Modern philosophy, if it has not settled any other of the chronic disputes that have troubled the history of the subject, appears to have decided once and for all the question of synthetic a priori principles. Logical analysis has demonstrated that synthetic propositions are empirical while a priori propositions are analytical and notational. Nevertheless, a broader survey of the contemporary philosophical scene reveals that the strict meaning of the expression “modern philosophy” above should be rendered “philosophers of one of the current schools of philosophy”. For contemporary European philosophers have not abandoned the notion of synthetic a priori principles altogether. They have modified without abandoning Kant's Copernican discovery of the laws of nature in the human mind. There are, to be sure, two ways of viewing the situation. Either logical analysis has overlooked certain unique phenomena and thus has failed to comprehend the arguments which take their description as premises, or existentialism has persisted in the use of an inadequate logic. The purpose of this paper is to test this issue and in doing so to explore the psychological roots of the idea of synthetic a priori principles. The means adopted is a critical study of the existentialist theory of emotion which claims to have discovered a previously unrecognized basis for synthetic a priori principles in the phenomenelogy of human existence.

An Acquaintance of mine decided, in the late 1950s, to become an officer in the U.S. Navy, until he discovered a Navy regulation stating that ugly men would not be accepted as officer candidates. Surely there is something suspicious about such a policy. Yet, in a time when people are so conscious of the many forms of discrimination — race, colour, sex, age, religion — it is somewhat surprising that little serious attention is given to the practice of what I shall call ‘aesthetic discrimination against persons’, discrimination on the basis of appearance or looks. It is true that, in recent years, some social scientists have conducted research leading them to the conclusion that human beings prefer and esteem good looking people over plain or ugly ones (a conclusion the truth of which has been known for thousands of years prior to its ‘proof’). A few of these researchers have even been willing to venture moral opinions on the subject.

1. The problem: Here are three plausible but incompatible propositions:

(1) The answer to Locke's question (23):

Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night … I ask … whether the day and the night man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato ?

is yes.

(2) I am a human being. More generally, human persons are human beings.

(3) Identity is not relative.

On rencontre encore cette idée d'une triple révolution: Copernic, Darwin, Freud. La première phase fera l'objet de nos réflexions. Elle a été conçue par Freud comme une blessure au narcissisme humain. « Le narcissisme universel des hommes, leur amour d'eux-mêmes, nous dit Ricœur expliquant Freud, a, jusqu'à présent, subi trois sévères coups de la part de la science: ce fut d'abord la position centrale de la terre qui fut contesée par Copernic, puis … « Freud lui-même nous dit que pour l'homme pré-copernicien » la position centrale de la terre indiquait qu'elle jouait un rôle dominant dans l'univers et concordait avec la tendance qu'il avait à se considérer comme maître du monde «. Et à l'époque de Freud des historiens de la science abondèrent dans le même sens: au « moyen âge », la terre et l'homme étaient au centre de l'univers et cette position était la plus honorable.

Qualia epiphenomenalism is the view that qualitative properties of events, such as the raw feel of tastes or painfulness, lack causal efficacy. One common objection to qualia epiphenomenalism is the epistemic argument, which states that this loss of causal efficacy undermines our capacity to know about these epiphenomenal qualitative properties (Sterjnberg, 1999; Watkins, 1989). A number of rejoinders have been offered up to insulate qualia epiphenomenalism from the epistemic argument. In this paper I consider and ultimately reject two such replies, namely, the common underlying cause reply and the appeal to physical-effect epiphenomenalism.

In a Recent article [9], Alexander Rosenberg attacks the “manipulative” view of causation as being unilluminating and as being beset with difficulties. As a proponent of that view [3], I have felt it necessary to take up cudgels in its defence.

Rosenberg's criticisms are directed at Gasking's version of this view [5]. Gasking's recipe for causation is, “one says ‘A causes B’ in cases where one could produce an event of the A sort as a means to producing one of the B sort” (p. 485). Here it is taken for granted that we have general manipulative techniques for producing events of the A sort and that this is implicitly assumed when one speaks of A as a cause. There is one qualification to this formula for causes which arises from the necessity for individuating processes, namely, that, for A to be the cause of B, it must not always lead to B (for then the technique for producing A would also be a B-producing one), but only in special cases.

Marx called a social pattern “contradictory” if the conditions of its maintenance are also key ingredients for its demise. The science of ecology, too, studies patterns the conditions for whose maintenance are also key ingredients for their demise. The historical materialist notion of contradiction has a close counterpart in the ecological notion of succession. Succession is a process by which the structure of a biological community—both niche structure and species structure—changes as a result of each species' modification of the habitat. Just by living, each species members alters its environment, and in non-climax communities these effects, summed over all living things, constitute disequilibria. The habitat changes, and with it the niche structure. Gradually the species structure of the community changes. Each seral stage, with its distinctive species structure, requires for its maintenance the ongoing existence of living members of each species in the structure; yet this condition is the key ingredient for succession, for the demise of the seral stage. Succession results, in effect, from contradictions that are present in each seral stage. (For an illustrative example of seral stages and biological succession, see the Appendix.)

John Locke, in his Essay, poses the following problem:

It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge, therefore, is real only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the reality of things. But what shall be here the criterion? How shall the mind, when it perceives nothing but its own ideas, know that they agree with things themselves?

The word δξα is used frequently by Plato and with the many shades of meaning that it had in the idiomatic Greek of his time. References to all its occurrences and to those of δοξζω in the Platonic corpus Lafrance gives in an appendix to his book (415–422); and from these in his first chapter (19–33) he selects typical cases to exemplify a score or more of what he calls “literary” meanings, which he divides into two main groups, the objective sense, “appearance”, and the subjective, “opinion”. By eliminating the occurrences of doxa in these colloquial or “literary” senses he restricts his investigation to Plato's philosophical uses of the term, disregarding even the occurrences of these in what he deems to be merely repetitious or undeveloped passages and subjecting to minute analysis only the most fully developed and consequently most significant philosophical passages concerned with doxa. This is the fourth of the four methodological principles that are formulated by Lafrance to govern his investigation and read in the light of which the dialogues, he believes, reveal an intelligibly coherent theory of doxa (15–18). According to the first of these principles in the reading of any Platonic text there must be borne in mind the period of Plato's intellectual evolution in which it was written and the nature of his epistemological notions at that moment; according to the second, Platonic dialogues being genuine philosophical dramas, it is always as fulfilling a function in a definite dramatic situation that Plato discloses his thought to the precise extent that he has decided to do so, and consequently any passage on doxa, to which as such no dialogue is devoted, must be understood in the light of the context in which the question of doxa has arisen. According to the third principle the understanding of a Platonic text requires that account be taken of the scholarly literature dealing with it.

In some of his last publications, R. G. Collingwood takes the position that problems in philosophy are not eternal. Such a denial, in the context of the controversies concerning the overall interpretation of Collingwood's work, is significant for at least two reasons: it seems to suggest an “atomistic” view of the history of philosophy on Collingwood's part, perhaps one that resembles that of the history of science as offered in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Also, the denial seems to reverse Collingwood's earlier views which insisted on a philosophia perennis, and this would support those who maintain that at some point Collingwood's thought underwent a “radical conversion”.

Since some moral philosophers take inspiration from David Hume, and some think that there are moral questions to do with the relative status of the two sexes of humans, it is worth looking to Hume for assistance on this topic. His opinions are not explicit, for nowhere, to my knowledge, does he openly address the Woman Question. Nevertheless, I find that he exposes himself in three places. Consider them in turn.

L'intentionnalité pose aux philosophes qui se réclament du matérialisme ou du physicalisme deux problèmes complémentaires qui sont les deux faces d'une même médaille. Premièrement, peut-on naturaliser l'intentionnalité? Deuxièmement, les propriétés intentionnelles des représentations sont-elles causalement efficaces? Un moteur peut-il être sémantique?