R. G. Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine has been widely discussed in recent years by his commentators. However, most philosophers who discuss the re-enactment doctrine touch only briefly on his view of the identity of thoughts. This is surprising because Collingwood claims that the historian's successful re-enactment of the thought behind the historical agent's action involves re-thinking the same thought as the agent and not merely a copy of his thought.

Several recent commentators have suggested that for fully rational agents who find themselves in iterated prisoner's dilemmas of indefinite length, co-operation is the rational strategy. Their argument is that these fully rational agents can be taught, through the co-operative actions of other agents, to bypass the dominant move of noncooperation and co-operate instead. The proponents of the “teaching strategy” seem to have ignored the compelling argument of Jordan Howard Sobel. While the teaching argument may work for agents who are less than purely rational, Sobel has pointed out that hyperrational utility maximizers cannot be taught; they reason deductively, not inductively, as the “teaching argument” requires.

C'est dans une fuite au-delà de la polarisation des sexes et de la prison de l'identité sexuale qui réside, selon Carolyn Heilbrun (1982, ix), notre salut; et la terre promise s'appelle: « androgynie ». De même, selon Bazin et Freeman (1974, 185), l'image de l'androgynie est essentielle pour nous guider dans un processus de changement radical de la société. Harris (1974), par contre, considère l'androgynie comme un mythe sexiste déguisé. Rhodes (1983, 109) l'assimile à un modèle utopique taré par des préjugés patriarcaux sexistes. Et Mary Daly, après une période d'engouement pour l'idéal androgyne, le décrit caricaturalement comme un être humain composé de deux moitiés déjetées: John Wayne et Brigitte Bardot fusionnés en frère et soeur siamois (1975, 30).

Empirical foundationalism affirms that some empirical beliefs a person holds (at a time) have a degree of justification or warrant that does not derive from their being inferable from other empirical beliefs the person holds. Such beliefs are basic for the person (at the time). In his recent book Laurence Bonjour claims that foundationalism faces the following problem:

The basic problem confronting empirical foundationalism … is how the basic or foundational empirical beliefs to which it appeals are themselves justified or warranted or in some way given positive epistemic standing, while still preserving their status as basic. This problem amounts to a dilemma: if there is no justification, basic beliefs are rendered epistemically arbitrary, thereby fatally impugning the very claim of foundationalism to constitute a theory of epistemic justification; while a justification which appeals to further premises of some sort threatens to begin anew the regress of justification which it is the whole point of foundationalism to avoid.

Roughly thirty years ago, R. M. Hare told an Anglo-French philosophy conference about a young Swiss student who came to stay with his family in Oxford. It seems that the student was doing very nicely, until, in a burst of misguided hospitality, the Hares provided him with one of their few French books, Camus's L'Etranger. Reading Camus had the effect of changing the student from an affable, altogether attractive young man into a chain-smoking recluse for whom “rien, rien n'avait d'importance”.

In constructing the concept of truth I believe to be implicit in Sartre's philosophy, I shall inevitably make glancing contact with differences between his and Descartes' understanding of the cogito—their common foundational truth. This family quarrel will, however, remain peripheral to my discussion of what I take to be the core claim of any cogito-argument: that my existence is certain insofar as it results from my thinking. Beyond that, nothing is certain about what Descartes meant by the certainty of the cogito, or about what could reasonably be meant by it. His express inconsistencies in characterizing the (now inferential, now intuitive, even performative) force of his cogito-argument are well known, as are the various incompatible, textually more or less defensible, construals of generations of his interpreters. Unsurprisingly, then, the problem of truth for those of his followers, including Sartre, who have not been content to accept cogito, ergo sum as an unanalyzable datum, has tended to centre on proposing more intellectually transparent readings of their ancestor's seemingly inscrutable ergo.

Ever since classical times, both Greek and Roman, friendship as a philosophical topic has been on the wane. The only notable exception is Montaigne's essay which, however, owes much to classical treatments. This decline of philosophical interest in friendship is not easy to account for. Alasdair McIntyre's overall thesis in After Virtue seemingly affords him with a ready interpretation. The progressive atomization of society, together with the concurrent growth of individualism that characterizes the modern era, claims McIntyre, are responsible for the demotion of friendship from the public to the private sphere.

Marx called a social pattern “contradictory” if the conditions of its maintenance are also key ingredients for its demise. The science of ecology, too, studies patterns the conditions for whose maintenance are also key ingredients for their demise. The historical materialist notion of contradiction has a close counterpart in the ecological notion of succession. Succession is a process by which the structure of a biological community—both niche structure and species structure—changes as a result of each species' modification of the habitat. Just by living, each species members alters its environment, and in non-climax communities these effects, summed over all living things, constitute disequilibria. The habitat changes, and with it the niche structure. Gradually the species structure of the community changes. Each seral stage, with its distinctive species structure, requires for its maintenance the ongoing existence of living members of each species in the structure; yet this condition is the key ingredient for succession, for the demise of the seral stage. Succession results, in effect, from contradictions that are present in each seral stage. (For an illustrative example of seral stages and biological succession, see the Appendix.)

Canadian philosopher Rupert C. Lodge (1886–1961) developed a pluralistic or “comparative philosophy” in which he adopted what I shall call the polycentric perspective. The polycentric perspective recognizes that since philosophical discourse, indeed all discourse, is necessarily linear, “of only one dimension”, it follows that no one metaphysical system, no one philosophical perspective, can ever be considered adequate on its own. In this paper I argue that the philosophy of pluralism, the adoption of the polycentric perspective by Lodge and other early Canadian philosophers, can and does serve as an adequate answer and intriguing alternative to Richard Rorty's challenge to Speculative Philosophy in The Consequences of Pragmatism and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

This work interlinks three rapidly developing fields: human reproduction, applied ethics, and feminism. The convergence of the three, each of which is interesting and important in its own right, creates a synergistic effect by which each mutually illuminates the others.

David Lewis has shocked the philosophical community with his original version of extreme modal realism according to which “every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is”. Logical Space is a plenitude of isolated physical worlds, each being the actualization of some way in which a world could be, that bear neither spatiotemporal nor causal relations to each other. Lewis has given independent, converging arguments for this. One is the argument from the indexicality of actuality, the other an elaborate cost-benefit argument of the inference-to-the-best explanation sort to the effect that a systematic analysis of a number of concepts, including modality, causality, propositions and properties, fares better under his theory than under any rival one that takes a possible world to be either a linguistic entity or an ersatz abstract entity such as a maximal compossible set of properties, propositions or states of affairs. Lewis' legion of critics have confined themselves mostly to attempts at a reductio ad absurdum of his theory or to objections to his various analyses. The indexical argument, on the other hand, has not been subject to careful critical scrutiny. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this argument cannot withstand such scrutiny. Its demise, however, leaves untouched his argument from the explanatory superiority for his extreme modal realism.

A certain mythology has been perpetuated in discussions of philosophy of time. It has been contended that the adoption of a particular theory of time, what I will call the “Non-dynamic Theory of Time” (NDTT) results in a commitment to Fatalism. This unwanted, if not intolerable baggage, is said to be avoided only by jettisoning NDTT and espousing what I will call the “Dynamic Theory of Time” (DTT). What I hope to show is that the truth of the matter is almost completely the reverse; while NDTT has absolutely no Fatalistic ramifications, DTT, when it is conjoined with a most plausible supposition, does.

I am pleased to participate in this joint Critical Notice, in part because it is an opportunity to pay a debt of gratitude. Thirteen years ago, as a Toronto undergraduate with interests in things like Hegelian metaphysics, I enrolled in an ethics seminar with Wayne Sumner. I had not done any ethics before, and took this course largely because I thought I ought to. But it turned out to be the best course of my undergraduate career, and permanently changed my philosophical interests. Having learned what I did in the seminar I have been doing ethics ever since—so, thank you, Wayne.

The principle that epistemic justification is necessarily transmitted to all the known logical consequences of a justified belief continues to attract critical attention. That attention is not misplaced. If the Transmission Principle is valid, anyone who thinks that a given belief is justified must defend the view that every known consequence of the belief is also justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection principle is modified, the possibility of deductive justification is threatened. If some known consequence fails to be justified, the failure may extend to every known consequence. To reject Transmission is to insert a logical gap between the justification of a premise and the justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection on the Transmission Principle therefore usefully brings us face to face with the following dilemma: accept the principle and hand Cartesian scepticism a powerful weapon, or modify the principle and risk undermining deductive justification.

Dans un avant-propos, les éditeurs de ce recueil en expliquent les origines: la plupart des textes ici rassemblés correspondent à des communications à l'un ou l'autre de trois colloques consacrés à Rawls.

François Terré, dans une préface, présente la position de Rawls au public français comme un essai de conciliation entre liberté individuelle, justice sociale et règle de droit. Rawls renoue avec la primauté du juste: il tient compte des droits individuels, mais aussi du point de vue holiste et du système des droits; il résiste à l'unilatéralité de l'individualisme, mais aussi à l'unilatéralité de l'utilitarisme collectif. Terré insiste aussi sur les silences de Rawls, qui ne parle ni de la violence ni de l'irrationnel pourtant si présents dans nos sociétés. Avec cohérence, Rawls refuse de sacrifier les droits de l'individu à l'utilité sociale mais ne dit rien des sacrifiés que sont l'étranger, l'handicapé, le délinquant.

Lawrence Haworth's book, Autonomy, discusses “Autonomy as a Psychological Idea”, and “Autonomy as a Normative Idea”. Part 1 discusses autonomy in relation to rationality, agency, and responsibility, defends it against Skinnerian sceptics, and outlines a theory of autonomous decision-making and the autonomous task environment. Haworth's conception of autonomy integrates and builds on the concepts of S. I. Benn, G. Dworkin, H. Frankfurt, and R. W. White. Part 2 centres on social/political theory, and not, despite the book's subtitle, on ethics as such. Haworth argues that only autonomy, and not liberty or happiness, is an intrinsic (non-moral) value, and fundamental right. His “autonomist” theory of liberty rights, a form of revisionary liberalism derived from the later idealists, is opposed to the classical liberal/libertarian theory. The arguments prompt a re-examination of the role of autonomy in the arguments for liberty (and happiness), but do not, in my view, make a persuasive case for “autonomism” against classical liberalism (hereafter liberalism). The book is chiefly noteworthy for its success in covering many important topics connected with autonomy, in an impressively short space, and in an always clear and often very insightful way.

It is commonplace to criticize utilitarianism on the ground that it does not take moral rights seriously; that it cannot account for the rights we have, and for their role in constraining our pursuit of the overall good. Wayne Sumner does not directly address this criticism in The Moral Foundation of Rights. Instead he attempts to show that consequentialism can defeat nihilism about rights: the view that there are no moral rights at all.

I like the idea behind this book. It is an empiricist alternative to the powerful and influential contemporary rationalist position on scientific law, causality, and counterfactuals, associated with Chisholm and David Lewis, which “takes its inspiration from modal logic and set theory [and] involves … an assumption of non-truth-functional connectives to define unanalyzable natural necessities, or defines such connectives and such necessities in terms of an ontology of possible worlds”. Wilson's views, springing from Hume and Nelson Goodman, involve no unobservables such as natural necessities or possible worlds, but are based instead on good old Humean laws of constant conjunction. How lovely if Wilson could pull this off!