In this paper, I raise the following problem: How does Avicenna define modalities? What oppositional relations are there between modal propositions, whether quantified or not? After giving Avicenna's definitions of possibility, necessity and impossibility, I analyze the modal oppositions as they are stated by him. This leads to the following results: The relations between the singular modal propositions may be represented by means of a hexagon. Those between the quantified propositions may be represented by means of two hexagons that one (...) could relate to each other.This is so because the exact negation of the bilateral possible, i.e. ‘necessary or impossible’ is given and applied to the quantified possible propositions.Avicenna distinguishes between the scopes of modality which can be either external or internal . His formulations are external unlike al-F̄ar̄ab̄;’s ones. However his treatment of modal oppositions remains incomplete because not all the relations between the modal propositi.. (shrink)

A fascinating account of exemplarity in the context of deconstruction.

Biology seems to present local and transitory regularities rather than immutable laws. To account for these historically constituted regularities and to distinguish them from mathematical invariants, Montévil and Mossio (Journal of Theoretical Biology 372:179–191, 2015) have proposed to speak of constraints. In this article we analyse the causal power of these constraints in the evolution of biodiversity, i.e., their positivity, but also the modality of their action on the directions taken by evolution. We argue that to fully account for the (...) causal power of these constraints on evolution, they must be thought of in terms of normativity. In this way, we want to highlight two characteristics of the evolutionary constraints. The first, already emphasised as reported by Gould (The structure of evolutionary theory, Harvard University Press, 2002), is that these constraints are both produced by and producing biological evolution and that this circular causation creates true novelties. The second is that this specific causality, which generates unpredictability in evolution, stems not only from the historicity of biological constraints, but also from their internalisation through the practices of living beings. (shrink)

Proof, Computation and Agency: Logic at the Crossroads provides an overview of modern logic and its relationship with other disciplines. As a highlight, several articles pursue an inspiring paradigm called 'social software', which studies patterns of social interaction using techniques from logic and computer science. The book also demonstrates how logic can join forces with game theory and social choice theory. A second main line is the logic-language-cognition connection, where the articles collected here bring several fresh perspectives. Finally, the book (...) takes up Indian logic and its connections with epistemology and the philosophy of science, showing how these topics run naturally into each other. (shrink)

This book promotes the research of present-day women working in ancient and medieval philosophy, with more than 60 women having contributed in some way to the volume in a fruitful collaboration. It contains 22 papers organized into ten distinct parts spanning the sixth century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Each part has the same structure: it features, first, a paper which sets up the discussion, and then, one or two responses that open new perspectives and engage in further reflections. (...) Our authors’ contributions address pivotal moments and players in the history of philosophy: women philosophers in antiquity, Cleobulina of Rhodes, Plato, Lucretius, Bardaisan of Edessa, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Peter Abelard, Robert Kilwardby, William Ockham, John Buridan, and Isotta Nogarola. The result is a thought-provoking collection of papers that will be of interest to historians of philosophy from all horizons. Far from being an isolated effort, this book is a contribution to the ever-growing number of initiatives which endeavour to showcase the work of women in philosophy. (shrink)

The infinite judgement has long been forgotten and yet, as I am about to demonstrate, it may be urgent to revive it for its critical and productive potential. An infinite judgement is neither analytic nor synthetic; it does not produce logical truths, nor true representations, but it establishes the genetic conditions of real objects and the concepts appropriate to them. It is through infinite judgements that we reach the principle of transcendental logic, in the depths of which all reality can (...) emerge in its material and sensible singularity, making possible all generalization and formal abstraction. (shrink)

Purpose: finding out the features of logical methods for obtaining conclusions on humanitarian subjects. The task of this scientific research is to analyze the logical paradigmatic aspects of humanitarian knowledge, such as the differences in the formation of sets, logical forms and conclusions, and so on. Methods: a set of logical methods such as analysis, synthesis, abstraction and generalization, informal logic of understanding, etc. Scientific novelty: the logic of humanitarian knowledge is formed on the basis of the logic of historical (...) knowledge, the specificity of which is manifested in the special meaning of individual sets that receive direct and indirect meaning, form the corresponding logical connections in obtaining conclusions. When obtaining conclusions on humanitarian subjects, the formation of an exemplary individual is a plurality. Its ideal qualities are transferred to an unnamed set. Thus, the integrity of the humanitarian subject is created. In the transition from parts to the whole there is a “logical jump”, which is also the difference in the procedure for obtaining a conclusion. Widely used rational understanding by identifying the value of the whole. Understanding can be strong or weak. The difference in the logic of humanitarian knowledge is primarily due to the peculiarity of the work of human thinking, which uses specific tools in formatting various scientific disciplines and organizing the cognitive process. Among the many new approaches and methods of the humanities developed in phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of life, structuralism, postmodernism, etc., hermeneutics should be noted. It is hermeneutics that occupies a special place in humanitarian knowledge due to its ontology and logic. Conclusions: the logic of humanitarian knowledge is formed on the basis of historical consciousness, relies on ontology and has signs of the logic of practical thinking. In its formation, it is advisable to use the theory of practical judgments and conclusions, taking into account subjective values of life experience, obtaining the logical values of truth and falsehood. The terms of deductive and non-deductive forms are based on judgments about values. The logic of humanitarian knowledge to a large extent is hermeneutical logic, which, in turn, is the logic of rational understanding. (shrink)

The Middle Included is a systematic exploration of the meanings of logos throughout Aristotle’s work. It claims that the basic meaning is “gathering,” a relation that holds its terms together without isolating them or collapsing one to the other. This meaning also applies to logos in the sense of human language. Aristotle describes how some animals are capable of understanding non-firsthand experience without being able to relay it, while others relay it without understanding. Aygün argues that what distinguishes human language, (...) for Aristotle, is its ability to both understand and relay firsthand and non-firsthand experiences. This ability is key to understanding the human condition: science, history, news media, propaganda, gossip, utopian fiction, and sophistry, as well as philosophy. Ömer Aygün finds Aristotle’s name for this peculiar but crucial human ability of “gathering” both experiences is logos, and this leads to a claim about the specificity of human rationality and language. (shrink)

Essays on Aristotle's Sea-Battle, Lazy Argument, Argument Reaper, Diodorus' Master Argument -/- The book is devoted to the ancient logical theories, reconstruction of their semantic proprieties and possibilities of their interpretation by modern logical tools. The Ancient arguments are frequently misunderstood in modern interpretations since authors usually have tendency to ignore their historical proprieties and theoretical background what usually leads to a quite inappropriate picture of the argument’s original form and mission. Author’s primary intention was to draw attention to the (...) complexity of some historical arguments and to the theoretical context in which arguments were created, circulated, developed, and finally tuned. Four well-known ancient arguments – with a common central subject related to the future contingencies problem – are reconstructed from available historical sources: “The Sea Battle”, which is drawn from Aristotle’s treatise De Interpretatione; two arguments, usually ascribed to the Stoics, “The Lazy Argument” and “The Reaper”; “The Master Argument” of the Megarian philosopher Diodorus. Arguments are linguistically and semantically detaily analyzed, formally presented by reflecting some relevant corresponding hypotheses based on physical or logical theories of their ancient authors, and finally covered by appropriate logical tools familiar to a modern reader. Two appendices are added at the closing part of the book. One covering some assumptions relevant for understanding of rival streams in ancient theories of meaning related to the nature of names and naming; the other is devoted to the ancient understanding of logical proposition and attempts to find an adequate Latin translation of the Greek delicate philosophical term “ἀξίωμα”. (shrink)

Contemporary work on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy often overlooks a discussion in CP.V.3 of a Peripatetic strategy for dissolving theological fatalism. Boethius’ treatment of this strategy and the lesson it provides about divine foreknowledge requires a reorientation of our understanding of the Consolation text. The result is that it is not foreknowledge nor any other temporally-conditioned knowledge that motivates Boethian concern but divine knowledge simpliciter.

This paper focuses on the concept of symbol and tries to outline its function as a means of communication. In order to describe the communicative qualities of symbol, it is necessary to show its ethical nature. The paper analyses the role symbols play in intersubjective relations, in the construction of the individual’s reality, and in the human ability to attribute meanings and assign functions.The conceptual frame- work for the understanding of what symbol is, how it works, and how it is (...) made is a particular combination of phenomenology and pragmatism, which lies on the theory of ‘appresentation’, as we can find it in Alfred Schütz’s viewpoint. The paper invites a reflection on the power of symbol, particularly on its power to communicate the incommunicable. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that metaphysicians ought to utilize quantum theories of gravity as incubators for a future metaphysics. In §1, I will argue why this ought to be done. In §2, I will present case studies from the history of science where physical theories have challenged both the dogmatic and speculative metaphysician. In §3, I will present two theories of QG and demonstrate the challenge they pose to certain aspects of our current metaphysics; in particular, how they (...) challenge our understanding of the abstract-concrete distinction. In this section I demonstrate how five different accounts of the distinction each fail to hold under the received interpretations of loop quantum gravity and string theory. The central goal of this paper is to encourage metaphysicians to look to physical theories, especially those involving cosmology such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, when doing metaphysics. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the way Philip Melanchthon, author of the Augsburg Confession and Martin Luther's closest co-worker, sought to establish the relationship between faith and reason in the cradle of the Lutheran tradition, Wittenberg University. While Melanchthon is widely recognized to have played a crucial role in the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century as well as in the Renaissance in Northern Europe, he has in general received relatively little scholarly attention, few have attempted to explore his philosophy (...) in depth, and those who have examined his philosophical work have come to contradictory or less than helpful conclusions about it. He has been regarded as an Aristotelian, a Platonist, a philosophical eclectic, and as having been torn between Renaissance humanism and Evangelical theology. An understanding of the way Melanchthon related faith and reason awaits a well-founded and accurate account of his philosophy. Having stated the problem and finding it inadequately treated in the secondary literature, this dissertation presents an account of Melanchthon's philosophical development. Finding that his philosophy was ultimately founded upon his understanding of and method in rhetoric and dialectics, this dissertation explicates his mature accounts of these arts. It then presents an account of Melanchthon's philosophy as both humanistic (i.e., rhetorically based and practically rather than speculatively oriented) and fideistic (i.e, skeptical about the product of human reason alone, but finding certainty in philosophy founded upon, and somewhat limited by, Christian faith). After a final assessment of claims about Melanchthon's philosophy from the secondary literature, this dissertation considers how such a humanistic, fideistic philosophy might be helpful for Christians in a philosophically post-modern situation. (shrink)

Stasis is a process of classical rhetoric that identifies the core issue in a trial or a similar debate. Hermagoras of Temnos included the first comprehensive analysis of stasis in his second-century BCE treatise on rhetoric, now lost. Modern scholars tend to echo George Kennedy, who maintains that Hermagoras’ inspiration for the hierarchical structure of stasis is indeterminate. This article, however, employs scholarship in legal semiotics, including the work of Miklós Könczöl and Bernard S. Jackson, to argue that Hermagoras based (...) stasiastic structure on Aristotle’s first-figure syllogism. Ideally, knowledge of that structure can enhance modern applications of stasis. (shrink)

This article attempts to explore ancient Chinese philosophical thought by analyzing how pioneering Chinese thinkers made judgments and inferences, and compares it to ancient Greek philosophy. It first addresses the starting-point and the object of cognition in Chinese ancient philosophy, then analyses how early thinkers construed definition and proposition, and finally discusses how they made inferences on the basis of definition and proposition. It points out that categorization is an important methodology in ancient Chinese philosophy, and that rectification of names (...) and the doctrine of the mean are key criteria in making judgments. (shrink)

Argumentation logicians have recognized a specter of relativism to haunt their philosophy of argument. However, their attempts to dispel pernicious relativism by invoking notions of a universal audience or a community of model interlocutors have not been entirely successful. In fact, their various discussions of a universal audience invoke the context-eschewing formalism of Kant’s categorical imperative. Moreover, they embrace the Kantian method for resolving the antinomies that continually vacillates between opposing extremes – here between a transcendent universal audience and a (...) context-embedded particular audience. This tack ironically restores the very external mediation they thought to obviate in their aim to ‘dethrone’ the absolutism and totalitarianism of formal logic with a democratic turn to audience adherence, the acceptability of premises and inferential links, and a contextual, or participant-relative, notion of cogency. (shrink)

There is little need today to be apologetic about making Aristotle the basis for a philosophical discussion on human cognition. Interest in the Stagirite is in fact on the upsurge: interest in Aristotle not merely as a great thinker who lived in a particular epoch of time, but more pointedly as a philosopher who has much to offer for the promotion of serious thinking in our own day. In this regard I might merely refer to some straws that are indicative (...) of the direction in which the winds are blowing. One was a series of four lectures given by Richard Sorabji in the spring of 1990 at the University of Toronto, in which the relevance of Aristotle for understanding current philosophical problems became strikingly apparent to those who listened to or took part in the discussions. Another was the conference held at the University of Alberta the same year on Aristotle and his medieval commentators. A third is the reprinting of John Herman Randall’s book Aristotle, which is scheduled to appear shortly in the collection entitled The Easton Press Library of Great Lives. (shrink)

The main concern of Agamben's work, prior to the Homo Sacer project, is how to understand the existence of or potentiality for language. Contemporary philosophy casts language as the unsayable presupposition of discourse. Agamben criticises this as an incomplete nihilism that remains within the horizon of metaphysics, and attempts to think the experience of language without an unsayable ground. I examine Agamben's critique of the role of the ineffable in the theory of the subject, and in the thought of Heidegger (...) and Derrida. I contrast this with his account of infancy as an experience that fully assumes the groundlessness of language. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 378-385, May 2022.

In this paper we argue, from an inferential approach, that the inferential role played by a model, during modeling practice, is independent of the notion of representation engaged with the chosen modeling approach. Indeed, we believe that the notion of surrogative reasoning is neither subsidiary nor founded on the notion of representation and that it will only find its foundations in logic itself. Neither the notion of representation is an inferential notion nor FIM is a type of representation-based thinking.

Speech is already in itself a writing. Any concept that is to name, to stay for the abstract or concrete reality is made up of a mental trace. There is always a sleepy-waiting yet ever present trace at the origin of the representation and the naming of any ontological phenomenon. The trace is itself The apriori ontology – and this is how writing is pre-eminent to the later formal verbalization of any already traced concept of any abstract or concrete phenomenon (...) of reality. The trace is the very possibility of the existence. The whole reality is originally “written”, then existing and finally spoken. (shrink)

Kavram mantığı üzerine bina edilen klasik mantık bilimi, daha çok ad kavramlar ve bu kavramlardan bileşen önermeler üzerinden yürütülmüştür. Bu, İslâm mantık tarihinde öncekilerin mantık geleneğinde böyle olmakla birlikte sonrakilerin mantık geleneğinde çok daha belirgindir. Mantık biliminin, bu eğilimle yürütüldüğü ve yüzyılları içeren tarihinde fiil kavramlar, hem kavram hem de yargı bağlamlarıyla kimi belirsizlikleri beraberinde sürükleye gelmiştir. Her ne kadar mantık bilimi, kurulduğu andan itibaren psiko-sosyal temelli dillerin belirleyiciliğinden mümkün oldukça kendisini yalıtıp bilimlere evrensel dil sunma iddiasında bulunmuş ve bu (...) doğrultuda onun evrensel kurallarını oluşturmaya çalışmış olsa da psiko-sosyal temelli dil yapılarının, mantık biliminin işini zaman zaman zorlaştırdığı göze çarpmaktadır. Farklı dillerde farklı yapılarda ifade edilen belirsiz adlar, belirli fiil ve belirsiz fiiller mantıkçıların işini epey güçleştirmiştir. Onlar bize göre dillerden kaynaklı bu güçlüğün üstesinden gelmek için fiiller yerine en az tartışma barındıran belirli adlar üzerinden mantık bilimini işleme yolunu tercih etmişlerdir. Fakat öyle olsa bile bu, kanaatimizce problemi çözüme kavuşturmak yerine ötelemiş, özellikle fillerin kavram ve yargı mantığı bakımından neliği sorunu büyük oranda cevapsız kalmıştır. Çalışmamız, mantık biliminin, dillerin psiko-sosyal temelli yapılarına sırtını dönmekten kaynaklı problemlerinden biri olarak belirsiz ad ve filleri soruşturmaya açmaktadır. (shrink)