Since philosophers do not write down all they think, there are logical spaces in every text. The commentator's job is to bridge these, relying upon the implications of his author's statements. He usually works on the assumption that his philosopher is a rational and, therefore, a consistent thinker. When he has to contend with statements that are ambiguous, elliptical or apparently inconsistent, or with logical gaps that are unusually wide, he chooses the interpretation that confers the maximum coherence upon the theory under review. There are hard choices to be made, especially when the philosopher has avoided committing himself explicitly on a central point. Where the philosopher has been silent, is the critic allowed to speak? It is presumptuous of him to do so, no doubt, but, I think, warranted if the philosophical theory is thereby strengthened.

Atribuer la perception à toutes les monades, et pas seulement aux esprits, devait faire aussitôt problème et orienter par la suite l'histoire du leibnizianisme. Le problème se trouvait posé, en premier lieu, par certaines ambiguïtés de Leibniz, quand il fonde les phénomènes psychologiques sur la géométrie projective de l'expressio, transpose les formes d'Aristote dans le contexte d'un siècle cartésianisé, se sert de l'analogie pour conclure; en second lieu, par la difficulté intrinsèque de la question; en troisième lieu, animer toutes les monades ne revenait-il pas à accorder que la matière peut penser? ou bien, ne s'exposaiton pas à verser dans le spinozisme? Il était donc prudent de réserver la perception aux seuls esprits. Wolff trahissait ainsi la monadologie. Mais à peine croyait-on avoir sauvé la distinction des deux substances en réduisant les simples monades aux Atomi Naturae de la Monadologia physica, qu'à partir de la métaphore des points animés on allait faire de l'esprit une production de la nature, avec le matérialisme, ou de la nature une production de l'esprit, avec la Naturphilosophie. On essaiera plus loin de donner une idée de cette histoire du leibnizianisme.

On rencontre encore cette idée d'une triple révolution: Copernic, Darwin, Freud. La première phase fera l'objet de nos réflexions. Elle a été conçue par Freud comme une blessure au narcissisme humain. « Le narcissisme universel des hommes, leur amour d'eux-mêmes, nous dit Ricœur expliquant Freud, a, jusqu'à présent, subi trois sévères coups de la part de la science: ce fut d'abord la position centrale de la terre qui fut contesée par Copernic, puis … « Freud lui-même nous dit que pour l'homme pré-copernicien » la position centrale de la terre indiquait qu'elle jouait un rôle dominant dans l'univers et concordait avec la tendance qu'il avait à se considérer comme maître du monde «. Et à l'époque de Freud des historiens de la science abondèrent dans le même sens: au « moyen âge », la terre et l'homme étaient au centre de l'univers et cette position était la plus honorable.

Writers on jurisprudence often stress that conflict between positive laws and morality does not invalidate the positive laws. A law which requires me to compensate another for an injury caused by a dangerous object kept on my property is not invalidated by the fact that I have not been negligent and have no moral obligation to compensate the injured person. And although I have a moral obligation to keep my promises, positive laws may validly imply that I need not keep promises not made for a consideration or under seal. Thus positive law may permit acts not permitted by morals and may forbid acts permitted by morals. The lesson drawn from these thoughts is that to establish a positive law as valid we need not consider the relationships it bears to the rules of morals. A valid law is simply a law created in accordance with the constitutional conventions or ‘rules of recognition’ of the society in which it is to be applied. It is the manner of its establishment, not its relationship to morals, which makes a law valid.

Un philosophe ne meurt que dans la mesure où sa pensée ne nous est plus présente, dirait Marcel. Nous croyons donc rendre hommage au Père Racette en continuant dans la philosophie contemporaine la recherche, si bien commencée chez Merleau-Ponty et Michel Henry, du sens du lien au corps.

Dans l'ordre historique, le point de départ servant de donnépivot s'avère le dualisme cartésien. Depuis que Platon a regardé l'homme comme menant deux coursiers tendant sans cesse à diverger de direction, l'un figure de l'âme, l'autre du corps, un dualisme ontologique est né qui a toujours trouvé place en philosophie. Saint Thomas, sous l'influence néo-platonicienne, a vu une pénétration de la lumière de l'esprit dans les sensibiliés supérieures et de là dans les sensibilités inférieures.

Professor Weinberg, in his recent Abstraction, Relation, and Induction, has critically discussed the nominalistic tradition stemming from Ockham and continuing in the work of Berkeley and Hume. In this tradition there is one fundamental principle, which however divides into two parts. The first is (α) Whatever is distinguishable is distinct, and conversely. The second is (β) Whatever is distinct is separable, and conversely. Weinberg argues that both (α) and (β) are mistaken.

In this paper I propose to explore the case against nominalism. I shall suggest that Weinberg's argument against (β), though not defective in the way some recent critics believe, depends upon a hidden premiss. I shall also suggest that the argument against (β), when the needed premiss is added, is but a special case of a more general argument. The latter in no way depends upon considerations concerning relational predicates, though Weinberg does in his discussion specifically introduce such considerations. Nor is that unreasonable on his part.

H. L. A. Hart's new book of essays (Punishment and Responsibility, Oxford 1968) rejects any theory of the classic retributive type for justifying legal punishment. Hart denies that useless punishments can be justified even of fully guilty men; he rejects as the justifying aim of punishment the hope of crowning wickedness with the suffering it deserves; he denies that great guilt could justify a more severe punishment than utility-considerations would call for. We will be concerned here with only one of his arguments supporting this rejection: the objection that mere human judges cannot measure wickedness accurately enough to see that each degree of wickedness gets the appropriate amount of suffering. And of course modern fashions of determinist thinking have brought home to us even more vividly the absurdity of trying to measure wickedness, since determinism makes us wonder if we know how much any offender could have helped doing what he did.

This is an exciting book of considerable scope. In it Danto considers knowledge and knowledge-claims, belief, skepticism, and the relation language bears to the world. One might reflect the admitted “darkness” of the preface (APK xii) by saying that Danto is out to show how knowledge, belief, perception, and language require that there be a gap between us and the world (the object of these), and how that gap “is a traversable space” (loc. cit.). It should be noted that Danto applies many of his conclusions to traditional philosophical problems in his What Philosophy Is, a book apparently intended as an introductory text.