Paul Horwich writes in his recent book, Meaning (p. 3): “the picture of meaning to be developed here is inspired by Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a word is constituted from its use—from the regularities governing our deployment of the sentences in which it appears.” Horwich makes no claim to a faithful exegesis of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations but I argue in the present article that the conception of meaning he develops in his book is actually quite close to that of the author of the Investigations. I do this by comparing the views of the two philosophers. I also examine the question of holism, which, as it seems, is inseparable from the notion that use is constitutive of meaning.

Akrasia is both an intentional and an irrational phenomenon. These two characteristics can be reconciled by a careful reconstruction of practical reasoning. I undertake this task along Davidsonian lines, arguing against his critics that the notion of unconditional judgement is the key to an adequate account of akrasia. Unless akrasia is conceived as a failure of the agent to form an unconditional judgement that conforms to her best judgement “all things considered,” the intentionality of akrasia is lost. Likewise, I show how practical and theoretical reasonings concur in the production of action, and why akrasia is a problem for the philosophy of action before being a problem for moral philosophy.

The aim of this article is to assess the coherence of the metaethical positions on which discourse ethics as developed by Habermas and Apel rests. After showing that one is faced here with a non-descriptivist, anti-realist but cognitivist moral theory, I examine whether a non-descriptivist cognitivism, on the one hand, and an anti-realist cognitivism, on the other hand, can consistently be held. I maintain that the problem of the relation between cognitivism and non-descriptivism is adequately solved by the two authors, but that the problem of the relation between cognitivism and anti-realism is still waiting for an appropriate answer, which I put forth in my article.

I present several arguments which provide what I consider to be a definitive argument against certain forms of masculine language in their so-called sexually neutral usage. In the first part, I concentrate on the use of the word “homme,” and I defend the idea that it embodies a perverse contingent a priori. In the second part, I examine how this pernicious a priori—this masculine language virus—infects the pronominal system of French. I conclude with an undoubtedly surprising linguistic and feminist criticism of a recent decision by the Office de la langue française du Québec to feminize job titles, arguing instead that the problem lies elsewhere and hence so does an efficient solution.