S'agissant du problème lié au statut de la connaissance humaine en général, la querelle du faillibilisme et du fondationnalisme n'est pas neuve. On peut même dire qu'elle parcourt l'histoire de la philosophie depuis ses tout débuts. Dans le contexte des préoccupations propres à la pensée contemporaine, cette querelle semble cependant se cristalliser autour de la question suivante : quel statut devons-nous aujourd'hui accorder à nos énoncés philosophiques? Pouvons-nous et devons-nous encore revendiquer pour ces énoncés, traditionnellement chargés d'établir les fondements et les principes premiers, un statut ontologique, sinon transcendantal? Ou au contraire, le développement des sciences expérimentales modernes, ayant éveillé en nous de manière sans cesse plus aiguë la conscience de la précarité de nos connaissances, ne nous incite-t-il pas désormais à envisager les propositions philosophiques comme n'étant rien de plus, malgre leur prétention et leur visée, que des énoncés faillibles, relatifs à l'expérience ou à l'histoire?

A recent aspect of Canadians' concern to discover their “national identity” has been the interest of some Canadians to discover the history of philosophy in their country. Several decades ago this interest scarcely existed. If any questions about the subject had been raised, the chances are they would have elicited sceptical smiles or yawns. Many would simply have denied—and a few still deny—that there is any “Canadian philosophy” at all. Nowadays, however, the climate of opinion is more accommodating, so that those who study and write about what past philosophers in this country have done can expect to receive a serious hearing. No doubt a conclusive case for the study has yet to be stated. But the most extensive speculative statement made thus far is the book by Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott which I shall comment on below.

L. W. Sumner's excellent book Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics has four central goals. He aims (1) to demonstrate the subjectivity of welfare (chaps. 1 to 3); (2) to show that the traditional subjective accounts of welfare—namely, hedonism and preference theories—are inadequate (chaps. 4 and 5); (3) to construct an alternative subjectivist account of welfare (chapter 6); and (4) to argue for the moral primacy of welfare (chap. 7). I will not comment here on Sumner's treatment of the subjectivity of welfare, as I have had my say on this topic elsewhere. In fact, my space here will only permit me to discuss the second and fourth goals of the book. Even with this narrow focus, I will be forced to leave unexplored a wealth of truly lovely work which passes by us on the road to these central conclusions.

L'histoire de la philosophie voit d'abord en Hobbes un spécialiste de la philosophie politique, au point qu'on en oublie souvent l'importance du reste de son oeuvre. Sans doute, il n'est pas faux d'insister sur la contribution hobbienne à la philosophie politique. Et de l'avis de Hobbes lui-même, c'est dans ce domaine qu'il avait été particulièrement novateur. Cependant, son ambition était plus large: il voulait construire un système entier de philosophie, dont la politique ne devait représenter que la dernière partie. En effet, selon l'ordre de sa grande oeuvre, les Eléments de la philosophie, l'exposé du système total se divisait en trois grands livres: Du corps, De l'homme et Du citoyen. Apparemment, le système devait donc se composer des trois parties suivantes: une physique, une anthropologie et une science politique. En fait, le premier volume, sur le corps, comporte également la méthodologie, la logique et la philosophie première. La division en trois a pourtant sa vérité, et même une vérité troublante si l'on prend au sérieux la volonté hobbienne de constituer un système rigoureux dans lequel les sciences de l'homme et de la politique résulteraient de celle des corps en général, en ce sens du moins que les dernières sciences supposeraient les principes des premières. Car il semble que Hobbes ait admis une certaine autonomie des trois grandes parties de son système, au point que, par exemple, la politique paraît pouvoir trouver son propre fondement en elle-même, sans référence particulière aux développements de la physique.

The Laboratory of the Mind was written with two purposes in mind. The first was to contribute to the growing literature on thought experiments (TE) with a selection of the most interesting examples of the genre. The second and much more ambitious purpose was to serve as a “first attempt at a (modern) rationalist interpretation of science” (p. x).

The problem. The purpose of this paper is to provide a general discussion of Aristotle's views on scientific explanation, by which I mean a discussion of Aristotle's treatment of scientific explanation, its structure and its principles, as distinct from Aristotle's own principles of explanation. By means of this distinction I hope to be excused from a discussion of Aristotle on form and matter, potentiality and actuality, and the four causes, and to avoid so far as possible the controversy among commentators concerning the respective merits of Aristotle qua naturalist and Aristotle qua pre-Thomist Thomist. I wish to be excused from treating these problems in order to approach directly Aristotle's formal treatment of scientific explanation as given in the Posterior Analytics, but if I were to be accused of introducing a distinction between parts of the Aristotelian corpus for which there is insufficient warrant, if I were told that I am making an illegitimate abstraction from the whole of which the Posterior Analytics is but a part, I should plead not guilty.

Group rights have long been of special concern to Canadians. Quebec has maintained a distinct language and civil law system, and Canada's Aboriginal Peoples have always had (“enjoyed” is perhaps the wrong word here) different legal rights from those of other Canadians. Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau sought to reduce the significance of these special protections. He argued that they were the product of historical compromise and political wrangling rather than of any principled vision ofjustice. As a result, he opposed any special status for Quebec in favour of nationwide bilingualism, and sought to dismantle the reserve system for the First Nations. He sought to replace both with the idea of universal citizenship.

It is incorrect to construe Hume as a Pyrrhonian sceptic. Or so I have argued elsewhere. To the contrary, Hume in fact offers a detailed defence of the thesis that the norms of scientific inference, that is, the “rules by which to judge of causes and effects”, are reasonable rules to follow in forming our beliefs. Conforming to these rules in its formation of causal beliefs is a strategy the understanding employs in order to satisfy the end of curiosity (T271). Science is reasonable because, so far as we can, within our fallible limits, discover, it is the strategy of belief formation that is the best means of achieving our end of truth, insofar as the latter is, within our fallible limits, attainable.

In what follows I will sketch a very simple possible-world semantics which will allow us to sharpen the notion of a non-reductive, but materialist, mind-body identity theory. This simple semantics will enable us to characterize the various possible positions on mind-body identity and display the range of positions with respect to psycho-physical reduction. Though I am sympathetic to a non-reductive position which I label “autonomous monism”, I will be concerned here less with presenting positive arguments for that position than with describing a framework in which such arguments can be made and pointing out the issues that the position raises. The discussion achieves its abstract viewpoint at the cost of slightly idealizing the process of theory reduction, but the overview attained is worth the price.

The purpose of this paper is to show that we should dispense with the concept of immediate awareness, when it takes for its object the existence and nature of our sensations and images.

The question of whether we are immediately aware of the existence and nature of our sensations and images cannot be answered in a reasonable manner unless we have a firm grip on the concept of immediate awareness. Philosophers who have employed it have usually employed it in such a way that the word “immediate” in the corresponding phrase “immediate awareness” describes both the nature of the awareness and how it came to have that nature. When it describes the nature of the awareness “immediate” means “incorrigible”.

ABSTRACT: This paper suggests that it is largely a want of notional distinctions which fosters the “explanatory gap” that has beset the study of consciousness since T. Nagel’s revival of the topic. Modifying Ned Block’s controversial claim that we should countenance a “phenomenal-consciousness” which exists in its own right, we argue that there is a way to recuperate the intuitions he appeals to without engaging in an onerous reification of the facet in question. By renewing with the full type/token/tone trichotomy developed by C. S. Peirce, we think the distinctness Block (rightly) calls attention to can be seen as stemming not from any separate module lurking within the mind, but rather from our ability to prescind qualities from occurrences.

Amartya Sen argues that a conception of impartiality built upon “trans-positional objectivity” provides a potential remedy to conflicts of distributive justice by securing the most “reasonable reasons” in a debate. This article undertakes a critical analysis of Sen’s theory by contrasting it with Paul Ricoeur’s claim that impartiality is a normative concept and therefore that the demand faced within the arena of competing distributive claims is not one of providing the most reasonable reasons but of exposing and understanding the role of convictions that underwrite normative frameworks, or ethical orders.