Ever since classical times, both Greek and Roman, friendship as a philosophical topic has been on the wane. The only notable exception is Montaigne's essay which, however, owes much to classical treatments. This decline of philosophical interest in friendship is not easy to account for. Alasdair McIntyre's overall thesis in After Virtue seemingly affords him with a ready interpretation. The progressive atomization of society, together with the concurrent growth of individualism that characterizes the modern era, claims McIntyre, are responsible for the demotion of friendship from the public to the private sphere.

Central to the Empiricist conception of matter and epistemology is the distinction between the primary and secondary properties. This distinction is part of the apparatus needed to formulate and answer the question «What aspects of perceptual information yield true knowledge of reality?” Correlatively, the distinction enables the reconciliation of the commonsense and scientific conceptions of matter in the fundamental Lockean tenet that matter possesses only the primary qualities.

In their History of Canadian philosophy, The Faces of Reason, Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott introduce the concept “philosophical federalism” to describe a tendency shared by many of the early Canadian idealists, a willingness to attempt to understand and accommodate philosophical positions opposed to their own. In this paper I wish to examine the relationship this concept bears to another one, which many still regard as merely an Utopian ideal, that of world federalism.

Charles Taylor begins his essay “Kant's Theory of Freedom” by stating that in the last three centuries people have sought recognition, equality and justice as corollaries of “liberation”. The process, he says, “has been punctuated, and partly shaped, by paradigm statements by major thinkers …. Among these statements, Kant's has been very important. It marked a crucial step on the way.” Similar sentiments are expressed by Hayek, Rawls and others.

Quand meurt un philosophe tous les autres héritiers. La disparition rećente de Gaston Bachelard n'a donc pas seulement pour effet d'endeuiller la pensée françhise, elle est ressentie comme une invitation à dresser un premier bilan de l'ceuvre qu'il nous a léguée. Or cette oeuvre surprend autant par la profondeur de ses assises culturelles que par l'aisance avec laquelle elle s'introduit puis s'impose, en des secteurs de l'activité humaine qui paraissent souvent fort éloignés les uns des autres. Chez Bachelard ce n'était pas seulement un philosophe doublé d'un homme de science qui parlait, ce qui eut déjà constitué une performance remarquable. C'était aussi un artiste attentif aux rêveries et aux songes et un poète autant qu'un analyste du subconscient. Bachelard a done fait œuvre d'imagination aussi bien que de raison. Il a voulu mener la double vie de l'homme nocturne et de l'homme diurne et de ce fait s'est acquis la double audience des hommes de lettres et des hommes de science.

For a variety of reasons, the AIDS epidemic is forcing a thorough reassessment of many of the standards by which the terminally ill and other medical patients are treated by health-care systems throughout the world. This has generally been a good thing. It has provided needed motivation for public policy-makers to take seriously a range of health-care issues that have often been downplayed, ignored, or debated with vigour only within the relatively mute pages of the academic journals of health-care professionals, philosophers, law professors and others. Issues such as euthanasia, testing for dangerous communicable diseases, palliative care, and even important general questions about the distribution and availability of health-care resources have been pushed toward the front of the public health-care agenda largely because of the impact of AIDS. And it is fair to say that these matters are often being addressed with an urgency and sensitivity that would be absent without the political impetus that was unleashed along with this disease. One of the most controversial issues that has arisen concerns access to experimental therapies by the terminally ill. As is the case in other areas, the political forces generated by the AIDS tragedy have created an opportunity for productive review of policies and practices that undoubtedly deserve scrutiny and reform. However, my aim in this paper is to urge caution on some of the advocates of reform. I will argue that many recent proposals to enhance access to experimental therapies by the terminally ill rest on philosophically unsupportable grounds and pose an unjustifiable threat to the public interest in finding safe and effective therapies for terminal illnesses.

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.

At the beginning of the third Section of the Groundwork, Kant appears to state the synthetic a priori proposition which it is the business of that Section to justify. It is: “An absolutely good will is one whose maxim can always have as its content itself considered as a universal law.” I shall contend that a consideration of Kant's use of analytic method shows that he is committed to regard this proposition not as synthetic, but rather as analytic. Hence, I shall contend that his statement of the proposition to be justified in the third Section is a slip, which hinders the study of the third Section and which, therefore, requires a textual emendation. Kant, I claim, does not attempt to justify this proposition but another.

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.

In this paper, I argue that John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson's ‘process manifesto’ is ironically more sympathetic to descriptive metaphysics than to revisionary metaphysics. Focusing on their argument that any process philosophy automatically slides into Whiteheadian obscurantism if it does not just rest content with revealing the problematic features of ordinary language, I argue that their position occludes a logical space, one in which revisionary metaphysics is articulated without any Whiteheadian obscurantism and involves no dereliction of critical/revisionary orientation. I argue that key features of the respective critical social ontologies of Judith Butler and Talia Mae Bettcher occupy such a logical space.

This article addresses two main concerns: first, the relation between the truth/falsehood and purity/impurity criteria as applied to pleasure, and, second, the status of our pleasures of learning. In addressing the first, I argue that Plato keeps the truth/falsehood and purity/impurity criteria distinct in his assessment of pleasures and thus leaves room for the possibility of hybrid pleasures in the form of true impure pleasures and false pure pleasures. In addressing the second issue, I show that Plato's view is perfectly able to accommodate an understanding of our pleasures of learning as pure pleasures even if such pleasures are preceded by awareness of a lack (ignorance).

Scholarship on the political ramifications of Aristotle’s account of friendship has focused on “political friendship” and has lost sight of the importance of his account of “like-mindedness” or “concord” (ὁμόνοια). Such a focus is mistaken for a number of reasons, not least of which is that, whereas Aristotle has a determinate account of like-mindedness, he has almost nothing to say about political friendship. My paper examines the ethical and political aspects of like-mindedness in light of a disagreement between Richard Bodéüs and René Gauthier about the autonomy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a work of ethical theory.

I raise questions about Chakravartty's voluntarism about stances: supposing that we recognize a hierarchy of stances, voluntarism might be at once true (in an ultimate sense) but misleading when it comes to the practical tenability of pursuing certain debates in the philosophy of science, such as the debate about scientific realism or how to ‘naturalize’ metaphysics.

This paper identifies a puzzle that emerges when recent work on the suspension of judgement is integrated with evidentialist solutions to the wrong kind of reasons problem: it looks like there is no such thing as a reason to suspend judgement. Two possible responses to this puzzle are considered: one recharacterizes the suspension of judgement as a mental action, and the other recharacterizes it as a second-order attitude. It is argued that these responses sidestep the puzzle only with unacceptable compromise to the view of suspension of judgement.

ABSTRACT: As Smith freed moral philosophy from former control bodies (the Church, the state), the Scottish philosopher opened the field for a scientific political economy. In his Adam Smith. Philosophie et économie (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1990, p. 45), Jean Mathiot asked : «Should then one wonder that his [Smith’s] audacious stand became the historical grounding stone for political economy, then bringing recognition as an objectively-grounded field of knowledge?» Mathiot’s text and thought have been little debated to this day; this essay is meant to fill that gap, in particular with regard to the history of Smith’s reception in France. Mathiot sought to understand better the “impartial spectator” using a new character whom he claimed Smith was implicitly sketching, and whom he called “the impartial laborer”. To Mathiot’s mind, from the Theory of moral sentiments (1759) to the Wealth of Nations (1776), the link is nothing else than Smith’s own philosophy.

This article explores the relation between Descartes's appeal to God's veracity and his connected notions of “metaphysical” and “moral” certainty. I do this by showing their roles in his proof of the external world, his position on other minds, and his position on the “beast-machine.” Descartes uses God's veracity in the first proof, but not in the second or third. I suggest that the reason for this is that extending his appeal to God to other minds would have placed his beast-machine doctrine in jeopardy. I conclude by accounting for some Cartesian passages that might seem incompatible with my reading of moral certainty's important role in his philosophy.

L'Æsthetica de Baumgarten est restée depuis plus de deux cents ans dans l'ombre de la «révolution» au moins nominale qu'elle a représentée pour l'histoire de la philosophic moderne. Et de fait, Baumgarten doit moins son importance historique à l'évaluation rigoureuse qu'on a pu faire des concepts qu'il a contribué à développer, qu'à l'ouverture d'un champ théorique et philosophique particulier. Car quelles que soient les limites et les lacunes historiques de son projet théorique, il n'en reste pas moins qu'une grande partie de la tradition philosophique de l'esthétique, en particulier dans le contexte de la philosophie allemande, y a trouvé la possibilité d'une unification et comme la marque d'une «origine». C'est Baumgarten qui, le premier en Allemagne, a réuni les conditions nécessaires pour assurer à la théorie de l'art et du beau une cohérence systématique qui lui avait été auparavant refusée et, par voie de conséquence, pour lui permettre de former un champ théorique et philosophique distinct. On a souvent fait remarquer que Baumgarten avait «inventé» très peu de thèmes nouveaux en esthétique; et il est indéniable qu'il s'est contenté la plupart du temps de réorganiser, dans ses observations, un matériau à la fois ancien et restreint, qu'il tire presque exclusivement de la rhétorique et de la poétique traditionnelles. Mais la pertinence historique de sa pensée tient plutôt au fait qu'il crée une nouvelle perspective unifiée, un nouveau centre de gravité qui permet d'organiser de façon neuve un ensemble de phénomènes qui avaient été traités avant lui de façon indépendante.