An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic (what is semantically important may not be important), and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis (advanced in [2] and [3] and in Chisholm [15]) – which implies the inadequacy of classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data.

Descartes Published the Latin text of his Meditations in 1641 and its French translation, by the Due de Luynes, in 1643. There have been many subsequent editions of this version, the most recent being that of M. André Robinet and Mile Anne Becco. In addition to the original text, this edition contains a more or less complete index, a mini-concordance, and some other valuable statistical information. In this brief study we use this index as the basis for an investigation of some of the conceptual ties in this historically important and still very controversial work.

«…le point le plus important, voyez-vous, c'est que le professeur soit plein de dignité et à une certaine distance de l'élève… Done, je suis assis au fond de la salle le plus loin possible de la porte; à lextérieur de la porte (qui est fermée) est assis un domestique; àl'extérieur de la porte extérieure (qui est egalement fermée), est assis un sous-domestique; dans l'escalier à mi-étage, est assis un sous-sous-domestique; enfin dans la cour est assis l'élève.

In this paper I bring together and discuss claims that David Lewis has made in Counterfactuals, and in “Causation,” and explore a number of difficulties which the views of these two works make for each other. If these difficulties are as serious as I suggest, they will require revision or rejection of the view of causation that Lewis defends.

In a recent article “Abortion and Simple Consciousness' (Journal of Philosophy, V. LXXIV, N. 3, pp. 159–172), Werner S. Pluhar puts forward the following view:

A few words of explanation are in order. The reasoning can, I think, be summed up as follows: If one thinks that being conscious is what gives beings rights (and this seems to be a fairly common idea), then what justifies preferential treatment for humans as opposed to sentient members of other species? The fact, or so the answer goes, that humans have a higher degree of consciousness than do members of other species. But human fetuses do not have a higher degree of consciousness than, say, adult dogs. What justifies preferential treatment of human fetuses as opposed to adult dogs? The fact that human fetuses have a higher potential for reaching a higher degree of consciousness than do adult dogs. The liberal who holds that future generations have rights, e.g., to a healthy environment, thereby holds that merely potentially conscious beings have rights. If we have a right to life, then future generations also have that right. But fetuses are no less potentially conscious beings than unconceived future generations. So even a liberal must concede that if we have a right to life, fetuses have a right to life, and that it is at least prima facie wrong to destroy them by abortion.

L'objectif de l'ouvrage de R. Bernier et P. Pirlot est d'être un essai de «biophilosophie». L'organisation du texte détermine la mise en oeuvre de ce projet, nous serions meme porté à dire qu'ici la fonction et l'organe participent du même scheme de détermination causale et/ou fonctionnelle. Mais peut-être les auteurs pretendraient-ils que nous jouons sur les mots en assimilant par analogie indue le projet finalise de deux «biophilosophes» à l'illusoire argumentation teleologique que certains «philosophes», voire certains scientifiques devenus «philosophes», s'obstinent à retracer dans les figures les plus positives de l'explication biologique. Sans jeu de mots, nous le promettons cette fois, lafonction du livre de R. Bernier et P. Pirlot est de tenter la reduction des subterfuges téléologiques qui hantent parfois le langage théorique de la biologie et qui subvertissent à coup sûr les analyses de certains métaphysiciens de la biologie.