1 Logic in philosophy The century that was Logic has played an important role in modern philosophy, especially, in alliances with philosophical schools such as the Vienna Circle, neopositivism, or formal language variants of analytical philosophy. The original impact was via the work of Frege, Russell, and other pioneers, backed up by the prestige of research into the foundations of mathematics, which was fast bringing to light those amazing insights that still impress us to-day. The Golden Age of the 1930s (...) deeply affected philosophy, and heartened the minority of philosophers with a formalanalytical bent. As Brand Blanshard writes in Reason and Analysis (1964) – I quote from memory here, to avoid the usual disappointment when re-reading an original text. (shrink)

Consider a circle and a pair of its semicircles. Which is prior, the whole or its parts? Are the semicircles dependent abstractions from their whole, or is the circle a derivative construction from its parts? Now in place of the circle consider the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole), and in place of the pair of semicircles consider the myriad particles (the ultimate concrete parts). Which if either is ultimately prior, the one ultimate whole or its many ultimate parts?

The subjectivism of the Austrian school of economics is a special case of Dewey's transactional philosophy, also known as pragmatism or pragmatic epistemology. The Austrian economists Carl Friedrich Menger (1840-1921) and Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) adopted an Aristotelian deductive approach to economic issues such as social behavior and exchange. Like Menger and Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) viewed scientific knowledge, even in the social sciences, as asserting and aiming for objective certainty. Hayek was particularly critical of attempts to apply the (...) empiricism of the natural sciences in the social sciences. Though Hayek was not a positivist in the sense ascribed to Milton Friedman (1912-), because he accepted the possibility of final, objective certainty, Hayek's view of scientific knowledge was closer to that of the logical positivists of the Vienna circle than to Dewey's pragmatism. Mises' a priorism, asserting and aiming for apodictic certainty, represented a more extreme form of objectivism even than Hayek's. Mises was similar in this regard to non-Austrian axiomatists such as Gerard Debreau (1921-2005), though he joined Hayek in eschewing mathematical formalism. In Dewey's contrasting view, the scientist commends new, alternative ways of knowing to the scientific community, offering more profound insight or more efficacious practical applications. Alternative ways of knowing which do not offer practical or intellectual benefits are to be rejected. Both the radical subjectivism of the Austrian school and Dewey's transactional strategy justify rejection of the mirage of social justice. Dewey's knowledge as ways of knowing suggests a broader and more fundamental critique of the socialist position in the calculation debate. The arguments presented by the Austrian school can be reformulated in terms of Dewey's pragmatic philosophy. (shrink)

Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method provides an insightful critique of Russell’s analysis and metaphysics of logical atomism, proposing an unduly neglected neo-idealist alternative to Russell’s philosophical method. I summarize Collingwood’s critique of analysis and sympathetically outline the philosophical methodology of Collingwood’s post-Hegelian dialectical method: his scale of forms methodology, grounded on the overlap of philosophical classes. I then delineate Collingwood’s critique of the metaphysics of logical atomism, demonstrating how the scale of forms methodology is opposed to Russell’s logical atomism. (...) Finally, I reflect on the reasons Collingwood’s Essay aroused little interest upon publication and the importance of continually rethinking the history of philosophy. (shrink)

We prove that four theses commonly associated with coherentism are incompatible with the representation of a belief state as a logically closed set of sentences. The result is applied to the conventional coherence interpretation of the AGM theory of belief revision, which appears not to be tenable. Our argument also counts against the coherentistic acceptability of a certain form of propositional holism. We argue that the problems arise as an effect of ignoring the distinction between derived and non-derived beliefs, and (...) we suggest that the kind of coherence relevant to epistemic justification is the coherence of non-derived beliefs. (shrink)

From time to time philosophers and scientists have made sensational, provocative claims that certain things do not exist or never happen that, in everyday life, we unquestioningly take for granted as existing or happening. These claims have included denying the existence of matter, space, time, the self, free will, and other sturdy and basic elements of our common-sense or naïve world-view. Around the middle of the twentieth century an argument was developed that can be used to challenge many such skeptical (...) claims based on linguistic considerations, which came to be known as the Paradigm Case Argument ... (shrink)

This entry focuses on two of the more historically important monisms: existence monism and priority monism . Existence monism targets concrete objects and counts by tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object exists. Priority monism also targets concrete objects, but counts by basic tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object is basic, which will turn out to be the classical doctrine that the whole is prior to its parts.