I. Analytic interpretation of Descartes' argument for a substantial distinction between mind and body works within a framework of assumptions – which is broadly Aristotelian – concerning the character of the Cartesian categories of substance, essence, and mode. Relying on a series of texts concerning the mind/body distinction which is usually passed over by interpreters, I will develop and draw out the implications of a different – a Platonic – view of these categories.

An Old and continuing tendency amongst critics of Kant's thought on ethics has been to maintain that since the categorical imperative merely provides a formal condition for the rightness of actions – that the principle of the action be universalizable without contradiction – it is inadequate as a test for the rightness of actions. Such critics as Hegel, Mill, and recently, R.P. Wolff, have suggested the same fundamental objection to Kant's doctrine: the requirement that a maxim be universalizable is formally compatible with any action whatsoever being right.

It would no doubt conform to most people's unschooled intuition to call

1. Hamlet was a Danish prince.

true, and

2. Hamlet was a Spanish peasant.

false. Yet most philosophers who have considered the question have given us reason to believe that our intuitions could lead us in such cases into (at worst) contradiction or (at best) deviant logic.

Voluntary Abortion involves the preventable destruction of an unformed or partly formed human organism. It is disagreement about the moral significance of this fact which sustains the controversy over abortion. This disagreement derives from a dispute about the sanctity, or morally protected position, of the destroyed organism, which in turn results from conflicting opinions about the basis or criterion of sanctity rather than any uncertainty over how they may apply. The thesis of this paper is that this last disagreement about the criterion of moral sanctity cannot be settled by rational, i.e. non-circular, argument; and hence, that there is no rational method of resolving the controversy over the morality of abortion.

Le Colloque dont ce livre nous fournit les actes fut une initiative du professeur Jerzy A. Wojciechowski (Philosophie, Université d'Ottawa.) Les professeurs Guy Lafrance et William Shea, de la même faculté, faisaient également partie du comite d'organisation; les appuis financiers provinrent du Conseil des Arts du Canada et de l'Université d'Ottawa. Les actes contiennent la totalité des communications rédigées pour l'occasion, y compris celles qui n'ont pas été présentées oralement (entre autres celles de Kedrov, Dobrowolski, Grolier, Hooker, Jolley); on compte 20 articles, de longueurs fort inégales, et cinq commentaires d'articles; vingt contributions sont écrites en anglais, quatre en français, iine en russe (Kedrov.)

Recent defences of abortion on demand have located the morally relevant difference between normal adult human beings and non-viable fetuses in the possession of personhood by the former but not by the latter. It is, so the story goes, morally wrong to kill innocent human beings because they are persons, but non-viable fetuses, though they be biologically human, are nevertheless not persons and may therefore be killed without doing anything morally wrong.

I. Ian Hacking asks an intriguing question, and answers it in an interesting way. Why, he asks, does language matter to philosophy? It is a simple question. But his answer is not quite so simple, though its main feature is simple: Language matters to philosophy today for the same reason that ideas were important to philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each in its time has been the “interface” between the knower and the known. There is much truth to this answer of his, though we may note that it is somewhat incomplete: we would still like to know how ideas then and language now have come to occupy this position.

J'avais Commencé cet article comme un compte-rendu de lecture. II s'est transformé en un débat beaucoup plus large sur la nature de l'analyse philosophique et sur les difficultés que soulève son application à un domaine passablement embrouillé, celui de l'éthique et du droit. Je commencerai done par résumer sommairement l'ouvrage de Georges Legault qui a été le point de départ de mes réflexions.

The general anti-abortionist line is that abortion is wrong because it is the killing of innocent people. The main pro-abortionist response to this has been to deny that what is killed in an abortion is, properly speaking, a person. Killing these things merely prevents another person from being added to the world, just as would contraception, except at a later stage in the total process; abortion is not, therefore, any kind of murder, any deprivation of a person's life. Kelly and Schedler now raise an interesting new question about this: suppose we do not kill the fetus, but merely painlessly prevent it from developing? This process they call ‘tinkering’. And they infer, from an apparently reasonable reconstruction of this standard pro-abortionist argument that “5′, Therefore, any non-viable fetus may be tinkered with”, and they affirm, “Presumably 5′ is morally repugnant”, (p. 123) And from this, in turn, they eventually infer that abortion itself is morally wrong, the argument being that there is no relevant difference between abortion and tinkering. This is an interesting argument. It is a good one? I will argue that it is not.

In a recent critical notice Myles Brand dismisses my evolutionary argument against the identity theory on grounds that the counterfactual situation I claim it allows for and cannot explain not actually occurring could never, on that theory, arise.