It is shown that Uffink's attempt to protect the interpretation of the wave function against protective measurements fails due to several errors in his arguments.

The pragmatist revival of recent decades has in some respects obscured the radical emancipatory potential of Deweyan pragmatism. The author suggests that neo-pragmatists such as Richard Rorty have too often failed to grasp the ways in which Dewey's notion of social intelligence was bound up with the case for participatory democracy, and that recent efforts to bring out the potential of pragmatism for supporting certain forms of feminist and gay critical theory make for a more compelling reconstruction of pragmatism.

Professor Girle suggests that the ancient Athenian interest in Aristotle’s syllogistic flowed from a preoccupation with debate in the form of a dialogue game. But other cultures, especially in India, also had a preoccupation with debate that could be characterized in the same way. This kind of explanation seems to us to ignore the elephant in the room: the fact that, in ancient Athens, dialogue and debate were not merely a game. They were the life and death of the state. (...) Many Athenians felt that foolish policies had cost the state dearly, especially during the Peloponnesian War, and many of them blamed those policies on shoddy political reasoning in the Assembly. (Plato hammers at this theme relentlessly.) And tellingly, it is only in the wake of such tragedies that Aristotle’s syllogistic finally emerged. We think that any credible explanation of the ancient Greek interest in formal logic needs to include this grim political reality. (shrink)

The comment starts with a brief exposition of the Eroteric View put forth by Artūrs Logins. I then provide one friendly comment on the exact form of the normative question which is central to the view, and suggest that in addition to the question, ‘Why ought S to φ?’, Logins should take the question, ‘Why is S permitted to φ?’ as definitive of normative reasons. In a more critical comment, I reflect on how normative explanatory reasons and (...) normative reasoning reasons relate, calling into question Logins’s claim that the two kinds of reasons are fundamentally distinct. First, I argue that being a normative explanatory reason near enough guarantees being a normative reasoning reason; second, I argue that normative explanatory reasons as well as normative reasoning reasons can be weighed, and that they can be weighed against each other. But this causes trouble for the Eroteric View. (shrink)

A commentary on the rhetoric of contemporary analytic moral theory as illustrated in Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1999 Tanner Lectures on Human Values ("Goodness and Advice"), with particular reference to Thomson's anxieties about the rejection of claims of objective judgements by college freshman and to her effort to demonstrate the existence of such judgments in matters of morality and taste.

Les developpements de la reflexion contemporaine ont suscite un nouvel interet pour la pensee d'Aristote. La phenomenologie d'Edmund Husserl avait des l'entre-deux-geurres reintroduit une serie de notions empruuntees a la philosophie du Stagirite, au point de paraitre renouer avec les developpements de la scolastique aristotelicienne medievale. Les etudes d'Andre de Muralt reunies dans ce recueils s'attachent a l'interpretation de la metaphysique d'Aristote. L'interrogation soulevee a une portee immediatement metaphysique, et tout aussi bien critique, logique et linguistique. Elle determine le domaine (...) d'une onto-logie, dont la metaphysique aristotelicienne est, parallelement a la dialectique platonicienne, l'une des manifestations exemplaires. Analysee dans son rapport a la phenomenologie husserlienne, a l'ontologie heideggerienne et a la philosophie analytique du langage, la metaphysique aristotelicienne peut ainsi s'inserer dans le debat contemporain et l'eclairer. (shrink)

Je voudrais demander au lecteur d’envisager favorablement une doctrine qui peut, je le crains, paraître extrêmement paradoxale et subversive. La doctrine en question est la suivante : il n’est pas désirable de croire en une proposition lorsqu’il n’y a aucune raison..

Pour déterminer quelle éthique il convient d’adopter à l’ère de la technique, il faut se concentrer sur les problèmes terminologiques que doit résoudre la réflexion contemporaine sur la technique. La distinction entre « les techniques » et « la technique » permet d’opérer une distinction nette entre une histoire des techniques et une réflexion spécifiquement philosophique sur le phénomène technique comme tel. Toutefois, cette réflexion proprement philosophique doit se dédoubler à son tour, suivant qu’elle envisage la technique phénoménalement ou essentiellement. (...) Dans le premier cas, elle étudiera les traits constitutifs et les phases de développement des objets techniques. Dans le second cas, elle tentera de dégager un enjeu ou une « essence destinale » de la technique comme telle, à l’ère contemporaine. On examinera alors la pertinence relative du concept de techno-science et l’on se demandera s’il permet de comprendre l’extraordinaire essor planétaire de la communication. Cet effort de clarification devrait permettre de de préciser les niveaux d’intervention de la méditation philosophique, afin de lui garantir le maximum de pertinence dans la préparation des décisions éthiques. (shrink)

The following contribution1 was inspired by Cleo Condoravdi’s article on NPI licensing in temporal clauses (Condoravdi, this volume). Condoravdi gives a coherent and comprehensive account of be- fore which crucially involves coercion of propositions to the earliest or maximal times at which the propositions are true, and a modal component for non-factual interpretations. I argue for a nonmodal, non-coercive analysis of clauses like [A before B] as ‘A is the case when B has not been the case’, triggering a conversational (...) implicature that B will be the case later. I will discuss temporal operators involving measure phrases, like three hours before, and I will show that so-called “expletive” negation in corresponding clauses in German is, in fact, interpreted as negation. (shrink)