In the first Critique Kant introduced the analytic/synthetic distinction and illustrated it with theoretical propositions. As his main aim in that work was to justify synthetic a priori propositions, Kant was able to bring his central questions into relief and discuss the methodology of their solution by contrasting synthetic propositions, such as: “Every event has a cause” with analytic propositions, such as: “Every effect has a cause.” Consequently, few commentators have any difficulty in stating as propositions the propositions Kant is justifying in the first Critique or in pointing out the difficulty of justifying such propositions.

The Protestant Reformation is said to have had a number of ramifications within philosophy. Popkin has traced the sceptical crisis in 17th century philosophical thought back to the criterion problem, the search for a rule of religious truth, which was precipitated by the Reformation. Rex has shown how the elaboration of what might be called the epistemology of religious certitude devised by Calvinist theologians provided fertile intellectual ground for the acceptance of Cartesianism. I shall claim that one product of the Reformation was a set of closely related doctrines, doctrines which were to become associated with Cartesianism, and which were essential to the formulation ofthe Reformers' case.

In outline, at least, the major argument of David Gauthier's, Morals By Agreement is quite clear: it is rational to acquire a disposition to moral behaviour with those similarly disposed because having it gives one the highest practically attainable utility in interactions with them. Once one has acquired such a disposition, a disposition which constrains one's individual maximization of the satisfaction of one's preferences (i.e., a Constrained Maximizer or “CM” disposition), it is rational to act morally towards similar agents. He thus takes himself to have constructed from instrumental rationality alone, a justification of voluntary compliance with moral principles. He appears to have shown that it is instrumentally rational for free and uncoerced agents to perform moral actions.

ABSTRACT: Individual rational judgment, of the kind required for justification in cognition or morals, is fundamentally socially and historically conditioned. I argue for this by defending key themes from Kant’s and Hegel’s accounts of rational judgment and justification, including the “autonomy” of rational judgment and one key point of Hegel’s account of “mutual recognition.” These themes are rooted in Kant’s and Hegel’s transformation of the modern natural law tradition, which originates the properly pragmatic account of rationality, which affords genuine rational justification, and which provides for realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and strict objectivity about moral norms.

Philosophers no longer argue whether Hume ever read Berkeley, yet some remain puzzled as to why so little of Berkeley appears in Hume's works. Professor Popkin has remarked that even “where Hume and Berkeley come closest to discussing the same subject or holding the same view, Hume neither uses Berkeley's terms nor refers to him.” An apparent exception to this generalization is Berkeley's doctrine of minima sensibilia, for both philosophers use this term to denote indivisible sensible points, and both invoke such points in order to show that sensible extension is not infinitely divisible. Yet it has been suggested that, although Berkeley and Hume employ the same terms, they nevertheless maintain different doctrines: Hume's minima are unextended, whereas Berkeley's are extended.

In Part I of Parmenides, Socrates introduces a Theory of Forms to explain opposites compresent in ordinary things, and claims that Forms cannot have opposite features. In Part II, Parmenides relies on Socrates’ claim and derives unacceptable consequences—that the Form of Oneness does not exist, and if that is so, then nothing exists: a clearly false conclusion. To avoid it, Socrates must give up his thesis in Part I and find a way to preserve the explanatory role of Forms. This paper aims to articulate the structure of the exercise in Part II.

La notion de maladie créatrice semble avoir été entrevue par Novalis: « Les maladies sont, certes, une chose importante pour l'humanité, puisque'elles sont si nombreuses et que chaque homme a tant à lutter contre elles. Mais nous ne connaissons que bien imparfaitement l'art de les utiliser. Elles sont probablement la matiére et le stimulant les plus importants pour notre pensée et pour notre activité. II y aurait là une récolte abondante à faire, me semble-t-il, dans le champ intellectuel, dans le domaine de la morale, de la religion, et Dieu sait dans quel autre merveilleux domaine ». A un autre endroit, Novalis déclare que l'hypocondrie est une maladie trés remarquable: « II y a une petite hypocondrie et une hypocondrie sublime. C'est par cette derniére qu'il faudrait essayer de trouver une voie d'accés vers l'âme ». Cette phrase semble indiquer que pour Novalis il existerait des maladies d'essence supérieure et, pourrait-on dire, plus saines que la santé. Inversement il existerait une fausse apparence de santé due à la maladie, comme celle dont une nation en révolution peut donner l'exemple: « II existe une énergie par maladie et par faiblesse, qui donne l'impression d'être plus puissante que la véritable énergie, mais qui céde en laissant dans un état de faiblesse encore plus profonde ».

Some authors have proposed that Avicenna considers mathematical objects, i.e., geometric shapes and numbers, to be mental existents completely separated from matter. In this paper, I will show that this description, though not completely wrong, is misleading. Avicenna endorses, I will argue, some sort of literalism, potentialism, and finitism.

What would be a genuinely caring approach to the provision of procedures of so-called artificial reproduction such as in vitro fertilization (IVF)? What are appropriate and justified social policies with respect to attempting to enable infertile persons to have offspring? These urgent questions have provoked significant disagreements among theologians, sociologists, healthcare providers, philosophers and even — or especially — among feminists. In the existing literature and in developing social policy, three different kinds of answers can be discerned. (1) Some have suggested that access to IVF should be provided as a matter of right. (2) Some existing social policies and practices imply that access to IVF is a privilege. (3) Some theorists have argued that, because of its alleged violation of family values and marital security, or because of its risks, costs, and low success rate, IVF should not be available at all. After evaluating each of these views, I shall offer a feminist alternative, describing what I think would constitute the caring provision of in vitro fertilization.

Pasch is usually credited with having presented the first axiomatization of a geometrical theory, but the Vorlesungen über neuere Geometrie (1882) contains many features which do not fit the Hilbertian paradigm. Thus Pasch, while axiomatizing his “elementary geometry,” claims that it is an empirically true theory. Scholars usually regard the discrepancies between Pasch and the post-Hilbertian standard method as mere inconsistencies of Pasch's theory. On the contrary, this article aims at reconstructing the coherence and originality of the Vorlesungen. We will first display the historical background of this work and then try to reconcile Pasch's logical axiomatic claim with his empiricist stance. More importantly, we will insist on the remarkable logical procedures worked out by Pasch in order to adapt his mathematical development to the strictures of his broad philosophical position.

In this paper, the key tenets of Anjan Chakravartty's book Scientific Ontology are critically discussed. After a brief presentation of the project of stance-based ontology (Section 2), I move on to criticize Chakravartty's account of metaphysical inference (Sections 2 and 3). Then, in Section 4, I take issue with Chakravartty's view that fundamental debates in metaphysics inevitably lead to irresolvable disagreement, while in Section 5, the concept of epistemic stance is scrutinized, noting that there are problems in Chakravartty's account of the rationality of stance-choice. Finally, Section 6 is about the implications of stance-based ontology for the scientific realism debate.

St. Augustine said “When you do not ask me what Time is, I know perfectly well; but when you do ask me, I cannot think what to say.” What, then, was it that he knew perfectly well, and what was it that he did not know? Obviously he knew perfectly well such things as these, that what happened yesterday is more recent than what happened a month ago; that a traveller who walks four miles in an hour, goes twice as fast as a traveller who takes two hours over the same journey. He knew how to say things and how to understand things said to him which specified dates, durations and times of day; epochs, seasons and moments. He knew when it was midday and he could use the calendar. He could cope efficiently and easily with concrete chronological and chronometrical tasks. He could use and understand tensed verbs.

Many philosophers would claim that sexual differentiation is irrelevant to philosophy. They would say that the philosopher is trying to understand the world and himself qua human being, not qua man or qua woman. While this may have been the intent, in ethics some curious results concerning women have occurred. In some cases, when one compares the analysis of what a philosopher considers to constitute a good person with what he says about the nature of woman, we must conclude that a woman cannot ultimately be good. In this paper I propose to show how two philosophers of widely differing traditions, namely Aristotle and Kierkegaard, have both maintained this.

As With other topics about which philosophers theorize, there are two approaches to semantics. One might begin by stipulating what the content of a semantic theory of a language is to be, that is, what the theory is to say in describing what each expression in the language means. Alternatively, one can begin by trying to formulate semantic theories with adequate descriptive apparatus – vocabulary and description forming rules – for marking the differences between one thing and another that an expression of some language(s) may mean, and then, with theories in hand, see what content or significance can plausibly be assigned to the vocabulary and descriptions which the theories yield. Adherents of the second approach are apt to regard the first approach, with suspicion, as a piece of a priori theorizing about what it comes to for an expression to mean what it does, hence about what properties speakers of the relevant language are prepared to recognize in it. But there is little doubt that the first approach has been the most popular one with philosophers as a whole, nor that the most popular forms of stipulation about content centre on the idea of assigning ‘truth conditions’ to sentences.

In a recent review David Gauthier presents two arguments designed to support the eminently comforting belief that, while recognizing aboriginal rights in Canada will entail some costs for the dominant European community, these costs will be of a comparatively modest nature, and certainly far less than the sort of compensation currently claimed by the indigenous peoples themselves. Unfortunately for the Europeans, but fortunately for the indigenes, there seems to be no moral justification whatsoever for the arguments he adduces. In fact, the only way his arguments can be made to work is by assuming that radically different sets of moral principles operate for different peoples. As usually happens in such cases, the Europeans get better protection from the moral principles designed for them, than the aborigines do from the principles designed (as it happens, by the Europeans) for them.

Chase Wrenn argues that there are no epistemic duties. When it appears that we have an epistemic duty to believe, disbelieve or suspend judgement about some proposition P, we are really under a moral obligation to adopt the attitude towards P that our evidence favours. The argument appeals to theoretical parsimony: our conceptual scheme will be simpler without epistemic duties and we should therefore drop them. I argue that Wrenn’s strategy is flawed. There may well be things that we ought to do on epistemic grounds alone.

The weather can be very cold at Dachau concentration camp, but Dachau was apparently not cold enough for some Nazi purposes. A camp doctor named Rascher wrote to Heinrich Himmler in February 1943, asking to be transferred to Auschwitz to continue his experiments—which involved freezing live prisoners. The letter reads: “Auschwitz is more suitable [than Dachau] as it is colder there and the camp itself is much larger, thereby attracting less attention to the test persons, who tend to scream while freezing.”