Only concreta are causative, though other things can play a passive part in enabling them to do the causing that they do. Nonconcreta—platonic universals included—are just the instrumental and ethical values of concreta. There is no sense of the word in which both concreta and nonconcreta “exist”; but, coining one, we can say nothing “exists,” in that coined sense, over and above concreta, their vicissitudes and their values. That is nominalism.

An argument against the claim that moral realism cannot be sustained because moral beliefs, being affective-conative states, cannot themselves be true or false. In fact moral claims can fail both in terms of a failure of the standard it expresses to be realised by a given agent and also in terms of whatever it commends to be good or bad, right or wrong, in actual fact.

‘Simplicity’ comes up in different senses in scientific methodology. The simplicity criterion at issue here is relied on in all inductive inference, it’s argued. Therefore, it cannot be inductively...

One of the standard objections against Marxism-Leninism is that by speaking as they do of individuals’ and classes’ objective interests, Leninists are claiming undemocratically to know what is good for people better than those people sometimes do themselves. But all of us have at some time decided that we have been mistaken in desiring something or not desiring something; and so all of us thus recognize in principle the distinction between what we desire and what is objectively in our interests. (...) A definition of people’s “objective interests” is developed in terms of what they would desire if sufficiently informed. A democratic-minded voter unwilling to distinguish between people’s objective interests and their desires could never vote for something as being in the interests of the majority without first ascertaining the votes of the others, with the result that no voting could ever take place if all were so minded. Even “paternalism” is not unconditionally to be avoided. (shrink)

La cohérence du marxisme de Louis Althusser est ici assaillie à partir de la théorie de la connaissance engelsienne. On prétend dévoiler certains « concepts »-clés de l'althusserisme comme étant des métaphores non susceptibles de toute interprétation qui se tienne. Son adhésion foudroyante à l'objectivisme réaliste se manifeste comme fausse . Cinq problématiques althusseriennes sont examinées et critiquées successivement. Il s'agit de sa désapprobation du concept engelsien de vérité relative et objective, sa distinction entre l'objet de connaissance et l'objet réel, (...) sa conception de « l'idéologie », sa conception de « l'empirisme », et sa conception de la philosophie.The coherence of Louis Althusser's "Marxism" is here assailed from the standpoint of Engels' theory of knowledge. Key Althusserian "concepts" turn out to be mere metaphors insusceptible of any consistent construal, it is claimed, while his blustering allegiance to realist objectivism proves spurious . In succession, his disapproval of Engels' concept of relative truth, his distinction between the object of knowledge and the real object, his conception of "ideology", his conception of "empiricism", and his conception of philosophy are examined and criticized. (shrink)