Andre Gombay gives a penetrating, accurate account of the functioning of duress as a defence in current Canadian law, and puts forward an intelligent and very appealing suggestion as to how the law on duress might be reformed. As part of the underpinnings for his reform proposals, he attempts to unravel the elements of justification and excuse that intertwine in duress and provides his analysis of how duress is distinguishable from other excuses or defences. I agree with him that the present working conception of duress in law falls far short of its appropriate moral potential as a defence, and I wish in these comments to support his proposals for reform. However, I think his arguments regarding the nature of duress, and its bearing on our responsibility for what we do under duress, are less persuasive, and it is here that I will begin.

In a recent issue of Dialogue, John O. Nelson corrects what appears to be an inexplicable error in the Haldane-Ross edition of Descartes' Meditations. At a “very crucial place,” he tells us, the translation “fails to do justice to Descartes' text.”

In Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume examines the idea of necessary connection, which, he observes, forms an indispensable part of our idea of cause and effect. He concludes:

The idea of necessity arises from some impression. There is no impression convey'd by our senses, which can give rise to that idea. It must, therefore, by deriv'd from some internal impression, or impression of reflexion. There is no internal impression which has any relation to the present business, but that propensity, which custom produces, to pass from an object to the idea of its usual attendant. This therefore is the essence of necessity. Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from causes to effects and from effects to causes, according to their experienced union.

In the first part of this paper I will outline a feature of Wittgenstein's later views which has not to my knowledge been much noticed. In the second part I will suggest some light that it casts on two main Wittgensteinian themes. In the third part I will offer some critical ruminations.

The aim of this article is to discuss the transcendental status of Kant's moral philosophy. Despite what is usually thought among scholars, we intend to demonstrate that morality for Kant is not part of transcendental philosophy. We shall at first recall the reasons that have driven Kant to separate morality from the transcendental philosophy. Kant's position seems both firm and clear: morality, although involving a priori concepts such as the moral law, is not a transcendantal knowledge because its major concept, the will, is not pure enough; it refers somehow to experience. On the other hand, after considering the positions of renowned scholars such as Gueroult, Delbos, and Höffe, who claim that Kant's morality became partially or totally transcendantal since the writing of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, we suggest that Kant had then found the right way to establish on a critical basis a future metaphysics of morals.

Various philosophical accounts of function attributions have taken the following form: f is a function of a structure X in a system S if and only if X does f in S and f causally contributes to G. While sharing this form, these accounts disagree over how “G” is to be specified. Specifications of “G” range from the fairly determinate (e.g., “the reproductive capacity of S”, or “the survival of S”) to the less determinate (e.g., “some goal of S” or “some good of S”). Although much of the debate over functions has been concerned with the proper characterization of “G”, it has become apparent that theories which fit this schema are subject to now-standard counterexamples in which f does in fact causally contribute to the realization of G, but f fails to be a function of X in that f's contribution is accidental in nature. Consider, for example, goal-state theory according to which f is a function of X in S just in case f contributes to the realization of some goal of S. Imagine that Jones has a silver dollar in his shirt pocket which deflects a bullet meant for his chest. Assuming that the coin is in Jones's pocket for reasons unrelated to his goal of continued existence, although the coin contributes to this goal, it does not have the function of “bullet deflector” since its contribution is merely accidental. We can easily generate similar counter-examples for other theories which fit this schema but differ in how “G” is specified. I will call this the problem of “accidental G-generating effects”. Counterexamples of this type have put pressure on theorists to modify this schema or at least to add additional conditions in order to rule out “accidental functions”. In this paper I will first examine various modifications which have been suggested for avoiding this type of counterexample, and then develop a new approach to the question of “accidental functions”.

The Faces of Reason, though it was mostly written in peaceful surroundings in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, arose in part out of a rather tumultuous debate about Canadian culture, its nature, its background, and its prospects. It also arose partly out of a consideration of philosophy in Canada and its failure, already evident in the 1960s, to deal with questions which seemed obvious to anyone with a grasp of Canadian intellectual history, but which never seemed to occur to the young philosophers from the United States and Britain who manned the growing number of philosophy departments in English Canada.

If Hegel's philosophy were to be characterized by a phrase, it might be “The Dialectical System of Absolute Spirit.” The phrase would seem formidable to some but merely pretentious to others. There are recent signs of an exhumation of the systematic features of Hegel's philosophy in the English-speaking world, and it is to be hoped that the durable clichés of an earlier English period will not prevent a fresh look at Hegel's philosophy. There is, of course, no denying his systematic ambitions, nor any wish on my part to do so. It is just these that I find fascinating. He sought to bring within a comprehensive intellectual order the whole of reality—and a little more besides, say his detractors. In the Phenomenology of Spirit by a turbulent dialectic he scrabblesup to the top of Mount Parnassus in order to clutch the petticoats of the Absolute. In the Science of Logic and in the first part of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences he lays out the logical paradigm of intellectual necessities which are subsequently exhibited in the philosophy of nature and of concrete spirit.

Le but de ces quelques pages est de clarifier la manière dont Sartre utilise la notion de «l'être» dans son principal ouvrage, l'Être et le Néant. L'être, nous dit Sartre, est « dévoilé par quelque moyen d'accès immédiat» qu'il nomme « l'ennui», « la nausée » etc. « L'être » dont il est ici question est, nous le verrons, le concept général qui s'applique aux deux catégories d'existents qui, selon Sartre, composent le monde: l'être-en-soi et l'être-pour-soi. On a souvent dit que l'intérêt de cet ouvrage se trouve dans les analyses qu'il nous donne de l'être-pour-soi qui est le nom donné à la « réalité humaine », et non dans ce qu'il nous dit concernant l'être-en-soi. II est vrai que Sartre ne consacre que quelques pages à cette derniére question. Cependant, il me semblc que ce que nous dit Sartre concernant l'être-en-soi est la clef de son ontologie de base, et que le sens de cet « En-soi» éclairera, également, certaines de ses affirmations concernant le « Pour-soi». Les deux concepts sont solidaires, mais le sens de l'En-soi est, en quelque sorte, plus fondamental que le sens du Pour-soi.

Dans les études consacrées aux écrits politiques et éducatifs de Rousseau, on a beaucoup insisté sur la loi qui commande son anthropologie, à savoir que l'altérité corrompt. Cependant, on a moins insisté sur une notion fondamentale de cette anthropologie, celle des bornes et des places, ce qui explique un certain nombre de malentendus quant au caractère plus ou moins pessimiste ou conser vateur des écrits de Rousseau. Pourtant, un lien existe entre la loi de l'altérité et le concept des bornes, car ne corrompt chez Rousseau que le type de comparaisons qui refusent l'ordre d'un tout et qui, de ce fait, situent l'individualité et l'altérité en dehors de leurs bornes.

According to the received view of scientific theories, a scientific theory is an axiomatic-deductive linguistic structure which must include some set of guidelines (“correspondence rules”) for interpreting its theoretical terms with reference to the world of observable phenomena. According to the semantic view, a scientific theory need not be formulated as an axiomatic-deductive structure with correspondence rules, but need only specify models which are said to be “isomorphic” with actual phenomenal systems. In this paper, I consider both the received and semantic views as they bear on the issue of how a theory relates to the world (Section 1). Then I offer a critique of some arguments frequently put forth in support of the semantic view (Section 2). Finally, I suggest a more convincing “meta-methodological” argument (based on the thought of Bernard Lonergan) in favour of the semantic view (Section 3).

The flurry of debates on mental causation in recent years has largely been occasioned by Donald Davidson's original and controversial views on the role of mind in the causation and explanation of behaviour. In his classic 1963 paper, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” Davidson argued, against the prevailing opinion of the Ryleans and later-Wittgensteineans, that in order to be genuinely explanatory of human behaviour, reasons must be causes; and in his equally influential and far more controversial 1970 paper, “Mental Events,” he undertook to show how reasons can be causes—how it is possible for our beliefs, desire, intentions, and the like, in terms of which we “rationalize” our behaviour, to be at the same time causes of our behaviour. While the basic thesis of the 1963 paper was widely accepted, setting a trend for much of the work on action theory for the following three decades, the account of the causal efficacy of mind in “Mental Events” generated a great deal of controversy. The debates continue, involving scores of participants but seldom Davidson himself. What makes the present collection of previously unpublished papers particularly interesting is that it contains Davidson's own reply to some of his most notable critics, together with their rejoinders; so we now have a contemporary perspective on the mental causation debate that Davidson initiated, unwittingly, a quarter of a century ago.

« L'égalité, parce que la liberté ne peut subsister sans elle … » réclamait Rousseau. Lorsqu'il pense la Révolution, tout philosophe politique voudrait tenir tous les bouts de la chaîne qui relie l'éthique au politique. L'ouvrage récent de Kai Nielsen, qui propose la thèse de l'égalitarisme radical comme nerf du processus d'institution de la cité juste, ne manque précisément pas de se confronter aux problèmes concomitants des relations entre égalité et liberté. Le philosophe albertain s'y montre comme à l'accoutumée cet humaniste sensible et généreux dont la « raison et la pratique » sont orientées par l'idéal égalitaire. Le credo (belief) fondamental auquel il nous dit souscrire: « the interests of every one matter and matter equally », serait pour Nielsen comme le postulat indispensable à la relance du contrat social démocratique. Etre un égalitariste radical signifierait, si j'ai bien compris les implications de son discours, que Ton s'engage dans la cause du bien, que l'on croit à l'homme socialiste, vertueux et perfectible de même qu'au renouvellement des rapports sociaux dans l'équité. C'est aussi et surtout soutenir la force émancipatoire de l'égalité civile, sociale et politique, ou, autrement dit, dans les termes de Nielsen, supputer que l'égalité des conditions, conçue tout ensemble «comme un but et comme un droit», une fois inscrite dans les structures, dans les institutions sociales, déterminera la véritable liberté, celle de tous et de chacun au sein des rapports intersubjectifs et sociaux. Enfin, c'est penser que ce concept d'égalité ainsi réévalué jouerale rôle de condition nécessaire et suffisante pour changer le moi, le monde et la vie. Equality and Liberty est un vivant plaidoyer en faveur de la dignite morale autant que de l'efficace socialiste d'un modèle politique, l'égalitarisme radical, tel que Nielsen se le représente.