During the 1982 Canadian Philosophical Association Meeting in Ottawa, a workshop on the philosophy of religion in Canada was held. Its participants were all contributors to a previously published book edited for the University of Ottawa Press (1982), entitled Analytical Philosophy of Religion in Canada, who were thus given the opportunity to comment on their own positions and to reply to the criticism that had been made of them.

I am grateful to Professor Garceau for his thoughtful and gracious characterization and critique of my account of religion. As will become apparent, as I proceed, there is much in his account, both methodological and substantive, that I think is fundamentally mistaken, but, that notwithstanding, I very much appreciate the tone and spirit in which his critique of my work was conducted. Benoît Garceau has carefully studied my views and has in an exemplary manner tried sympathetically to understand them to capture what divides reflective and informed religious believers and reflective and informed skeptics. It is, I believe, fair enough to say that the task of trying to ascertain what most fundamentally divides contemporary literate believers and skeptics is of fundamental significance in any attempt to come to grips with the contemporary significance of religion, though it does seem to me that this task is much more problematic than is usually thought. In responding here to Carceau's specific criticisms, I shall, in the general drift of my remarks, be trying to make some contribution to the clarification of that issue. Though I shall only be able to touch on a small corner of it, I shall be concerned to examine in what way, if at all, it is possible for there to be, as Garceau would put it, a dialogue between such believers and skeptics; and I shall be concerned, as well, somewhat more broadly, to ascertain what it would be like for us, not only to understand each other, but, if indeed such a thing is possible at all, what it would be like to move a step forward in the ancient but still ongoing and developing debate concerning whether one should, all things considered, be, if one can, a believer, or a skeptic.

Je voudrais d'abord remercier Kai Nielsen d'avoir bien voulu me communiquer, deux semaines avant cette rencontre, le texte de son exposé. Cela m'a donné le temps d'absorber le choc de sa critique, de préparer une réplique qui soit autre chose qu'une riposte et puisse contribuer à clarifier quelque peu le débat dans lequel nous sommes tous deux engagés.

The nature of analogies, and their legitimacy in argumentation and inference, is a disputed subject. This essay is intended to shed some light on the tangle of issues that it involves. After discussing in section one the different functions of analogy, in particular in explanation and in science, we present in section two a prima facie defense of analogical argument against those who repudiate it entirely and in section three an account of its logical structure. Section four argues that analogical inference does not collapse, as some of its critics contend, into standard induction, and section five attempts to explicate more precisely the warrant for analogical inference. We conclude in section six by suggesting a typology for arguments from analogy.

James E. Tomberlin [6] has recently argued that the logical systems of conditional obligation proposed by Azizah al-Hibri [1] and Peter Mott [5] are incapable of resolving at least one variant of the notorious contrary to duty imperative paradox, formulated originally by Chisholm [2]. Tomberlin concedes that these systems offer the very best of the' “conditional obligation approach” to deontic logic and concludes his critical discussion with the pessimistic remark that “the best of this approach is simply not good enough. Deontic logic … is obliged to turn elsewhere for its proper formulation and resolution of the deontic paradoxes” ([6], 373). Below I argue that Tomberlin's three central arguments against al-Hibri and Mott are fallacious.

My objective here is to sketch a proposal against the many who insist on reading Rorty as arguing within traditional philosophy, in spite of his contentions to the contrary. I want to suggest that Rorty should be read as importantly outside the philosophical tradition and as an external critic. My proposal turns on roughing out how Rorty's brand of prag- matism differs from more familiar sorts.

To speak of hybris in the case of Parmenides seems hardly justified. He is addressed by the unnamed goddess to whose abode he journeys as κoũρε, “youth” or “initiate”, hardly a term of great respect in Greek usage. He is guided on his path, i.e., he has not found it by himself, and he receives a truth he never claims as his own. Could a mortal show greater awareness of his limitations? Yet, in an oddly disturbing way the distinction between the divine and the human is obliterated—the worst kind of hybris for Greek thought and feeling.

For some time now ethical debates have been fought on a field whose boundaries are the historical theories of Kant's deontology and Mill's utilitarianism. Recently, however, several have chosen to leave the battlefield entirely—to suggest, in various ways, that both of the major ethical theories share a common, flawed outlook. Thomas Nagel, for example, has argued that founding ethics on the sole ground of interpersonal obligations (a common feature of Kantianism and utilitarianism) unnecessarily “fragments” human value. Such an account has the effect of pitting one species of human value (duties to others) against other quite legitimate values (personal goals and special relationships). Or approaching the matter from quite another direction, Philippa Foot also holds that morality, as a system of interpersonal obligations, is too limiting. However, she proposes to counter the advancing forces of modern ethics by championing an Aristotelian doctrine of virtue.

I offer here an interpretation and defense of John Stuart Mill's qualitative hedonism. One of the results of Mill's well-known mental crisis was a concept of utility substantially different from the orthodox Benthamite quantitative hedonism which Mill came to regard as being fraught with difficulties. He saw Bentham's concept as being excessively narrow, and he sought to overcome its limitations by enlarging his own concept of utility. He did this by including the quality of pleasures along with the quantity in the estimation of their worth. At the same time, Mill was highly critical of the intuitionist ethical theories of his day, and propounded utilitarianism as the rational, objective, and scientific alternative. So if Mill is to succeed in his enterprise of countering intuitionism while avoiding the pitfalls of Benthamite utilitarianism, he must retain the objectivity of Benthamism while repudiating its narrowness. Mill's critics have argued that when he opened up his concept of utility to include quality, he modified his theory so radically that he can no longer be called a hedonistic utilitarian, and that he relinquished the consis- tency and objectivity of Benthamite utilitarianism along with its weak- nesses. I argue here that Mill abandons neither hedonism nor utilitarianism, and that the objectivity and consistency of his theory are not undermined.

Ce nouvel examen des Fragments et Témoignages de/sur Zénon d'Elée, Maurice Caveing l'a entrepris pour combler et les deficiences des études sur Zénon inspirées par la science moderne qui font peu de cas de l'histoire de la philosophic grecque, et celles des travaux d'héllenistes qui n'ont aucune idée des solutions modernes apportees au problème du continu.

According to its author, Engineered Death is not a book about the morality of homicide but about intellectual self-consistency—in particular about the self-consistency of the “liberal” view of homicide. The “liberal” view is defined by Woods as the view that murder is morally wrong because, and only because, it is a violation of rights. He tells us that he is concerned to defend neither liberalism in general nor its notion of individual rights in particular, but only to work out the implications of these assumptions for the problems of abortion, suicide, euthanasia, and senecide. It is only in this sense that Woods' disclaimer about the non-ethical nature of his book can be taken seriously. In every other respect it is a treatise on ethics. It puts forward and defends moral theses that are independent of, and in some cases even contrary to, traditional ethical liberalism.

Le livre de Louise Marcil-Lacoste traite d'un chapitre controversé de Fhistoire de la philosophic Le dix-huitième siècle a connu un ensemble de doctrines et de thèses auquel réfère l'expression « philosophie du sens commun ». Il s'en faut de beaucoup que cette philosophie du sens commun ait dominé la scène philosophique. De Locke à Condillac et à Kant, en passant par Berkeley et par Hume, la plupart des grands philosophes n'ont que peu à voir avec ce courant. Par contre, il ne serait pas faux de dire que la philosophie du sens commun sous ses diverses formes les accompagne le long de leur itinéraire spéculatif, les conteste, les met au défi, les corrige, les exploite et leur survit dans de nouvelles métamorphoses au siècle suivant (par exemple dans l'orthodoxie académique de Victor Cousin). La recherche qui nous est présentée vise à reconstituer les thèses centrales formulées par deux interprètes du sens commun, le jésuite français Claude Buffier au début du siècle et le philosophe écossais Thomas Reid vers la fin du siècle. En reconstituant ces «systèmes » du sens commun, l'auteur entend exorciser les images d'Epinal qui les caricaturent parmi les historiens et les interprètes; par voie de conséquence, l'auteur songe à régler une question restée jusqu'á présent indécidée: celle du plagiat possible de Reid par rapport à Buffier. La reconstruction raisonnée des «systèmes» est judicieusement réalisée, et il apparaît que la différence est radicale entre les deux penseurs, alors même qu'ils semblent énoncer des positions similaires, au point que l'on finit par se demander si un concept non équivoque de sens commun permettrait encore de les relier l'un à l'autre.

There are fourteen original papers (plus Kai Nielsen's introduction) in this substantial volume devoted to the general problem of the relation of Marxism, or at least Marxism as found in the works of Marx, and moral theory. The questions are, in Nielsen's words, “whether there should be or even could be a Marxist moral theory and if there could be a Marxist moral theory, what sort of a moral theory it should be” (1) (all references in this Critical Notice are to pages in the volume under review). Why does he not include the question what Marx's moral theory is? For a few of these writers do think that Marx had (at least in fragmentary form) some moral views that inform his writing, and attempt to say what they are. But Nielsen is justified in putting the questions they treat of in the way he does, for as is commonly known, Marx had no explicit, worked- out moral theory. So if one wishes to argue that he nevertheless has a morality or part of a morality, one has no alternative to attempting to infer it from what he does say.