The author contends that the Objectivist epistemology has lacked a viable model of propositional knowledge for nearly fifty years, due to neglect of Rand's unit-perspective view of concepts. This pioneering insight, he says, not only is an essential building block of her concept theory, but also welds together the three levels of logical theory and provides the clearest X-ray picture of our multilayered conceptual knowledge. Using the unit-perspective to expand Rand's theory of concepts, the author then devises a theory of (...) the proposition, giving considerable attention to axioms and statements about nonexistent subjects. (shrink)

This paper seeks to clarify and link Levinas’s understanding of who we are to both his metaphysics of conversation and his unique understanding of justice, suggesting that Levinas’s markedly religious understanding of the subject provides an important clue as to what constitutes meaningful dialogue, and what the work of philosophy – grounded in meaningful dialogue – ought to entail. Based on Levinas’s account, in addition to searching for order and clarity (making transcendence immanent), the task of philosophy is to safeguard (...) thinking from the delusion that truth has been discovered once and for all. That is, to break up proposed identifications of truth, to reject ideology – to refuse to take order and clarity for granted, even at the risk of uncertainty, as this uncertainty is what allows for the possibility of an existential shift, a new way of understanding things, a new mode of being. This inevitably involves welcoming, in hospitality, the death that necessarily accompanies metanoia. (shrink)