The main part of this paper will begin with a description of the sorts of circumstances in which one may be said to be giving an explanation of something or other. It will then proceed by a series of steps through an account of the role which the giving of reasons has in this process, focussing in particular on the kinds of reasons a person advances when he explains why something is desirable; and this account will again give way (I hope not unnaturally) to a discussion of the logic of the words “evidence” and “proof,” terms which appear crucially in the much-debated matter in moral philosophy of whether it is possible to prove, as the saying goes, “one's ultimate ends.”

One of the central problems in philosophy since Kant has been that of the possibility of a science of human culture. Dilthey, Croce and Collingwood devoted their energies to this task, in an atmosphere marked by an intense hostility between positivists, who represented the tradition of naturalism and historicists, who represented the tradition of humanism. The positivists, led by Comte, Buckle, Mill and Taine, argued for a science of man modelled on the prevailing methods of the natural sciences. Typical of this approach was the attempt by the English historian T. H. Buckle:

to accomplish for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events analogous, to what has been effected by other inquiries for the different branches of the natural sciences.

In 1919, G. E. Moore introduced into technical philosophy the term “entailment.” He used it to name the converse of the relation which holds between two propositions when the one follows from or is deducible from the other. Moore believed this latter to be exemplified by the relation in which the conclusion of an argument in Barbara stands to the conjunction of its premises and by the relation in which x is coloured stands to x is red.

In this new edition of Professor Hendel's Studies in the Philosophy of David Hume (1925), there are no changes in the body of the work, except the elimination of the original Chapter five, “Space, Time and Reality,” and its replacement by a short Appendix (III) entitled “On Space and Time: Correction of Former Errors.” Three appendices have been added: I. “The ‘Discoveries’ of Hume and the ‘New Scene of Thought’”; II. “Hume's Relation to Hutcheson;” III. “On ‘The Nature of Experience’ and the Senses in Which It Has Been Considered Normative.” A more substantial addition is a thirty-page introduction in which Professor Hendel reviews the great efflorescence of Hume scholarship in the present century and notes how vastly more important Hume the philosopher looms now than when he wrote the Studies. Finally, there is a supplement of one hundred pages, “On Atomism: A Critique of Hume's First Principles and Method.”

I believe that Mr. Sosa is right about my example but wrong on the substantive issue; which shows that my example was poorly chosen. If the ugliest Irishman was so ugly that even the Irish were offended, they might form a committee to get rid of him. Suppose he was kidnapped and deposited in New York. If we were informed of all this and also knew that the ugliest Irishman is the Prime Minister, I agree that we should have been given an adequate explanation of why the Prime Minister is in New York.

R.M. Hare's new book, Freedom and Reason, is a welcome contribution to modern moral philosophy and should be read with care by anyone who believes that ethics should be relevant to the moral life, and that reason should have a substantial role to play in that life. Freedom and Reason, though not simply a sequel to Hare's earlier work, The Language of Morals, should be read with the earlier work in mind. This is important, not only because it presupposes some of the conclusions of that work, but also because of the strong criticism which the earlier work provoked, and which Freedom and Reason to a large extent answers.

M. K.T. Gallagher a entrepris la t^che difficile d'introduirele public philosophique américain dans l'univers de la pensée de Gabriel Marcel. Tâche difficile, non pas tant parce que la mentalité américaine serait plus qu'une autre réfractaire à cette pensée—on pourrait faire remarquer en effet l'influence exercée très tôt sur la formation et l'évolution de la pensée marcellienne par J. Royce—mais en raison de la nature toute particulière de la manière m≖me dont Marcel philosophe.