Ian Rumfitt

The Logic of Gersonides, a Translation of Sefer ha‐Heggesh ha‐Yashar (The Book of the Correct Syllogism) of Rabbi Levi ben Gershom with Introduction, Commentary, and Analytical Glossary by Charles H. Manekin. New Synthese Historical Library, Vol. 40. Kluwer, Dordrecht, xii + 341 pp. ISBN 0–7923–1513–8 Luigi Firpo: Il processo di Giordano Bruno Rome (Salerno Editrice) 1993. pp. xxvii + 378. Hardback only: 44,000 liras. ISBN 88–8402–135–9. Anthony Kenny: Descartes. A Study of His Philosophy (Reissued Thoemmes Press, 1993) 256 pp. £9.99 ISBN 1 85506 236 4 A. John Simmons: The Lockean Theory of Rights Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992 pp. ix, 387. £30.00. ISBN 0–691–08630–3 Ross Hutchison: Locke in France 1688–1734. The Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 1991 (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 290) pp. 251. £46.00. ISBN 0–7294–0418–8 Thomas Reid: Practical Ethics: Being Lectures and Tapers on Natural Religion, Self‐Government, Natural jurisprudence, and the Law of Nations Edited from the manuscripts with an Introduction and a Commentary by Knud Haakonssen. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 556. £40.00. ISBN 0–691–07350–3 The Cambridge Companion to Kant ed. by Paul Guyer, Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xii + 482 £40 hardback, £12.95 paperback. ISBN 0–521–36587–2 hardback, 0–521–36768–9 paperback. Gerd Buchdahl: Kant and the Dynamics of Reason Oxford: Blackwell. 1992. pp. x + 371 A. Bowie: Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction Routledge: London and New York, 1993. Pp. 211. £37.50 hb. £11.99 pb. ISBN 0–415–10346–0 (hb), 0–415–10347–9 (pb) Miszellen zu Nietzsche. Versuche von operationalen Auslegungen von Jean‐Pierre Schobinger, Basel: Schwabe & Co. AG, 1992, 151 Seiten David Boucher and Andrew Vincent: A Radical Hegelian. The Political and Social Philosophy of Henry Jones Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993. Pp. x + 267. £35.00. ISBN 0–7083–1207–1 J. Alberto Coffa: The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pbk. 1993, xii + 445 pp. £15.95. ISBN 0 521 44707 0.

In his 'paratactic' analysis of indirect speech reports, Davidson took the occurrence of 'that' in 'Galileo said that the Earth moves' to be a demonstrative expression which refers to the reporter's subsequent utterance of 'the Earth moves'. Ian McFetridge used his 'counting problem' to argue that we get a better version of the paratactic theory if we take the demonstrative 'that' to refer to the proposition expressed by the reporter's utterance, rather than to the utterance itself. In this note, I defend McFetridge's argument against an objection of Richard Holton's.

Many prominent writers on the philosophy of logic, including Michael Dummett, Dag Prawitz, Neil Tennant, have held that the introduction and elimination rules of a logical connective must be ‘in harmony ’ if the connective is to possess a sense. This Harmony Thesis has been used to justify the choice of logic: in particular, supposed violations of it by the classical rules for negation have been the basis for arguments for switching from classical to intuitionistic logic. The Thesis has also had an influence on the philosophy of language: some prominent writers in that area, notably Dummett and Robert Brandom, have taken it to be a special case of a more general requirement that the grounds for asserting a statement must cohere with its consequences. This essay considers various ways of making the Harmony Thesis precise and scrutinizes the most influential arguments for it. The verdict is negative: all the extant arguments for the Thesis are weak, and no version of it is remotely plausible.

The paper addresses itself to the "Homeric struggle" in the theory of meaning between those (e.g., Grice) who try to analyze declarative meaning in terms of an intention to induce a belief and those (e.g., Davidson) for who declarative meaning consists in truth conditions. (The point of departure is Strawson's celebrated discussion of this issue, in his Inaugural Lecture.) I argue that neither style of analysis is satisfactory, and develop a "hybrid" that may be-although what I take from the Gricean side in the struggle is not the notion of an intention, but that of somebody's reason for speaking as he does. The paper applies the hybrid analysis to resolve certain problems connected with the rationale for compositional, truth-theoretic semantics

In developing his alternative, Brandom starts from a version of inferential-role semantics according to which an assertion's content is constituted by its place in a field of inferential relations. It is because we have "an independent theoretical grip on the notion of an inference", and of its goodness or badness, that we are able to attain a notion of content that is prior to any of the representational concepts. He stresses that the relevant assessment of inferences is not whether they are logically valid, but whether they are "materially correct," in a sense that Sellars is said to have succeeded in explaining. "As examples, consider the inference from 'Pittsburgh is to the West of Philadelphia' to 'Philadelphia is to the East of Pittsburgh', the inference from 'Today is Wednesday' to 'Tomorrow is Thursday', and that from 'Lightning is seen now' to 'Thunder will be heard soon'. It is the contents of the concepts West and East that make the first a good inference... and the contents of the concepts lightning and thunder, as well as the temporal concepts, that underwrite the third". Subsentential contents are extracted from the sentential contents thereby identified using substitutional methods derived from Frege.