In Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature, Hume examines the idea of necessary connection, which, he observes, forms an indispensable part of our idea of cause and effect. He concludes:

The idea of necessity arises from some impression. There is no impression convey'd by our senses, which can give rise to that idea. It must, therefore, by deriv'd from some internal impression, or impression of reflexion. There is no internal impression which has any relation to the present business, but that propensity, which custom produces, to pass from an object to the idea of its usual attendant. This therefore is the essence of necessity. Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of the thought to pass from causes to effects and from effects to causes, according to their experienced union.

L'envahissement de l'espace par la technique est un fait accompli. Non seulement l'espace physique et l'espace organisationnel, mais aussi l'espace du discours et celui de l'écriture sont déjà bien occupés. La technique est en effet devenue un sujet de conversation quotidien, remplit les colonnes de toutes sortes de journaux et de revues et fait l'objet d'un nombre considérable d'études monographiques. Alors pourquoi ce titre encore qui risque d'aggraver le resserrement des habitants des lieux et hâter leur étouffement?

It is not difficult to sympathize with the strong impulse among philosophers to attempt to explain, justify, and even define moral concepts in factual terms. For without some kind of grounding in the facts of human nature, we may be quite perplexed concerning what relevance moral concepts have to our actual decisions, actions, and social relationships. Put another way, without grounding moral concepts in facts we may be quite puzzled as to the connections between principles and practice, between the ideal and the actual. The history of ethical theory contains several serious efforts by various philosophers to provide factual grounding for moral concepts, efforts which we cannot here take up.

Willard thinks we should be puzzled and perplexed about the relevance of morality in deciding what to do. His puzzlement stems from not being able to see any connection between facts and values. In particular, he holds that moral rights (if there are any) cannot be based on needs because needs are not really facts and, even if they were, there seems no way to bridge the fact/value gap between needs (construed as facts) and moral rights.

One might imagine that this remark of James was too obvious to be denied, but in fact current philosophical orthodoxy runs against it. Since the renewal of interest in the emotions produced by Anthony Kenny's Action Emotion and Will in 1963, philosophers have focussed primarily on the cognitive aspects of emotions—the judgments, evaluations, beliefs, presuppositions which they contain. Bodily feelings have been, on the whole, slighted. Sometimes they are dismissed outright, as by Robert Solomon: “feelings no more constitute or define the emotion than an army of fleas constitutes a homeless dog. … Feeling is the ornamentation of emotion, not its essence.”; more often, as in Jerome Neu, given only rather slight attention because “thoughts are of greater importance than feelings (in the narrow sense of felt sensations) in the classification and discrimination of emotional states”.

In this article I am going to propose a modification in the theory of pure restitution, in the hope that such modification will eliminate at least some sources of resistance to the theory, while preserving the theory's distinct place among the philosophical approaches to the institution of legal punishment.

It is commonplace that negative duties are more stringent than positive duties: for example that it is harder to justify killing than letting die. It is almost equally commonplace that this distinction requires defence, in particular against those who regard it as a mere apology for the privileges of the wealthy and secure.

Il y a un certain nombre d'années que je lis quotidiennement des articles ou des ouvrages concernant l'histoire des théories linguistiques. J'ai rarement éprouvé autant de plaisir qu'à la lecture du livre de Marc Dominicy. Je crois qu'il y a à cela une raison tres claire: c'est la façon de travailler de l'auteur. Pour lui, d'une part les théories formulées dans le passé sont descriptibles dans une langue moderne qui les rend comparables (voir ma note 12) entre elles et avec les theories plus modernes (10), d'autre part la pratique historiographique est cumulative. Le second point est sans doute dans son esprit une conséquence du premier, ou du moins il est la conséquence d'un axiome très fort assurant l'existence d'un principe de démarcation entre la science et la non-science (ibid.). Je pense qu'on peutfaire l'économie du principe de démarcation, si on part du principe que l'historiographie doit être cumulative. Cela suppose en effet que l'historien discute des représentations de prédécesseurs, mais plus encore que les leurs comme les siennes soient discutables, et par conséquent qu'elles soient formulables dans un Iangage qui les rende comparables. Dans le livre de l'auteur cela se traduit doublement par: a) une bibliographic importante et l'attribution assez générale, dans le cours du texte, des thèses avancées à ceux qui les ont émises; b) une représentation formalisée de la théorie qu'il décrit. Il y a là une grande rigueur autant méthodologique que déontologique.

Opuscula Aesthetica Nostra is a pioneering publishing effort, blazing a trail which specialists in other philosophical fields should consider following. It purports to represent what is happening in aesthetics throughout English-speaking and French-speaking Canada today, and in consequence it is an intriguing exercise in Canadian bilingualism. It purports also to show, as co-editor Calvin Seerveld says in the Preface, that “aesthetics deserves its own bona fide place in the national market place of ideas”; so the editors have reprinted strong previously published papers, in addition to soliciting new material on the occasion of the Tenth International Congress of Aesthetics held in Montreal in 1984. The result is a satisfying pot-pourri of ideas.

Le tome premier du livre de P. Ricoeur contient les deux premiéres parties, consacrées respectivement au cercle entre temporalité et narrativité et a la configuration dans le récit historique. Le tome deux contient la troisième partie consacrée à la configuration dans le récit de fiction. Le dernier tome rassemble les différentes réflexions suscitées par les études antérieures et porte sur la refiguration du temps par le récit. Les deux premières parties du livre constituent une mise en place des difficultés de la phénoménologie du temps et une discussion approfondie des travaux consacres au statut épistémologique de la compréhension narrative et de l'explication par des lois scientifiques en histoire. Sous le terme general de récit deux grands sous-ensembles sont distingués selon que les récits se réfèrent au monde ayant réellement existé comme en histoire ou qu'ils se réfèrent à un monde fictif comme dans le roman ou l'épopée. Cette division oriente les études préparatoires des tomes un et deux, après lesquelles la parenthèse pourra être levée et la question de la référence à la vérité reformulée.

The general editorial plan behind The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell calls for two parallel series, one concerned with Russell's work on philosophy, logic and mathematics, the other with his less technical contributions in areas such as politics, practical ethics, history and education. Volume 1, sub-titled Cambridge Essays, 1888–99, is in a sense the ancestral volume of both series, for it comprises both technical and non-technical subjects. Russell appears here as diarist, public speaker, political commentator, as well as apprentice philosopher and expert on non-Euclidian geometries. The Collected Papers as a whole will span the more than 80 years of Russell's writings devoted to a formidable range of topics from the personal to the highly abstract but, large as it is, this publishing project will make no attempt to bring together the totality of his writings, since many of these remain in print and are readily available. Instead, the project's distinct emphasis will be on Russell's shorter writings, such as essays, articles, reviews and speeches, which are not so easily located, even when previously published. Grouped together in convenient subdivisions, these papers will chronicle for us Russell's intellectual and social growth to an extent even greater than that attempted by Russell himself in his three-volume Autobiography or in My Philosophical Development, and they will also serve to acquaint us with the thoughts, feelings and attitudes of the venerable figure behind the well-known major books. The project's essential aim, then, is to mine and refine the vast Russell Archives in a way that will yield a permanent foundation of study for anyone, whether mere admirer or life-long scholar, who has any interest in Russell's life and work.