A recent aspect of Canadians' concern to discover their “national identity” has been the interest of some Canadians to discover the history of philosophy in their country. Several decades ago this interest scarcely existed. If any questions about the subject had been raised, the chances are they would have elicited sceptical smiles or yawns. Many would simply have denied—and a few still deny—that there is any “Canadian philosophy” at all. Nowadays, however, the climate of opinion is more accommodating, so that those who study and write about what past philosophers in this country have done can expect to receive a serious hearing. No doubt a conclusive case for the study has yet to be stated. But the most extensive speculative statement made thus far is the book by Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott which I shall comment on below.

Comme Yvon Lafrance l'indique dans les deux premières lignes de son introduction: « Il n'existe aucune étude en français sur la théorie platonicienne de la doxa ». En ce domaine, la recherche a été Presque exclusivement le fait de platonisants allemands (cités 11–12, n. 1). D'où l'importance du livre de Yvon Lafrance, qui renouvelle la problématique sur la doxa en la situant dans un contexte intellectuel tout à fait original, celui d'un Français d'Amérique du Nord qui, dans ses recherches sur Platon, tient compte à la fois du courant analytique anglo-saxon, dont l'importance quantitative et qualitative n'a cessé de croître depuis les années cinquante, et du courant historique « continental », allemand et français surtout.

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.

The word δξα is used frequently by Plato and with the many shades of meaning that it had in the idiomatic Greek of his time. References to all its occurrences and to those of δοξζω in the Platonic corpus Lafrance gives in an appendix to his book (415–422); and from these in his first chapter (19–33) he selects typical cases to exemplify a score or more of what he calls “literary” meanings, which he divides into two main groups, the objective sense, “appearance”, and the subjective, “opinion”. By eliminating the occurrences of doxa in these colloquial or “literary” senses he restricts his investigation to Plato's philosophical uses of the term, disregarding even the occurrences of these in what he deems to be merely repetitious or undeveloped passages and subjecting to minute analysis only the most fully developed and consequently most significant philosophical passages concerned with doxa. This is the fourth of the four methodological principles that are formulated by Lafrance to govern his investigation and read in the light of which the dialogues, he believes, reveal an intelligibly coherent theory of doxa (15–18). According to the first of these principles in the reading of any Platonic text there must be borne in mind the period of Plato's intellectual evolution in which it was written and the nature of his epistemological notions at that moment; according to the second, Platonic dialogues being genuine philosophical dramas, it is always as fulfilling a function in a definite dramatic situation that Plato discloses his thought to the precise extent that he has decided to do so, and consequently any passage on doxa, to which as such no dialogue is devoted, must be understood in the light of the context in which the question of doxa has arisen. According to the third principle the understanding of a Platonic text requires that account be taken of the scholarly literature dealing with it.

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.