John R. Searle argues that consciousness is a biological problem, and that the subjective feature of consciousness doesn’t exclude the scientific study thereof. In this paper I attempt to show that Searle’s identification of the subjectivity of conscious experience as being merely ontologically subjective, but not epistemically subjective is problematic, as it confuses epistemic subjectivity with axiological subjectivity. Since Searle regards the distinction between epistemic subjectivity and ontological subjectivity as an important basis for scientific studies of consciousness, the unsoundness of (...) his argument weakens his advocacy of Biological Naturalism. (shrink)

Can philosophy still be fruitful, and what kind of philosophy can be such? In particular, what kind of philosophy can be legitimized in the face of sciences? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions, listing the characteristics philosophy should have to be fruitful and legitimized in the face of sciences. Since the characteristics in question demand that philosophy search for new knowledge and new rules of discovery, a philosophy with such characteristics may be called the ‘heuristic view’. (...) According to the heuristic view, philosophy is an inquiry into the world which is continuous with the sciences. It differs from them only because it deals with questions which are beyond the present sciences, and in order to deal with them must try unexplored routes. By so doing, when successful, it may even give birth to new sciences. In listing the characteristics that philosophy should have, the paper systematically compares them with classical analytic philosophy, because the latter has been the dominant philosophical tradition in the last century. (shrink)

This paper identifies a tension in Frege’s philosophy and offers a diagnosis of its origins. Frege’s Context Principle can be used to dissolve the problem of propositional unity. However, Frege’s official response to the problem does not invoke the Context Principle, but the distinction between ‘saturated’ and ‘unsaturated’ propositional constituents. I argue that such a response involves assumptions that clash with the Context Principle. I suggest, however, that this tension is not generated by deep-seated philosophical commitments, but by Frege’s occasional (...) attempt to take a dubious shortcut in the justification of his conception of propositional structure. (shrink)

This paper discusses a problem for Russellian propositions. According to Russellianism, each word in a sentence contributes its referent to the proposition expressed by the sentence. Russellian propositions have normally been conceived of as problematic for two reasons, viz. they cannot account for the unity of the proposition and they have problems with non-referring singular names. In this paper, I argue that Russellianism also faces a problem with respect to properties. It is inconsistent with both traditional realism and trope-theories. The (...) only theory of properties which is consistent with Russellianism is Platonism. Moreover, it is argued that Russellianism needs a particularly implausible version of Platonism. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to expose the foundations of Enrique Dussel’s philosophy of liberation and to explain its contributions in the context of Latin-american thinking. In a postmetaphysical level of foundation, the philosophy of liberation adopts the ethos from semitic thinking and the Levinas’ hermeneutics of the «Other» with the proposal of formulate a criticism of eurocentrism and to build an alternative philosophical model. In front of the traditional paradigms of philosophy and philosophical historiography, Enrique Dussel develops a (...) new arquitectonics to report on the specificity of our thinking. (shrink)

John R. Searle’nin Çin Odası Argümanı oldukça ilgi çekici ve üzerinde çokça tartışılmış bir argümandır. Argümanın ilgi çekiciliğini günümüzün en baskın zihin kuramlarından biri olan kompütasyonalizmi hedef almasına, üzerinde çokça tartışılmasını ise felsefi implikasyonlarının hayli zengin olmasına bağlayabiliriz. Searle, argümanının beynin kelimenin tam anlamıyla bir bilgisayar, zihnin de bir bilgisayar programı olduğunu ileri süren kompütasyonalizmin kesin ve net bir reddi olarak görse de, bize ve birçoklarına göre argüman onun düşündüğü kadar ikna edici değildir. Bu çalışmada Çin Odası Argümanı Searle’nin genel (...) zihin anlayışı zemininde incelenecek ve argümana verilen yaygın cevaplar değerlendirilerek argümanın neden ikna edici olmadığı gösterilmeye çalışılacaktır. (shrink)