Though the divide between reason-based and causal-explanatory approaches in psychiatry and psychopathology is old and deeply rooted, current trends involving multi-factorial explanatory models and evidence-based approaches to interpersonal psychotherapy, show that it has already been implicitly bridged. These trends require a philosophical reconsideration of how reasons can be causes. This paper contributes to that trajectory by arguing that Donald Davidson’s classic paradigm of 1963 is still a valid option.

Quand nous lisons un livre passionnant, quand nous passons une bonne soirée avec des amis ou quand nous dégustons des mets raffinés, nous nous trouvons parfois dans un état de plaisir. La notion de plaisir traverse de nombreux champs de recherche en philosophie. Une question centrale reste sans doute celle de sa nature : qu’est-ce donc que le plaisir ? Pour y répondre, une comparaison avec d'autres entités mentales plus familières se révèle fructueuse, et permet de mettre à jour ses (...) spécificités propres. La définition du plaisir doit rendre compte de sa diversité, puisque le plaisir semble toujours se présenter sous des formes multiples : qu'y a-t-il de commun parmi toutes les instances de plaisir ? Par ailleurs, le plaisir semble souvent avoir un objet, ce qui soulève une série de questions : Quel type de chose peut être un objet du plaisir ? Dans quelle mesure l'objet du plaisir constitue-t-il le plaisir lui-même ? Plus généralement, quelle est la nature du lien entre le plaisir et son objet ? Ces questions seront abordées dans la Section 1. Au-delà de ces questions définitionnelles, des questions plus spécifiques se posent concernant la manière dont on peut rendre compte du plaisir dans une optique naturaliste : dans quelle mesure le plaisir est-il une entité qui s’intègre dans une image unifiée du monde dans lequel on vit ? Puisqu'il est généralement entendu que la science manifeste cette ambition unificatrice, comment peut-on rendre compte du plaisir de manière scientifique ? La Section 2 est dédiée à ces questions. Une des principales difficultés rencontrées est que le plaisir ne semble pas neutre. Il paraît plutôt avoir une valeur affective positive, dans un sens qui reste bien sûr à éclaircir. Cette valeur se manifeste d'abord dans le fait que le plaisir est susceptible d'orienter nos actions et réactions : nous sommes typiquement attirés par le plaisir, de la même manière que nous cherchons à éviter la souffrance. C'est l'aspect motivationnel du plaisir. La valeur affective du plaisir semble cependant aller au-delà de son rôle motivationnel, pour donner lieu à des caractéristiques normatives. Non seulement le plaisir motive certaines actions, mais il les justifierait aussi, en fournissant des raisons d'agir qui semblent valides. Plus encore, le plaisir semble bon pour nous, ou nous faire du bien. Il semble donc avoir une valeur prudentielle, en ce qu'il contribuerait à rendre notre vie meilleure. Cela pourrait alors justifier son intégration dans le domaine de la morale. Ces considérations seront l’objet de la Section 3. (shrink)

This volume examines the entire logical and philosophical production of Nikolai A. Vasil’ev, studying his life and activities as a historian and man of letters. Readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of this influential Russian logician, philosopher, psychologist, and poet. The author frames Vasil’ev’s work within its historical and cultural context. He takes into consideration both the situation of logic in Russia and the state of logic in Western Europe, from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of (...) the 20th. Following this, the book considers the attempts to develop non-Aristotelian logics or ideas that present affinities with imaginary logic. It then looks at the contribution of traditional logic in elaborating non-classical ideas. This logic allows the author to deal with incomplete objects just as imaginary logic does with contradictory ones. Both logics are objects of interesting analysis by modern researchers. (shrink)

There is a traditional conception of knowledge but it is not the Justified True Belief analysis Gettier attacked. On the traditional view, knowledge consists in having a belief that bears a discernible mark of truth. A mark of truth is a truth-entailing property: a property that only true beliefs can have. It is discernible if one can always tell that a belief has it, that is, a sufficiently attentive subject believes that a belief has it if and only if it (...) has it. Requiring a mark of truth makes the view infallibilist. Requiring it to be discernible makes the view internalist. I call the view Classical Infallibilism. (shrink)

Pour contrer le scepticisme au sujet de la connaissance des valeurs, la plupart soutiennent avec John Rawls qu’une croyance comme celle qu’une action est bonne est justifiée dans la mesure où elle appartient à un ensemble de croyances cohérent, ayant atteint un équilibre réfléchi. Christine Tappolet s’inspire des travaux de Max Scheler et d’Alexius von Meinong pour défendre une conception opposée au cohérentisme. La connaissance des valeurs est affirmée dépendre de nos émotions, ces dernières étant conçues comme des perceptions des (...) valeurs. (shrink)

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)

Alexius Meinong's specific use of the term "self-presentation" had a significant influence on modern epistemology and philosophical psychology. To show that there are remarkable parallels between Meinong's account of the self-presentation of experiences and Lehrer's account of the exemplarization of experiences is one of this paper's main objectives. Another objective is to put forward some comments and critical remarks to Lehrer's approach. One of the main problems can be expressed by the following: The process of using a particular experience as (...) a sample, that is, an exemplar that we use to stand for and refer to a plurality of experiences, Lehrer calls "exemplarization". As concrete experiences are multifarious (red and round, for example), how can we single out a specific sort of experiences (the red ones) by the process of exemplarization when we use such a multifarious experience as a sample? (shrink)

The project of a 'naive physics' has been the subject of attention in recent years above all in the artificial intelligence field, in connection with work on common-sense reasoning, perceptual representation and robotics. The idea of a theory of the common-sense world is however much older than this, having its roots not least in the work of phenomenologists and Gestalt psychologists such as K hler, Husserl, Schapp and Gibson. This paper seeks to show how contemporary naive physicists can profit from (...) a knowledge of these historical roots of their discipline, which are shown to imply above alla critique of the set-theory-based models of reality typically presupposed by contemporary work in common-sense ontology [1]. (shrink)

The discussions which follow rest on a distinction, first expounded by Husserl, between formal logic and formal ontology. The former concerns itself with (formal) meaning-structures; the latter with formal structures amongst objects and their parts. The paper attempts to show how, when formal ontological considerations are brought into play, contemporary extensionalist theories of part and whole, and above all the mereology of Leniewski, can be generalised to embrace not only relations between concrete objects and object-pieces, but also relations between what (...) we shall call dependent parts or moments. A two-dimensional formal language is canvassed for the resultant ontological theory, a language which owes more to the tradition of Euler, Boole and Venn than to the quantifier-centred languages which have predominated amongst analytic philosophers since the time of Frege and Russell. Analytic philosophical arguments against moments, and against the entire project of a formal ontology, are considered and rejected. The paper concludes with a brief account of some applications of the theory presented. (shrink)

O propósito deste trabalho é fornecer uma resposta a duas questões fundamentais: 1) pode uma lógica não alética ser uma lógica meinongiana? E consequentemente 2) pode uma lógica não alética ser uma lógica adequada a uma teoria meinongiana dos objetos? Usando os resultados de da Costa (1989) e da Costa & Marconi (1986) e além disso de da Costa (1986 e 1993), proponho uma lógica minimal não alética de primeira ordem com identidade e o símblo " de Hilbert (da Costa (...) et al. 1992) que podem colocar em um espírito meinongiano os aspectos mais relevantes da lógica meinongiana subajcente à teoria dos objetos de Meinong. Esta é apenas uma primeira abordagem minha, para dar conta de reflexões complexas, mas também interessante como o pensamento de Meinong. Além disso, dando uma resposta positiva a 1) e 2) indico um modo plausível que pode evitar ambas as difíceis abordagens e a tentativa de recusar a teoria dos objetos de modo a não comprometer a lógica padrão e algumas de suas leis. Minha abordagem mostra que a teoria de Meinong pode ser uma ontologia válida, porque há uma lógica adequada e não banal subjacente a ela. DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n1p99. (shrink)