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  1. Conventionalism and the Impoverishment of the Space of Reasons: Carnap, Quine and Sellars.Kenneth R. Westphal - 2015 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 3 (8).
    This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism (...)
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  2. Realism, Science, and Pragmatism.Kenneth R. Westphal (ed.) - 2014 - New York: Routledge.
    This collection of original essays aims to reinvigorate the debate surrounding philosophical realism in relation to philosophy of science, pragmatism, epistemology, and theory of perception. Questions concerning realism are as current and as ancient as philosophy itself; this volume explores relations between different positions designated as ‘realism’ by examining specific cases in point, drawn from a broad range of systematic problems and historical views, from ancient Greek philosophy through the present. The first section examines the context of the project; contributions (...)
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  3. ‘Constructivism, Contractarianism and Basic Obligations: Kant and Gauthier’.Kenneth R. Westphal - forthcoming - In J.-C. Merle (ed.), Reading Kant’s Doctrine of Right.
    Gauthier’s contractarianism begins with an idea of a rational deliberator but ‘finds no basis for postulating a moral need for the justification of one’s actions to others. The role of agreement is to address each person’s demand that the constraints of society be justified to him, not a concern that he justify himself to his fellows’ (Gauther 1997, 134–5). He contrasts his view with Scanlon’s contractualism, according to which agreement with others is the core of morality and each agent has (...)
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