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.

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.

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.

One of the striking characteristics of contemporary moral philosophy is the speed with which philosophers in the English-speaking world have jettisoned their reluctance to address concrete ethical problems and dilemmas and have plunged into the field of applied ethics. No less interesting is the impact that the work of some of the more noted of them has had outside of strictly philosophical circles. One need only to mention John Rawls or H. L. A. Hart to make the point. It is no longer difficult to prove that these same trends are deeply entrenched amongst Canadian philosophers. A further parallel is suggested by the fact that a Canadian philosopher, George Grant, has also had a substantial impact on recent Canadian thought. The appearance of a parallel, however, is illusory. For while applied ethics certainly has its practitioners in Canada today, and while it is widely recognized that both American and British philosophers have had a substantial and philosophically respectable impact on their respective societies, there seems widespread resistance to the idea that philosophical reflection has a role to play in the development of a distinctive understanding of Canadian society. And there is widespread scepticism in professional philosophical circles in Canada that the work of George Grant is of genuine philosophical interest, whatever his popular reputation.

Some writers about the history of philosophy in Canada have wondered why it should be studied. That is a worthy question, but it is not the one I want to discuss here. I am going to assume there are good reasons for doing so because I want to consider some general features of the subject of such studies and to determine what has to be done to establish certain descriptive claims about it. I will also point out some concerns I have about the proper explanation of certain interesting features of Canadian philosophic activity, and I will present a brief evaluation of one major study. I will do this with the aid of a contention that the study of the history of an intellectual discipline is a little like an evolutionary study of a biological species, but I will close by pointing out one reason for doing history which goes beyond description, and even explanation, of the past.

Mr. Mathien asks for evidence that there is Canadian philosophy in a special sense. He is not concerned with questions about whether people who were Canadians, or lived out much or most of their working lives in Canada, wrote philosophy which deserves to be taken seriously. Rather, he asks whether what has gone on in Canada by way of philosophy can be assembled in such a way as to make a coherent discipline.

Kai Nielsen is perhaps the most prolific of contemporary philosophers in Canada, as well as one of the most interesting. There are three salient aspects of his philosophy: his Marxism, his anti-foundationalism, and his particular brand of atheism. (The point of that last phrase will become clear in due course.) Among a large number of objections which I have to Nielsen's arguments and conclusions, one in particular stands out. I do not see how anti-fideism can consistently be combined with anti-foundationalism. The essence offideismis that one does not deem it necessary to rationally justify one's (typically religious) position, but one just “plumps for” it. But any justification of a (religious or other) position appears to involve appeal to foundations. Either the reasons in accordance with which a belief or set of beliefs is to be accepted can at least in principle be spelled out; or the belief or set of beliefs is arbitrary and unjustified. Nielsen needs to grasp the former horn of the dilemma to attack religious beliefs in the way he does; but to do so necessarily involves the foundationalism which he also attacks. A lot of the special quality of Nielsen, as a philosopher, comes out in the devices with which he covers over this intellectual crevasse.

In their History of Canadian philosophy, The Faces of Reason, Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott introduce the concept “philosophical federalism” to describe a tendency shared by many of the early Canadian idealists, a willingness to attempt to understand and accommodate philosophical positions opposed to their own. In this paper I wish to examine the relationship this concept bears to another one, which many still regard as merely an Utopian ideal, that of world federalism.

The Faces of Reason, though it was mostly written in peaceful surroundings in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, arose in part out of a rather tumultuous debate about Canadian culture, its nature, its background, and its prospects. It also arose partly out of a consideration of philosophy in Canada and its failure, already evident in the 1960s, to deal with questions which seemed obvious to anyone with a grasp of Canadian intellectual history, but which never seemed to occur to the young philosophers from the United States and Britain who manned the growing number of philosophy departments in English Canada.

Au moment où, dans la postface de 1973 à son livre Erkenntnis und Interesse, Habermas dresse le bilan des principales objections quilui ont été adressées, il est amené à faire état d'une distinction cruciale qui n'avait pas été dégagée de façon suffisamment claire dans le texte. Le point six de cette postface est intitulé « Reconstruction contre autocritique », et il débute comme suit:

La parution de la monographic de Sneed, The Logical Structure of Mathematical Physics (1971) a suscité un renouveau d'intérêt en philosophie contemporaine des sciences. Cet ouvrage arrivait à un moment où l'épistémologie des sciences, telle que développée dans les milieux germaniques et anglo-saxons, accusait de graves insuffisances dans la reconstruction rationnelle du développement historique des théories physiques. Mis sur la défensive par les thèses et arguments historiques de Kuhn et de Feyerabend, ces milieux « orthodoxes » devaient reconnaitre l'état embryonnaire de ce qui devait être une épistémologie diachronique des sciences, une épistémologie du changement scientifique où les méthodes d'analyse formelle puissent être aussi mises á contribution. A cela s'ajoutait un certain malaise, une certaine stagnation de la problématique, plus synchronique, de l'approche traditionnelle issue du mouvement empiriste logique. Le probleme de la dichotomie langage théorique—langage observationnel, ainsi que son fidèle compagnon, le problème des termes théoriques, le statut épistémologique des règies de correspondance, la dèfinition du concept d'analyticité en science, autant de questions qui avaient été discutées et critiquées, à maintes reprises, pour aboutir à des résultats peu concluants aux yeux des philosophes, comme à ceux des physiciens préoccupés des fondements de leur discipline et à qui la teneur de cette discussion semblait souvent étrangère à la pratique scientifique.

Cet article tentera de dèfinir le fascisme. Une premiére partie rendra comptedu dernier livre deZeev Sternhell, Ni gauche ni droite (1983). Ce livre èclaire le fascisme français d'une façon qui fut trés contestèe (Julliard, 1984; Comte, 1985) mais qui demeure originale. Une deuxiéme partie insistera sur l'ambiguïtè du discours fasciste et critiquera cer-taines théses de Sternhell. Une troisiéme partie s'efforcera de cerner le fascisme europèen de l'entre-deux-guerres et montrera la complèmen-taritè de diverses grilles d'analyse. Dans une quatrième partie, on trai-tera des raisons psychologiques et des conditions sociales de son succés populaire. Car ce succés est une de ses caractèristiques les plus trou-blantes. Enfin, dans une cinquiéme partie, on verra que des règimes politiques trés diffèrents sont accusès de fascisme, parce que chacun, par un trait ou par un autre, ressemble au fascisme de Mussolini ou de Hitler. Mais cela ne justifie pas qu'on les rassemble sous un même vocable. On suggèrera done de restreindre l'usage de la notion de fascisme.