Cet article a déjà paru dans Beiträge zur geistigen Situation der Gegenwart Jg. 8, Heft 3. Nous remercions Cathrin Nielsen de nous voir permis de la reproduire ici. Im Oktober 1887, also knapp zwei Jahre vor seinem geistigen Zusammenbruch, schreibt Nietzsche an Hermann Levi in München : „Vielleicht hat es nie einen Philosophen gegeben, der in dem Grade im Grund so sehr Musiker war, wie ich es bin“. Wenig später vertraut er seinem engen Freund Heinrich Köselitz alias Peter Gast (...) an : es - XIXe siècle – Nouvel article. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Le recours au raisonnable est partout présent dans l’œuvre de John Rawls. Et cependant, le concept lui-même est souvent vu comme problématique et nombreux sont ceux qui pensent que le raisonnable ne saurait avoir la portée cruciale que Rawls lui attribue. Le concept est ici élucidé et certaines conceptualisations du raisonnable sont explicitées. L’auteur soutient que ces conceptualisations permettent au raisonnable de jouer le rôle-clé que Rawls en attend.

RésuméLe recours au raisonnable est partout présent dans l'œuvre de John Rawls. Et cependant, le concept lui-même est souvent vu comme problématique et nombreux sont ceux quipensent que le raisonnable ne saurait avoir la portée cruciale que Rawls lui attribue. Le concept est ici élucidé et certaines conceptualisations du raisonnable sont explicitées. L'auteur soutient que ces conceptualisationspermettent au raisonnable dejouer le rôle-clé que Rawls en attend.

La recherche d’une définition de la raison droite ( orthos logos ) au livre VI de l’ Éthique à Nicomaque d’Aristote n’est pas une recherche des “raisons droites” ou du “raisonnement droit” que produit l’expert – il ne tente pas de caractériser (et moins encore de “définir”) le type de justification ou de délibération qu’un médecin ou un phronimos produisent avant de choisir la bonne façon de procéder. A fortiori, il ne recherche pas des règles de conduite. Il recherche plutôt (...) les propriétés qui caractérisent l’âme d’une personne qui est capable de raisonner correctement: la “raison droite” comprise comme perfection de la partie rationnelle de l’âme. Dans cet article, j’examine la description aristotélicienne de la phronēsis, la vertu de la pensée ( dianoētikē aretē ) qui a rapport à l’action, et l’ euboulia, en tant qu’elle en est l’excellence caractéristique. (shrink)

La notion de raisonnable est omniprésente dans l'oeuvre de Rawls. Pourtant, plusieurs estiment que cette notion est problématique et qu'elle ne saurait avoir la portée critique dont Rawls l'investit. Dans cet article, je me propose de clarifier cette notion en soutenant que dans certaines de ses articulations conceptuelles, la notion de raisonnable peut effectivement jouer le rôle critique que lui assigne Rawls.The appeal to reasonableness is ubiquitous in the work of John Rawls. Yet the concept itself is to be problematical (...) and it is frequently tought that reasonability cannot have the critical weight that Rawls takes it to have. The concept is elucidated and, as well, some conceptualizations of reasonnability are articulated. It is argued that there are conceptualizations of reasonnability that can be critically deployed in the way Rawls presupposes. (shrink)

On continue encore largement, en France, à rapporter la pensée d’Eugen Fink aux textes et concepts qu’il élabore dans le cadre de son étroite collaboration avec Husserl, limitant ainsi son originalité à une radicalisation de la pensée du dernier Husserl (à travers des thèmes comme celui du spectateur désintéressé, du méontique ou de l’Entmenschung). Des études récentes, en Italie et surtout en Allemagne, se penchent quant à elles avec une attention soutenue sur les écrits du second Fink, écri...

Je voudrais d'abord remercier Kai Nielsen d'avoir bien voulu me communiquer, deux semaines avant cette rencontre, le texte de son exposé. Cela m'a donné le temps d'absorber le choc de sa critique, de préparer une réplique qui soit autre chose qu'une riposte et puisse contribuer à clarifier quelque peu le débat dans lequel nous sommes tous deux engagés.

Reason, we are told, is what makes us human, the source of our knowledge and wisdom. If reason is so useful, why didn't it also evolve in other animals? If reason is that reliable, why do we produce so much thoroughly reasoned nonsense? In their groundbreaking account of the evolution and workings of reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber set out to solve this double enigma. Reason, they argue with a compelling mix of real-life and experimental evidence, is not geared (...) to solitary use, to arriving at better beliefs and decisions on our own. What reason does, rather, is help us justify our beliefs and actions to others, convince them through argumentation, and evaluate the justifications and arguments that others address to us. In other words, reason helps humans better exploit their uniquely rich social environment. This interactionist interpretation explains why reason may have evolved and how it fits with other cognitive mechanisms. It makes sense of strengths and weaknesses that have long puzzled philosophers and psychologists--why reason is biased in favor of what we already believe, why it may lead to terrible ideas and yet is indispensable to spreading good ones.--. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, this article presents an overview of some of the diverse approaches to intersubjectivity that can be found in the phenomenological tradition. Starting with a brief description of Scheler’s criticism of the argument from analogy, the article continues by showing that the phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity involve much more than a ‘solution’ to the ‘traditional’ problem of other minds. Intersubjectivity doesn’t merely concern concrete faceto-face encounters between individuals. It is also (...) something that is at play in simple perception, in tool-use, in emotions, drives and different types of self-awareness. Ultimately, the phenomenologists would argue that a treatment of intersubjectivity requires a simultaneous analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and world. It is not possible simply to insert intersubjectivity somewhere within an already established ontology; rather, the three regions ‘self’, ‘others’, and ‘world’ belong together; they reciprocally illuminate one another, and can only be understood in their interconnection. (shrink)

Surprises are important in our everyday lives as well as in our scientific and philosophical theorizing—in psychology, information theory, cognitive-neuroscience, philosophy of science, and confirmation theory. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory theory of what makes something surprising. It has long been acknowledged that not everything unexpected is surprising. The reader had no reason to expect that there will be exactly 190 words in this abstract and yet there is nothing surprising about this fact. We offer a novel theory that explains (...) when and why an unexpected fact is surprising. We distinguish between descriptive and normative notions of what is surprising; clarify the sense in which surprising facts are unexpected; and, finally, develop and defend the significance account of surprise, according to which a fact is surprising to an agent if and to the extent that it is both unexpected and significant to the agent. Since a surprising fact can be significant to an agent in various ways—personal, moral, epistemic, and aesthetic—surprise is not merely or primarily epistemic. Fitting surprise reflects more than a person’s view of what is; it reflects a person’s view of what is significant. (shrink)

The claim that the human cognitive system tends to allocate resources to the processing of available inputs according to their expected relevance is at the basis of relevance theory. The main thesis of this chapter is that this allocation can be achieved without computing expected relevance. When an input meets the input condition of a given modular procedure, it gives this procedure some initial level of activation. Input-activated procedures are in competition for the energy resources that would allow them to (...) follow their full course. What determines which of the procedures in competition get sufficient resources to trigger their full operation is the dynamics of their activation. This dynamics depend both on the prior degree of mobilisation of a modular procedure and on the activation that propagates from other active modules. It is quite conceivable also that the mobilisation of some procedures has inhibitory effects on some others. The relevance-theoretic claim is that, at every instant, this dynamics of activation provides rough physiological indicators of expected relevance. The flow of energy in the system is locally regulated by these indicators. As a result, those input-procedure combinations that have the greatest expected relevance are the more likely ones to receive sufficient energy to follow their course. (shrink)

Motivated by examples, many philosophers believe that there is a significant distinction between states of affairs that are striking and therefore call for explanation and states of affairs that are not striking. This idea underlies several influential debates in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, normative theory, philosophy of modality, and philosophy of science but is not fully elaborated or explored. This paper aims to address this lack of clear explanation first by clarifying the epistemological issue at hand. Then it introduces an (...) initially attractive account for strikingness that is inspired by the work of Paul Horwich and adopted by a number of philosophers. The paper identifies two logically distinct accounts that have both been attributed to Horwich and then argues that, when properly interpreted, they can withstand former criticisms. The final two sections present a new set of considerations against both Horwichian accounts that avoid the shortcomings of former critiques. It remains to be seen whether an adequate account of strikingness exists. (shrink)

Review of Philosophy and Psychology has lately published a number of papers that in various ways take issue with and criticize my work on the link between consciousness, self-consciousness and selfhood. In the following contribution, I reply directly to this new set of objections and argue that while some of them highlight ambiguities in my work that ought to be clarified, others can only be characterized as misreadings.

How should modern medicine's dramatic new powers to sustain life be employed? How should limited resources be used to extend and improve the quality of life? In this collection, Dan Brock, a distinguished philosopher and bioethicist and co-author of Deciding for Others (Cambridge, 1989), explores the moral issues raised by new ideals of shared decision making between physicians and patients. The book develops an ethical framework for decisions about life-sustaining treatment and euthanasia, and examines how these life and death decisions (...) are transformed in health policy when the focus shifts from what is best for a patient to what is just for all patients. Professor Brock combines acute philosophical analysis with a deep understanding of the realities of clinical health policy. This is a volume for philosophers concerned with medical ethics, health policy professionals, physicians interested in bioethics, and undergraduate courses in biomedical ethics. (shrink)

In this chapter we focus on the debate over publicly-maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the US (chiefly regarding the over 700 monuments devoted to the Confederacy), but to some degree also in Britain and Commonwealth countries, especially South Africa (chiefly regarding monuments devoted to figures and events associated with colonialism and apartheid). After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist, and neutrally categorize removalist (...) and preservationist arguments heard in the monument debate. We suggest that both extremist and moderate removalist goals are likely to be self-defeating, and that when concerns of civic sustainability are put on moral par with those of fairness and justice, something like a Mandela-era preservationist policy is best: one which removes the most offensive of the minor racist monuments, but which focuses on closing the monumentary gap between peoples and reframing existing racist monuments. (shrink)

If we want to assess whether or not a naturalized phenomenology is a desideratum or a category mistake, we need to be clear on precisely what notion of phenomenology and what notion of naturalization we have in mind. In the article I distinguish various notions, and after criticizing one type of naturalized phenomenology, I sketch two alternative takes on what a naturalized phenomenology might amount to and propose that our appraisal of the desirability of such naturalization should be more positive, (...) if we opt for one or both of the latter alternatives. (shrink)

Non-skeptical robust realists about normativity, mathematics, or any other domain of non- causal truths are committed to a correlation between their beliefs and non- causal, mind-independent facts. Hartry Field and others have argued that if realists cannot explain this striking correlation, that is a strong reason to reject their theory. Some consider this argument, known as the Benacerraf–Field argument, as the strongest challenge to robust realism about mathematics, normativity, and even logic. In this article I offer two closely related accounts (...) for the type of explanation needed in order to address Field's challenge. I then argue that both accounts imply that the striking correlation to which robust realists are committed is explainable, thereby discharging Field's challenge. Finally, I respond to some objections and end with a few unresolved worries. (shrink)

In recent years more and more people have started talking about the necessity ofreconciliating phenomenology with the project of naturalization. Is it possible to bridge the gap between phenomenological analyses and naturalipossible to naturalize phenomenology? In their long introduction to the book NaturalizingPhenomenology published by Stanford University Press in 1999, the four coPetitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud might be seen as a kind of manifesto for this new approach. An examination of this introduction is consequently a good starting point for (...) a discussion of the issue. (shrink)

The dominant language of politics in the United States has been political individualism, with minimal restrictions on property and personal, voluntary conduct. But there are second languages of community that stress cooperation and group action. These second languages include the constitutional tradition for public health. Public health offers a community justification for paternalistic measures that, for example, discourage smoking or require seatbelts.

Several authors believe that there are certain facts that are striking and cry out for explanation—for instance, a coin that is tossed many times and lands in the alternating sequence HTHTHTHTHTHT…. According to this view, we have prima facie reason to believe that such facts are not the result of chance. I call this view the striking principle. Based on this principle, some have argued for far-reaching conclusions, such as that our universe was created by intelligent design, that there are (...) many universes other than the one we inhabit, and that there are no mathematical or normative facts. Appealing as the view may initially seem, I argue that we lack sufficient reason to accept it. (shrink)

Modern reflection about the good life and the good society has been dominated by a spirit of liberal optimism, according to which people typically know what’s good for them and make prudent choices in pursuit of their interests. As a result, people tend to do best, and pretty well at that, when given the greatest possible freedom to live as they wish. This appealing doctrine rests on a bold assumption about human psychology: namely, that people have a high degree of (...) aptitude for securing their well-being given arbitrarily high levels of “option freedom.” Yet a large body of empirical research suggests that people are systematically prone to make a variety of serious errors in the pursuit of happiness. These errors are probably serious enough to place liberal optimism’s psychological assumptions in doubt. If people do tend to fare best in the option-rich environments traditionally favored by liberal moderns, notably classical economists, this may not be mainly through the prudent exercise of choice. Or perhaps human beings actually benefit from certain constraints or burdens on choice. (shrink)

In this entry, I tackle the phenomenon known as "faultless disagreement", considered by many authors to pose a challenge to the main views on the semantics of subjective expressions. I first present the phenomenon and the challenge, then review the main answers given by contextualist, absolutist and relativist approaches to the expressions in question. I end with signaling two issues that might shape future discussions about the role played by faultless disagreement in semantics.

There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? (...) While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that when a theory is committed to an apparently unexplainable massive correlation, that fact counts significantly against the theory. Philosophical theories that imply that we have knowledge of non-causal mind-independent facts are especially prone to this objection. Prominent examples of such theories are mathematical Platonism, robust normative realism and modal realism. It is sometimes thought that theists can easily respond to this sort of challenge and that theism therefore has an epistemic advantage over atheism. In this paper, (...) I will argue that, contrary to widespread thought, some versions of theism only push the challenge one step further and thus are in no better position than atheism. (shrink)

A point made repeatedly over the last few years is that the Locked-in Syndrome offers unique real-life material for revisiting and challenging certain ingrained philosophical assumptions about the nature of personhood and personal identity. Indeed, the claim has been made that a closer study of LIS will call into question some of the traditional conceptions of personhood that primarily highlight the significance of consciousness, self-consciousness and autonomy and suggest the need for a more interpersonal account of the person. I am (...) skeptical about these claims and will in the following argue that the theoretical relevance of LIS for an understanding of selfhood and personhood has been exaggerated. (shrink)

Dan Marshall and Josh Parsons note, correctly. that the property of being either a cube or accompanied by a cube is incorrectly classified as intrinsic under the definition we have given unless it turns out to be disjunctive. Whether it is disjunctive, under the definition we gave, turns on certain judgements of the relative naturalness of properties. They doubt the judgements of relative naturalness that would classify their property as disjunctive. We disagree. They also suggest that the whole idea of (...) judging relative naturalness is a dubious business. We reply that, like them or not, such judgements cannot easily be avoided. (shrink)

The claim that the human cognitive system tends to allocate resources to the processing of available inputs according to their expected relevance is at the basis of relevance theory. The main thesis of this chapter is that this allocation can be achieved without computing expected relevance. When an input meets the input condition of a given modular procedure, it gives this procedure some initial level of activation. Input-activated procedures are in competition for the energy resources that would allow them to (...) follow their full course. What determines which of the procedures in competition get sufficient resources to trigger their full operation is the dynamics of their activation. This dynamics depend both on the prior degree of mobilisation of a modular procedure and on the activation that propagates from other active modules. It is quite conceivable also that the mobilisation of some procedures has inhibitory effects on some others. The relevance-theoretic claim is that, at every instant, this dynamics of activation provides rough physiological indicators of expected relevance. The flow of energy in the system is locally regulated by these indicators. As a result, those input-procedure combinations that have the greatest expected relevance are the more likely ones to receive sufficient energy to follow their course. (shrink)

In these writings by one of our most creative legal philosophers, Meir Dan-Cohen explores the nature of the self and its response to legal commands and mounts a challenge to some prevailing tenets of legal theory and the neighboring moral, political, and economic thought. The result is an insider's critique of liberalism that extends contemporary liberalism's Kantian strand, combining it with postmodernist ideas about the contingent and socially constructed self to build a thoroughly original perspective on some of the most (...) vital concerns of legal and moral theory.Dan-Cohen looks first at the ubiquity of legal coercion and considers its decisive impact on the nature of legal discourse and communication, on law's normative aspirations and claim to obedience, and on the ideal of the rule of law. He moves on to discuss basic values, stressing the preeminence of individual identity and human dignity over the more traditional liberal preoccupations with preference-based choice and experiential harm. Dan-Cohen then focuses more directly on the normative ramifications of the socially constructed self. Fundamental concepts such as responsibility and ownership are reinterpreted to take account of the constitutive role that social practices--particularly law and morality--play in the formation of the self.Throughout, Dan-Cohen draws on a uniquely productive mix of philosophical traditions and subjects, blending the methods of analytic philosophy with the concerns of Continental philosophers to reconceive the self and its relation to ethics and the law. (shrink)

I argue, with examples, that most human cognitive skills are neither instincts nor gadgets but mechanisms shaped both by evolved dispositions and by cultural inputs. This shaping can work either through evolved skills fulfilling their function with the help of cultural skills that they contribute to shape, or through cultural skills recruiting evolved skills and adjusting to them.

In this short paper I survey recent contextualist answers to the challenge from disagreement raised by contemporary relativists. After making the challenge vivid by means of a working example, I specify the notion of disagreement lying at the heart of the challenge. The answers are grouped in three categories, the first characterized by rejecting the intuition of disagreement in certain cases, the second by conceiving disagreement as a clash of non-cognitive attitudes and the third by relegating disagreement at the pragmatic (...) level. For each category I present several important variants and raise some (general) criticisms. The paper is meant to offer a quick introduction to the current contextualist literature on disagreement and thus a useful tool for further research. (shrink)

Reviews the history of teaching in the United States over three hundred years, and describes aspects of recruitment, organization, and logic particular to the profession.

Faced with the choice between supporting industrial plant agriculture and hunting, Tom Regan’s rights view can be plausibly developed in a way that permits a form of hunting we call “dignitarian.” To motivate this claim, we begin by showing how the empirical literature on animal deaths in plant agriculture suggests that a non-trivial amount of hunting would not add to animal harm. We discuss how Tom Regan’s miniride principle appears to morally permit hunting in that case, and we address recent (...) objections by Jason Hanna to environmentally-based culling that may be seen to speak against this conclusion. We then turn to dignity, which is especially salient in scenarios where harm is necessary or justifiable. We situate “dignitarian” hunting within a larger framework of adversarial ethics, and argue that dignitarian hunting gives animals a more dignified death than the alternatives endemic to large-scale plant agriculture, and so is permissible based on the kinds of principles that Regan endorses. Indeed, dignitarian hunting may actually fit better with Regan’s widely endorsed animal rights framework than the practice of many vegans, and should only be rejected if we’re just as willing to condemn supporting conventional plant agriculture. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self-assessment of affect are a genuine possibility—one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or “affective ignorance.” For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are unable to discern them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of (...) happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block’s controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self-reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways. (shrink)

As the Mohist doctrine of inclusive care (jian ai 兼愛) is usually understood, it is an affront to both human nature and commonsense morality.1 We are told that the Mohists rejected all particularist ties, especially to family, in the interests of a radically universalist ethic.2 But love for those close to us is deeply rooted in our natures, and few would deny that this love has moral significance. If the Mohists did deny this, it would be easy to dismiss them, (...) regardless of the abstract weight of their arguments. But the Mohists did not deny this. They consistently took it for granted that we have special attitudes and obligations toward those close to us. Filial piety was one of their core values, and .. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss two philosophical issues that hold special interest for empirical researchers studying happiness. The first issue concerns the question of how the psychological notion(s) of happiness invoked in empirical research relates to those traditionally employed by philosophers. The second concerns the question of how we ought to conceive of happiness, understood as a purely psychological phenomenon. With respect to the first, I argue that ‘happiness’, as used in the philosophical literature, has three importantly different senses that (...) are often confused. Empirical research on happiness concerns only one of these senses, and serious misunderstandings about the significance of empirical results can arise from such confusion. I then argue that the second question is indeed philosophical and that, in order to understand the nature of (what I call) psychological happiness, we need first to determine what a theory of happiness is supposed to do: what are our theoretical and practical interests in the notion of happiness? I sketch an example of how such an inquiry might proceed, and argue that this approach can shed more light on the nature and significance of happiness (and related mental states) than traditional philosophical methods. (shrink)

Several theorists have been attracted to the idea that in order to account for counterpossibles, i.e. counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, we must appeal to impossible worlds. However, few have attempted to provide a detailed impossible worlds account of counterpossibles. Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno’s ‘Remarks on Counterpossibles’ is one of the few attempts to fill in this theoretical gap. In this article, I critically examine their account. I prove a number of unanticipated implications of their account that end up implying (...) a counterintuitive result. I then examine a suggested revision and point out a surprising implication of the revision. (shrink)

Life satisfaction is widely considered to be a central aspect of human welfare. Many have identified happiness with it, and some maintain that well-being consists largely or wholly in being satisfied with one’s life. Empirical research on well-being relies heavily on life satisfaction studies. The paper contends that life satisfaction attitudes are less important, and matter for different reasons, than is widely believed. For such attitudes are appropriately governed by ethical norms and are perspectival in ways that make the relationship (...) between life satisfaction and welfare far more convoluted than we tend to expect. And the common identification of life satisfaction with happiness, as well as widespread views about the centrality of life satisfaction for well-being, are problematical at best. The argument also reveals an unexpected way in which philosophical ethics can inform scientific psychology: specifically, ethical reflection can help explain empirical results insofar as they depend on people’s values. (shrink)

The central characteristic of cognitive explanations of behavior is the appeal to inner representations. I examine the grounds which justify representational explanations, seeking the minimum conditions which organisms must meet to be candidates for such explanations. I first discuss Fodor's proposal that representationality be attributed to systems which respond to nonnomic properties, arguing that the distinction between the nomic and nonnomic in perception is fatally ambiguous. Then I turn to an illustrative review of the behavior and neurobiology of Hermissenda crassicornis, (...) a marine mollusk. Concerning this "model system," I compare the representational style of explanation with both behaviorist and neurophysiological explanations. Representational explanation is potentially more comprehensive than its rivals, and thus I conclude that representations are useful posits wherever internal information-bearing states mediate behavior. (shrink)

This article is a study of the Later Mohists' 'Lesser Selection (Xiaoqu)', which, more than any other early Chinese text, seems to engage in the study of logic. I focus on a procedure that the Mohists called mou . Arguments by mou are grounded in linguistic parallelism, implying perhaps that the Mohists were on the way to a formal analysis of argumentation. However, their main aim was to head off arguments by mou that targeted their own doctrines, and if their (...) argument succeeds then it entails that linguistic parallelism can never ground a cogent argument. In a way, this committed them to the view that formal logic cannot work, but the fact that they did not pursue this line of investigation was by no means inevitable. One consequence of this study is that the Later Mohists conducted their logical work by studying the behaviour of terms and verb phrases, and did not identify the sentence as a significant linguistic unit. This tends to confirm Chad Hansen's generalisation that early Chinese philosophers did not posit sentences or other sentence-like entities such as propositions, beliefs, or laws. Focusing on subsentential expressions did not stop the Mohists from addressing genuinely logical issues, but it may help explain the fact that they never developed a conception of logical structure. This study includes the complete Chinese text of the 'Lesser Selection' and a translation in English. (shrink)