Richard Hooker was a leading Anglican theologian in Elizabethan England. In his books Of the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity, it is maintained that laws of God,nature, reason, and laws concerning doctrine are unchangeable; on the other hand,law of human and positive is mutable. According to Hooker, laws of church government and order are positive and when the necessity of exigency, episcopal ordination could be changed. In the American Revolution, William White, an Episcopal Church clergy insisted that church government and order in America were changeable by developing Hooker's argument. It seems that Hooker's theory of mutable laws of church government had a significant influence on the modern American Episcopal Church.

It is widely admitted that when someone is morally responsible for an action,(1) the action must be none other than her action, i.e., the action must be ascribable to her, and (2) the action must be alternative when she did it. About the first condition Locke says someone is morally responsible for an action only if it is the effect of her volition. But it is still to be asked how her volition can be identified with herself. About the second condition Locke doesn't seem to say something explicitly. This paper is addressed to these two conditions in Locke's theory of responsibility.

So far most Bentham scholars have failed to pay enough attention to the fact that Bentham tried to address the problem of methodology of sciences in his Logic,of which the theory of language constituted a sort of philosophical foundation. In consequence, the most distinctive feature of his methodology of sciences has not been brought to light sufficiently. This paper, thus, is an attempt to clarify this feature, which I call ‘the reorganization of the structure of reality through inventing new ideas’, by examining his Logic. In that process, I challenge the received view that attributes both foundationalist and reductionistic theory of knowledge to Bentham. In contrast, it is argued that his theory of knowledge upon which his methodology of sciences rests is radically pragmatic.

The similarity between Locke and contemporary French thinkers is that both assert that the realm in which reason should play an active role must be distinguished from that in which things can be considered as a matter of faith. The difference between them, on the other hand, lies in their views on the traditional revelation based on the authority of the church: Locke considers the revelation to be a matter of reason because it relies only on the words that lead to the probable interpretation, while the French thinkers treat it as a matter of faith because they believe the authority to be entirely decisive. Thus, this paper is an attempt to reveal the significance of Locke's matter of reason as contradistinguished from his matter of faith.

Epistemological status of moral judgment, or the question concerning the existence of moral values, has been and still is one of the biggest issues in metaethics.
Some ( especially called ‘Humean’ ) insist that the values, including moral values, are really products of ’attitudes’ projected into the world, and others argue that they are independent of the activity of the subject’s mind. We find Hume’s phrases often referred to in this sort of disputes. But the fact that many philosophers are getting inspiration from Hume does not always mean that they, both Humeans and anti-Humeans, correctly understand what Hume intended to claim. This paper tries to reply some of the serious problems appearing in the controversy by showing that it is proper from Hume's standpoint to assume the morality located in the external world.

Locke's theory of language is often taken to insist on the possibility of a private language of the kind that is denied by Wittgenstein, and is severely criticized on this basis. It is true that Locke's linguistic thesis appears to be in support of the possibility of a private language. However, Locke also insists on the public nature of language, and so his theory cannot be easily discounted on grounds of his support for the possibility of a private language. Moreover, if it is because of his linguistic thesis that his language theory is regarded as the theory of a private language, it is possible to avoid this criticism due to the merit of the linguistic thesis itself. This paper demonstrates this point by elucidating the normative and factual aspects of Locke's linguistic thesis.

This paper clarifies the contexts of standing army controversy. Trenchard opposed standing army from the standpoint of republicanism. Defoe and Davenant defended standing army not only in opposing republicanism but also in their recognition of the threat of French power to England. Defoe, recognizing the military-technological revolution in the Modern, consent of parliament is adequate for guaranteeing a free constitution, but Davenant did not. In his struggle to adapt republicanism to the contemporary world situation, he eventually transformed the republicanism of farmer=warrior society to that of commercial society. Defoe also defended the commercial society but his was more monarchical.