Just as mathematics helps us to represent and reason about the natural world, in its internal applications one branch of mathematics helps us to represent and reason about the subject matter of another. Recognition of the close analogy between internal and external applications of mathematics can help resolve two persistent philosophical puzzles concerning its applicability: a platonist puzzle arising from the abstractness of mathematical objects; and an empiricist puzzle arising from mathematical propositions’ lack of empirical factual content. In order to (...) see how this is the case, we will examine what it is to apply mathematics internally and describe examples. (shrink)

Licentiate (STL) Thesis of 2022. This study restores the Thomistic understanding of the essence of marriage, shared between natural and sacramental marriage. First, it reviews categorical real relations before summarizing the Scriptural witness to marriage as a form of conjoined relation. Then, marriage as a mutual real relation is presented and expanded upon, following the works Saint Thomas Aquinas.

In this paper, we aim at identifying a concept of man that can represent a reference point for those who work or supervise social processes characterized by commercial or economic purposes. Economic, management, and organizational theories and ideas have a large impact on the way we think of ourselves, and we act accordingly. By making a radical departure from the ontological assumptions, this paper proposes a shifting of the current paradigm in terms of how we theorize about man. In order (...) to do this, we analyze the ontological level of the relationship between the idea of happiness and the concept of man from medieval scholastics, and the relationship between the idea of happiness and functionalism in social science. We first prove the formal equivalence between the structures of human choice as described in the qq. 6–21 Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the model of problem-solving behavior as conceptualized in popular management models. Then we show that the Aquinas theory of action could provide a more adequate view of economy and business in the sociocultural and environmental context in which they operate. Finally, we present the implications of this study for management theory, practice, and education. (shrink)

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis-"woman," "femininity," etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A "discursive" approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

This essay examines the reception of the ancient virtue of greatness of soul (or magnanimity) in the Arabic tradition, touching on a range of figures but focusing especially on Miskawayh and even more concertedly on al‐Ghazālī. Influenced by a number of Greek ethical texts available in Arabic translation, both of these thinkers incorporate greatness of soul into their classifications of the virtues and the vices. Yet a closer scrutiny raises questions about this amicable inclusion, and suggests that this virtue stands (...) in an uneasy relationship to the larger ethical schemes of both thinkers. This is substantiated by a careful probing of these thinkers’ considered views on the value of honor and the ethics of self‐evaluation. Yet if the values embedded in the virtue of greatness of soul conflict with these thinkers’ ethical standpoints, there is then an interesting question to ask as to why this conflict should be obscured from view. (shrink)

I propose and defend the hypothesis that understanding is the norm of explanation. On this proposal, an explanation should express understanding. I call this the understanding account of explanation. The understanding account is supported by social and introspective observations. It is also supported by the relationship between knowledge and understanding, on the one hand, and assertion and explanation, on the other.

Is knowledge justified true belief? Most philosophers believe that the answer is clearly ‘no’, as demonstrated by Gettier cases. But Gettier cases don’t obviously refute the traditional view that knowledge is justified true belief (JTB). There are ways of resisting Gettier cases, at least one of which is partly successful. Nevertheless, when properly understood, Gettier cases point to a flaw in JTB, though it takes some work to appreciate just what it is. The nature of the flaw helps us better (...) understand the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification. I propose a crucial improvement to the traditional view, relying on an intuitive and independently plausible metaphysical distinction pertaining to the manifestation of intellectual powers, which supplements the traditional components of justification, truth and belief. (shrink)

In a ground-breaking essay Nagel contended that the controversy over impossible numbers influenced the development of modern logic. I maintain that Nagel was correct in outline only. He overlooked the fact that the controversy engendered a new account of reasoning, one in which the concept of a well-made language played a decisive role. Focusing on the new account of reasoning changes the story considerably and reveals important but unnoticed similarities between the development of algebraic logic and quantificational logic.

It is sometimes mentioned that Bernard Bolzano’s work on grounding anticipates many insights of the current debate on metaphysical grounding. The present paper discusses a certain part of Bolzano’s theory of grounding that has thus far not been discussed in the literature. This part does not so much anticipate what are nowadays common assumptions about grounding, but rather goes beyond them. Central to the discussion will be a thesis of Bolzano’s by which he tries to establish a connection between grounding (...) and unification. The paper spells out this thesis in detail and discusses the assumptions on which it rests. Next to this mainly historical aim, the paper also presents reasons why philosophers who are not interested in the historical Bolzano should find the thesis interesting by relating it to a certain view on unification and explanation that has been put forward by Kim. A final part of the paper provides a critical evaluation of the thesis against the background of current accounts of grounding. (shrink)

This paper speaks of morality in the broadest of terms, but in generalities derived from one of the most fundamental of phenomenological doctrines. It is proposed that a polarization exists which corresponds to the epistemological divide that can be found between idealism and empiricism. Our morality harks back to Platonism, the arrival of which immediately provoked a response which resulted in a competing paradigm, its polar opposite: the embryonic Aristotelian doctrine of what Merleau-Ponty termed "induction". Interpretations to this day waver (...) between adherence to the material world and the ideal. What is maintained in this paper is that idealism and empiricism are both epistemologically inadequate. Given, however, that our morality is one of moral universals, the reader is asked to reflect on what induction must mean for it, and to consider the shadow that induction, being far from benign, must cast in a society which rests on a belief in moral absolutes. While acknowledging that this may raise eyebrows, given Nietzsche's reputation, the author contends that Nietzsche (1886, 1887) was the first to break with this duality and to speak from a place which was on neither side of this metaphysical divide. While scholars often ignore that part of Nietzsche's philosophy which is affirmative, focusing instead on his "nihilism", it is argued that the evils which his philosophy is said to foster mostly exist in a style of thought which he explicitly rejects. Although Nietzsche was hostile to modern ideas, perceiving in them a threat to our spiritual health, and hoped to "translate man back into nature" (Nietzsche, 1886/1989, p. 161) - which those sympathetic towards liberal values will take issue with - it cannot but be agreed with Nietzsche that in modernity the moral landscape has changed. Morality has been rationalized in a way that the ancients never knew; mind has been introduced into what primordially was the domain of instinct (Nietzsche, 1888/1990, p. 43). While for Nietzsche himself, however, rationality was more a symptom, the contention of this paper is that it is the source of the change in the moral landscape of modernity. (shrink)

The very idea of a general philosophy of science relies on the assumption that there is this thing called science —as opposed to the various individual sciences. In this programmatic piece I make a case for the claim that general philosophy of science is the philosophy of science in general or science as such. Part of my narrative makes use of history, for two reasons. First, general philosophy of science is itself characterised by an intellectual tradition which aimed to develop (...) a coherent philosophical view of science, qua a part of culture with distinctive epistemic features and a distinctive relation to reality. But, second, this tradition went through some important conceptual shifts which re-oriented it and made it more sensitive to the actual development of science itself. The historical narrative focuses on three such moments: the defining moment, associated with Aristotle, and two major conceptual turns, related to Kant and Duhem. The pressures on the very idea of a general philosophy of science that followed the collapse of the macro-models of science that became popular in the 1960s, the pressures that lay all of the emphasis on fragmentation and not on integration, can be dealt with by a new synthesis within general philosophy of science of the constitutive and the historical, in light of the intellectual tradition that has defined it. (shrink)

In Poggiolesi we have introduced a rigorous definition of the notion of complete and immediate formal grounding; in the present paper our aim is to construct a logic for the notion of complete and immediate formal grounding based on that definition. Our logic will have the form of a calculus of natural deduction, will be proved to be sound and complete and will allow us to have fine-grained grounding principles.

It is argued that in deterministic contexts evidence for causal relations states whether a boundary condition makes a difference or not to a phenomenon. In order to substantiate the analysis, I show that this difference/indifference making is the basic type of evidence required for eliminative induction in the tradition of Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill. To this purpose, an account of eliminative induction is proposed with two distinguishing features: it includes a method to establish the causal irrelevance of boundary (...) conditions by means of indifference making, which is called strict method of agreement, and it introduces the notion of a background against which causal statements are evaluated. Causal statements thus become three-place-relations postulating the relevance or irrelevance of a circumstance C to the examined phenomenon P with respect to a background B of further conditions. To underline the importance of evidence in terms of difference/indifference making, I sketch two areas, in which eliminative induction is extensively used in natural and engineering sciences. One concerns exploratory experiments, the other engineering design methods. Given that a method is discussed that has been used for centuries, I make no claims to novelty in this paper, but hope that the combined discussion of several topics that are still somewhat underrepresented in the philosophy of science literature is of some merit. (shrink)

Spinoza's causal axiom is at the foundation of the Ethics. I motivate, develop and defend a new interpretation that I call the ‘causally restricted interpretation’. This interpretation solves several longstanding puzzles and helps us better understand Spinoza's arguments for some of his most famous doctrines, including his parallelism doctrine and his theory of sense perception. It also undermines a widespread view about the relationship between the three fundamental, undefined notions in Spinoza's metaphysics: causation, conception and inherence.

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 addresses the problem of expertise in a democratic political system: the tension between the authority of expertise and the democratic values that guide political life. We argue that for certain problems, expertise needs to be understood as a dialogical process, and we conceptualize an understanding of expertise through and as argument that positions expertise as constituted by and a function of democratic values and practices, rather than in the possession of, acquisition of, or relationship to epistemic materials. Conceptualizing (...) expertise through argument leads us to see expertise as a kind of phronetic practice, oriented toward judgments and problems, characterized by its ability to provide inventional capacities for selecting the best possible resolution of a particular problem vis-à-vis particular expectations regarding the resolution of a problem. At its core, expertise thus comes to exist in reference not to epistemic but to dialogical, deliberative, democratic practice. (shrink)

Robert H. Holden, in ‘The Public University's Unbearable Defiance of Being’ (2009, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 41:5, pp. 575–591) argues that the public university ought to welcome the infusion of relevant beliefs, including religious ones, in carrying out its research and teaching responsibilities. In this paper, I examine whether he has shown that some opinions are suppressed, whether he has shown that other views are hegemonic, the central argument that lies behind his thinking, and then consider the educational consequences of (...) his position. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to subject a basic figure of historical analysis - the juxtaposition of event and series - to the changing alphanumerical writing systems of Ancient Greece, the Early Modern Age, and the contemporary digitial environment. It shows how the basic mathematical analysis of periodicity and frequency in the realm of sound is, first, a by-product of innovations in war technology and, second, radically changed by different ways in which numerical systems process data. With regard to the (...) development of Kittler’s thought the article is a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless highly revealing and representative example of his recent switch from media-technological to more alphanumerically oriented analyses and the accompanying focus on the importance of Ancient Greece for the evolution of science. (shrink)

In reaction to a particularly scathing review of his Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard postulated what he called a ‘preacher-machine.’ As we will see, the preacher-machine is only one type of character-machine, for, in Practice in Christianity, there are five other such machines. Starting up these character-machines will allow for an analysis of the repulsion of the God-man, Christ himself. This repulsion is important because Kierkegaard claims that it is the condition for the emergence of faith. After discussing repulsion, Kierkegaard will (...) locate a singular mistake of Christendom, which will allow him to offer his remedy to this problem. In doing so, I will claim, Kierkegaard makes a particularly forceful claim about the true status of Christianity. We begin by attempting an articulation of a definition of monstrosity before setting the scene of these six machines. (shrink)

Summary The Copernican system was condemned as heretical by a decree of the Roman Inquisition in 1633. This decree was effectively, though not officially, withdrawn in 1757, after which date Catholic astronomers felt themselves free to accept and propagate the system without reserve. Between these dates their attitudes varied greatly. In France the decree was never promulgated and was legally unenforceable. Astronomers could be Copernican without any fear of consequences and most of them were, though some, out of respect for (...) the Church, refrained from declaring themselves publicly. In Italy the possible risks were greater, but a few Copernican or near-Copernican works were published without hostile reactions. The ecclesiastical authorities were tolerant and made little positive effort to enforce conformity. By 1744, the system was being freely propagated in Rome itself. (shrink)

Analytic induction (AI) is an interpretation of scientific method that emerged in early twentieth-century sociology and still has some influence today. Among the studies often cited as examples are Becker’s articles on marijuana use. While these have been given less attention than the work of Lindesmith on opiate addiction and Cressey on financial trust violation, Becker’s work has distinctive features. Furthermore, it raises some important and interesting issues that relate not only to AI but to social scientific explanation more generally. (...) These concern, for example, the presence and nature of causal systems in the social world, the relationship between historical and generalizing approaches, the character and role of social scientific theories, and how they are generated. In this article Becker’s research is examined in detail, and these issues explored through comparisons with the work of Lindesmith and Cressey. (shrink)

This essay examines the question of whether language, knowledge, and truth are possible in a world of relativism and flux, developing along a line of comparison between the Cratylus and Theaetetus of Plato on the one hand, and the Zhuangzi 莊子 of the Daoist philosophical tradition on the other. Against Plato’s image of “leaky pots” that symbolizes the impossibility of language in a state of flux, the Zhuangzi introduces “spillover-goblet words” that resist the language of necessity and essence by continually (...) emptying themselves out, only to be filled again with the always contingent. To put the ideas and metaphors of each of these perspectives into conversation, the essay drafts a comparison between two manners of animal classification, with classical taxonomy aligning with Platonism on the one hand, and the evolutionary science of “cladistics”—taxonomy based on ancestry—allying with Daoism on the other. In the end, it is Plato who is left holding his pejorative “leaky pots,” as under conditions of essential change it is putatively unchanging categories themselves that are shown to create the worst problems for knowledge. (shrink)

Feminist critics have charged that Aristotle's mistaken and harmful remarks about women and slaves show inconsistency or bias-driven arbitrariness. However, this analysis shows that these remarks function within a consistent and coherent theoretical corpus. Thus, both Aristotle's hierarchical and dualistic first principles and the methodology on which his entire corpus is based must be unreliable. Moreover, consistency and coherence must be insufficient warrants of theoretical insightfulness. Aristotle's mistakes suggest caveats for feminist philosophical reconstruction.

There have been several different and even opposed conceptions of the problem of logical constants, i.e. of the requirements that a good theory of logical constants ought to satisfy. This paper is in the first place a survey of these conceptions and a critique of the theories they have given rise to. A second aim of the paper is to sketch some ideas about what a good theory would look like. A third aim is to draw from these ideas and (...) from the preceding survey the conclusion that most conceptions of the problem of logical constants involve requirements of a philosophically demanding nature which are probably not satisfiable by any minimally adequate theory. (shrink)

The question posed in the title of this paper is an historical one. I am not, for example, primarily interested in the term 'Platonism' as used by modern philosophers to stand for a particular theory under discussion – a theory, which it is typically acknowledged, no one may have actually held.1 I am rather concerned to understand and articulate on an historical basis the core position of that 'school' of thought prominent in antiquity from the time of the 'founder' up (...) until at least the middle of the 6th century C.E.2 Platonism was unquestionably the dominant philosophical position in the ancient world over a period of more than 800 years. Epicureanism is perhaps the sole major exception to the rule that in the ancient world all philosophers took Platonism as the starting-point for speculation, including those who thought their first task was to refute Platonism. Basically, Platonism sent the ancient philosophical agenda. Given this fact, understanding with some precision the nature of Platonism is obviously a desirable thing for the historian of ancient philosophy. (shrink)

Recent literature has explored at some length the transition between individual observations and the experimental facts that they are supposed to establish, emphasizing particularly the social dimension of this question. In this article I examine some crucial stages in the history of this problem, in particular, the way in which the establishment of experimental facts became social. I begin with a brief discussion of experimental facthood in late Renaissance thought before turning to Bacon and Descartes and showing the extent to (...) which their conception of experimental facthood is radically individualistic. I then discuss the self-consciously social conception of experimental facthood found in the writings of the early Royal Society. After a digression about some recent issues concerning the rhetoric of scientific experiments in the period, I end with some speculations about why the transition occurred when it did. The transformation in the philosophical view about the role of community in the establishment of experimental facts, I suggest, is closely connected with the emergence of a community entitled to make the judgments necessary to establish such facts. (shrink)

Tarski’s conceptual analysis of the notion of logical consequence is one of the pinnacles of the process of defining the metamathematical foundations of mathematics in the tradition of his predecessors Euclid, Frege, Russell and Hilbert, and his contemporaries Carnap, Gödel, Gentzen and Turing. However, he also notes that in defining the concept of consequence “efforts were made to adhere to the common usage of the language of every day life.” This paper addresses the issue of what relationship Tarski’s analysis, and (...) Béziau’s further generalization of it in universal logic, have to reasoning in the everyday lives of ordinary people from the cognitive processes of children through to those of specialists in the empirical and deductive sciences. It surveys a selection of relevant research in a range of disciplines providing theoretical and empirical studies of human reasoning, discusses the value of adopting a universal logic perspective, answers the questions posed in the call for this special issue, and suggests some specific research challenges. (shrink)

The domain of sport provides opportunity for development and growth, which is often incremental but can be marked by significant breakthroughs. Using Aristotle’s virtue ethic as a model, this paper explores the challenge of overcoming new obstacles, sometimes reversing bad habits, in the athletic domain. Breakthrough victories in sport are achievements that both reward persistent effort and open new horizons in the pursuit of excellence. They are significant because they seem to hold out a promise for future performance, now that (...) some barrier has been passed. Breakthrough victories are often among the most important and rewarding moments in an athletic career. (shrink)

This paper aims to reconstruct the overarching logical structure of Michael Williams's response to philosophical skepticism. One goal is to forestall overhasty dismissals of his position based on failures to understand the logical relations among his various anti‐skeptical claims and arguments. In many places, Williams suggests that the strategy he calls “theoretical diagnosis” is sufficient to defuse the skeptical challenge and that, accordingly, his anti‐skeptical strategy consists solely in developing theoretical diagnoses. According to the account developed here, this claim is (...) misleading—in need of significant qualification, if not outright false. Even so, the paper concludes that, in its essentials, Williams's response is structurally sound, given his understanding of the problem posed by skepticism. The paper ends with a brief assessment of the merits of that response. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the problem of scientific change as an explanatory problem, that is, as a philosophical problem concerning what logical forms of explanation we should employ in order to un...

From Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations the following classifications are put forward and defended through extensive excerpts from the text. (AR-PFC) All sophistical refutations are exclusively either ‘apparent refutations’ or ‘proofs of false conclusions’. (AR-F) ‘Apparent refutations’ and ‘fallacies’ name the same thing. (ID-ED) All fallacies are exclusively either fallacies in dictione or fallacies extra dictionem . (ID-nAMB) Not all fallacies in dictione are due to ambiguity. (AMB-nID) Not all fallacies due to ambiguity are fallacies in dictione . (AMB&ID-ME) The set of (...) fallacies due to ambiguity and fallacies in dictione together comprise the set of arguments said to be “dependent on mere expression”. Being “dependent on mere expression” and “dependent on language” are not the same (instances of the latter form a proper subset of instances of the former). (nME-FACT) All arguments that are not against the expression are “against the fact.” (FACT-ED) All fallacious arguments against the fact are fallacies extra dictionem (it is unclear whether the converse is true). (MAN-ARG) The solutions of fallacious arguments are exclusively either “against the man” or “against the argument.” (10) (F-ARG) Each (type of) fallacy has a unique solution (namely, the opposite of whatever causes the fallacy), but each fallacious argument does not. However, each fallacious argument does have a unique solution against the argument, called the ‘true solution’ (in other words, what fallacy a fallacious argument commits is determined by how it is solved. However, if the solution is ‘against the man’ then this is not, properly speaking, the fallacy committed in the argument. It is only the ‘true solution’—the solution against the argument, of which there is always only one—that determines the fallacy actually committed). (shrink)

This essay explores the significance of Agamben’s sparse references to medieval Jewish thinkers (that is, the Rishonim) and raises the question as to whether the modern interpretive horizon of “history” is adequate for providing an understanding of these thinkers.

ABSTRACTPolitical rituals, like the sovereign acclamation described in Rousseau’s social contract, exhibit a logic of representation that seem to oscillate between presence and absence, and enact a problematic identification of the people as a multitude of individuals and as a whole. This article explores this logic of rituals by comparing problems of political representation in Rousseau and Agamben with the highest principle of Aristotle’s philosophy. It thus elucidates the problem of representation in rituals of political power.

There is an obvious role for self-assertion within discourse. It is much less obvious what role self-withdrawal might play. Indeed, it is far from obvious what role it could play. For how can we enter into discourse at all if we pull ourselves from the fray? Heidegger, however, claims not only that self-withdrawal has a role to play but that reticence is the authentic mode of discourse. In this paper, I develop an account of reticence that explains its importance to (...) Being and Time. I argue that Heidegger's conception of reticence is central to his explanation of how the understanding can be developed in terms of the things themselves, rather than in terms of what one says about things. (shrink)

: We question the claim, common since Duhem, that sixteenth century astronomy, and especially the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus, was instrumentalistic rather than realistic. We identify a previously unrecognized Wittenberg astronomer, Edo Hildericus (Hilderich von Varel), who presents a detailed exposition of Copernicus's cosmology that is incompatible with instrumentalism. Quotations from other sixteenth century astronomers show that knowledge of the real configuration of the heavens was unattainable practically, rather than in principle. Astronomy was limited to quia demonstrations, although demonstration propter (...) quid remained the ideal. We suggest that Osiander's notorious preface to Copernicus expresses these sixteenth century commonplaces rather than twentieth century instrumentalism, and that neither `realism', nor `instrumentalism', in their modern meanings, apply to sixteenth century astronomy. (shrink)

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis—“woman,” “femininity,” etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A “discursive” approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.

Within recent feminist philosophy, controversy has developed over the desirability, and indeed, the possibility of defining the central terms of its analysis—“woman,” “femininity,” etc. The controversy results largely from the undertheorization of the notion of definition; feminists have uncritically adopted an Aristotelian treatment of definition as entailing metaphysical, rather than merely linguistic, commitments. A “discursive” approach to definition, by contrast, allows us to define our terms, while avoiding the dangers of essentialism and universalism.