The opposition between community and society set out by Collingwood in his New Leviathan (1942) should be compared with the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that Tönnies had introduced in 1887. The debate on ideal types of social organizations apparently pertains to «pure sociology» and was continued by Durkheim and Weber. However, Collingwood's use of this distinction may be construed as an attack on the very idea of sociology in the name of the primacy of rational will.

This is a book built round an argument. Several variants of the argument are offered, and I shall consider but one of them. It is directed against the following act utilitarian principle:

AU: An act is right if and only if it would have best consequences (i.e. consequences at least as good as those of any alternative act open to the agent)

The argument may be freely rendered as follows. Suppose that we have an agent, Smith, in a society, S, such that the following conditions are satisfied:

C1: Smith accepts AU and attempts always to act in accordance with it

C2: Smith is rational: he understands the implications of accepting AU and applies AU correctly

C3: No other person in S accepts AU

C4: All others in S know that C1 and C2 obtain

C5: All others in S are rational: they understand the implications of Smith's accepting AU

C: All others in S are tolerant of Smith's accepting AU: they do not criticize him for acting in accordance with it

C7: Smith knows that C3 – C6 obtain

C1 – C7 collectively define the position of an act utilitarian in a non-act utilitarian society, with certain assumptions as to rationality and tolerance. Then the thesis is that under C1 – C7 Smith will sometimes fail to do the act with best consequences. His very acceptance and correct application of AU (under the other conditions) conspire to prevent the production of certain good consequences which would otherwise be possible.

It is occasionally desirable to take an overview of quite a wide area of philosophy: what one loses in detail one gains in perspective. I follow this procedure in the present paper. Ia m concerned with the whole area where we indulge in practical deliberation, or where we attempt to justify some course of action we propose to follow or have followed. To do this I investigate the nature of a reason for acting and how such reasons can enter into an attempt to justify some act. It should be noticed that just having reasons for acting in some way does not entail that acting in that way is justifiable. In what follows, I speak first of reasons, later of justifications.

C'est dans une fuite au-delà de la polarisation des sexes et de la prison de l'identité sexuale qui réside, selon Carolyn Heilbrun (1982, ix), notre salut; et la terre promise s'appelle: « androgynie ». De même, selon Bazin et Freeman (1974, 185), l'image de l'androgynie est essentielle pour nous guider dans un processus de changement radical de la société. Harris (1974), par contre, considère l'androgynie comme un mythe sexiste déguisé. Rhodes (1983, 109) l'assimile à un modèle utopique taré par des préjugés patriarcaux sexistes. Et Mary Daly, après une période d'engouement pour l'idéal androgyne, le décrit caricaturalement comme un être humain composé de deux moitiés déjetées: John Wayne et Brigitte Bardot fusionnés en frère et soeur siamois (1975, 30).

Keith S. Donnellan and, independently, Saul Kripke have presented counterxamples to that fregean theory of proper names associated with Strawson, Searle and others. As well, Donnellan has put forward a rival theory to the Fregean one. It is not fully worked out, and is obscure; but it is not empty and, in contrast to Kripke's positive account of names, is not meant to be a mere “picture”.

For some time there have been arguments in favour of the claim that “free markets” are necessary for a proper account of distributive justice. Traditionally the arguments have come from two quarters. On the one hand markets are recommended for reasons of efficiency. This fits into a utilitarian argument claiming that market economies best promote the greatest good when compared to the alternatives. On the other hand there is a libertarian argument claiming that only free markets are consistent with individual liberty. Neither of these arguments have been met with widespread support. However, Ronald Dworkin has offered an argument supporting markets that breaks new ground. He argues that market economies have the considerable virtue of treating people as “equals” with respect to their preferences for goods and careers. This fits well with his larger claim that social justice in economics and politics requires treating people as equals.

Les réflexions que je propose sous ce titre se rattachent, d'une manière plus ou moins lointaine, à ce qu'on appelait jadis « la doctrine de l'analogie ». Comme on sait, analogie, en grec, fut surtout employé par les mathématiciens. Cette origine mathématique, quelles que fussent les transformations que philosophes, théologiens et logiciens lui ont fait subir, n'acessé de hanter, comme une obsession, les conceptions qu'on en a proposées au cours des siècles.

The Principle that freedom is necessary for moral responsibility (hereafter referred to as “the freedom principle”) has received a variety of explications, but few philosophers have doubted that in some plausible sense it is true. However, two philosophers have recently challenged it using very different but equally ingenious arguments. J.F.M. Hunter has provided the more obviously direct attack in arguing that considerations of freedom as such are in no way relevant to assessments of moral responsibility. Harry Frankfurt has directed his fire at the version of the freedom principle which says that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. Both Frankfurt and Hunter point out the significance of their arguments for the determinism/moral responsibility debate: if there is no freedom requirement for moral responsibility, then even if determinism threatens freedom, it does not follow that determinism threatens moral responsibility.

I like the idea behind this book. It is an empiricist alternative to the powerful and influential contemporary rationalist position on scientific law, causality, and counterfactuals, associated with Chisholm and David Lewis, which “takes its inspiration from modal logic and set theory [and] involves … an assumption of non-truth-functional connectives to define unanalyzable natural necessities, or defines such connectives and such necessities in terms of an ontology of possible worlds”. Wilson's views, springing from Hume and Nelson Goodman, involve no unobservables such as natural necessities or possible worlds, but are based instead on good old Humean laws of constant conjunction. How lovely if Wilson could pull this off!

Genuine ethical subjectivism is a kind of logical autism, uncurable by distinctions. It is, roughly put, that attitude according to which duty is discoverable by introspection. What I wish to call pseudo-subjectivism is more akin to an anxiety neurosis. It is a more common disturbance than the genuine form of the disease, but, happily, is easily cured without recourse to clinical treatment, by therapy than can be self-administered in the privacy of one's study. Every man his own analyst. Pseudo-subjectivism is an anxiety syndrome associated with the view that one ought to do what one thinks one ought to do. The cure consists in becoming reassured that this need not be genuine subjectivism at all. The purpose of this paper is to provide that reassurance.