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.

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.

La philosophie analytique de l'action se réclame du langage ordinaire de l'action comme une des sources de ses data philosophiques. Elle se propose d'en examiner le fonctionnement, d'en extraire les concepts clés, de caractériser les formes de propositions dans lesquelles s'expriment nos actions et notre façon spontanée de les comprendre, d'examiner l'articulation propre aux stratégies d'action et au discours qui les justifie, et de faire des « proposals » pour la construction d'une théorie de l'action. En somme, il s'agit d'ériger le langage ordinaire en instance de contrôle aussi bien sur le plan du traitement de problèmes philosophiques que sur celui de la construction de méta-théories des sciences de l'homme. Ce travail sur le langage de l'action peut revêtir plusieurs fonctions: fonction de clarification ou de détection de confusions, fonction thérapeutique pour guérir le langage de maladies philosophiques, c'est-à-dire des pseudo-problèmes, fonction heuristique pour prescrire une diète appropriée au traitement des perplexités philosophiques qui surgissent « quand le langage tourne à vide, non quand il travaille », pour employer le mot de Wittgenstein (1953, #138).

Les rencontres de Royaumont sur le thème de « La Philosophic analytique » ont fourni l'occasion de mettre en relief très accusé, tant par les rapports présentés que par les discussions, les tendances de l'école anglaise d'Oxford et celles de diverses écoles « continentales », pour reprendre un terme favori de Grande-Bretagne. Le colloque aura été, en définitive, une invitation à briser, de part et d'autre, l'attitude « insulaire » qui menace réellement tout courant de pensée qui se refuse pratiquement à reconnaitre les dimensions multiples des problèmes et de l'activité philosophiques.

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.

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.