A stranger runs out of a bank while I am sitting at the wheel of my car waiting for the lights to change; he jumps in beside me, points a gun at me, and says, “Drive me to St. Bruno.” This is Andre Gombay's example, from his excellent paper on duress. The question that interests Gombay and me is: Could I refrain from doing what the gunman asks?

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.

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.

De la spontanéité révolutionnaire, je dénnerai une prèmiere définition, extrêmement sommaire, qu'il faudra affiner. La spontanédité, c'est un mouvement et un événement qui ont des causes, qui ont des conditions, qui ont des raisons et des motivations, mais qui tendent a les deborder et à les dépasser. La spontan´ité constitue une expérience politique.

One of the main problems is of course the mind-body problem. It'snot really a question as to how there can be such disparate things as protons and electrons on the one hand, and such things as desires on the other, cohabiting the same universe and apparently having quite a lot to do with each other. For, provided that we are not squeamish about committing the pathetic fallacy, we can attribute desires to any kind of servomechanism, we can claim that the ordinary water closet, for example, wants to remain full at all times and when necessary acts so as to fulfil that desire. The question, as I see it, is rather, how there can be such a thing as consciousness of desire existing in universelargely unconscious.

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.

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).

In a recent article, Don Marquis canvasses the arguments on both sides of the abortion controversy and then puts forward his own argument against abortion:

A. To deprive someone of the value of his or her future is prima facie wrong.

B. The future an adult has is included in the future of the fetus it developed from.

C. Abortion deprives the fetus of the value of its future.

D. Therefore, abortion is prima facie wrong.

I wish to show that this reasoning in no way settles the issue of whether abortion is wrong. Section 1 concerns premise B, Sections 2 and 3 C, and Section 4 A.Notes

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.

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic (what is semantically important may not be important), and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis (advanced in [2] and [3] and in Chisholm [15]) – which implies the inadequacy of classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data.

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.

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.

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.

ABSTRACT: In his recent collection of essays, Language, Truth and History (2005), Donald Davidson appears to endorse a philosophy of language which gives primary importance to the notion of the speaker’s communicative intentions, a perspective on language not too dissimilar from that of Paul Grice. If that is right, then this would mark a major shift from the formal semanticist approach articulated and defended by Davidson in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). In this paper, I argue that although there are many similarities between these two thinkers, Davidson has not abandoned his earlier views on language