We believe that, granting radical holism, a homophonie (or disquotational) definition of truth for a language achieves no progress towards guaranteeing the material equivalence of the left- and right-hand-side sentences for T-sentences. In order to avoid paradoxes such as the antinomy of the liar, Tarski requires that the metalanguage be semantically richer than the object language. For a radical holist, the difference in semantic powers of the meta- and object languages means that homophony is no guarantee of synonymy; therefore, worries about the indeterminacy of translation still apply.

Moral platonism, the claim that moral entities are both objective and prescriptive, is generally thought to be a dead end. In an attempt to defend a moderate form of moral platonism or more precisely platonism about values, I first argue that several of the many versions of this doctrine are not committed to ontological extravagances. I then discuss an important objection due to John McDowell and developed by Michael Smith, according to which moral platonism is incoherent. I argue that objectivism is compatible with the claim that certain ways of being aware of values, namely those involving emotions, are motivating.

Rousseau develops a genealogical reflection on political domination. The intelligibility of the genealogy does not rest on the psychological category of craving for power. That is why Rousseau differentiates between tyranny and despotism. Rousseau stresses this difference in two works: Discours sur l'origine de l'inégalité parmi les hommes and Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques. Tyranny and despotism differ in that the latter produces an ideological speech. Political domination depends upon a double process. In the first process, ruling implies creating inequality in the political order, thus excluding people from political decisions. In order to mask this political inequality, the ideological speech produces two fictions: the fiction of the guaranty and the fiction of the community. In the second process, ruling implies generating public opinion which, in turn, adheres to this political order.

The following paper is not a literal exegesis of Hegel's æsthetics, but rather the attempt to encounter his æsthetics from a philosophical perspective which considers the æsthetic experience as intuition of finitude. From this perspective our purpose is to indicate the contemporary philosophical relevance of Hegel's æsthetics by underscoring some elements of it which can help us to rethink the relation between æsthetic experience and the subject in his interaction with his world. The question of this essay is: how can æsthetic experience be a substantial experience for the modern subject?

This book is the second volume of a critical edition of the writings of Thomas Reid, an edition that will include many of his manuscript remains as well as his previously published works. These volumes are intended to displace the heretofore standard 8th edition of Reid's works edited by Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856). Hamilton's edition is marred by his numerous, often intrusive, and obtuse footnotes. Reid's spelling and punctuation were also sometimes “corrected” by Hamilton, so his edition does not present a fully accurate version of the original editions whose publication was superintended by Reid. The type in the Hamilton edition is also archaic and very small, making reading the text excessively difficult. The present and subsequent volumes are intended to present canonical texts free of the flaws in the Hamilton text. This volume succeeds admirably in that project.