Section 1 reviews Strawson’s logic of presuppositions. Strawson’s justification is critiqued and a new justification proposed. Section 2 extends the logic of presuppositions to cases when the subject class is necessarily empty, such as (x)((Px & ~Px) → Qx) . The strong similarity of the resulting logic with Richard Diaz’s truth-relevant logic is pointed out. Section 3 further extends the logic of presuppositions to sentences with many variables, and a certain valuation is proposed. It is noted that, given this valuation, (...) Gödel’s sentence becomes neither true nor false. The similarity of this outcome with Goldstein and Gaifman’s solution of the Liar paradox, which is discussed in section 4, is emphasized. Section 5 returns to the definition of meaningfulness; the meaninglessness of certain sentences with empty subjects and of the Liar sentence is discussed. The objective of this paper is to show how all of the above-mentioned concepts are interrelated. (shrink)

The conclusions derived by Keynes in his Treatise on Probability (1921) concerning induction, analogical reasoning, expectations formation and decision making, mirror and foreshadow the main conclusions of cognitive science and psychology.The problem of weight is studied within an economic context by examining the role it played in Keynes' applied philosophy work, The General Theory (1936). Keynes' approach is then reformulated as an optimal control approach to dealing with changes in information evaluation over time. Based on this analysis the problem of (...) inductive justification, from a societal perspective, is not, What can we rationally believe will occur in the economic future, given our past experiences? but Can we make the future so as to attain specific economic goals with practical certainty? An answer requires that restrictions be placed on the methodological individualist approach and the acceptance of a restricted holistic approach. (shrink)

What is the source of logical and mathematical truth? This book revitalizes conventionalism as an answer to this question. Conventionalism takes logical and mathematical truth to have their source in linguistic conventions. This was an extremely popular view in the early 20th century, but it was never worked out in detail and is now almost universally rejected in mainstream philosophical circles. Shadows of Syntax is the first book-length treatment and defense of a combined conventionalist theory of logic and mathematics. It (...) argues that our conventions, in the form of syntactic rules of language use, are perfectly suited to explain the truth, necessity, and a priority of logical and mathematical claims, as well as our logical and mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

Annotation A challenge to our perception of how cultures and ideals are formed, this book shows that while structural ideals allow people to co-operate as they work toward goals - their own or those of their community - these images of perfection, so easily accepted as the unalterable structure of our society, can be changed, and are changed by individuals.

This paper discusses the development of self-consciousness in the history of philosophy of the 20th century compared with the same development in the natural sciences. The author characterizes this stage of philosophical historiography as the “revolution of relativity.” This movement of self-consciousness was apparent in not only the humanities but also the natural sciences at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Awareness of probability is a fundamental achievement of non-classic physics, which has since reversed its paradigm. In contrast (...) to the Newtonian scheme, quantum theory introduces the category of probability and insists that we can talk about certain physical phenomena only in a probabilistic mode and that the method of observation affects the phenomena observed. Consequently, any “object-subject” and “subject-subject” interaction involves the experience of the researcher, which thereby affects the results. The same model of interpretation lies at the basis of the turn toward self-consciousness in the history of philosophy of the 20th century. The classical history of philosophy is built on idealization and gives an objective description of the philosophical process. Following the other sciences, the philosophy of the 20th century understood that historical and philosophical reality largely depends on the historians of philosophy; that such reality is constructed by certain means; that there is a certain kind of historical and philosophical work; and that, with different strategies, methods and approaches, we obtain different results that are complementary to each other. The 20th century was a time of competing interpretations rather than gradually progressing historical and philosophical systems. This stimulated the search for own ideal of objectivity. For philosophical historiography, this is the hermeneutic ideal of the structural analysis of text or architectonic reconstruction. The historicalphilosophical revolution of relativity promotes the development of critical historiography and revises the foundations of its classical tradition. (shrink)

For a variety of reasons, consciousness and selfhood are beginning once again to be intensively studied in a scientific frame of reference. The notions of each which are emerging are extremely varied: in the case of selfhood, the lack of an adequate vocabulary to capture various aspects of subjectivity has led to deep confusion. The task of the first part of this article is to clear up this terminological confusion, while salvaging whatever is valuable from the contemporary discussion. The more (...) important task of the second part is to discuss the moral issues inevitably involved in any treatment, scientific or otherwise, of the modern identity. (shrink)

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, philosophers of various sorts, including Helmholtz, Avenarius, Husserl, Russell, Carnap, Neurath, and Heidegger, were united in promulgating a new, “scientific” philosophy. This article documents some of the varieties of scientific philosophy and argues that the history of scientific philosophy is crucial to the development of analytic philosophy and the division between analytic and continental philosophy. Scientific philosophy defined itself via criticisms of old-fashioned systematic metaphysics and, in the twentieth century, of Lebensphilosophie. It (...) offered a modernist vision of philosophy participating in a progressive, problem-solving, piecemeal, and collaborative scientific ethos. The article argues that the rise of scientific philosophy indicates a change of the conception of science as well as philosophy in the late nineteenth century and notes some tensions in the accounts of science offered by scientific philosophers. The article offers some preliminary lessons for the interpretation of logical empiricism and phenomenology as episodes within a larger history of scientific philosophy. (shrink)

While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other minds that can be baldly stated and that is exhaustive of both traditions, the problem(s) of other minds can be loosely defined in family resemblances terms. It seems to have: (1) an epistemological dimension (How do we know that (...) others exist? Can we justifiably claim to know that they do?); (2) an ontological dimension that incorporates issues having to do with personal identity (What is the structure of our world such that inter-subjectivity is possible? What are the fundamental aspects of our relations to others? How do they impact upon our self-identity?); and (3) A conceptual dimension in that it depends on one's answer to the question what is a mind (How does the mind – or the concept of 'mind'– relate to the brain, the body and the world?). While these three issues are co-imbricated, I will claim that analytic engagements with the problem of other minds focus on (1), whereas continental philosophers focus far more on (2). In addition, this article will also point to various other downstream consequences of this, including the preoccupation with embodiment and forms of expressivism that feature heavily in various forms of continental philosophy, and which generally aim to ground our relations with others in a pre-reflective manner of inhabiting the world that is said to be the condition of reflection and knowledge. (shrink)

Philosophical translation between "linguistic violence" and translative hermeneutics. Translational considerations from the perspective of the translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's L'être et le néant The establishment of translatology as a scientific discipline is a late phenomenon to which not only linguistics but also the philosophy of language has contributed significantly. Although the considerations of Schleiermacher, Ricoeur, Derrida, Balibar, Cassin and other philosophers are very stimulating for the examination of the translation problematics, they do not offer a particular translation theory of philosophical (...) texts. Most of their works are of little help in practice when it comes to translating a complicated philosophical text. That is why I will take in this paper the opposite path and start from my own experience as a translator of philosophical literature into Bulgarian and, more concretely, from my translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's L'être et le néant. On the base of this key work of contemporary philosophy and its translations into different languages, I will address the difficulties and the specifics of philosophical translation, discuss various translation methods, and argue several theses, which could serve as impulses for a further development of translation theory and translation practice in the field of philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, the author attempts three things: (a) to describe the main beliefs of the “continental empiricist” epistemology that dominated the study of the social sciences in North America since the mid 1930s; (b) to speak of the influence of this epistemology on the dominant or mainstream school in the study of politics; and (c) to propose a new-old approach to the study of politics, based on the thinking of Michael Polanyi (1891-1976).

In order to make reliable predictions in any region of human activity, it is necessary to distinguish clearly what is based on experience and what is a construction of intellect. The theory of knowledge developed in the present paper is an attempt to devise a set of axioms that demarcate experience, as the only source of our knowledge of the external world, from the ideas, scientific models, and theories by means of which the scientific predictions are made. After a discussion (...) of the causality in relation to the laws of nature, the axioms of the expounded theory are formulated in the formalism of set theory. The theory is then applied to some problems in physics to demonstrate its usefulness. (shrink)

The Computational Metaphor is an extremely influential notion, and more than any other trend has given rise to the field of Cognitive Science. Environmentalism is at present better formalised as a political movement than as a scientific paradigm, despite significant research by Gibson and his followers. This article attempts to address the difficult problem of synthesising these two apparently antagonistic research paradigms.

For both philosophers and managers, reasoning with ourselves and others can be used both as (1) a way of knowing what is ethical and (2) a way of acting to help ourselves, others and organizations behave ethically. However, for many of us, knowing is frequently not the same as acting. Four areas are addressed: (1) thirteen limitations of ethical reasoning as an action strategy; (2) how a better understanding of these limitations can strengthen ethical reasoning as an action strategy; (3) (...) how an understanding of these limitations can serve as a conceptual foundation for exploring other ethical action strategies; and, (4) implications for experiential learning and teaching. (shrink)

The nature and worth of Michael Oakeshott’s contribution as a political thinker have long been the subject of deep disagreement within the community of Anglophone political theory. This is partly the product of a partial familiarity with Oakeshott’s corpus. During his lifetime, his body of published work had a rather slender appearance, comprising two major monographs, separated by some forty years, and two rather more accessible collections of essays on politics and history. Following his death in 1990, however, a much (...) larger body of writings has become available. In particular, with the publication of his Notebooks, we are afforded the chance to form a nuanced and informed understanding of how the thinking in his texts interconnected, and to appreciate the range of intellectual influences and political preoccupations that characterised his work. (shrink)

The paper presents H. L. A. Hart as a leading exponent of the analytic orientation in legal philosophy. Hart showed that the principles and methods of analytic philosophy yield fruitful implications to law, where they may foster fresh ideas and innovative solutions. The text emphasizes the linguistic aspect of Hart’s works; his achievements in legal theory are discussed in the context of the principles of ordinary language philosophy.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991.

This chapter reviews some of the history of discussions of logical form and offers a truth-theoretic account that traces back to Donald Davidson.

Michael F. Duggan ABSTRACT: This article examines the basis for testing historical claims and proffers the observation that the historical method is akin to the scientific method in that it utilizes critical elimination rather than justification. Building on the critical rationalism of Karl Popper – and specifically the deductive component of the scientific method called ….

While some cultures have established a long tradition of theoretical thinking, Romanian culture appears to have an innate resistance to theory and to the standards of what is usually considered to be the proper way of theorizing. This paper tries to demonstrate the hypothesis shown above by analyzing the case of postmodernism related theories within the Romanian cultural environment. More precisely, we have focused our attention on what is considered to be one of the most relevant works on Romanian postmodernism, (...) the homonymous book belonging to the almost unanimously acclaimed Mircea Cărtărescu. Through a very short demonstration of the flaws existent in the approach taken on by mr. Cărtărescu I will try to make a relevant point on all Romanian theories on postmodernism, and – on a larger scale – on the Romanian vision of what a well-designed theory in the field of the humanities is. (shrink)