It is incorrect to construe Hume as a Pyrrhonian sceptic. Or so I have argued elsewhere. To the contrary, Hume in fact offers a detailed defence of the thesis that the norms of scientific inference, that is, the “rules by which to judge of causes and effects”, are reasonable rules to follow in forming our beliefs. Conforming to these rules in its formation of causal beliefs is a strategy the understanding employs in order to satisfy the end of curiosity (T271). Science is reasonable because, so far as we can, within our fallible limits, discover, it is the strategy of belief formation that is the best means of achieving our end of truth, insofar as the latter is, within our fallible limits, attainable.

On suppose généralement que Descartes fait jouer au libre vouloir un rôle secondaire par rapport à celui de la raison. Dans ce texte, j'avan cerai que sur certains points d'importance cruciale, c'est le libre vouloir cartésien qui possède la primauté sur la raison.

In a series of experiments done in wartime Nazi Germany, inmates of the Dachau concentration camp were exposed to cold by being immersed in ice water, or kept outside in freezing temperatures; their responses were measured, and various techniques were used in an attempt to revive them. The immediate application of these hypothermia studies was to the war effort, to try to protect or save soldiers exposed to cold water or air. An account of the procedures and results of these experiments was written by an American officer, Major Leo Alexander, on the basis of his post-war discovery of documents and interviews in Germany. These reports reveal the ghastly and abominable details of the experiments.

Recent scientific work in British Columbia has caused some ethical debate when it consulted the Alexander report and used some of the Nazi experimental data. The scientists in the Hypothermia Unit of the University of Victoria, unsurprisingly but reassuringly, have no intention of repeating the Nazi atrocities, and condemn them. The current controversy concerns the morality of their using the Alexander data in their study. This out-of-the-way case has some small intrinsic interest; but its consideration leads to broader concerns.

Michel Foucault disait de ses propres travaux qu'ils avaient été des essais aveugles (Archéologie du savoir, 26) qui ne s'éclairaient qu'en cours de route, au fur et à mesure que se précisait la méthode d'analyse historique qui y était appliquée. Us ont été reçus comme oeuvres d'his-torien. Cet accueil laissait cependant l'inconfortable impression que Foucault envahissait le champ de l'histoire en se comportant en his-torien cannibale, en dissolvant de son regard de sauvage les évidences incontestées et en résolvant avec facilité les problèmes sur lesquels les spécialistes se cassaient les dents. Cela lui a valu une réception controversée. Foucault eut, en effet, maille à partir non seulement avec les historiens, mais aussi avec les spécialistes des disciplines auxquelles il s'intéressait. De plus, chaque fois qu'on lui demandait de définir le “point d'où il soulevait la terre épistémique ”, de circonscrire l'espace blanc où il s'installe quand il fait ses enquêtes et fabrique les histoires sur l a folie, sur la maladie et la naissance de la clinique, sur l'apparition des sciences de la vie, du langage et de l'économie, sur la naissance de la prison et sur l'usage des plaisirs des grecs au dix-neuvième siècle, Foucault répondait en véritable anarchiste qu'il n'était ni ceci, ni cela, qu'il était plutôt contre toutes ces étiquettes que l'on essayait de lui coller.

Le présent essai examine d'abord les notions newtoniennes d'espace et de temps absolus en elles-mêmes et dans leurs relations réciproques, puis ensuite dans leurs rapports avec d'autres notions connexes comme celles de lieu et de mouvement, en prenant pour base le Scholium qui fait suite aux définitions formulées au début des Principia mathematica philosophiae naturalis. La seconde partie analyse les arguments et precédés utilisés par Newton pour identifier des mouvements absolus, et prouver ainsi que de tels mouvements existent. La troisième partie montre en quel sens il faut entendre que ces mouvements sont « absolus », et pourquoi on ne peut en tirer une preuve ultérieure de l'existence d'un temps et d'un espace absolus et subsistants.

The weather can be very cold at Dachau concentration camp, but Dachau was apparently not cold enough for some Nazi purposes. A camp doctor named Rascher wrote to Heinrich Himmler in February 1943, asking to be transferred to Auschwitz to continue his experiments—which involved freezing live prisoners. The letter reads: “Auschwitz is more suitable [than Dachau] as it is colder there and the camp itself is much larger, thereby attracting less attention to the test persons, who tend to scream while freezing.”

Pour ceux qui entreprennent de parler de la liberté, la conception grecque constitue une référence quasi inévitable. Mais si les uns l'invo-quent avec nostalgie comme un modèle, d'autres s'efforcent au contraire d'en exposer les limites ou la spécificité. C'est que la notion elle-même de «liberté grecque» continue à être l'objet de controverses; et il n'est pas étonnant que les interprétations proprement philosophiques des doctrines s'en ressentent directement. On peut sans doute trouver à ces divergences plusieurs explications: la difficulté intrinsèque du sujet et les passions qu'il suscite presque immédiatement, la diversité des domaines et des auteurs concernés, les choix philosophiques des interprètes, notamment.

In the aftermath of emotivism and behaviourism, cognitivist theories of emotion became current in both philosophy and psychology. These theories, though varied, have in common that emotions require propositional attitudes such as beliefs or evaluations. Accordingly, cognitivist theories characterize emotions themselves with features of such attitudes, including syntax, semantic meaning, and justifiability.

La fondation d'une revue comme Dialogue s'accompagne de crainte et d'espoir. Crainte de ne pouvoir la faire vivre et progresser, crainte « inavouée » que la production philosophique ne soit pas à la hauteur de l'opinion que nous avons de nous-mêmes ou de ce que le monde extérieur attend de nous… Espoir cependant de consolider les structures d'une Association canadienne de philosophie à peine naissante, chancelante, mais vivant déjà d'un idéal exigeant et dont la revue porte le nom.

There is a well-known argument which is an attempt to show that all arguments in favour of determinism are self-defeating. Proponents of the Determinism-Is-Self-Defeating Argument (hereafter referred to as DISDA) claim that all pro-deterministic arguments, if successful, undermine rationality and epistemic justification. Indeed, the proponents of DISDA claim that since the truth of determinism implies that we cannot claim to know the truth of any proposition, then it follows, of course, that proponents of determinism cannot claim to know that determinism is itself true. Hence, the self-defeating nature of determinism.

TIT FOR TAT (TFT) is the familiar strategy of returning like for like, good for good, bad for bad. Recently Robert Axelrod has shown this rule to be remarkably effective in promoting co-operation among egoists.1Nevertheless, it has been morally denigrated, most notably in the Sermon on the Mount but also by the modern patron of TFT, Anatol Rapoport:

Of the contingent strategies, Tit-for-tat elicits consistently the most cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Obviously, it would be fatuous to interpret this result as a vindication of the “eye-for-an-eye” principle. The success of Tit-for-tat may be no more than that of a simple reinforcement schedule in à two-choice situation, devoid of ethical overtones.

During the formative years for Dialogue (1960-1961), I was absent from Canada on sabbatical leave, and so my memory of the initial moves by the officers and directors of the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) towards publishing their own scholarly review is faded by time and fuzzily out of focus. One thing stands out clearly and should be spoken of first. The initial impetus and steady pressure towards publication came from the francophone members. Father Jean Langlois spoke of this in his brief “liminaire”, introducing the first number in June 1962: “Réalisation d'un projet dont nous rêvions depuis la fondation de notre groupement, il y a quatre ans.” It had been no idle or empty dream. Money had been earned and set aside for just this purpose by one of our senior francophone members and was available towards the start-up production costs. A francophone co-editor had been chosen well before his anglophone colleague was sounded out. The motion committing the Association to the venture was proposed and seconded, in Montreal, by members from the universities of Montreal and of Ottawa.

A natural, and popular, way to approach the identity of a continuant under a sortal F is to suppose there to be:

(a) A synchronic F-unity relation, binding bits of a world-slice into discrete F-stages.

(b) A diachronic F-unity relation, binding series of F-stages into F's.

In a Minkowskian world, of course, the synchronic and diachronic relations must reveal themselves as simply aspects of a single unity relation for F. But since the proper time of the continuant itself is the most natural generator of space and time axes, the decomposition of the unity-relation into (a) and (b) will normally be effortless.

Otto Neurath est intéressant à plus d'un titre. En premier lieu, il a joué un rôle central dans le développement institutionnel du mouvement dénommé « empirisme logique » dont certains interprètes ont considerablement réduit l'étendue et tronqué les thèses. En second lieu, intellectuellement, il occupe une place importante dans les réflexions épistémologiques et politiques d'avant la seconde guerre mondiale, comme en temoigne le fait que Karl Popper le prenne pour cible dans La logique de la découverte scientifique ou Friedrich Hayek dans La route de la servitude. En troisième lieu, il est, comme le note Popper, l'incarnation d'une approche épistémologique originale (Popper, 1944–45, 165–166).

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.

The assumption is often made that there cannot be scientific laws about individuals. I shall try to provide a plausible semantics and epistemology for scientific laws about individuals. This would be interesting, however, only ifone were tempted to believe that mentioning individuals did not disqualify a sentence from scientific lawhood. To begin with, I will try to provide such a temptation.

The term “ontology”, as is well enough known, is of seventeenth-century vintage. According to current research, it first appears in the year 1613. By the end of the century it had waxed firm in common recognition. Through the influence of Christian Wolff in the following century, the eighteenth, it quickly became standard in the school tradition for the science of being in general, the science of being qua being. In its morphology the term showed clearly enough that it was meant to designate a science that bore upon being in the widest range of the notion. In that tenor it was described at the time as metaphysica de ente, philosophia de ente, doctrina de ente, or entis scientia, in the sense that “being” denoted its proper subject matter (objectum proprium) more correctly than did “metaphysics”.' Accordingly, it was intended to imply that “being”, tout court, was to be regarded as the object of a philosophical science quite as “soul”, for instance, played the role of object for psychology.

The title of my paper may lead the reader to expect an account of the content of Canadian philosophy, as seen from outside Canada. This is not my intention. In fact, I shall say very little indeed about the content of Canadian philosophy. What I shall offer, rather, is an apology for Canadian philosophy. The apology, needless to say, will not be apologetic; it will be an apologia, a clearing of the ground for a position. And the apology itself will be cosmopolitan, having a world-wide perspective.