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.

Humpty-Dumpty affirmait que les mots signifiaient exactement ce qu'il lui plaisait qu'ils signifient, «ni plus, ni moins». Il a parfois des défenseurs chez les chercheurs qui se sont penchés sur le problème de la non-littéralité (Beardsley, 1962, 1978; Black, 1979). On peut cependant affirmer qu'ur locuteur, s'il utilise non littéralement des expressions qui ont ure signification conventionnelle, ne peut en changer à volonté la signification pour leur faire signifier exactement ce qu'il a l'intention de signifier. Par exemple, quelqu'un qui fait une métaphore ne peut changer la signification des expressions qu'il utilise. C'est la thèse que je défendrai au cours des prochaines pages. On verra aussi quelles intentions devrait avoir un locuteur qui signifierait non littéralement quelque chose.

Le manuscrit sur la Critique de la philosophie de l'État de Hegel fédigé par Marx à l'été de 1843 est demeuré inconnu de la tradition marxiste jusqu'en 1922, date ou le savant russe, David Rjazanov, l'a decouvert dans les archives du Parti Social-Démocrate à Berlin. Dans l'édition critique allemande de Dietz, le texte occupe 130 pages. II s'agit d'un texte ardu, difficile, voire meme rébarbatif. Marx recopie les paragraphes 261–313 de la Philosophic du Droit de Hegel pour en faire une critique détailléè, quelquefois brillante, souvent obscure et nebuleuse. Le texte peut etre divisé en quatre parties: la critique de la conception générate de l'État (Par. 261–274), la critique de la monarchic (Par. 275–286), du pouvoir exécutif (Par. 287–297) et du pouvoir legislatif (Par. 298–313). Mais comme l'écrit Marx dans une lettre en date du 5 mars 1842 à Arnold Ruge «le fond en est la réfutation de la monarchie constitutionnelle comme une chose bâtarde, contradictoire et qui se condamne elle-même». Notre propos prendra appui sur la premiere partie du texte, mais les conclusions auxquelles nous arriverons pourront s'étendre a l'ensemble du manuscrit.

George Berkeley and Martin Buber are philosophers whose views one might not expect to find being discussed in one and the same essay. Nevertheless, in what follows I hope to show that a comparison of their epistemologies reveals substantial similarities, both methodological and doctrinal. The ground for such a comparison lies in the religious orientation of these two very different philosophers. It is an orientation each has emphasized more than once, both in his philosophical and in his less formal writings.

It is often quite proper, philosophically speaking, to raise objections to a philosophical inquiry because it is seeking an answer to a question which ought not to have been raised in the first place. So in this instance, one might maintain that it is illegitimate to ask questions about the metaphysics of the Tractatus, just because the Tractatus is not the sort of book which is supposed to have a particular metaphysics. The Tractatus, we have heard said, is a book on the philosophy of language, not one on metaphysics; it is a specification of what language is, or ought to be like, and is not meant to have anything to do with the metaphysical constitution of the world.

This remarkable reconstruction of Søren Kierkegaard's (SK) work based on a reading of original Danish sources could have been entitled Phenomenology of (Finite) Spirit or, perhaps, Itinerarium Cordis Ad Deum. In ten chapters it attempts to uncover SK's ethico-religious understanding of the humanjourney towards the transcendent God. It is a journey away from speculative absorption in nature and universal history, away from the hubris of poetical self-creation, away even from ethical awareness of the universally human and a kind of Pelagian self-confidence in one's ability to do the good. Thejourney ends with the recognition of one's own powerlessness and nothingness—a recognition that can lead either to prideful despair or to humble faith.

From the time of Reid through Coleridge to T. H. Green, Hume was interpreted as a sceptic and as a wholly negative philosopher. And from their perspective such an interpretation no doubt makes some sense, given the vested interest in religion and the absolute of the idealists: from that perspective it is an essential part of a positive position that it take one beyond the realm of ordinary objects known by sense experience to a realm of entities that transcend that world of everyday life. That interpretation lingers on, like bad jokes, to retail in Philosophy 100 classes. On the other hand, in an age where the demand that one have access to a transcendent entity is less insistent, it has become possible to challenge the orthodox reading of Hume. The first to do this was Norman Kemp Smith, who argued that, while Hume was a sceptic, he in fact also had a positive view, not to be sure that of Reid & Co., but that of a naturalist, that is, one who holds that our beliefs, and our moral commitments, are none of them rational, none of them products of reason, but rather are products of our instinctive and passionate natures. This interpretation continues to have important defenders such as Popkin and Stroud. More recently, however, some scholars have gone further and argued that there are good senses in which Hume is not a sceptic, and that he constructs a case that our instinctual beliefs are not only natural but also rational. Major works defending this reading of Hume as a naturalized epistemologist are those of Livingston and Jones. The Kemp Smith interpretation has, however, found a major new defender in John Wright's The Sceptical Realism of David Hume.

No idea sounds so silly that no ancient Greek fervently defended it. I hope we do not lose sight of the value there is in studying the Greeks. Yet it is even better to do as they did and not just to study what they said.

In Patterns of Moral Complexity, Charles Larmore describes three related ways in which moral and political theory are more complex than is often allowed. He objects to three parallel simplifications: that moral decision making largely consists in the application of rules to particular situations; that the ideals by which we are guided in our personal (private, social) lives should also do service as political ideals, a simplification which he calls “expressivism”; and that there is but a single source of moral value (that we must be either consequentialists, or deontologists, or endorse the “principle of partiality”). Against these simplifications he argues in a sort of Aristotelian way for (1) the centrality of judgment in moral reasoning; (2) for the liberal principle that the state should not strive to express our highest personal ideal; and (3) for the, I suppose eclectic, view that partiality, deontological reasons, and consequentialist reasons all have a place in moral reasoning and that therefore the moral person may well be caught in conflicts that present him or her with tragic choices. These are the three “patterns of moral complexity” that the title of the book refers to.