Seventeenth century discussions of materialism, whether favorable or hostile towards the position, are generally conducted on a level of much less precision and sophistication than recent work on the problem of the mind-body relation. Nevertheless, the earlier discussions can still be interesting to philosophers, as the plethora of references to Cartesian arguments in the recent literature makes clear. Certainly the early development of materialist patterns of thought, and efforts on both the materialist and immaterialist side to establish fundamental points in the philosophical analysis of mind, have considerable historical interest at the present time. This paper attempts to clarify the significance of some of leibniz's views in connection with the materialist thesis. I do not have in mind his rather notorious parallelism, though some of the points made below bear indirectly on the character of this position (or perhaps on the question whether he held it consistently). Instead, I will examine his approach to arguments against materialism.

My discussion of duress falls into three parts. In part I of the paper, I argue chiefly that Xings done under duress remain clear cases of action, and that they are special cases of acting for a reason. In part II, I propose a five-point analysis of acting under duress. In part III, I examine how duress operates as a defence. I maintain that duress is sometimes an excuse and sometimes a justification for conduct, although I further argue that nevertheless it would not be unreasonable to classify duress as an excuse.

Can general terms stand as logical subjects? viz., following Professor Geach's exposition of subject and predicate, can general terms ever occur as an expression which is such that it can be said to stand for something that the sentence S (in which it occurs) is about, S itself being formed by attaching a predicate to that expression? Frege, in ‘On Concept and Object’, contended that no ‘concept’ could stand as the reference of a grammatical subject, in view of the essentially predicative nature of the ‘concept’, and, as for Frege a concept is what is expressed in language by a general term, no general term can stand as a logical subject.

Les considérations physiologiques sont étrangères, en tant que telles, au projet de l'Ethique, et sans doute, à l'ensemble des préoccupations philosophiques de Spinoza. Au début de Ia seconde partie de l'Ethique, Spinoza précise clairement: “j'expliquerai seulement ce qui peut nous conduire comme par la main à la connaissance de l’ Arne humaine et de sa béatitude suprême”. Pourtant, le livre ne laisse pas de contenir une révision intéressante du modèle mécaniste que Descartes appliquait à l'explication du corps humain; il contient surtout une hypothèse sur Ia structure organique, qui, nous le croyons, a joué un rôle de modèle pour un certain type de théorie de l'être vivant. Ce type de conception se trouve d'abord dans l'iatromécanisme de Boerhaave et de ses disciples au XVIIIe siècle, mais les séquelles en sont identifiables jusque dans Ia philosophie biologique contemporaine.

Philosophers often contrast personal authority to authority vested in offices. Some such distinction is traditional and sometimes useful. But it does not provide us with an exhaustive classification of the types of authority, for there is a third type of authority that I shall argue is more fundamental than these two. Let us start with the types marked out by the usual distinction.

Consider first the sort of authority illustrated by the following sentences:

1. (1) Smith is an authority on physics.

2. (2) Smith has (some) authority as a physicist.

3. (3) Smith's views (utterances) on physics have (some) authority.

4. (4) O.K., I believe you—after all, you're the authority on physics!

A person is an authority in virtue of possessing extensive knowledge of a field or subject-matter. There seem to be no limits on what the field or subject-matter can be—for instance, one can be an authority on trivia.

The object here is to develop a moral argument against theism. By “theism” is meant the worship of a (supposed) omnipotent, all righteous God. An attitude of worship, it may be assumed, would not be an attitude of worship if it did not preclude all doubt as to the worthiness of the object of worship. At any rate, it is only this attitude whose castigation as immoral is meant to be argued for here.

There are, of course, as many theisms as there are theistic religions, sects, cults, denominations et cetera. let M be the moral code of one such theism. It is immaterial here whether the moral code M is or is not dogmatically spelled out in the theistic religion in question. The present argument will follow equally well if the believers claim nothing more than an imperfect, incomplete, and uncertain knowledge of M.

There is a widely held view that the expressions ‘necessary truth’, ‘a priori truth’ and ‘analytic truth’ either express the same concept or, at least, refer to all and only the same items. Philosophers who hold this view, and who are sometimes described as ‘empiricists’, often draw the conclusion that the truths of logic and mathematics, if necessary, are also a priori and are, in some important sense, empty or not about the world. The subject matter of these disciplines, then, is said to differ in a philosophically important way from that of the empirical sciences, such as physics or chemistry. Rationalists, in contrast, have traditionally held that some a priori truths, either of logic or mathematics (or of some other area), are synthetic and, hence, non-analytic: i.e., there are synthetic a priori truths.

I want to attempt to analyze a forgotten area in the philosophy of emotions, the relations between physiological changes and the emotions. I want to do this:

• (1) by first of all briefly setting out some distinctions necessary to the understanding of the position I will be arguing for,

• (2) then by trying to elucidate what exactly is to be understood by the term ‘physiological change’ in the context of an emotion,

• (3) by showing that particular physiological changes are not part of the concept of any particular emotion and are only linked causally to the cognitive-appetitive part of an occurrent emotional state (the description of which part, forms the concept of that particular emotion),

• (4) by showing, however, that the notion of a physiological change is part of the concept of an emotional state,

• (5) and, finally, by drawing out some consequences of this analysis.

Under the title of ‘the axiom of existence’, hereafter (AE), John R. Searle has reduced to compact dictum a view to which many philosophers subscribe:

(AE) ‘Whatever is referred to must exist’.

(A less equivocal, though inelegant formulation would be: ‘It is necessary that whatever is referred to exist at some time or other’.) In this paper I shall offer two major arguments against adopting (AE), at least on certain assumptions. There have been a number of defenses of (AE), among them those arguing that it is fundamental to any systematic philosophy of language or logic. With the exception of discussing some of Searle's remarks in part Ill of this paper I shall not comment on any of these defenses.

Wittgenstein expounds his notion of a family resemblance in two important passages. The first is from The Blue Book:

I wish here to consider a certain type of argument often produced as a refutation of ethical egoism. Such an argument asks us to consider a situation in which the interests of two people conflict. It is then pointed out that the consequence of applying both ethical egoism and some widely accepted conceptual truth concerning the moral words to this situation is in some way ‘absurd’. Ethical egoism is therefore to be rejected. My strategy, in trying to show that this kind of argument is unsound, is this: I will first produce a simple refutation of ethical egoism of my own; I will show why it is unsound; I will try to show that these other arguments fail in the same way.

In “A Short Refutation of Ethical Egoism,” Richmond Campbell purports to refute “the view that everyone ought (morally) to do what benefits him the most in a given situation.” This is the theory which is “sometimes called impersonal ethical egoism (IEE)” [249). Campbell takes the following proposition as fundamental to his refutation of IEE.

Granted proposition I, Campbell's refutation would require only: