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.

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”.

In Morals by Agreement, David Gauthier convinced many of us—including Peter Danielson, author of Artificial Morality, the latest successor to MA—that morality can best be understood as a set of intramental, strategic responses to patterns of otherwise dilemmatic, game-theory-reducible interactivity. More particularly, Gauthier and Danielson are of a mind that: (a) characteristic of our interactive circumstances are the Prisoner's Dilemma and its cognates; (b) these are circumstances in which our pre-moral, straightforward maximizing (SM) disposition fares considerably worse than (virtually any species of) “constrained maximization” (CM)—the latter being the dispositional essence of morality—and (c) it should not surprise us, therefore, that (or, at least, if) selective pressure has rendered most of us just so morally (i.e., CM) disposed. In short, what Danielson calls the “fundamental” justification for morality—that is, one “that does not appeal to any of the concepts of [morality itself]” (AM, p. 19)—is that: conventional wisdom notwithstanding, nice guys—though, adds Danielson, not necessarily the nicest guys—finish first!

Depuis sa découverte par Martin Grabmann en 1927, la collection de questions (Quœstionensammlung) contenue dans le manuscrit de Barcelone, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Ripoll 109 (ff. 134ra–158va) est devenue familière aux historiens de la philosophie et des universités médiévales. Bien qu'on s'accorde à considérer cet écrit comme un document d'exceptionnelle importance à cause des informations qu'il nous fournit sur la nature de l'enseignement dispensé dans les facultés des arts au Moyen Âge, il n'est pourtant connu que par de brefs extraits, plus ou moins correctement édités, et l'on en réclame depuis longtemps la publication intégrale.

It is often said that philosophy in the seventeenth century returned from a Christian otherworldliness to a pagan engagement, theoretically and practically, with material nature. This process is often described as one of secularization, and the splitting off of science from natural philosophy and metaphysics is a traditional figure in accounts of the emergence of the modern. At the same time, the historiographical assumption that early modern science had religious and philosophical foundations has informed such classics as E. A. Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1932), Gerd Buchdahl's Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (1969), and Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination (1986). A recent collection testifies to continuing interest in the theme of a positive relationship between theology and science.

The subject of this paper is the relationship between factual beliefs and moral beliefs, between is-statements and ought-statements. Hume recognizes that a problem exists concerning this relationship. He states the problem in an oft-quoted passage from his Treatise. In their writings, moral philosophers pass imperceptibly from is-statements to ought-statements; and this change is “of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it”.

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.

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!

Whether or not we adopt some form of physicalism in our thinking about the psychology of humans and other organisms we all believe that a mind is something that comes into being, changes, develops and decays. The correlation of the development and then later the decay of our mental powers with changes in the brain post-dates our belief that the mental realm is as much an area where things ebb and flow, come to be and pass away, as is the physical. Even ancient authors who hold to the indestructibility of the soul allow that it changes in a host of ways. It is very odd, then, to discover that Aristotle appears to deny all this and feels impelled to treat the soul as unchanging and motionless. I propose to explore here exactly what Aristotle meant by saying the soul does not move and why he said it. In the end our investigation leads to some difficulties for Aristotle's psychological ontology which I am not able to resolve.

ABSTRACT: Careful analysis of the details of the text allows us to refine Socrates’ understanding of manliness. Laches submits without a fight to Socrates’ objections to his definition of manliness as prudent perseverance. He does not appreciate that Socrates objections merely require that he make his definition more precise. Nicias refuses to consider objections to his understanding of manliness as avoiding actions that entail risk. The two sets of objections show that manliness entails first calculating that a risk is worth taking and then subsequently not rejecting that calculation without due consideration.

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.

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).

The first person singular is the nucleus on which all the other referential devices depend… The final point of reference, by which a statement is attached to reality, is the speaker's reference to himself, as one thing and one person among others… The world is always open to conceptual re-arrangement. But the re-arrangement is only the addition of new tiers of discrimination to a foundation that remains constant: the recognition of persisting things singled out by active observers who have a statable standpoint as objects among other objects. It is in judgments of perception that the notion of identity, and principles of individuation, are given their earliest sense. That beings, who are capable of action and observation, are born into, and move among, a world of persisting objects is a logical necessity and not a contingent matter of fact. (Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action, London: Chatto and Windus, 1959, pp. 40, 87).