exercé, spécialement au cours des années 1951 à 1954, une influence assez considérable sur la pensée de Merleau-Ponty. Un travail de portée plus générale nous ayant amené à mesurer l'importance de la chose pour Pensemble de l'œuvre de ce philosophe, nous allons seulement essayer ici de prećiser un peu le rôle d'une telle influence en nous appuyant sur une analyse de l'interprétation de Saussure par Merleau-Ponty.

Dans la Phénoménologie de la Perception, celui-ci avait déjà consacré un chapitre à l'étude de la parole conçue comme gesticulation ou expression corporelle. Quand, en 1953–54, il abordera le Problème de la Parole, dans un cours au Collège de France, c'est à Saussure lui-même qu'il attribuera des vues assez voisines: “Le cours cherchait à illustrer et é étendre cette notion saussurienne de la parole comme fonction positive et conquérante.

The distinction between crimes that involve wrongs in themselves and crimes that are wrong because the law makes them so has long puzzled theorists. This essay argues that the distinction, while getting at something real, is based on a mistake. That mistake is made both by those who see moral wrongness as a necessary condition for criminality and by those who believe merely making something illegal is sufficient to make it criminal. Neither is correct. Rather, what makes something a criminal wrong is that it involves a violation of a law that has been justified in terms of “public reason.”

The relation of will to belief is an issue of perennial philosophical and religious interest. Most of the classical accounts of religious belief, both ancient and modern, have accorded the will an important, if not the decisive, role. In the philosophy of mind, the issue has traditionally been one of the major dividing lines, some philosophers arguing a position near that of Descartes, that the will is a constituent element of belief, others siding with Spinoza and Hume, arguing that it is not. But what really is the issue? Much recent discussion of belief and will has been devoted to the question whether we can believe at will apart from any sort of evidence—what has been called belief by fiat. While it may be that this is the most natural interpretation of the claim that belief is based on will, it is certainly not the only one. What is more, most of those who have argued for the importance of the will in belief have never really asserted it. No doubt, one can glean statements from their writings that seem to suggest it; but with due allowance for rhetorical excess, a careful reading of their positions will, I think, show that they were really dealing with other issues. What I hope to accomplish in raising again the issue of will and belief is to advance and defend a set of claims that gets at these other issues. Throughout, my concern will be primarily with religious beliefs, and this not simply out of personal and professional interest, but because the issues I want to discuss arise more clearly (though by no means exclusively) in relation to beliefs of this sort.

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.

In her recent paper, “Belief, Values and the Will,” Trudy Govier raises several interesting and challenging points. Most interesting is her conclusion that it is at least logically possible for a person to believe something “simply in virtue of having taken that decision,” i.e., by fiat. In otherwords, it is possible to believe something by an act of will.

On commémore assez couramment la naissance ou la mort d'un savant, qui sont deux événements contingents, étrangers à la valeur de l'homme, bien que le premier ait rendu cette valeur possible quant à la manifestation, et que le second l'ait rendue d'autant plus précieuse qu'il en a souligné la fragilité.

Paul Valéry a dit que «les grands hommes meurent deux fois, une fois comme hommes et une fois comme grands ». De Claude Bernard, on peut dire que l'année 1965 a confirmé sa survie comme grand, près d'un siècle après sa mort comme homme (1878), car ce qui fut célébré, au Collège de France, dans un Colloque à la fois historique et scientifique, c'est le Centenaire d'un grand livre. Commémoration done au plein sens du terme, puisqu'en identifiant un homme et son œuvre, la postérité ressuscitait le premier en reconnaissant et en proelamant la présence stimulante et agissante de la seconde dans l'univers de la culture.

Bogen has written an excellent book, packed with sensible and suggestive things about Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and about the problems that exercised him. Bogen treads successfully a narrow ridge few others have been able to tread. He has a very clear grasp of what both the earlier and the later Wittgenstein were up to, but he can stand back from Wittgenstein's work and present a lucid and dispassionate account of its philosophical strengths and weaknesses. He is not the kind of unsympathetic and unilluminating critic who regards the Wittgensteinian corpus as aphoristic, obscure and disorganized trivia. Nor is he the kind of acolyte who regards it as sufficient simply to refer his colleagues to the appropriate section of the Investigationswithout further explanation. Whatever thesis Bogen wants to find in Wittgenstein he documents fairly and carefully. Whatever view held by Wittgenstein Bogen wants to regard as penetrating or (even) correct, he usually defends himself independently of its being Wittgenstein's view and also of Wittgenstein's own arguments. Bogen also, in true Wittgensteinian fashion, makes throughout the book masterly use of the happy example. The net result is a book which can be read most profitably both by those interested in Wittgenstein and by those interested in the philosophy of language.

In 1931, writing in a personal journal, Wittgenstein enumerated the names of those thinkers whom he deemed to have been his most important intellectual influences. He makes the strong claim that these are thinkers whose seminal ideas he has taken over, further elaborated and incorporated into his own work. Here are the names he lists in their order of appearance: Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa. At the time of the first publication of this list in Culture and Value, those familiar primarily with the most widely read and influential writings on Wittgenstein and his philosophical influences, Norman Malcolm's Memoir (including Von Wright's introduction) and Toulmin and Janik's Wittgenstein's Vienna, would most likely have been surprised by the inclusion of Spengler's name. His is the only one on the list that does not appear in either book. Every other thinker named is not only mentioned as an influence on Wittgenstein in one or the other work, but some of the purported details of that influence are offered. And the appearance of Spengler's name is doubly surprising, given the relatively low esteem in which his work is generally held. Of the others listed, perhaps only Weininger fails to emerge as a respected figure.

My final aim in this paper is to show that Descartes is not guilty, as is so often maintained, of circular argumentation in the Meditations. But first it is important to uncover and remove certain tenacious misconceptions and confusions concerning what goes on in the Meditations which lend credence to the charge of circular argumentation. In this connection Mr. Harry Frankfurt's recent article, “Memory and the Cartesian Circle,” is peculiarly instructive; for it presents not only a completely untenable defence of Descartes but one that, implicitly at least, rests on the very misconceptions that give substance to the notion of a Cartesian Circle. With the intention, then, of clearing the ground for the construction of my own defence of Descartes, I shall spend the first part of this paper examining Frankfurt's central thesis, the errors contained in it, and their sources. This thesis is contained in his statement, which I shall henceforth designate by the letter “J,” “Descartes did not attempt to justify present clear and distinct perceptions.”

Suppose that we have negative, natural rights to our lives, liberty, and possessions and that these rights are absolute or indefeasible. Then at best only minimal states will be legitimate, where such are states that restrict their activities to the enforcement of the basic rights of individuals and the like. (Indeed, it is possible that no actual states, minimal or not, will be legitimate.) Such appears to be the consequence of absolute natural rights. When made aware of these implications of absolute natural rights, many philosophers deny their existence. In the absence of a convincing defense of absolute natural rights, the defense of the minimal state thereby loses force.

One of the main problems that Paul Horwich’s Minimalist theory of truth must face is the generalization problem, which shows that Minimalism is too weak to have the fundamental explanatory role Horwich claims it has. In this paper, I defend Horwich’s response to the generalization problem from an objection raised by Bradley Armour-Garb. I also argue that, given my response to Armour-Garb, Horwich’s proposal to cope with the generalization problem can be simplified.

ABSTRACT: In this paper I argue that John McDowell’s objections to Philipa Foot’s ethical naturalism do not justify a rejection of her views, but only clarifies what we can defensibly take from her position. Moreover, his comments suggest a way in which Foot’s naturalism may help to secure the realism McDowell defends in his own work. In seeing how Foot’s naturalism can reassure us of the reality of ethical reasons, we can understand how McDowell needs something like Foot’s naturalism in order to redeem his own realist aspirations for ethics.

Recent interpretations of Locke's primary/secondary quality distinction have tended to emphasize Locke's relationship to the corpuscularian science of his time, especially to that of Boyle. Although this trend may have corrected the unfortunate tendency to view Locke in isolation from his scientific contemporaries, it nevertheless has resulted in some over- simplifications and distortions of Locke's general enterprise. As everyone now agrees, Locke was attempting to provide a philosophical foundation for English corpuscularianism and one must therefore look not only at the current scientific hypotheses but also at the nature of the philosophical foundation Locke was attempting to erect. In particular, Locke made an attempt, based on epistemological principles, to give a philosophical justification of atomistic corpuscularianism. Moreover, he was not content to give this justification post hoc—the epistemological foundation was prior to, and determined the framework for, the details of the correct scientific theory. Locke's epistemology made legitimate an atomistic theory, one making crucial use of the notion of solidity in the definition of the elementary particles, although it did not prejudge the details of this theory.

This paper critiques Jesse Prinz’s rejection of Adam Smith’s model of impartial spectatorship as a viable corrective to empathic bias. I argue that Prinz’s case is unconvincing, insofar as it rests on an underdeveloped account of Smith’s view of critical self-regulation. By presenting a more detailed and attentive reading of Smithean impartial spectatorship, and exploring Smith’s compelling account of structural supports for sympathetic engagement, this paper demonstrates how Smith’s work is able to constructively engage with contemporary concerns regarding empathy’s role in guiding moral behaviour.

This paper is in two parts. I begin the first part by presenting a brief resume of an account of Hume's Section “Of Personal Identity” which I offered at length in a paper first published twenty years ago. I shall then try to respond to some criticisms of my interpretation of that Section. The authors of these criticisms consider that Hume's account of personal identity is less sceptical and more defensible than I suggested it is. The purpose of responding to these criticisms is not, I trust, that of protecting an ego: this would be an objective that would be uniquely inappropriate in such a context. It is rather to look again at some difficult but important problems in Humean exegesis. In the second part of the paper I turn to some criticisms that are commonly levelled against Hume, and which I have been inclined to subscribe to myself in the past. I do not think that a proper assessment of these criticisms depends upon accepting or rejecting the reading of Hume that I have tried to defend in the first part, so the two parts of the paper are largely independent of each other. I now incline to believe, however, that the criticisms I shall deal with in the second part are criticisms to which Hume has, or could find, quite plausible answers.

Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge was published in 1710, when he was only twenty-five. The public silence that greeted it stunned him. Even the ridicule that he had anticipated was initially confined to private circles. No doubt this mortifying experience reinforced his belief “that whatever doctrine contradicts vulgar and settled opinion” must “be introduced with great caution into the world”. It had, indeed, been for this reason that he had “omitted all mention of the non-existence of matter in the title-page, dedication, preface, and introduction to” his performance. In this way he hoped that “the notion of [immaterialism] might steal unawares on the reader, who possibly would never have meddled with a book that he had known contained such paradoxes”.

In 1972, one of Michelangelo's earliest and best-known Pietàs was attacked by an evident lunatic. Fifteen times it was struck with a ninepound hammer; the Madonna's arm was broken in several places, her nose was knocked off, and her eye and veil were badly chipped. Immediately after the assault, and before knowing precisely what was needed to be replaced, the Director of the Vatican Museum, Redig de Campos, decided that integral restoration was called for.