L'on considère, selon une interprétation largement soutenue, que nous assistons dans la Méditation première à une montée en puissance du doute reposant sur une efficacité croissante des raisons de douter. Nous suggérons ici que nous pouvons défendre une lecture déflationniste du doute des Méditations en ce que la succession des arguments sceptiques utilisés par Descartes accuse une courbe d'efficacité décroissante. Cette lecture n'est bien évidemment pas sans conséquences, évoquées en conclusion, sur l'interprétation de l'exercice même du doute et, plus fondamentalement, de la doctrine cartésienne de la connaissance.

L'hédonisme axiologique a une longue histoire en philosophie. Pourtant, il garde une mauvaise réputation qui lui vaut d’être parfois écarté sans ménagement de la discussion philosophique. Cet article se propose de défendre l'hédonisme axiologique en exposant les principaux arguments en sa faveur et en répondant aux principales critiques et confusions dont il fait l'objet. Une attention particulière sera portée aux arguments établissant la spécificité du plaisir et du déplaisir par rapport à toutes les autres choses — amitié, savoir, justice, etc. — dont on pourrait argumenter la valeur finale.

In a recent article, Mario Attie-Picker maintains that a number of experimental studies provide evidence against Sextus Empiricus's empirical claims about both the connection between belief and anxiety and the connection between suspension of judgement and undisturbedness. In this article, I argue that Sextus escapes unharmed from the challenge raised by the studies in question for the simple reason that he does not make the claims ascribed to him. In other words, I argue that Attie-Picker is attacking a straw man.

Kant's critique of rational psychology is a thought experiment that targets no individual or school, but rather the natural tendency of human reason to “hypostatize” the highest intellectual condition of all cognition (the pure ‘I think’) as though it were itself a cognition of the ‘I.’ To do so is to violate the very anti-circularity stricture also at work in Kant's better-known transcendental critiques of Locke and Hume. Along with a new type of circularity (level circularity), this article proposes a conception of transcendental arguments different from that of most contemporary debates regarding empiricism, naturalism, and Cartesian foundationalism.

I employ the notion of fanhood to object to David Gauthier's Dependency Thesis, according to which, if a disposition is rationally required to adopt, so too are the acts expressing it. I first establish that fanhood is a commitment relevantly similar to a moral commitment. I then argue that, because genuine fanhood characteristically issues in inherently irrational behaviours in the form of ‘luck charms,’ or, superstitious practices fans believe will help their team win, it poses a decisive objection to the Dependency Thesis, thereby eliminating a promising attempt to defeat the moral sceptic.

I argue that Aristotle takes a ‘natural language semantics’ approach to logic, which is consistent with the general attitudes one finds in informal logic today. Although his position is complex, Aristotle emphasizes the intensional rather than the extensional side of argument evaluation. He does not take a truth-functional approach to semantics, but an approach that elucidates the illative mechanism through an understanding of natures. This comes close to what informal logicians insist on. The informal logic movement was, to a very large extent, a Canadian initiative, prominently featuring authors such as Johnson, Blair, Govier, and many others.

Dans Naissance de la clinique, Michel Foucault développe une théorie de la socialisation de la perception sous le nom d’« archéologie du regard médical ». Selon ce modèle, le regard quotidien est conditionné par un code perceptif qui détermine à la fois les traits dignes d'attention et le sens qu'il faut leur attribuer — ce que Foucault nomme des « régimes de visibilité ». Foucault pense ainsi la structuration sociale de l'expérience perceptive comme le produit d'un a priori historique dont il tente de dessiner les contours. Le but de cet article est de décrire les intérêts et les difficultés d'un tel projet. Nous montrerons notamment que Foucault ne développe aucune réelle théorie de la perception, ce qui fragilise son modèle de deux manières : au niveau théorique, d'abord, celui-ci laisse de côté la question de la transformation du code perceptif mis en évidence ; au niveau empirique, ensuite, il n'est pas en mesure de rendre compte des ethnographies contemporaines de la pratique médicale.

Spinoza's philosophy is often celebrated for its strong anti-normative current. Spinoza argues, for instance, that good and bad do not indicate anything positive in things, and that affects are always particular to the situation in which they arise. And yet Spinoza argues that melancholy is “always evil,” and cheerfulness “always good,” thus problematizing a key metaphysical principle of his system. Turning to select sections in the Ethics and Theological-Political Treatise, this article offers a reading of these two problematic affects before connecting Spinoza to recent work on early modern melancholy that conceptualizes it as an ‘assemblage.’

I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On this anti-reductionist account, intention is treated as an irreducible state of the subject. I will draw a comparison between this account and Wright's and I will show that Davidson's account can be viewed as a non-reductionist judgement-dependent account along the lines suggested by Wright. I then explain how this account can help deal with various perplexities in Davidson's later view of meaning and mental content.

This article examines Wilhelm Dilthey's project of a critique of historical reason and the reproach of historicism addressed by Heinrich Rickert. Through a comparative analysis of their respective attempts to establish a philosophical grounding for the human sciences, this article demonstrates that Dilthey and Rickert, despite their disagreement, converge toward a productive reinterpretation of the crisis of historicism and pave the way for a reconfiguration of the relationship between philosophy and history. The article focuses on three aspects of the historicist view: the importance of the particular, the historically situated character of the knowing subject, and the primacy of historical consciousness.

I draw on Heidegger and Zwicky to challenge the notion that underlying divergent perspectives of an entity there must be something that is ‘the same’; instead, sameness is disclosed within particular world-disclosures. I focus on Heidegger's concepts of world and truth as foundation for thinking about different human worlds. I introduce Zwicky's work on gestalts, internal relations, truth as asymptotic limit, and metaphors; the concept of metaphoricity of Being helps us think through how it is that no thing underlies the different perspectives of a phenomenon, and yet that there are limits for disclosures.

In this article, I discuss two approaches to the phenomenon of gesture, constituted by the existential dimension of embodiment, intersubjectivity, affectivity, and language: while Martin Heidegger states that human bodily movement as a whole should be understood as gesture in contrast to the spatial movement of things, Vilém Flusser integrates under this notion a multitude of human practices and activities that common sense hesitates to call gestures. The dilemma of the phenomenology of gesture consists in this tension between the plural concreteness of gestural appearances and the irrepressible temptation to identify a unitary layer that would allow them to hold together.