Some thirty years ago Klaus Reich claimed that Kant's abandonment of feeling as the source of our moral appraisals was due to his reading of Plato and the Stoics, and more interestingly that it led him to the fundamental concept of his mature moral theory, the autonomy of the will. Despite the obvious importance of the latter claim, it seems to have gone either unnoticed or unchallenged, at least in the English philosophical literature. This is particularly surprising since, apart from holding any view as to the legitimacy of singling out the source of Kant's mature moral theory, more obvious influences than those of Plato and the Stoics seem to have played such a role : the variant of Lutheran Christianity, Pietism, Rousseau, and the cultural context of the Enlightenment.

« La «théorie des idées» de Platon est un essai pour résoudre ce problème et mon opinion est qu'elle est un des essais les plus réussis faits jusqu'ici. La théorie qu'on défendra dans ce qui suit est largement platonicienne, avec simplement les modifications que le temps a montrées nécessaires.» (Problems of Philosophy, 1912, cité d'après l'édition de 1946, p. 91).

To speak of hybris in the case of Parmenides seems hardly justified. He is addressed by the unnamed goddess to whose abode he journeys as κoũρε, “youth” or “initiate”, hardly a term of great respect in Greek usage. He is guided on his path, i.e., he has not found it by himself, and he receives a truth he never claims as his own. Could a mortal show greater awareness of his limitations? Yet, in an oddly disturbing way the distinction between the divine and the human is obliterated—the worst kind of hybris for Greek thought and feeling.

A certain mythology has been perpetuated in discussions of philosophy of time. It has been contended that the adoption of a particular theory of time, what I will call the “Non-dynamic Theory of Time” (NDTT) results in a commitment to Fatalism. This unwanted, if not intolerable baggage, is said to be avoided only by jettisoning NDTT and espousing what I will call the “Dynamic Theory of Time” (DTT). What I hope to show is that the truth of the matter is almost completely the reverse; while NDTT has absolutely no Fatalistic ramifications, DTT, when it is conjoined with a most plausible supposition, does.

Many philosophers and theologians have thought that God's omniscience entails the truth of strict determinism. Many others, including most of the Scholastics, held that arguments for this view confused necessitas consequential and necessitas consequentis. I think the Scholastics were right. What I am primarily concerned to argue in this paper is that nonetheless great difficulties remain concerning the relation between God's knowledge and the fact that there are contingent events.

John Rawls' Difference Principle has been well known since his early papers on distributive justice, and has taken on renewed interest with the publication of A Theory of Justice. The principle is one I find attractive, but I am skeptical of the arguments heretofore put forward in its defence. Here I will outline an entirely different defence which, while it may yield Rawls' desired conclusion, leaves one with a rather different picture from his of the place of the Difference Principle in the theory of distributive justice.

A very material question has been started concerning abstract or general ideas, whether they be general or particular in the mind's conception of them. A great philosopher [Dr. Berkeley] has disputed the receiv'd opinion in this particular, and has asserted, that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term, which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals, which are similar to them. As I look upon this to be one of the greatest and most valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic of letters, I shall here endeavour to confirm it by some arguments, which I hope will put it beyond all doubt and controversy.

Il nous paraît assez significatif qu'au long de l'histoire de la philosophic, la quête du sens de l'existence se soit développée, quoique sous des modes différents, dans une étroite relation avec le dévoilement de la mort. Dans son effort de se donner la réalité, l'activité rationnelle effectue une séparation avec cette réalité, reproduisant ainsi la coupure originelle des êtres vécue dans l'expérience du changement; cependant, nous croyons déceler dans cette activité même une action sur cette séparation, une conquête, une maîtrise, qu'elle prenne la forme du défi ou de l'assomption. L'exercice de mort caractéristique de la philosophic serait-il done le prélude d'une création?

Rolf Gruner (1977) has argued that natural selection plus time does not entail, and hence does not explain, evolution. This according to Gruner is the result of the undeniable fact that evolution involves an increase in the complexity of organisms:

Since increase in complexity is part of the concept of evolution, evolution is not explained by the theory of natural selection. The Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian affirms the reality of evolution and seems to believe that it can be accounted for in terms of natural selection. But it could be accounted for in this way only if the assumption were justified that generally the more complex organism is better adapted to its environment, and thus stands a better chance to survive and breed, than the less complex organism. And this assumption is not justified. “The more complex, the better adapted” will not do even as a rule of thumb, as most biologists today will be prepared to admit (711).

Writers on jurisprudence often stress that conflict between positive laws and morality does not invalidate the positive laws. A law which requires me to compensate another for an injury caused by a dangerous object kept on my property is not invalidated by the fact that I have not been negligent and have no moral obligation to compensate the injured person. And although I have a moral obligation to keep my promises, positive laws may validly imply that I need not keep promises not made for a consideration or under seal. Thus positive law may permit acts not permitted by morals and may forbid acts permitted by morals. The lesson drawn from these thoughts is that to establish a positive law as valid we need not consider the relationships it bears to the rules of morals. A valid law is simply a law created in accordance with the constitutional conventions or ‘rules of recognition’ of the society in which it is to be applied. It is the manner of its establishment, not its relationship to morals, which makes a law valid.

In a famous passage from his Logic, Kant says that three questions — What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? — ultimately hang on the third one, which is the question of Man. This paper examines the nature of this special link between the very ends of philosophy and the question of Man. Its intent is to show how Culture, as receptive to Ideas, provides both the unity of the different definitions of Man given by Kant, and the condition of possibility for the questioning of philosophy. This distinctive quality of man, according to Kant, is the precondition for Metaphysics, Ethics, and Religion. In the end, philosophy's principle of unity lies not in the limitation or finiteness of man, but in the fact that man, according to Kant, is always in relation with some form of infinity, whether it is that of Ideas (metaphysics), that of the Law (ethics), or that of the ultimate Good (religion).

ABSTRACT: This article evaluates the strategies used by Christian philosophers to counter the invasion of Spinozist ideas between 1680 and 1720. The analysis of these refutations reveals a significant evolution in the way they unfolded. I wish to show that the argument from finality, or God’s design, was the favored strategy against Spinoza that was selected in the end. This article aims to understand the reasons for this choice, and why the Catholic Church waited more than twenty years after Spinoza’s death to get organized and refute him directly.

Dans Naissance de la clinique, Michel Foucault développe une théorie de la socialisation de la perception sous le nom d’« archéologie du regard médical ». Selon ce modèle, le regard quotidien est conditionné par un code perceptif qui détermine à la fois les traits dignes d'attention et le sens qu'il faut leur attribuer — ce que Foucault nomme des « régimes de visibilité ». Foucault pense ainsi la structuration sociale de l'expérience perceptive comme le produit d'un a priori historique dont il tente de dessiner les contours. Le but de cet article est de décrire les intérêts et les difficultés d'un tel projet. Nous montrerons notamment que Foucault ne développe aucune réelle théorie de la perception, ce qui fragilise son modèle de deux manières : au niveau théorique, d'abord, celui-ci laisse de côté la question de la transformation du code perceptif mis en évidence ; au niveau empirique, ensuite, il n'est pas en mesure de rendre compte des ethnographies contemporaines de la pratique médicale.

ABSTRACT: I argue that the Ability Hypothesis cannot really accommodate the knowledge intuition that drives the knowledge argument and therefore fails to defend physicalism. When the thought experiment is run with, instead of Mary, an advanced robot Rosemary, for whom there presumably is no distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, proponents of the Ability Hypothesis would have to give a far-fetched and counterintuitive explanation of why Rosemary wouldn’t learn anything new upon release.

The ‘consensus’ model of public reason, associated with John Rawls’s political liberalism, has been criticised for excluding certain reasons from receiving consideration where the justification of the constitutional essentials is concerned. One limitation of these criticisms is that they typically focus on the exclusion of reasons political liberals are committed to excluding, notably reasons based on religious and comprehensive views. I argue that public reason excludes some reasons, central to the interests of many oppressed groups, that public reason advocates will agree should not be excluded.

There is still a question about what it means to say that Georges Canguilhem was a philosopher of error. This paper, unlike other work on the topic, investigates archival sources and early texts, up to and including the publication of the Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological in 1943, in order to reveal Canguilhem’s early thoughts on error and to formulate the basic philosophical problem therein, as he understood it. This work reveals a partial transformation of his thinking as he seeks to develop this question through the study of concrete human problems.