In the first section of this paper I offer a necessary condition (Moore's maxim) for members of a particular class of arguments to be acceptable as proofs. (Throughout I ignore proofs within formal systems.) In the second section, I point out that a plausible extension of this principle reveals that a number of additional arguments cannot function successfully as proofs. Finally, I note that a number of theological arguments, particularly cosmological and ontological arguments, are suspect in the light of this extended principle. Standardly in the ontological argument, criticism falls on the conditional, modality-enriching premise which involves a move from possibility (or conceivability) to actuality. I offer two defences of this premise, and argue that—as the use of Moore's extended maxim shows—the problem lies with the premise that asserts mere possibility.

If there is one aspect of David Gauthier's program for a contractualist morality that has been most sceptically received, it is his view that instrumentally rational agents would choose to adopt a disposition that would in turn constrain their future choices. Instead of remaining “straightforward maximizers” caught in a suboptimal state of nature, they would become “constrained maximizers” who could avoid prisoner's dilemmas (PDs) by engaging in conditional co-operation. Apart from the fact that Gauthier's entirely prescriptive orientation leads him to omit any specification of the mechanism through which this might be accomplished, serious doubts have been raised about the adequacy of the argument that he offers in support of adopting constrained maximization.

The appraisal model of love is object-centred and reasons-based: love is based on reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved. The bestowal model of love is subject-centred and non-reasons-based: love is not based on reasons derived from the valuable properties of the beloved, but rather originates in the lover. In this paper, I blend these disparate models, with the aim of preserving their virtues and overcoming their difficulties. I propose a subject-centred, reasons-based account: love arises within the lover, but, within the lover, love is based on the lover’s motivating reasons.

ABSTRACT: In the first part of the paper, I’ll rehearse an argument that perceiving that we see and hear isn’t a special case of perception in Aristotle but is rather a necessary condition for any perception whatsoever: the turning of one’s attention to the affection of the sense organs. In the second part of the paper, I’ll consider the thesis that the activity of the active intellect is analogous to perceiving that we see and hear.

We begin by discussing some logical constraints on the psychological approach to personal identity. We consider a problem for the psychological approach that arises in fission cases. The problem engenders the need for a non-branching clause in a psychological account of the co-personality relation. We look at some difficulties in formulating such a clause. We end by rejecting a recently proposed formulation of non-branching. Our criticism of the formulation raises some interesting questions about the individuation of person stages.

In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, K. R. Popper says that he has A. provided “a mathematical refutation of all those theories of induction which identify the degree to which a statement is supported or confirmed or corroborated by empirical tests with its degree of probability in the sense of the calculus of probability.” He tells us that “those who identify, explicitly or implicitly, degree of corroboration, or of confirmation, or of acceptability, with probability [are] Keynes, Jeffreys, Reichenbach, Kaila, Hosiasson, and, more recently, Carnap.”

La sémiologie est une discipline en gestation: ni ses concepts de base, ni sa méthode, ni son champ d'application ne sont encore parfaitement délimités. En cette nébuleuse nous voudrions toutefois montrer que s'esquisse un système stellaire polarisé par la notion de signe. Qu'un tel système ne soit pas encore visible à l'œil nu, cela dépend surtout, croyons-nous, d'une part du vocabulaire utilisé par les sémiologues, qui tantôt manipulent les mêmes termes en des acceptions différentes, tantôt conférent à des termes différents le même sens, d'autre part du fait que les distinctions sous-jacentes à certains choix ne sont pas considérées comme les éléments d'une combinatoire susceptible d'articuler les diverses positions possibles. Notre démonstration portera sur le champ d'application de la sémiologie: nous nous livrerons en premier lieu à un inventaire des principales tendances qui le parcourent, pour ensuite comparer ces tendances entre elles et reconstruire le système à l'intérieur duquel elles s'insèrent.

BonJour claims that he has found a way out of the Sellarsian dilemma. In this paper, I argue for three claims to show that his alleged solution fails. First, there are two requirements for being a good reason, and BonJour’s notion of non-conceptual awareness of sensory experience faces a serious dilemma with regard to these requirements. Second, he derives his idea of the so-called “constitutive awareness of content” from his conception of conscious occurrent belief. But this conception also faces an analogous dilemma with regard to these requirements. Third, his explanatory account faces the problem of representation.

Willard thinks we should be puzzled and perplexed about the relevance of morality in deciding what to do. His puzzlement stems from not being able to see any connection between facts and values. In particular, he holds that moral rights (if there are any) cannot be based on needs because needs are not really facts and, even if they were, there seems no way to bridge the fact/value gap between needs (construed as facts) and moral rights.

Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life, according to which the living is a normative subject, grounds its epistemology in medicine. Medicine is a technique or an art that aims to restore the individual normativity of the patient. It can only be practiced based on the knowledge and understanding of the life norms, and on experience and values, in other words, on the subjectivity. This explains why the clinic and the therapeutics require a personal relationship between the physician and the patient.

In Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought, Robert McRae alleges a flat “contradiction” (McRae 1976, p. 30) at the heart of Leibniz's doctrine of three grades of monads: bare entelechies characterized by perception; animal souls capable both of perception and of sensation; and rational souls, minds or spirits endowed not only with capacities for perception and sensation but also with consciousness of self or what Leibniz calls (introducing a new term of art into the vocabulary of philosophy) “apperception.” Apperception is a necessary condition of those distinctively human mental processes associated with understanding and with reason. Insofar as it is also a sufficient condition of rationality, it is not ascribable to animals. But apperception is a necessary condition of sensation or feeling as well; and animals are capable of sensation, according to Leibniz, who decisively rejected the Cartesian doctrine that beasts are nothing but material automata. “On the one hand,” writes McRae, “what distinguishes animals from lower forms of life is sensation or feeling, but on the other hand apperception is a necessary condition of sensation, and apperception distinguishes human beings from animals” (McRae 1976, p. 30). “We are thus left with an unresolved inconsistency in Leibniz's account of sensation, so far as sensation is attributable both to men and animals” (ibid., p. 34).

Recently, Brian Ellis came up with a neat and novel idea about laws of nature, which at first I misunderstood. Then I participated, with Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, in writing a joint paper, “The World as One of a Kind: Natural Necessity and Laws of Nature” (Ellis, Bigelow and Lierse, forthcoming). In this paper, the Ellis idea was formulated in a different way from that in which I had originally interpreted it. Little weight was placed on possible worlds or individual essences. Much weight rested on natural kinds. I thought Ellis to be suggesting that laws of nature attribute essential properties to one grand individual, The World. In fact, Ellis is hostile towards individual essences for any individuals at all, including The World. He is comfortable only with essential properties of kinds, rather than individuals. The Ellis conjecture was that laws of nature attribute essential properties to the natural kind of which the actual world is one (and presumably the only) member.

When the history of philosophy is painted in broad strokes, the philosophy of Descartes is generally regarded as the major watershed between classical and modern outlooks. Although Descartes himself was more concerned with epistemology and metaphysics than with axiology, his successors have generally drawn as an axiological corollary of his metaphysical bifurcation of reality the thesis that all final or intrinsic values, if they exist at all, exist only in the domain of conscious subjects, or at the very least as relata dependent upon such subjects. These subjects may indeed extend beyond humankind to include gods or beasts or even, according to the speculative flights of some, the “occasions of experience” of Whiteheadian panpsychists or the universal mind of the idealists. The common denominator of all these accounts, however, is that values essentially depend upon human or quasi-human entities, i.e., conscious, experiencing subjects. This post-Cartesian thesis is in marked contrast to the axiological realism of the classical world of Plato and Aristotle, which concurs with large segments of common sense in finding objects to exist with their axiological properties independently of human and similar subjects. The Cartesian legacy in axiology has been to encourage the exploration of human values and experiences of value while creating a moratorium on the investigation of subject-independent values.

No aspect of Locke's Essay has received more attention than his theory of personal identity. Yet surprisingly little attention has been given to the intellectual context in which it was written. This is particularly noteworthy in that the chapter in which the theory is developed, “Of Identity and Diversity” (II,xxvii), has a history quite independent of the bulk of the Essay. Added only in the second edition (1694), the theory constitutes a rather late chapter in Locke's intellectual biography. In contrast to other major themes of the Essay, such as the origin of our ideas, substance, power, essence, etc., which received their early development in the various drafts of the Essay (the first being dated 1670), Locke's views on personal identity were apparently first formulated in a note in his 1683 journal.

We argue that friendship is constituted in the practice of narration, not merely identified through psychological or sociological criteria. We show that whether two people have, as Aristotle argues, ‘lived together’ in ‘mutually acknowledged goodwill’ can be determined only through a narrative reconstruction of a shared past. We demonstrate this with a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship (1982). We argue that this book provides not only an illustration but also an enactment of the practice of friendship as the urge to redeem—and thus to instantiate—Aristotelian suzên (‘living together’) by means of its telling.

This has been a great century for logic and the foundations of mathematics. Ewald's excellent sourcebook is a welcome addition to the literature on the exciting developments of this and the past two centuries. The richness of the material on which Ewald is drawing is shown by the fact that he has assembled a broad and representative selection without once duplicating anything to be found in the famous sourcebooks of van Heijenoort and Benacerraf/Putnam.