RésuméCet article explore les liens entre le recours à la véracité de Dieu et les notions de certitude «métaphysique» et «morale» chez Descartes. Pour cela, je montre le rôle qu'elles jouent dans sa preuve de l'existence du monde extérieur, sa position sur l'existence d'autres esprits et celle sur l'«animal-machine». Descartes se sert de la véracité de Dieu dans le premier cas, maispas dans le deuxième ni le troisième. Je suggere que c'est parce que faire à nouveau appel à la véracité (...) de Dieu dans le cas des autres esprits aurait mis en péril sa doctrine de l'animal-machine. Je conclus en me penchant sur des passages de Descartes qui pourraient sembler incompatibles avec l'inter prétation que je fais du rôle important quejoue la certitude morale dans sa philosophic. (shrink)

RésuméCet article explore les liens entre le recours à la véracité de Dieu et les notions de certitude «métaphysique» et «morale» chez Descartes. Pour cela, je montre le rôle qu'elles jouent dans sa preuve de l'existence du monde extérieur, sa position sur l'existence d'autres esprits et celle sur l'«animal-machine». Descartes se sert de la véracité de Dieu dans le premier cas, maispas dans le deuxième ni le troisième. Je suggere que c'est parce que faire à nouveau appel à la véracité (...) de Dieu dans le cas des autres esprits aurait mis en péril sa doctrine de l'animal-machine. Je conclus en me penchant sur des passages de Descartes qui pourraient sembler incompatibles avec l'inter prétation que je fais du rôle important quejoue la certitude morale dans sa philosophic. (shrink)

I argue for an alternative to Quine’s conception of observation sentences, one that better satisfies the roles Quine envisages for them, and that otherwise respects Quinean constraints. After reviewing a certain predicament Quine got into in balancing the needs of the intersubjectivity of observation sentences with his notion of the stimulus meaning of an observation sentence, I push for replacing the latter with what I call the ‘stimulus field’ of an observation sentence, a notion that remains ‘proximate’ but is shared (...) between different language users. Throughout, I emphasize the epistemological role of observation sentences. (shrink)

According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. It is not because (...) of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method. (shrink)

According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. It is not because (...) of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method. (shrink)

Human heritable genome editing (HHGE) involves editing the genes of human gametes and/or early human embryos. Whilst ‘identity’ is a key concept underpinning the current HHGE debate, there is a lack of inclusive analysis on different concepts of ‘identity’ which renders the overall debate confusing at times. This paper first contributes to reviewing the existing literature by consolidating how ‘identity’ has been discussed in the HHGE debate. Essentially, the discussion will reveal an ontological and empirical understanding of identity when different (...) types of identity are involved. Here, I discuss genetic, numerical, qualitative and narrative and how each of them is relevant in the HHGE context. Secondly, given the different types of identity, the paper explores how we could navigate these different interpretations of identity in a way that promotes an inclusive and informed discussion between primary stakeholders and the general public in the HHGE debate. Here, I argue for and refine a multi-faceted concept of identity as a suitable framework for discussing the ethical and societal implications of HHGE because it not only could integrate different understandings of identity but also highlight the interconnectedness between these different understandings. (shrink)

Les principaux aspects psychologiques et philosophiques détachés du film Solaris réalisé par Andrei Tarkovski, ainsi que les techniques cinématographiques utilisées par le réalisateur pour transmettre ses messages aux spectateurs. Dans « Introduction », je présente brièvement les éléments pertinents de la biographie de Tarkovski et un aperçu du roman Solaris de Stanislav Lem et du film Solaris réalisé par Andrei Tarkovsky. Dans « Technique cinématographique », je parle du rythme spécifique des scènes, du mouvement radical déclenché par Tarkovski dans le (...) cinéma moderne, du rôle des éléments symboliques et iconiques et des affinités avec le fantastique domaine de la littérature russe. Dans « Aspects psychologiques », j'analyse la question de la communication dans une société humaine de l'avenir considéré par Tarkovski comme rigide, de l'obsession de la maison et de l'évolution personnelle de Kris, Hari et de leurs relations. Dans « Aspects philosophiques », le film est analysé à travers la philosophie de l’esprit (dualisme cartésien, réductionnisme et fonctionnalisme), le problème de l’identité personnelle, la théorie des espaces hétérotopiques développée par Michel Foucault et les interprétations sémantiques pouvant être déduites du film. J'analyse également la question de l'identité personnelle à travers la philosophie de Locke. Les « Conclusions » montrent les idées générales de cet essai, à savoir que les tentatives de l'homme pour classer et maintenir des formes d'interaction avec des entités inconnues seront toujours condamnées à l'échec et refléteront une erreur majeure du monde panoptique dans lequel nous vivons. Dans ce cadre d'analyse de la philosophie de l'esprit, le fonctionnalisme semble être le plus intuitif. Solaris est toutefois un film qui commence par une recherche de réponses et vient apporter à ces réponses toute une gamme de questions différentes. -/- SOMMAIRE: -/- Abstract Introduction 1 Technique cinématographique 2. Aspects psychologiques 3. Aspects philosophiques Conclusions Bibliographie Notes -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20367.53929 . (shrink)

When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn't engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn't engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as what people working in informal logic tend to say about argumentation. (...) -/- Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what's wrong with it. Still, even if you can't figure out what's wrong with an argument, you can know that it's misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence-types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn't engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn't engage with it at all. You shouldn't engage open-mindedly because you shouldn't be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn't engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. -/- In making this case, Jeremy Fantl discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers. (shrink)

I argue for a soft compatibilist theory of free will, i.e., such that free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, directly opposite hard incompatibilism, which holds free will incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism. My intuitions in this book are primarily based on an analysis of meditation, but my arguments are highly syncretic, deriving from many fields, including behaviorism, psychology, conditioning and deconditioning theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, simulation theory, etc. I offer a causal/functional analysis of (...) meta-mental control, or 'metacausality', cashed out in counterfactual terms, to solve what I call the easy problem of free will. (shrink)

Consequentialist and Kantian theories differ over the ethical relevance of consequences of actions. I investigate how they might differ too over the relevance of what actions are consequence of. Focusing on the case of group action and collective responsibility, I argue that there's a kind of analog to the problem of aggregating the value of consequencesthat Kantian theories will not confront and consequentialist theories will. The issue provides a useful way to characterize a deep difference between Kantian and consequentialist theories (...) and points, ironically, toward a way of making those views compatible. (shrink)

The appeal of the moral principle according to which we should treat like cases alike is so great that it verges on the axiomatic, or on the platitudinous. Recently, however, the principle has been challenged in deeply interesting ways. These ways are interesting because they do not invite skepticism about morality at large, but about the specific claim that what is good (or bad) for an agent in a given situation must be good (or bad) for any other similarly situated (...) agent. I here assess the post-challenge viability of the principle. In a sense, the principle survives, but this is neither an unqualified victory nor an inspiring result. The examination of these matters contains an important (and under-investigated) lesson about the nature of moral experience. (shrink)

John Locke famously claimed that our idea of substance is but a confused idea of “something we know not what.” However, he also thought that the idea of substance is a fundamental part of our ideas of ourselves and the objects surrounding us—of objects we do know. Interpreting this apparently ambivalent stance has long been a major challenge for Locke scholarship. In this article, I argue that the leading interpretations of Locke's conception of substance have failed to resolve this tension (...) because they have misconstrued the source of Locke's skepticism about our knowledge of what substance is. This skepticism, I argue, issues from an observation about the signification of the term “substance”: Locke maintained that the philosophical usage of the term is irremediably equivocal. This reading allows us to acknowledge that Locke could consistently hold that ordinary objects, such as persons, horses, or trees, are paradigmatic examples of substances. It also points to a better appreciation of how Locke's discussion of substance relates to the scholastic conceptions of substance he tried to overcome. (shrink)

Koriat & Goldsmith's distinction between the correspondence and storehouse metaphors is valuable for both memory theory and methodology. It is questionable, however, whether this distinction underlies the heated debate about so called “everyday memory” research. The distinction between experimental and naturalistic methodologies better characterizes this debate. I compare these distinctions and discuss how the methodological distinction, between experimental and naturalistic designs, could give rise to different theoretical approaches.

S. Kierkegaard argued that our highest task as humans is to realize an “intensified” or “developed” form of subjectivity—his name for self-responsible agency. A self-responsible agent is not only responsible for her actions. She also bears responsibility for the individual that she is. In this paper, I review Kierkegaard’s account of the role that our capacity for reflective self-evaluation plays in making us responsible for ourselves. It is in the exercise of this capacity that we can go from being subjective (...) in a degraded sense—merely being an idiosyncratic jumble of accidental and arbitrary attitudes and affects—to being a subject in the ideal or eminent sense. The latter requires the exercise of my capacity for reflective self-evaluation, since it involves recognizing, identifying with, and reinforcing those aspects of my overall make-up that allow me to express successfully a coherent way of being in the world. Kierkegaard argues that taking immortality seriously is one way to achieve the right kind of reflective stance on one’s own character or personality. Thus, Kierkegaard argues that immortality as a theoretical posit can contribute to one’s effort to own or assume responsibility for being the person one is. (shrink)

This essay explains the inescapability of moral demands. I deny that the individual has genuine reason to comply with these demands only if she has desires that would be served by doing so. Rather, the learning of moral reasons helps to shape and channel self- and other-interested motivations so as to facilitate and promote social cooperation. This shaping happens through the “embedding” of reasons in the intentional objects of motivational propensities. The dominance of the instrumental conception of reason, according to (...) which reasons must be based in desires of the individual, has made it harder to recognize that reasons shape desires. I attempt to undermine this dominance by arguing that the concept of a self that extends over time is constructed to meet the demands of social cooperation. Prudential reasons to act on behalf of the persisting self's desires are often taken to constitute the paradigm of reasons based on desires of the individual. But such reasons, along with the very concept of the persisting self, are constructed to promote human cooperation and to shape the individual's desires. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMaterialism is the view that everything that is real is material or is the product of material processes. It tends to take either a ‘cosmological’ form, as a claim about the ultimate nature of the world, or a more specific ‘psychological’ form, detailing how mental processes are brain processes. I focus on the second, psychological or cerebral form of materialism. In the mid-to-late eighteenth century, the French materialist philosopher Denis Diderot was one of the first to notice that any self-respecting (...) materialist had to address the question of the status and functional role of the brain, and its relation to our mental life. After this the topic grew stale, with knee-jerk reiterations of ‘psychophysical identity’ in the nineteenth-century, and equally rigid assertions of anti-materialism. In 1960s philosophy of mind, brain–mind materialism reemerged as ‘identity theory’, focusing on the identity between mental processes and cerebral processes. In contrast, Diderot’s cerebral materialism allows for a more culturally sedimented sense of the brain, which he described in his late Elements of Physiology as a ‘book – except it is a book which reads itself’. Diderot thus provides a lesson for materialism as it reflects on the status of the brain, science and culture. (shrink)

This paper examines the competing construals of the phrase recovering alcoholic, which, as a Membership Categorization Device, serves to fulfill a commitment to an identity category and at the same time evokes other category-bound activities, often with unintended consequences. Former problem drinkers are routinely referred to by themselves and others as recovering alcoholics, yet they are not ‘recovering’ in the canonical sense of the word, and they participate in a behavior – not drinking – which is a negation of the (...) behavior that originally qualified them as alcoholics. This use of the relatively new identity marker recovering alcoholic may discourage a problem drinker from attempting sobriety, as it implies an unbounded, never-ending period of recovery, unlike recovery from other diseases. (shrink)

Viele Menschen halten Patientenverfügungen für ein geeignetes Mittel, um selbstbestimmt zu entscheiden, wie mit ihnen im Fall schwerer Demenz umgegangen werden soll. Die meisten Bioethiker stimmen ihnen zu: Demenzverfügungen seien Ausdruck der „verlängerten Autonomie“ der Patientin. Doch ob sie recht haben, ist unklar. Dem viel beachteten Identitätseinwand zufolge sind die Ausstellerin der Verfügung und ihre schwer demente Nachfolgerin numerisch verschieden: Sie sind zwei und nicht eins. Wenn das stimmt, kann die Ausstellerin nicht verfügen, wie mit ihr im Falle schwerer Demenz (...) umgegangen werden soll. Die Demenzverfügung ist ungültig. In meinem Aufsatz möchte ich eine neue Replik auf diesen Einwand vorstellen. Ihr Ansatzpunkt ist der menschliche Organismus, den wir sehen, wenn wir in den Spiegel blicken. Er kann schwer dement werden, und auch er hat die Patientenverfügung unterschrieben. Warum sollte sie dann ungültig sein? Auf den ersten Blick hat diese Replik eine Reihe von Vorzügen. Insbesondere akzeptiert sie die populären Annahmen, auf denen der Identitätseinwand basiert. Bei näherem Hinsehen zeigen sich jedoch Probleme, die so gravierend sind, dass wir von ihr Abstand nehmen sollten. (shrink)

Terence Cuneo has recently argued that we have to be committed to the existence of epistemic facts insofar as they are indispensable to theorizing. Furthermore, he argues that the epistemic properties of these facts are inextricably ‘ontologically entangled’ with certain moral properties, such that there exist ‘moral-epistemic’ facts. Cuneo, therefore, concludes that moral realism is true. I argue that Cuneo’s appeal to the existence of moral-epistemic facts is problematic, even granting his argument for the existence of indispensable epistemic facts. I (...) conclude, therefore, that Cuneo’s argument fails to justify moral realism. (shrink)

Koriat & Goldsmith provide an excellent analysis of the flexibility of retrieval processes and how they are situationally dependent. I agree with their emphasis on functional considerations and argue that the traditional laboratory experiment motivates the subject to be accurate. However, I disagree with their strong claim that the quantity–accuracy distinction implies an essential discontinuity between traditional and naturalistic approaches to the study of memory.

I develop a Latin Social model of the Trinity that is an extension of my previous article on indexicals and the Trinity. I focus on the theological desideratum of the necessity of the divine persons’ unity of action. After giving my account of this, I compare it with Swinburne’s and Hasker’s social models and Leftow’s non-social model. I argue that their accounts of the divine persons’ unity of action are theologically unsatisfactory and that this unsatisfactoriness derives from a modern conception (...) of personhood according to which distinct and incommunicable intellectual acts and volitional acts are necessary conditions for one’s being a person. I argue that the Latin Social model is preferable to the modern-personhood models because it is simpler in explanatory economy with regard to securing the necessity of the divine persons’ unity of action. (shrink)

The correspondence view is consistent with a theory of direct remembering that assumes continuity between perception and memory. Two implications of direct remembering for correspondence are suggested. It is assumed that forgetting is exponential, and that remembering at one time is independent of factors influencing remembering at another. Elaboration of the correspondence view in the same terms as perception offers a novel approach to the study of memory.

Research Articles Thomas G. West, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

Both Reid and Berkeley reject ‘representationalism’, an epistemological position whereby we perceive things in the world indirectly via ideas in our mind, on the grounds of anti-scepticism and common sense. My aim in this paper is to draw out the similarities between Reid and Berkeley's ‘anti-representationalist’ arguments, whilst also identifying the root of their disagreements on certain fundamental metaphysical issues. Reid famously rejects Berkeley's idealism, in which all that exists are ideas and minds, because it undermines the dictates of common (...) sense. Reid also charges Berkeley with not only accepting but furthering the progress of ‘the Way of Ideas’, a longstanding tradition which has drawn philosophy away from true science and common sense. From Berkeley's perspective, Reid is a ‘materialist’; that is, he dogmatically accepts that mind-independent things exist. I argue that these important differences can be explained by both thinkers’ construal of certain ‘philosophical prejudices’. Finally, I conclude that despite these differences, both ought to be characterised as ‘anti-representationalists’ in light of their shared epistemological concerns. (shrink)

: This paper explicates and defends the thesis that individual rational judgment, of the kind required for justification, whether in cognition or in morals, is fundamentally socially and historically conditioned. This puts paid to the traditional distinction, still influential today, between ‘rational’ and ‘historical’ knowledge. The present analysis highlights and defends key themes from Kant’s and Hegel’s accounts of rational judgment and justification, including four fundamental features of the ‘autonomy’ of rational judgment and one key point of Hegel’s account of (...) ‘mutual recognition’. These themes are linked to Kant’s and Hegel’s transformation of the modern natural law tradition. The results explain why Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy are indeed the origins of the properly pragmatic account of rationality, why the pragmatic account of rationality provides genuine rational justification and why this pragmatic account of rational justification is consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and with strict objectivity about moral norms. > Russian translation : Nelly Motroshilova, ed., К 200-летию выхода в свет «Феноменологии духа» Гегеля, 195–219. > Turkish translation : ‘Hegel’in Tinin Görüngübilimi’nde Karşihkh Onanma ve Ussal Gerekçelendirme’. MonoKL 4–5 :212–231. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus that Emilie Du Châtelet’s challenging essay “On Freedom” defends compatibilism. I offer an alternative, libertarian reading of the essay. I lay out the prima facie textual evidence for such a reading. I also explain how apparently compatibilist remarks in “On Freedom” can be read as aspects of a sophisticated type of libertarianism that rejects blind or arbitrary choice. To this end, I consider the historical context of Du Châtelet’s essay, and especially the dialectic between various (...) strands of eighteenth-century libertarianism and compatibilism. (shrink)

Locke defines knowledge as the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. Nevertheless, he claims that we know particular things: the identity of our ideas, our own existence, and the existence of external objects. Although much has been done to reconcile the definition of knowledge with our knowledge of external objects, there is virtually nothing in the scholarship when it comes to knowing ideas or our own existence. I fill in this gap by arguing that perceptions of ideas are (...) complex mental states that convey propositional knowledge due to agreeing elements therein. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider some ways in which the Copy Principle and Hume’s nominalism impinge on one another, concluding that the marriage is not a happy one. I argue for the following claims. First, Hume’s argument against indeterminate ideas isn’t cogent even if the Copy Principle is accepted. But this does not vindicate Locke: the imagistic conception of ideas, presupposed by the Copy Principle, will force Locke to accept something like Hume’s view of the way general terms function, the (...) availability of abstract ideas notwithstanding. Second, Hume’s discussion of nominalism provides support for the “old Hume” interpretation, which takes the Copy Principle to be a criterion of meaningfulness, as against the “new Hume” reading, according to which it constrains what we can know. Finally, nominalism forces Hume to adopt a more complicated theory of ideas. (shrink)

In this paper, I point to two problems engendered by two assumptions that Hume makes. The first is his nominalism: the view that all ideas are fully determinate with respect to all the aspects that are represented in them. The second, perhaps hitherto unnoticed, is that names denote ideas. I propose some solutions, aiming to find one that is Humean.

The doctrine of idols is one of the most famous aspects of Bacon's thought. Yet his claim that the idols lead to madness has gone almost entirely unnoticed. This paper argues that Bacon's theory of idols underlies his diagnosis of the contemporary condition as one of ‘universal madness’. In contrast to interpretations that locate his doctrine of error and recovery within the biblical narrative of the Fall, the present analysis focuses on the material and cultural sources of the mind's tendency (...) towards error. It explains the idols in terms of Bacon's materialist psychology and his exposé of the debilitating effects of language and traditional learning. In so doing, it highlights the truly radical nature of the idols. For Bacon, the first step towards sanity was to alert people to the prevailing madness. The doctrine of idols was intended as a wake-up call, preparing the way for a remedy in the form of his new method of inquiry. The paper concludes by indicating how Bacon's method aimed to treat ‘universal madness’, and it suggests that his diagnosis influenced John Locke. (shrink)

We advance a theory of inductive reasoning based on similarity, and test it on arguments involving mammal categories. To measure similarity, we quantified the overlap of neural activation in left Brodmann area 19 and the left ventral temporal cortex in response to pictures of different categories; the choice of of these regions is motivated by previous literature. The theory was tested against probability judgments for 40 arguments generated from 9 mammal categories and a common predicate. The results are interpreted in (...) the context of Hume’s thesis relating similarity to inductive inference. (shrink)

In this paper I set out what I call a ‘conquest’ conception of Hume's experimental science of man. It is notable, I claim, that Hume regards what he calls the ‘capital’ of the sciences – ‘the science of MAN’ – as occupied territory, and that he views his ‘direct’ method of approach upon the science of human nature as a ‘conquest’. I expand upon such statements by leveraging the comparison that Hume draws between experimental moral philosophy and the experimental tradition (...) in natural philosophy inaugurated by Francis Bacon. Overall, I suggest that Hume's decision to ground his science of human nature upon experience and observation is as much about overthrowing the epistemic authority of speculative dogmas as it is about establishing a secure foundation for his system of the sciences, and I contend that Hume's application of his hypotheses to animals is central to this conception of his philosophical project in the Treatise. (shrink)

As the product of liberalism's first encounter with the theoretical problems posed by legal discrimination and unequal treatment of minority groups, Locke's argument for religious toleration foreshadowed contemporary democratic theory's emphasis on non-coercive discussion of diverse rights claims and broadly inclusive public deliberations. This study tries to illuminate the democratic dimension of Locke's toleration theory by focusing on his crucial account of the church as a voluntary association. Here Locke presented discursive possibilities for the articulation of diverse beliefs and interests (...) that he believed would not only benefit both society as a whole and the minority religious groups contained in it, but also weave principles of contestation and deliberation into the very fabric of the liberal polity. (shrink)

Properties seem to play an important role in causal relations. But philosophers disagree over whether or not properties play their causal or nomic roles essentially. Causal essentialists say that they do, while quidditists deny it. This article surveys these two views, as well as views that try to find a middle ground.

This article is one of the author’s serial writings to assimilate Ricoeur’s three-fold ethical investigation into various areas of human acts of forgetting, including 1) the therapeutic or pathological area, 2) the pragmatic area, dealing with individual and group’s self-identity in relation to time and otherness, and 3) the more explicitly ethical-political (social and institutional) area, in a wide context. Corresponding to the second area of the Ricoeurian three-fold investigation, this paper probes the ethical dimension of the Zhuangzian forgetfulness of (...) personal identity in relation to time and otherness. It first examines textual materials of the Zhuangzi to navigate on the narrative meanings of forgetting oneself or personal identity, and then delves into three domains of Zhuangzian conception on the forgetting of one’s fixed identity. Finally, it elaborates on the Zhuangzian notion of relational autonomy or agency that underlies the practice of forgetfulness of oneself or personal identity. (shrink)

This article is one of the author’s serial writings to assimilate Ricoeur’s three-fold ethical investigation into various areas of human acts of forgetting, including 1) the therapeutic or patholog...

RÉSUMÉ: Les philosophes de la période moderne sont souvent présentés comme ayant commis une erreur élémentaire: celle de confondre la force propositionnelle avec le contenu propositionnel. Par l'examen de deux cas saillants, à savoir les philosophes de Port-Royal et John Locke, je montre que l'accusation n'est pas fondée, et que Locke en particulier a les ressources requises pour construire une théorie des attitudes propositionnelles.

Newton’s earliest publications contained scandalous epistemological claims: not only did he aim for certainty; he also claimed success. Some commentators argue that Newton ultimately gave up claims of certainty in favor of a high degree of probability. I argue that no such shift occurred. I examine the evidence of a probabilistic shift: a passage from query 23/31 of the Opticks and rule 4 of the Principia. Neither passage supports a probabilistic approach to natural philosophy. The aim of certainty, then, was (...) an enduring feature of Newton’s methodology. (shrink)

Commentators usually agree that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is intended to undermine the plausibility of the belief in the existence of the soul. In this paper I argue that, instead of trying to reveal the implausibility of this belief, Locke seeks to rid the concept of the soul of its traditional cognitive and moral functions in order to render references to the soul redundant in philosophical explanations of the nature of human beings and their place in the world. On (...) this reading, the driving force behind Locke's discussion is not a sceptical problem posed by the impossibility of proving the existence of the soul, but the wish to maximize the ability of limited creatures such as ourselves to engage positively with their lives in the here and now. Locke's experience-focused philosophy will here present itself as a position with significant moral implications. (shrink)

David Hume (1711–1776) described the question of liberty and necessity as ‘the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science’ (Hume [1748] 1975, p. 95). He was right about it being contentious. Whether it is metaphysical is another matter. I think that what is genuinely metaphysical is an assumption that Hume, and a good many other philosophers, make in their treatment of the question. The assumption is about language and reality. I call it ‘the conformity assumption’. But more about (...) that shortly. Let us begin at the obvious beginning, by considering what the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘necessity’ mean in the expression ‘liberty and necessity’. (shrink)

David Hume (1711–1776) described the question of liberty and necessity as ‘the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science’ (Hume [1748] 1975, p. 95). He was right about it being contentious. Whether it is metaphysical is another matter. I think that what is genuinely metaphysical is an assumption that Hume, and a good many other philosophers, make in their treatment of the question. The assumption is about language and reality. I call it ‘the conformity assumption’. But more about (...) that shortly. Let us begin at the obvious beginning, by considering what the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘necessity’ mean in the expression ‘liberty and necessity’. (shrink)

As a rule we treat people as responsible for what they do. We admonish them if they behave badly, praise them if they do well. We punish people. And we reward them.There are exceptions, of course. For example, we do not punish someone for doing something he has been compelled to do, perhaps by having a gun in his back. And we even recognize such a thing as psychological compulsion, as in the case of kleptomania.

As a rule we treat people as responsible for what they do. We admonish them if they behave badly, praise them if they do well. We punish people. And we reward them.There are exceptions, of course. For example, we do not punish someone for doing something he has been compelled to do, perhaps by having a gun in his back. And we even recognize such a thing as psychological compulsion, as in the case of kleptomania.