One of the chief innovations in medieval adaptations of Aristotelian psychology was the expansion of Aristotle's notion of imagination or phantasia to include a variety of distinct perceptual powers known collectively as the internal senses (hawâss bâtinah). Amongst medieval philosophers in the Arabic world, Avicenna (Ibn Sînâ, 980–1037) offers one of the most complex and sophisticated accounts of the internal senses. Within his list of internal senses, Avicenna includes a faculty known as “estimation” (wahm), to which various functions are assigned in a wide variety of contexts. Although many philosophers in the Arabic world as well as in the Latin West accepted Avicenna's positing of an estimative faculty, Avicenna's best-known critics, al-Ghazâlî (1058–1111) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198), found Avicenna's arguments in support of a distinct estimative faculty problematic. For different reasons, both Averroes and Ghazâlî raised the basic question of whether one needed to posit a distinct faculty of estimation to supplement the perceptual abilities of the other internal senses, and whether the notion of an estimative power as defined by Avicenna was internally coherent. Such criticisms suggest that the Avicennian conception of estimation is not entirely unambiguous, and that a correct understanding of Avicenna's motivations for delineating an estimative power requires a careful study of the diverse activities assigned to it throughout Avicenna's philosophical writings.

Le problème de l'être-avec et de la socialité chez Heidegger a déjà une longue tradition de commentateurs. Ceux-ci se distinguent par la pluralité de leurs approches: se situant parfois à l'opposé de la méthode d'Être et temps, ils se portent alors à la défense d'autrui, insistent sur l'aspect dialogique et sur l'importance de la rationalité du discours dans le monde de la vie (Lebenswelt). D'autres encore, sans nécessairement remettre en question la méthodologie heideggérienne, défendent ou réinterprètent autrement sa phénoménologie de l'existence d'autrui: parmi eux, certains s'en tiennent uniquement à l'analytique existentiale, tandis que d'autres élargissent l'horizon de leurs critiques en tenant compte du projet global de la pensée de Heidegger. Il y a enfin les commentateurs pour lesquels cette question n'est abordée que dans le contexte politique de sa pensée.

L'informatique se définissant comme le traitement rationnel de l'information par machine automatique et l'intelligence se caractérisant par une même capacité de traitement rationnel, il était inévitable que l'on songe à associer l'intelligence au traitement automatique de l'information. C'est ce qu'a fait John McCarthy en forgeant le terme d'intelligence artificielle (IA). Par «intelligence artificielle» on peut vouloir exprimer l'ambition de

1. Recréer, transformer ou développer l'intelligence artificiellement

2. Simuler l'intelligence en la reconstituant dans des modéles imitant certains aspects de notre intelligence dite naturelle.

Karl Popper et David Miller (P.M.) ont soutenu l'idée selon laquelle le soutien probabiliste positif (s(h,e) = p(h,e) − p(h) > 0) que e apporte á h, lorsque de h on déduit e (h ⊢ e), ne justifie en rien l'espoir de pouvoir construire une logique inductive (L.I.) fondée sur le calcul des probabilityés.

‘Liberal’ is still a term of abuse in US presidential politics and certain academic circles. But gone for now are the days when liberals were saddled with responsibility for (depending on who was making the accusation) crime, promiscuity or crass concern with material wealth. Instead, competing political visions increasingly do battle for the right to carry the liberal banner.

This substantial study appears in a series called The Arguments of the Philosophers. If Professor Skorupski's admirable work on Mill is typical, it will be a remarkable series. Both as a work of scholarship and as a contribution to philosophy in its own right, this is an outstanding work, well worth reading by the general philosopher and not just by Mill devotees.

La parution d'un ouvrage entièrement consacré à la théorie kantienne du sublime mérite d'être saluée avec un certain enthousiasme, a fortiori lorsqu'il provient de la tradition anglo-saxonne, où la question du sublime est généralement considérée comme une «erreur» dont la théorie esthétique de Kant gagnerait à être expurgée. Paul Crowther remarque d'entrée de jeu que le regain d'intérêt pour l'esthétique de Kant qui s'est fait sentir dans le monde anglo-saxon depuis les années soixante-dix s'est concentré presque exclusivement sur les questions de la beauté et de l'art, au détriment du sublime. Paul Guyer avait prétendu fixer les raisons de cet ostracisme: d'abord, le sentiment du sublime est selon lui inconciliable avec l'explication fondamentale que donne Kant de la «réponse esthétique» en général en termes d'harmonie de l'imagination et de l'entendement; ensuite, la discussion du sublime minimiserait l'importance de 1'intersubjectivité esthétique, qui constitue selon lui l'essentiel de la théorie esthétique kantienne comprise comme une théorie du «goût»; et finalement, la discussion kantienne du sublime ne posséderait plus qu'un intérêt historique, qui ne saurait rencontrer nos sensibilités esthétiques modernes, tandis que nous aurions au contraire beaucoup à apprendre de la discussion des jugements sur la beauté (1979, p. 399 sq.). Or, c'est précisément d'une nouvelle sensibilité à l'endroit du sublime, qui se ferait sentir depuis les années quatre-vingt, que se réclame Crowther pour justifier son entreprise théorique (p. 2).

Among major contractarian theorists, David Gauthier has the most ambitious philosophical aims. John Rawls has recently made clear that his theory of justice is not intended to provide a timeless and culturally invariant account of justice derived from the theory of rational choice. Yet Gauthier, in his rightly acclaimed and widely influential writings, attempts to provide just such an account of morality and distributive justice. With this new publication of a collection of his most important articles from the past two decades following, by four years, the appearance of his systematic treatise on ethics (Morals by Agreement) we are now in a good position to assess Gauthier's moral theory.

Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe is the most significant event in Anglo-American aesthetics in many a year, and joins a small pantheon of landmark books such as Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects and Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Walton's aim is to provide a comprehensive account of the representational arts—literature, drama, cinema, painting, drawing, sculpture—from both the generative and the receptive points of view. That is to say, he attempts to explain how representations are fashioned, what their representational status consists in, how representations are apprehended and what the experience of them characteristically involves. Inthese aims he is to my mind enormously, if not completely, successful.

The apparently limitless philosophical terrain marked out by the debate over the relation between science and values is constructively revisited in Helen Longino's Science as Social Knowledge. This project is motivated by the view that the ideal of value neutrality places unrealistic constraints on science. Longino seeks to demonstrate that even “good science” embodies social and political interests and values because it is, irreducibly, a social activity. Her strategy is to weave a position which can make sense of both ideology and evidence in the practice of science; her underlying philosophical critique is that the standard impasse between positivism and wholism is structured by an individualist conception of science. In the development of her analysis, she examines and reworks the concepts of evidence, reasoning and objectivity to accommodate her understanding of the social practices which constitute inquiry. She then appeals to the highly charged field of research on the biological bases of alleged sex differences in temperament, behaviour and cognition, to illustrate concretely how her analysis makes sense of a variety of interactions between scientific inquiry and socio-cultural values in contemporary science. Longino thus provides an opening for modes of inquiry, such as feminist science, which are self-consciously shaped by specified socio-political interests and values; she argues that, far from contaminating science, such projects can be more objective than that mode of inquiry practised under the standard myth of asocial, acultural, apolitical objectivity characteristic of modern epistemologies.

Contemporary writing on human action sometimes distinguishes a presentoriented form of intentionality from a future-oriented form. Tense is then invoked mainly for a classificatory purpose, with little regard in this context to whether it may not have analytical (and therefore closer) connections with intentionality in general. That merits some surprise, in view of the crucial role assumed, in current debate between A- and B-theories of time on the subject of tense, by a wider intentionality that extends to cognitive and other mental states. In the wider context there is room for an interesting antithesis between analyses of the temporal in terms of intentionalistic concepts and retroanalyses that go the other way.