This substantial study appears in a series called The Arguments of the Philosophers. If Professor Skorupski's admirable work on Mill is typical, it will be a remarkable series. Both as a work of scholarship and as a contribution to philosophy in its own right, this is an outstanding work, well worth reading by the general philosopher and not just by Mill devotees.

ABSTRACT: Despite offering many formulations of his controversial indeterminacy of translation thesis, Quine has never explored in detail the connection between indeterminacy and the conception of meaning that he had supposedly derived from the work of Peirce and Duhem. The outline of such a conception of meaning, as well as its relationship to the indeterminacy thesis, is worked out in this paper; and its merits and implications are assessed both in the context of Quine’s own philosophical agenda, and also with a view to a very different approach to meaning and understanding exemplified by the work of Gadamer.

ABSTRACT: I distinguish two sorts of motivation for dualism. One motivation is driven by the distinctive character of conscious phenomenology. The other is driven by the special character of normativity: Is rationality an even “harder” problem than consciousness? There is no dramatic climax in which I show that these two dualist currents have a common source; in fact, I think they are relatively independent.

En France, la loi Kouchner (2002) a permis de repenser les droits des patients et a introduit la notion de démocratie sanitaire. En cancérologie, les associations de patients et (ex-)malades ont commencé progressivement à jouer plusieurs rôles (soutien et informations aux malades, représentation dans les institutions de soins et les agences d’État, enseignement auprès des soignants et participation à la recherche). Certains patients choisissent même d'en faire leur métier : c'est cette professionnalisation qui nous intéresse. Nous proposons ici de discuter des premiers résultats de deux recherches en cours sur le sujet.

In Part 1 of this paper I will define a sense of “person” which is importantly connected with ordinary notions of personhood. It is a consequence of my definition that each person exemplifies a specific “egoicity”. In Part 2 I will argue, on the basis of empirical facts about monozygotic (“identical”) twins, that egoicity is not determined by bodily constitution. In Part 3 I will conclude with a brief discussion of implications for The Mind-Body Problem.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I am interested in the ethics of everyday sexual agency: specifically, in moral questions about when, how, and why we identify ourselves as particular kinds of sexual agents. Given that sexual self-identifications involve a complex combination of individual and social processes, a framework which does justice to these processes would help make room for an analysis of the ethics of sexual self-identification. I introduce the concept of sexual authenticity as useful in these contexts, where such authenticity involves two main aspects: taking up sexual identifications as our ownmost and giving accounts of them to and with others.

Philosophers have long been interested in dreams, for a variety of reasons. Much recent discussion has narrowed the scope of the traditional concern, however, and today dreams are often regarded from a position of skepticism and implicit behaviorism. This standpoint grew out of, and helped to reinforce, a habit of regarding Wittgenstein's later work as demonstrating a need for public, behavioral criteria of meanings. Thus, philosophers have wondered if there is any sense in saying that we do experience dreams, because so few of the usual criteria of “experience” apply to them. This is no occasion to review the complete history of dream interpretation by analytic philosophers, let alone the orthodox interpretation of the Philosophical Investigations. Instead, I will report an aspect of dreaming which has been overlooked in recent discussion, apply these findings to some of the alleged difficulties of speaking meaningfully of dream experience and, finally, attempt to locate this understanding of dreaming within Wittgenstein's later work.

Consider the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Both Zeno and the philosophic tradition after him have accorded it the status of a legitimate problem. It is my aim to show, that both Zeno and the tradition have been mistaken; that the basis of the alleged paradox is a none too clear analysis of the nature of spatial relations; and that the appearance of the paradox itself rests on a confusion of two types of analysis: an ontological analysis on the one hand, and a qualitative one on the other. I shall therefore suggest a solution to the paradox that in effect amounts to a denial of its legitimacy.

It may seem that there is no need to review such a well-known book. This is the second edition of Peter Singer's text, Practical Ethics. The first edition has been widely used and influential; indeed for many it defines the field of applied ethics. The field is lucky; rarely is such popular work so carefully argued, so factually well informed and so well written. In addition, it is unusual for the author of a basic text to be so daring. Peter Singer deserves credit for placing the interests of animals and famine victims on the agenda of applied ethics, and for making that agenda so prominent in public fora. But it behooves us to scrutinize carefully the power of definitive works as well. What sets the agenda is, for that very reason, more difficult to assess critically.

Three hundred and forty-one years ago, on Saturday September 19, 1648, at eight a.m., Blaise Pascal's Great Experiment took place. Following Pascal's explicit instructions, his brother-in-law Florin Périer took two identical glass tubes and filled them with mercury. He inverted the tubes and submerged the open end in a bowl containing an inch of mercury. Thus he set up two Torricellian baroscopes in the garden of the Minim Monastery, at the base of the Puy-de-Dôme, one of the highest mountains in central France. The height of the mercury in each tube was carefully measured and marked on the glass. The measurements, which were identical, were recorded. One device was left in place, as a control baroscope, with an observer. The other was dismantled.

A Qualitative concept of selective dyadic confirmation — not Scheffler's and Goodman's —can be readily defined piggy-back upon the qualitative concepts of dyadic confirmation and dyadic disconfirmation as follows:

Dl ‘E selectively confirms H’ = df ‘E confirms H and E disconfirms H1 for every H1 that is a contrary of H relative to E’.