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 This decree was effectively, though not officially, withdrawn in 1757, after which date Catholic astronomers felt themselves free to accept and propagate the system without reserve.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)

Chrysippus claims that some propositions perish. including some true conditionals whose consequent is impossible and antecedent is possible, to which he appeals against Diodorus?s Master Argument. On the standard interpretation. perished propositions lack truth values. and these conditionals are true at the same time as their antecedents arc possible and consequents impossible. But perished propositions are false, and Chrysippus?s conditionals are true when their antecedent and consequent arc possible, and false when their antecedent is possible and consequent impossible. The claim (...) of the Master Argument that Chrysippus rejects, then, is stronger ihan usually supposed. (shrink)

Work on analogy has been done from a number of disciplinary perspectives throughout the history of Western thought. This work is a multidisciplinary guide to theorizing about analogy. It contains 1,406 references, primarily to journal articles and monographs, and primarily to English language material. classical through to contemporary sources are included. The work is classified into eight different sections (with a number of subsections). A brief introduction to each section is provided. Keywords and key expressions of importance to research on (...) analogy are discussed in the introductory material. Electronic resources for conducting research on analogy are listed as well. (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)

The analyses of explanation and causal beliefs are heavily dependent on using probability functions as models of epistemic states. There are, however, several aspects of beliefs that are not captured by such a representation and which affect the outcome of the analyses. One dimension that has been neglected in this article is the temporal aspect of the beliefs. The description of a single event naturally involves the time it occurred. Some analyses of causation postulate that the cause must not occur (...) later than the effect. If we want this kind of causality it is easy to add the appropriate clause to ( CAUS ). An alternative is not to rule out backwards causation or causal loops a priori , but expect that ( CAUS ), via the properties of the contraction P C - , will result in the desired temporal relation between C and E . One way of ensuring this is to postulate that when the probability function P is contracted to P C - , the probabilities of all events that occurred before C remain the same in P C - as in P . This means that all beliefs about the history of events up to C are left unaltered in the construction of the hypothetical state of belief P C - . In conclusion, I hope to have shown that, in spite of these limitations, ( EXP ) and ( CAUS ) provide viable analyses of explanation and causality between single events for the case when epistemic states can be described by probability functions. I have also shown that the two analyses can be used to explicate the close connections between the two notions. These analyses reduce the problems of explanation and causality, hopefully in a non-circular way, to the problem of identifying contractions of states of belief. (shrink)

Edward R. Murrow's reputation began and grew with World War II. This analysis, focused on his radio reporting, concerns two reports filed after he accompanied a bombing mission over Germany. The two reports provide a unique analytic opportunity because their foundation is in a singular experience. It is an analysis of the decision process, with ethical questions central to the development of the story, it is an application of classical ethical theory to a historical object for the purposes of creating (...) an understanding of media heritage and the application of moral philosophy. (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 problem of demarcating science from nonscience remains unsolved. This article executes an analytical process of elimination of different demarcation proposals put forward since the professionalization of the philosophy of science, explaining why each of those proposals is unsatisfactory or incomplete. Then, it elaborates on how to execute an alternative multicriterial scientific demarcation project put forward by Mahner. This project allows for the demarcation not only of science from non-science and from pseudoscience, but also of different types of sciences and (...) of scientific fields from each other. This article also offers arguments in favor of accepting two types of scientific demarcations, namely epistemic-warrant scientific demarcations and territorial scientific demarcations, and argues in favor of accepting a territorially broad scientific demarcation. (shrink)

Poincaré was a persistent critic of logicism. Unlike most critics of logicism, however, he did not focus his attention on the basic laws of the logicists or the question of their genuinely logical status. Instead, he directed his remarks against the place accorded to logical inference in the logicist's conception of mathematical proof. Following Leibniz, traditional logicist dogma (and this is explicit in Frege) has held that reasoning or inference is everywhere the same — that there are no principles of (...) inference specific to a given local topic. Poincaré, a Kantian, disagreed with this. Indeed, he believed that the use of non-logical reasoning was essential to genuinely mathematical reasoning (proof). In this essay, I try to isolate and clarify this idea and to describe the mathematical epistemology which underlies it. Central to this epistemology (which is basically Kantian in orientation, and closely similar to that advocated by Brouwer) is a principle of epistemic conservation which says that knowledge of a given type cannot be extended by means of an inference unless that inference itself constitutes knowledge belonging to the given type. (shrink)

Written by experts in the field, this volume presents a comprehensive investigation into the relationship between argumentation theory and the philosophy of mathematical practice. Argumentation theory studies reasoning and argument, and especially those aspects not addressed, or not addressed well, by formal deduction. The philosophy of mathematical practice diverges from mainstream philosophy of mathematics in the emphasis it places on what the majority of working mathematicians actually do, rather than on mathematical foundations. -/- The book begins by first challenging the (...) assumption that there is no role for informal logic in mathematics. Next, it details the usefulness of argumentation theory in the understanding of mathematical practice, offering an impressively diverse set of examples, covering the history of mathematics, mathematics education and, perhaps surprisingly, formal proof verification. From there, the book demonstrates that mathematics also offers a valuable testbed for argumentation theory. Coverage concludes by defending attention to mathematical argumentation as the basis for new perspectives on the philosophy of mathematics. ​. (shrink)

This book presents novel formalizations of three of the most important medieval logical theories: supposition, consequence and obligations. In an additional fourth part, an in-depth analysis of the concept of formalization is presented - a crucial concept in the current logical panorama, which as such receives surprisingly little attention.Although formalizations of medieval logical theories have been proposed earlier in the literature, the formalizations presented here are all based on innovative vantage points: supposition theories as algorithmic hermeneutics, theories of consequence analyzed (...) with tools borrowed from model-theory and two-dimensional semantics, and obligations as logical games. For this reason, this is perhaps the first time that these medieval logical theories are made fully accessible to the modern philosopher and logician who wishes to obtain a better grasp of them, but who has always been held back by the lack of appropriate ‘translations' into modern terms.Moreover, the book offers a reflection on the very nature of logic, a reflection that is prompted by the comparisons between medieval and modern logic, their similarities and dissimilarities. It is thus a contribution not only to the history of logic, but also to the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language and semantics.The analysis of medieval logic is also relevant for the modern philosopher and logician in that, being the unifying methodology used across all disciplines at that time, logic really provided unity to science. It thus presents a unified model of scientific investigation, where logic plays the aggregating role. (shrink)

Spinoza attributes mentality to all things existing in nature. He claims that each thing has a mind that perceives everything that happens in the body. Against this panpsychist background, it is unclear how consciousness relates to the nature of the mind. This study focuses on Spinoza’s account of the conscious mind and its operations. It builds on the hypothesis that Spinoza’s panpsychism can be interpreted as a self-consistent philosophical position. It aims at providing answers to the following questions: what is (...) consciousness, for Spinoza, and what are the causes that determine its presence in nature? How can human and non-human individuals be distinguished on account of their mentality? How can Spinoza conceive of the human mind as consisting entirely of conscious perceptions? And how, according to Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism, is the content of consciousness determined so that it reflects in thought the order and connection of the actions and passions of the body? To address these questions, I first determine what Spinoza’s notion of “consciousness” is and how he uses it. Then, I investigate whether he has a theory of recognition capable of accounting for specifically human behaviour and mentality. Further, I examine his description of memory and the way in which memory shapes the framework of human conscious thought. Finally, I look for an account of discursive reasoning, capable of explaining the existence of activities of the mind that, by operating on the content provided by memory, preserve themselves through time and change. (shrink)

The following is a critical and historical account of Aristotelian Essentialism informed by recent work on Aristotle’s modal syllogistic. The semantics of the modal syllogistic are interpreted in a way that is motivated by Aristotle, and also make his validity claims in the Prior Analytics consistent to a higher degree than previously developed interpretative models. In Chapter One, ancient and contemporary objections to the Aristotelian modal syllogistic are discussed. A resolution to apparent inconsistencies in Aristotle’s modal syllogistic is proposed and (...) developed out of recent work by Patterson, Rini, and Malink. In particular, I argue that the semantics of negation is distinct in modal context from those of assertoric negative claims. Given my interpretive model of Aristotle’s semantics, in Chapter Two, I provide proofs for each of the mixed apodictic syllogisms, and propose a method of using Venn Diagrams to visualize the validity claims Aristotle makes in the Prior Analytics. Chapter Three explores how Aristotle’s syllogistic fits within Aristotle’s philosophy of science and demonstration, particularly within the context of the Posterior Analytics. Consideration is given to the Aristotelian understanding of the relationship among necessity, explanation, definition, and essence. Chapter Four applies Aristotelian modal logic in contemporary contexts. I contrast Aristotelian modality and essentialism with contemporary modalism based upon the semantics of possible worlds, e.g. Kripke and Putnam. I also develop an account of how Aristotelian modal logic can ground a sortal dependent theory of identity, as discussed by Wiggins. (shrink)

16. ve 17. yüzyıllarda, dirimselci Yeni Platoncu kimya felsefesi doğa araştırmalarında deneysel yönteme taraftar iken, mantıksal ve matematiksel yöntemlere karşı çıkmıştı. Örneğin, Jan Baptist van Helmont, Aristoteles’in yöntemine matematiksel olduğunu söyleyerek karşı çıkmış ve de Aristoteles’in ilk hareket ettirici düşüncesinin onun matematiksel yönteminin bir sonucu olduğunu ileri sürmüştü. Bu yazıda, Francis Bacon’ın da, van Helmont’a benzer şekilde, ilk hareket ettirici düşüncesini Aristoteles’in tasımsal yönteminin bir sonucu olarak gördüğü ileri sürülecektir.

One of the elements that obstruct the access to a presumed meaning of Plato’s doctrine is the use of the conventional meaning of the term “philosophia”, that is the signification that has prevailed after Aristotle. In order to eliminate this anachronism, it is necessary to review the meanings that the term had before Plato and in his dialogues. We should see that for the founder of the Academy philosophy was not a purely contemplative act, but one that was concerned with (...) politics. In his opinion, philosophy as dialectics was the art of contentious reasoning, of continuous and everlasting validation of true opinions. This method does not lead to truth; it substitutes the truth – and all this happens in the field of language. Thus philosophy is also a way to govern and make politics. Ergo the expression “philosopher king” does not unite terms that were previously opposites, but rather expresses the need that this model of making politics takes the place of the already established political power. (shrink)

Mathematicians often speak of conjectures, yet unproved, as probable or well-confirmed by evidence. The Riemann Hypothesis, for example, is widely believed to be almost certainly true. There seems no initial reason to distinguish such probability from the same notion in empirical science. Yet it is hard to see how there could be probabilistic relations between the necessary truths of pure mathematics. The existence of such logical relations, short of certainty, is defended using the theory of logical probability (or objective Bayesianism (...) or non-deductive logic), and some detailed examples of its use in mathematics surveyed. Examples of inductive reasoning in experimental mathematics are given and it is argued that the problem of induction is best appreciated in the mathematical case. (shrink)

The questions concerning rationality and the ethics of verbal occurrences are at the centre of the deliberations of social communication. The antagonistic and cooperative functions of social discourses are connected with the notion of a conflict and the capability of solving it. Argumentative discourse as one of the types of social discourse is discussed within the framework of pragmatic, dialectic and rhetorical models. This paper is an attempt at critical assessment of the pragma-dialectical model of argumentation proposed by Frans H. (...) Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst. I defend the standpoint that the application of the pragma-dialectical model to the analysis of argumentation reliability in a naturally occurring discussion requires an expansion of the concepts introduced in the pragma-dialectical theory. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the deconstruction of defeasible argument schemes. It will be claimed that one of the central elements of all defeasible argument schemes is the rule of similarity which demands that one must ascribe similar propositions to essentially similar entities in order to be treated as reasonable. This rule is presented as interculturally valid and of such central importance that it could even been used as a defining quality of defeasible argumentation.

A trope is an abstract particular. Trope theorists maintain that tropes exist and argue that they can solve important philosophical problems, such as explaining the nature of properties. While many contemporary interpreters of Aristotle read him as a trope theorist, few commentators distinguish different versions of trope theory. Which, of any, of these versions did Aristotle hold? Classical trope theorists say that individuals just are bundles of tropes. This essay offers a reading of Categories 2-5 and Metaphysics VII-VIII that aligns (...) Aristotle's view with nonclassical trope theory, according to which objects are more than just bundles of tropes. (shrink)

The topic of this study is to what extent standards of rational inquiry can be rationally criticized and revised. It is argued that it is rational to treat all such standards as open to criticism and revision. Arguments to the effect that we are fallible with regard to all standards of rational inquiry are presented. Standards cannot be ultimately justified and with certainty established either as adequate or as inescapable presuppositions. Apel's attempt to give ultimate justifications of certain moral and (...) logical rules is examined and criticized. Special attention is given to our fallibility with regard to logical inference rules. The idea that certain logical rules cannot be put into question because any critical argument presupposes them is criticized. It has been claimed that there must be some basic standards which are such that they cannot be rationally evaluated and hence are rationally unrevisable. This is called "the unrevisability thesis". Related to this thesis is the normative policy according to which rationality requires that some standards be treated as unrevisable, the unrevisability policy. Two arguments that have been used to defend the unrevisability thesis and policy are examined and criticized. The conclusion is that we are not forced to accept either the thesis or the policy. The negation of the unrevisability policy is the revisability policy, according to which it is rational to treat all standards as open to rational criticism and revision. Objections that have been directed against the revisability policy are discussed and criticized. According to the objections, the revisability policy leads to rationality relativism. These objections are refuted, and it is argued that it is, on the contrary, rational to adopt the revisability policy and treat all standards of rational inquiry as criticizable and revisable. It is proposed that the rational change of standards should be viewed as a bootstrap process. General features of a bootstrap view of rational change of standards are presented, and it is argued that it is impossible to formulate a real theory of bootstrapping. Two models of standard change are presented and discussed: Laudan's reticulated model of scientific rationality and Briskman's bootstrap theory. It is claimed that in spite of defects and limitations, these models contribute to a richer understanding of bootstrapping. The fallibility and revisability of standards of rational inquiry have consequences for how the normativity of rationality should be understood. The book ends with an account of how the rationality of cognitive actions is related to the idea of the adequacy of standards. A distinction between absolute and standard-relative rationality is made, and it is argued that what an inquiring agent rationally ought to do coincides with what it is standard-relatively rational for him to do. It is shown that this view of rationality of inquiry is nevertheless inconsistent with rationality relativism, and that it is compatible with an objectivistic view of rationality. (shrink)

Inferential communities are communities using specific substantial argumentative schemes. The religious or scientific communities are examples. I discuss the status of the mathematical community as it appears through the position held by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré during his famous ar-guments with Russell, Hilbert, Peano and Cantor. The paper focuses on the status of complete induction and how logic and psychology shape the community of mathematicians and the teaching of mathematics.

This paper comprises two parts. The first part is an introduction to Auriol’s moderate conceptualism, as it is presented in his Commentary on Book II of the Sentences, distinction 9, question 2, article 1. The second part is an edition of the text. In the introduction, I focus on Auriol’s use of the noetic tool of connotation. My thesis, in particular, is that connotation is a necessary prerequisite to his moderate conceptu- alism. To this purpose, the first part of this (...) introduction will be devoted to a brief presentation of Auriol’s conceptualism. In the second part, Auriol’s theory of essential predication will be presented. In the third part, I will present my claim that Auriol’s theory of essential predication can only be made sense of when read against the background of his theory of connotation as applied to intellectual cognition. Finally, I will offer a collation of Auriol’s Commentary on Book II of the Sentences, dis- tinction 9, question 2, article 1, obtained by collating eight manuscripts, which hand down Auriol’s text, that is, Firenze, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, ms. Conv. Soppr. B.6.121, Firenze, ms. Conv. Soppr. A. 3.120, Napoli, Biblioteca nazionale, ms. VII.C.3, Padova, Biblioteca Antoniana, ms. 161, scaff. ix, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. latin 15867; Pelplin, Biblioteka Seminarium duchownego, ms. 46/85, Vaticano (Città del), Biblioteca Apostolica, ms. Borgiano 404, Vaticano (Città del), Biblioteca Apostolica, ms. Vat. lat. 942. (shrink)