Volume 100, Issue 4

In the Philebus , Socrates argues that pleasure, like judgment, can be “false” ( pseudēs ). Most scholars who discuss this claim restrict their interpretation to Socrates’ first argument that pleasure can be “false”, where Socrates uses pseudēs as a synonym of “incorrect” ( ouk orthēs ) (37a–40e). As a result, scholars have failed to recognize that in the next argument (41a–42c) Socrates uses pseudēs to pick out a different problem with pleasure: in certain circumstances, a pleasure can deceptively appear to a subject to be larger or smaller than it really is. As Socrates explicitly distinguishes between these two problems with pleasure, he is guilty of neither confusion nor intentional equivocation in his application of the predicate pseudēs . The distinction also resolves many longstanding interpretive puzzles, including the relationship between mixed and “false” pleasures and why Socrates describes the pleasures of sight, hearing, smell and learning as both pure and “true” ( alētheis ).

This article aims to interpret Leibniz’s dynamics project ( circa 1678–1700) through a theory of the causation of corporeal motion. It presents an interpretation of the dynamics that characterizes physical causation as the structural organization of phenomena. The measure of living force ( vis viva ) by mv 2 must then be understood as an organizational property of motion conceptually distinct from the geometrical or otherwise quantitative magnitudes exchanged in mechanical phenomena. To defend this view, we examine one of the most important theoretical discrepancies of Leibniz’s dynamics with classical mechanics, the measure of vis viva as mv 2 rather than ½ mv 2 . This “error”, resulting from the limits of Leibniz’s methodology, reveals the systematic role of this quantity mv 2 in the dynamics. In examining the evolution of the quantity mv 2 in the refinement of the force concept ( vis ) from potentia to actio , I argue that Leibniz’s systematic limitations help clarify dynamical causality as neither strictly metaphysical nor mechanical but a distinct level of reality to which Leibniz dedicates the “ dynamica ” as “ nova scientia ”.

Hume argues that whenever we seem to be motivated by reason, there are unnoticed calm passions that play this role instead, a move that is often criticised as ad hoc (e. g. Stroud 1977 and Cohon 2008). In response, some commentators propose a conceptual rather than empirical reading of Hume’s conativist thesis, either as a departure from Hume (Stroud 1977), or as an interpretation or rational reconstruction (Bricke 1996). I argue that conceptual accounts face a dilemma: either they render the conativist thesis trivial, or they violate Hume’s thesis that ‘ a priori , any thing may produce any thing’ ( THN 1.4.5.30). I defend an empirical construal of Hume’s conativist thesis. I provide two theoretical frameworks within which Hume’s appeal to the calm passions may be justified: first, by the framework of theoretical virtues, and secondly, by lights of his own “rules by which to judge of causes and effects” ( THN 1.3.15).

This paper assesses Grice’s work on conversational implicature in the light of one of its early targets: Austin’s claim that we cannot isolate the meaning of an expression from the context in which it is used. Grice argues that we can separate the literal meaning of many utterances from their pragmatic implicatures through the mechanism of explicit cancellation. However, Grice’s conception of cancellation does not account for the fact that an explicit cancellation must be uttered, and that its utterance involves further implicatures that undermine the attempted cancellation. What Grice calls explicit cancellations are better understood as utterances that resolve ambiguities, and hence apply only in cases where there exists an ambiguity that needs resolving. If Grice’s work does not undermine Austin, we are in a position to reassess an Austinian form of philosophical criticism that emphasizes the ordinary usage of expressions deployed in philosophical arguments.