Un problème est dit ici «mouvoir» la recherche, quand c'est sur lui que se concentre l'énergie du chercheur et que c'est son traitement qui fait «avancer» la recherche.

Une entreprise de recherche, une « e-r »,commej'écrirai souvent, est considérée ici comme une unité individuée et je postule qu'il y a toujours au moins un « niveau » où l'on peut se placer pour qu'il soit légitime de considérer une e-r comme une unité individuée.

L'étude de la nature et du rapport entre la doxa et l' épistèmé a retenu depuis quelques décennies l'attention des platonisants allemands. Déjà en 1877, O. Ihm publiait une dissertation doctorale sous le titre: Uber den Begriff der Platonischen Doxa und deren Verhältniss zum Wissen der Ideen. Plus récemment J. Sprute publiait également sa dissertation doctorale sous le titre: Der Begriff der Doxa in der Platonischen Philosophie (Göttingen, 1962). Quelques années plus tard, E. Tielsch faisait paraître un volumineux ouvrage portant le titre: Die Platonischen Versionen der griechischen Doxalehre (Meisenheim am Glan, 1970). C'est le dernier en date de ces ouvrages sur la doxa-épistémè qui retiendra ici notre attention. II s'agit de l'ouvrage de Th. Ebert qui a été publié en 1974 sous le titre: Meinung und Wissen in der Philosophic Platons. Cet ouvrage a été accueilli avec une certaine réticence par la critique tant pour sa méthode de lecture des dialogues platoniciens que pour son interprétation générale du platonisme. Nous aimerions done ici l'analyser à ce double point de vue de la méthode de lecture et de son interprétation du platonisme. Mais auparavant il nous faut dire un motsur la thèse centrale que défend l'auteur, pour être mieux en mesure de juger de la profondeur des changements que l'auteur nous suggère d'opérer dans notre compréhension des dialogues de Platon et, d'une façon plus générale, de la tradition platonicienne.

A central feature of David Gauthier's impressively searching version of social contract theory is the principle of maximin relative advantage. Given certain assumptions—more than he originally thought—this principle may be described as calling for maximum equal advantage, which is easier to talk about; and I shall refer to the principle under this description. Maximum equal relative advantage is equivalent to minimum equal relative concession; hence the principle of maximum equal relative advantage has a twin and mirror, the principle of minimum equal relative concession. Relative advantage and relative concession are ratios with the same denominator, the difference for a given agent between the maximum utility (umax) that she might get from the societyt o be contracted for and the minimum utility (umin) that would give her an incentive to cooperate in establishing the society and in keeping it up. The numerator for the one ratio—relative advantage—is the difference between the utility that she is actually going to gain from society (ua) and her minimum cooperative utility (umin). The numerator for the other ratio—relative concession—is the difference between her maximum utility (umax) and the utility that she is going to get (ua), in other words, the amount of utility that she foregoes in not getting her maximum.

«Le concept de production, déclarait Jean Ricardou, élimine deux illusions inverses: la création, l'expression» (ETG: 144). Ricardou condamne également l'inspiration, ainsi que l'imitation réaliste. Les quatre conceptions majeures qui ont hanté, et tenté l'histoire de l'esthétique depuis Platon se trouvent donc récusées au profit d'une théorie permettant d'accéder, par rapport au texte, «à une intelligibilité nouvelle: celle des lois de sa production, celle des principe [sic] de sa génération et de son organisation» (ETG: 143). Bien qu'elle concerne spécifiquement la littérature romanesque (et, à l'occasion, le cinéma), cette prise de position présente, à notre avis, un intérêt pour l'ensemble de la philosophie de l'art qu'elle pourrait, si elle s'avérait ou, du moins, se révélait opératoire, faire accéder «a une intelligibilité nouvelle». Aussi nous proposons-nous de l'examiner triptyquement: en produisant, d'abord, une fiction qui nous servira de texte-témoin; en analysant, ensuite, cette fiction en termes de production textuelle; en tentant de vérifier, enfin, si quelque autre type d'interprétation n'est pas également possible et, puisque la réponse sera affirmative, en tirant les conséquences de ce dédoublement de l'interprétation.

There are two related problems in the interpretation of Mill's ethics which become pressing once one has surmounted the more common misunderstandings and seen the over-all shape of his theory. One problem is to state his criterion of moral wrongness; the other is to show how he thinks this criterion derivable with the help ofthe Principle of Utility.

Tom Stoppard is justly praised by many for what are perceived as his technical skills as a dramatist—his wit, his seriousness, his mastery of parody and pastiche (the “country house” detective story in RIH and J, Shakespeare in RGD, Wilde and Joyce in T), his impressive control of dramatic structure (the overlapping of two dramatic worlds and the world of the audience in RIH, the use of a carefully elaborate set in J). Stoppard earns his place as a giant of modern drama from these qualities. They, however, are not what concern me here. His plays are also in various ways riddled with philosophy. My purpose in this paper is to examine the claim that he is a philosopher's dramatist, rather than a dramatist's dramatist or an ordinary thinking man's dramatist. I am not concerned with how far Stoppard himself as a matter of biographical fact may wish to make this claim, although Stoppard has made no secret of his fascination with Philosophy. I make the claim myself in order both to offer an interpretation of certain dramatic texts and to raise certain questions about philosophical method. I hope to show that to understand certain ways in which Stoppard's plays are philosophical is to appreciate something profound about the way in which philosophy and drama are akin—that is, I hope to make critical and (meta-) philosophical points, not historical or biographical points.

The overall objective of my current researches is to formulate and defend a variant of contractarian moral and social theory. Only a contractarian theory is, I claim, compatible with—and indeed required by—the theory of rational choice. I say “a variant” of contractarian theory because, for reasons I sketch in my paper “The Social Contract as Ideology”, there is a deep danger inherent in contractarian theory, the danger that it may be supposed that all human relationships are to be rationalized as contractual. The prevalence of this view—and it is, I believe, increasingly prevalent—would return us to the natural condition of humankind envisaged by Thomas Hobbes, the war of all against all. But this is contractarianism carried to excess; I want to argue, although assuredly not here, that satisfaction of a contractarian requirement is not only rationally necessary, but also necessary if our moral and social practices are to yield that true and complete human sociability integral to any life worth living, and fundamental to a community of free and equal persons.

Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is here criticized from the perspective of a more naturalistic and less compromising form of materialism. Parallels are explored between the problem of cognitive activity and the somewhat more settled problem of vital activity. The lessons drawn suggest that functionalism in the philosophy of mind may be both counterproductive as a research strategy, and false as a substantive position.

Discussions of the morality of capital punishment, and indeed discussions of the morality of punishment in general, usually assume that there are two possible justifications of punishment, a deterrence justification associated with utilitarianism and other consequentialist moral theories, and a retributive justification associated with deontological moral theories. But now that rights-based theories are attracting the increasing attention of moral philosophers it is worth asking whether these theories may not employ a different justification of punishment, with different consequences for the morality of particular forms of punishment. I will argue that rights theories do employ a different justification of punishment, and that this justification combines many of the attractive features of the deterrence and retributive justifications while avoiding their unattractive features. In particular, I will argue that the rights-based justification has more attractive consequences for the morality of capital punishment than either the deterrence or retributive justifications.

Gauthier's thinking about the social contract continues to develop vigorously. Had I aimed my criticisms at the stage of his thinking that he had reached at the time of his reply to them, rather than at earlier stages already in print, I would have organized my argument differently. Yet the earlier stages were interesting enough—and remain so—to deserve attention for their own sake. Moreover, my criticisms, even as they stand, have some effects that transcend those stages. They undermine the assumption that there is some uniquely attractive principle, whether Gauthier's principle of maximin relative advantage or any other, for determining what bargain is going to be struck on entering the social contract. They also, I persist in thinking, expose the difficulty of bringing home the maximum claims, as matters requiring respect, to agents who may lose out by accepting them as such matters.

Patricia Kitcher has argued that there is an anomaly in our thought about ourselves. Her thesis turns on a claim concerning our attitude toward an imagined case, and on an argument that the attitude is irrational.

The example, E, is as follows. Suppose you are told today that tomorrow you will lose those capacities, whatever they may be, in virtue of which you are a person. After this happens, the body which is now yours will be tortured. Pain will be felt.

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.

McTaggart maintained that, without the kind of change (henceforth A-change) which events undergo in passing from the future through the present into the past, how things are would be fundamentally different from how they appear. More particularly

(1) Without A-change there could be no change at all (#311).

(2) Without any change there could be no time (#309).

(3) Without A-change there could be no time (#312).

Le texte qui suit est la seconde tranche d'un article dont la publication a commencé dans la dernière livraison de Dialogue. Dans les trois sections numérotées respectivement 1.1,1.2 et 1.3 de la tranche déjàpubliee, je présente un modéle des déterminations principales d'un problème en contexte de recherche, modèle que j'appelle, par abréviation, « ERPC », pour rappeler que le modèle érotétique PC est une partie du modèle ER qui articule le système des déterminations d'une enterprise de recherche et pour évoquer les deux premières catégories du modèle PC, à savoir: « ce qui est posé » et « ce qui est cherché ».

Dans la partie de la philosophic que l'on appelle habituellement philosophie du langage, la vieille opposition entre le réalisme et le nominalisme est toujours actuelle. D'un côté, les thèses nominalistes trouvent de nouveaux défenseurs qui apportent quelquefois des arguments originaux ou qui reprennent d'anciennes argumentations. D'un autre côté le réalisme est violemment attaqué sur tous ses flancs.

A part l'ouvrage de Colin Evans qui date de 1975, nous pouvons dire que, de 1950 à nos jours, pratiquement rien n'a été publié sur la pensée de Taine. De 1880 à 1950, la question, pour les critiques de Taine, fut de savoir si ce dernier devait être classé parmi les positivistes ou les idéalistes. Tous ces auteurs, eux-mêmes influencés par l'incompatibilité intellectuelle entre Allemands et Anglais déjà constatée par Taine, se sont efforcés de placer Taine dans un de ces deux groupes et de démontrer que c'était bien là sa place.

Des contraintes qui relèvent du conformisme moral et idéologique s'imposent là où il n'y a pas de pouvoir étatique. La survie de l'humanité et la culture ne requièrent pas nécessairement l'Etat, contrairement à ce que pensait Hobbes, mais elles ne vont pas sans normes contraignantes. Celles-ci s'imposent d'autant mieux qu'elles paraissent liees à l'ordre du monde. Dans cet article, j'envisagerai d'abord comment les sociétés sans Etat conservent scrupuleusement les coutumes qui les régissent. C'est le conservatisme des traditions qui permet à ces sociétés de se passer d'un pouvoir séparé d'elles-mêmes. C'est leur refus de reconnaître un tel pouvoir qui les oblige au conservatisme. Je verrai ensuite comment Rousseau qui voulait établir un contrat social sans Léviathan, en arrive également à refuser l'évolution historique et à vouloir instituer ou maintenir une organisation sociale et morale capable d'auto-régulation.

The Tractatus first appeared in 1921, the same year that Post's “Introduction to a General Theory of Elementary Propositions” appeared in the American Journal of Mathematics. As the latter is the first piece clearly to present and exploit the distinction between a deductive system and a truth-functional interpretation of such a system, we may conclude that Wittgenstein's views had been arrived at somewhat before a variety of logical concepts had received the clarification and refinement incipient on the now taken-for-granted distinction between proof and model theory. One such concept, of considerable interest to Wittgenstein, was that of inference. The following constitutes an attempt to explicate his notion. In particular, I shall attempt to show that his repudiation of “laws of inference” is closely tied to his rejection of logical constants; and that both can be seen as the product of what might be termed a “metaphysics of completeness”—before, of course, any (presently recognizable) notion of completeness had achieved a measure of precision or currency.

The last half-century has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Aristotle's Topics and his theory of dialectic—culminating in J. D. G. Evan's book about Aristotle's concept of dialectic; the decision to devote the entire Third Symposium Aristotelicum to the Topics; and the appearance of a small but steady stream of articles, several of which are now conveniently bound together in the first volume of Articles on Aristotle, edited by Barnes, Schofield, and Sorabji. These studies provide two somewhat incompatible views of Aristotle's dialectic. On the one hand, it is argued that dialectic—as a method parallel but inferior to demonstration—was superseded by the discovery of the scientific method, or that dialectic—as a method of discussing first principles and of eliciting assent during debate—is at best a propadeutic to philosophic inquiry. These assessments are a consequence of the view that, what ever its strengths, dialectic can never transcend the level of opinion (endoxa) with which it begins, so as to achieve knowledge or certainty. At the other side of the spectrum are those who maintain that in addition t o having nonphilosophic uses, for Aristotle dialectical inquiry is often an integral part of philosophic investigation and, on occasion, its most important part. To some, dialectic's role in philosophic investigation is limited to the verification of definitions already discovered and to bringing an investigator to the threshold of discovering first principles, to others, dialectic's last stage (resolution, euporia) comprises part of the philosophic discovery itself.

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).