My project is to assess recent objections directed at Jürgen Habermas by Nancy Fraser, Iris Young and Seyla Benhabib. This dispute is significant because it concerns the value of the Enlightenment style, detached criticism promoted by Habermas as compared to new proposals about dissent from a stance connected to social movements. I argue that these feminist criticisms of Habermas's critical theory are compelling and that they require substantial changes in Habermas's thinking.

Increasingly our society relies upon government regulatory agencies to protect its people, its institutions and its environment from the negative impacts of new technologies. These agencies are saddled with the task of deciding among strongly conflicting viewpoints represented by a wide range of interest groups and “value communities” within the society. When regulatory decisions are made some interests and values are protected while others are curtailed.

A close reading of Georges Canguilhem’s early writings, recently published in a new edition, reveals that at the end of the 1930s, before he became the philosopher of life we know, Canguilhem carried out a spectacular reassessment of Bergson. One must therefore ask what inspired this new reading, since, against expectations to the contrary, the common problem he shared with Bergson does not seem to have been the problem of life. In this paper, I attempt to show how Canguilhem’s new attitude to Bergson allowed him to transfer Bergson’s theory of knowledge over to the field of the philosophy of values, whose object is the unity of experience.

Yoshida's explicit aim is to defend the standard empiricist model of reduction-bydeduction (SERM hereafter) from recent attacks. Thus the treatment is limited in both scope and orientation.

I shall argue that Yoshida does not succeed. The failure is both internal (on his own terms) and external (what is outside his scope).

Cet Article souligne quelques distinctions fondamentales concernant le système traditionnel des propositions catégoriques, distinctions sans lesquelles il nous semble impossible de bien saisir la structure de ce système, et distinctions dont la négligence vicie certaines études, en particulier celles déjà anciennes de Miller (1938) et de Reichenbach (1952), et celle toute récente de Grosjean (1972), et en général la plupart de celles qui depuis le début du siècle ont traité du problème de la subalternation. II ne faut pas confondre, en effet, la construction ou la définition des propositions du système, les transformations qui, appliquées à l'une d'entre elles, permettent d'en obtenir une autre distincte, les oppositions que ces propositions entretiennent entre elles, et enfin les lois d'inférence que l'on peut formuler à leur propos par le moyen d'opérateurs propositionnels les reliant tautologiquement deux à deux. Nous développons done séparéent chacun de ces quatre aspects du syst`me, et nous apportons également (d'où le titre de 1'article) une solution nouvelle au problème de sa représentation géométrique, problème auquel Reichenbach et Grosjean accordant une certaine importance, et que Blanché (1966) a aussi abordé en partie.

ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a Habermasian analysis of bullshit which diverges from the well-known account offered by Harry Frankfurt. It aims to show that Habermas’s theory of communicative action provides superior conceptual tools for such an analysis, but also that the phenomenon of bullshit ought to be deeply troubling to Habermasians. Bullshit frustrates the transition to discourse, interrupts the binding force of communicative action (the basis of Habermas’s account of social integration) and, if sufficiently widespread as to alter fundamental attitudes toward public speech, bullshit challenges the status of Habermas’s theory of communicative action as a reconstruction of the intuitive knowledge of competent speakers, which status is intended to justify its claim to provide the normative foundations for a critical theory of society in the Frankfurt School sense of an immanent critique.

Suppose that two nations A and B each possess a nuclear arsenal and are rational utility-maximizers. Suppose further that B has some interest in provoking A, possibly by attacking her with nuclear weapons. In the hope of preventing this from happening, A informs B of à conditional intention on her part to retaliate against B with nuclear weapons should B in fact attack A. By doing so A attempts to lower the probability of B's attacking A by increasing B's estimate of the conditional probability of A's retaliating once provoked. Problematic deterrent situations are those in which (1) B prefers to attack A without retaliation, (2) A prefers most of all that she not be attacked, and (3) A prefers an attack-with-no-retaliation scenario to an attack-with-retaliation scenario. Feature (3) is à result of the fact that A prefers to minimize nuclear devastation, i.e., A would herself be worse off retaliating than not retaliating to an attack. Now, if B knows all of this to be the case then A's expression of a conditional intention to retaliate will not in fact deter B from attacking, since A is rational and will not act contrary to her own best interests. B has no reason to fear A's retaliation and therefore B has no reason not to attack. Deterrence, it seems, is an irrational policy among fully rational actors. This is one version of the so-called paradox of deter-rence. If expressing a conditional retaliatory intention is the best way for A to ward off an attack, then the paradox can be strengthened as follows: It is rational for A to intend to act irrationally.

ABSTRACT: I explain and rebut four objections to the claim that attributions of intentional attitudes are normative judgments, all stemming, directly or indirectly, from the widespread assumption that the normative supervenes on the non-normative.

In Part I of Parmenides, Socrates introduces a Theory of Forms to explain opposites compresent in ordinary things, and claims that Forms cannot have opposite features. In Part II, Parmenides relies on Socrates’ claim and derives unacceptable consequences—that the Form of Oneness does not exist, and if that is so, then nothing exists: a clearly false conclusion. To avoid it, Socrates must give up his thesis in Part I and find a way to preserve the explanatory role of Forms. This paper aims to articulate the structure of the exercise in Part II.

“We Need Not hesitate to translate the word eudaimonia by the English ‘happiness’” (my transliteration). So Burnet wrote in 1900, but the hardening consensus is that he was wrong. The differences between the two notions, it is now commonly supposed, are too many and too deep to think that happiness and eudaimonia are very closely related; and consequently “happiness”, the long-established conventional translation, will seriously mislead us in understanding the nature of Aristotelian eudaimonia.

One of the main challenges faced by Russell's theory of judgement was to provide a satisfactory account of judgement that was not committed to the existence of true, false, or non-existent complex entities such as Meinongian objectives. In the study of the Russell-Wittgenstein debate on that theory, scholars never considered the idea that Wittgenstein might not have followed Russell on that issue. In this article. I address that question and hold, first, that problems raised by Russell's theory of judgement find their solution in the picture theory. Then, I show that Wittgenstein hesitated for a long period of time in the Notebooks between a version of his solution which is committed to the existence of possible (non-existing) complex entities and one which is not. Finally, I argue that he did, along with Meinong, go for a committing version in the Tractatus.

The main purpose of this paper is to argue, against the formalist or hypothetico-deductivist approach now dominant, that God or substance is for Spinoza a discovery, or indeed a kind of revelation. In both TdlE and Ethics, Spinoza affirms substance as the outcome of a search for salvation. He could not have held that a postulate or presupposition, even if thought necessary, can save man through abstract entailment. Indeed, salvation depends on “the quality of the object to which we cling with love”, the object being “the eternal and infinite thing” (TdlE 8–10).

It is well known that Sellars' account of linguistic meaning is closely linked to a framework of Rylean-behaviouristic concepts. It is far from clear, however, what the nature of this relation exactly is. Some (e.g., Chisholm, [2], 523) have construed this relation as conceptually so tight as to commit Sellars to logical behaviourism about meaning: semantical statements would be shorthand ways of talking about overt verbal and nonverbal behaviour and behavioural dispositions. On the other hand, some (e.g., J. Young, [18]), have construed the relation so loosely as to deny that the behaviouristic framework can possibly provide a conceptually adequate basis for understanding semantical discourse.