The main purpose of the paper is to criticize materialism in the philosophy of mind and to search for alternative approaches to the problems of mind, consciousness and body. According to the author, materialism does not present a satisfactory explanation of the mental life of human beings, because it fails to explain phenomena such as conscious experience, sleep, unconsciousness, death. These phenomena point to the fact that consciousness is not identical with the body and can be detached from it. The (...) author adopts the conclusion that the solution to the problem of consciousness is closely connected to the problem of identity of a human individual. A human being plays certain social roles, he or she possesses a body, he or she possesses a mind, but is not identical with them. In its essence, the human being is identical with consciousness. (shrink)

Paper responding to critique of Maurin (2002) presented by Herbert Hochberg in his “Relations, Properties and Particulars” (2004).

Tries to identify some strands in the birth of analytic philosophy and to identify in consequence some of its distinctive features.

David Lewis proposed to deal with the semantics of sentences that state what is possible for an individual in terms of possible individuals that are in ways the first individual might have been, so called counterparts of the individual. In this book, I defend counterpart semantics as an approach to the semantics of modality and natural language semantics in particular. Counterpart semantics has a rival, the standard Kripkean semantics that deals with the same sentences in terms of an accessibility relation (...) between possible worlds. While counterpart semantics appears to be more flexible and carries less metaphysical presuppositions (it does not presuppose that I myself exist in various possible worlds, e.g.), Kripkean semantics has some advantages of its own. Most importantly, it incorporates the core assumptions of what may be called standard possible-worlds semantics; i.e. the core assumptions of the most successful framework within linguistic semantics. Counterpart semantics, on the other hand, does not conform to these assumptions, or so I will argue. In this book I opt for a synthesis of these two approaches that allows to combine their advantages. In Chap.1 I introduce the basic idea of counterpart semantics. I defend counterparts against the charge, made by Kripke, that counterparts are irrelevant for the analysis of modality. In Chap. 2 I present the classical version of counterpart semantics, i.e. David Lewis's translation of the language of quantified modal logic into counterpart theory. I discuss some well-known problems and opt for a revision of that translation that is able to solve the problems. Lewis's translation indirectly defines semantical values for expressions of quantified modal logic. In Chap.3 I evaluate counterpart semantics with respect to basic features of possible-worlds semantics. I conclude that the semantical values indirectly assigned to sentences by Lewis's translation are not sets of possible worlds, and that they do not meet certain intuitive demands on notions of meaning and content. (The revisions proposed in Chap.2 do not change this.) In Chap.4 I discuss various versions of a combination of counterpart semantics with Kripkean semantics found in the literature. But I conclude that here, the benefits of the latter are achieved by forfeiting the advantages of the former. Chap.5 finally contains my own proposal how to combine the two approaches in a more satisfactory way. The core semantical notion is truth according to a maximal complete representation, where representations now play the role of worlds. It is an important feature of the counterpart relation that it is qualitative, i.e. a relation in which things stand in virtue how they are. In Chap.1 I point out why it is qualitative, and why it ought to be. In Chap.6 I show how to make the notion of a qualitative property or relation precise. Finally, in Chap.7 I show how to extend this and related notions to predicates and propositions. For counterpart semantics to work at all we have to assume that everything that can be said at all can in principle be expressed in a language with qualitative predicates only (and perhaps, additionally, names, treated directly referentially). In Chap.7 I show how this assumption allows to maintain that the representations of our semantics deserve their name. (shrink)

Kim has defended a solution to the exclusion problem which deploys the «causal inheritance principle» and the identification of instantiations of mental properties with instantiations of their realizing physical properties. I wish to argue that Kim's putative solution to the exclusion problem rests on an equivocation between instantiations of properties as bearers of properties and instantiations as property instances. On the former understanding, the causal inheritance principle is too weak to confer causal efficacy upon mental properties. And on the latter (...) understanding, the identification of mental and physical instantiations is simply untenable. (shrink)

This book is a defence of the philosophy of common sense in the spirit of Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore, drawing on the work of Aristotle, evolutionary biology and psychology, and historical studies on the origins of early modern philosophy. It defines and explores common sense beliefs, and defends them from challenges from prominent philosophers.

This thesis develops methods for representing how the contents of theories of meaning become conceived by their users. These contents are treated as the range of systematically elicited conceptions afforded by a designated corpus of key texts. The approach being taken involves first detailing a formal scheme for the components of situations attributed to various entities. This scheme is then applied as a framing device to form a template which accounts for the shared structure between the mental spaces which embody (...) how people conceive different theories of meaning. For the purposes of this task, cognition is treated as embodied in the sense that both the form and content of personal conceptualisations are largely dependent on what both bodily and ecological factors afford. The purpose of this approach is to help understand how theories operate when viewed as worldly entities within a materialist framework. The significance of such understanding lies in enabling analyses and comparisons which account for the effects of material restrictions such as how a theory’s presentation must necessarily be selective and how human cognition operates on models set by precedent. The framework being provided here allows the conceptions each individual theory of meaning elicits to be reduced to formal, commensurate models which account for differences between typical influences on the conceptions characteristic of different demographics such as experts of related fields. Approaching theories of meaning from this angle also reveals new avenues of comparison concerning otherwise implicit details. One involves theory-internal conditions on the full material identity of meaning-instantiating entities. The other concerns the extent of the domains for aggregating applicable influences for which a theory accounts and the range of those it may accommodate. (shrink)

The first part of this thesis articulates and defends the Subjectivist View of the Mental. According to this view, my mental states are essentially different from the mental states of everyone else, but the fact that they are is a subjective fact, rather than an objective one. Chapter 1 explains what it takes for a fact to be subjective, what kind of difference holds between my mental states and everyone else's mental states and what kind of intuitions lead me to (...) believe that there is such a difference. Chapter 2 defends the Subjectivist View of the Mental from objections and discusses some of its most significant implications. In the second part of the thesis, I explore the advantages that the Subjectivist View of the Mental offers when it comes to accounting for three basic features of our knowledge of the mental. Chapter 3 deals with the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds. It is argued that, if the Subjectivist View of the Mental is true, we can explain why this asymmetry holds without assuming that self-knowledge and knowledge of other minds are involved with substantially different ways of knowing. Chapter 4 focuses on the immunity to error through misidentification of mental self-ascriptions. I show that, while there has been a temptation to explain this phenomenon by following Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein in taking the content of mental self-ascriptions to be general rather than particular, this proposal cannot be made to work unless something like the Subjectivist View of the Mental is true. Chapter 5 is concerned with experiential knowledge. I argue that, if experiential truths are taken to be objective truths, it is not easy to see why experiential knowledge should have the peculiar 'first-hand' character it has. The problem disappears if experiential truths are regarded as subjective rather than objective. (shrink)

O conhecimento científico tem ficado a meio caminho entre a episteme - ou a veram &certam scientiam postulada por Descartes - e a doxa. Entre os cientistas é cada vez maior oreconhecimento de que mesmo que a verdade tenha sido alcançada não se tem como saberenquanto a pesquisa prosseguir. Na aparência, a filosofia é em alguns autores e em determinadosmomentos de sua história explicativamente mais pretensiosa que em outros. A tese que defendemosé a de que, no fundo, a hybris explicativa (...) é o traço distintivo dos Grandes Sistemas Filosóficos. Aconsciência metacientífica da falibilidade não tem contribuído para diminuir a arrogânciaexplicativa da maioria das filosofias. E se a soberba intelectual tem sido maior no tratamento dasquestões que fomentam disputationes seculares é porque é difícil, ou quiçá impossível, se chegar a umamodalidade de conhecimento sobre os Lebensproblemen. Para piorar, no panoramafilosófico contemporâneo a busca do conhecimento provado tem sido substituída com freqüênciapela arrogância do retorismo, isto é, pelo discurso vazio que tenta se fazer passar por boa filosofia. (shrink)

Maximus the Confessor granted in his works a certain attention to the issue of silence. The majority of the researchers that interpret the Maximian writings, especially, E. Michaud, V. Grumel and H.U. von Balthasar, have approached the theme of silence by referring to the difficult issue of the apocathastasis. Recently, C. Boudignon discusses about silence as tightly related to the Maximian exegesis. In this study I aim to highlight the interpretations of modern scholars in order to show, on one hand, (...) that in the writings of the Confessor the influence of monastic sources is evident and, on the other hand, that one may observe many contexts in which silence occupies a meaningful place. (shrink)

For such refined idealists as Schopenhauer, Husserl and Wittgenstein, the correlation between the world and the subject must be recognized. Furthermore, the three commonly emphasize the distinction between the transcendental subject and the empirical subject as well as the distinction between the subject and object’s mode of being. They all realized that the confusion of the transcendental subject and the empirical subject causes the paradox of that the subject as one part of the world is at the same time the (...) a priori condition of the whole world. In the history of western Philosophy, Schopenhauer is the first to realize that the subject is no more than the invisible body, or the body playing the subject’s role. Our body plays a role both as object and as subject. However, the fact does not mean that the body playing a role as a subject can be identified with the body playing a role as an object. As the subject, the body is the prerequisite of all the representations, but the body itself cannot simultaneously be represented by itself. If objects are always visible to me, then my body as a subject is invisible. (shrink)

This paper outlines a truth-conditional view of logical form, that is, a view according to which logical form is essentially a matter of truth-conditions. The main motivation for the view is a fact that seems crucial to logic. As _§_1 suggests, fundamental logical relations such as entailment or contradiction can formally be explained only if truth-conditions are formally represented.§2 spells out the view. _§_3 dwells on its anity with a conception of logical form that has been defended in the past. (...) _§§_4-6 draw attention to its impact on three major issues that concern, respectively, the extension of the domain of formal explanation, the semantics of tensed discourse, and the analysis of quantication. (shrink)

Some​ ​propositions​ ​are​ ​not​ ​only​ ​true,​ ​but​ ​could​ ​not​ ​have​ ​been​ ​otherwise. This​ ​thesis​ ​is​ ​about​ ​modality​ ​and​ ​the​ ​philosophy​ ​of​ ​language.​ ​Its​ ​centrepiece​ ​is​ ​a​ ​new​ ​account​ ​of the​ ​conditions​ ​under​ ​which​ ​a​ ​proposition​ ​is​ ​necessarily​ ​true​ ​in​ ​the​ ​above​ ​sense.

Wittgenstein’s achievement in the history of philosophy consists in turning philosophy away from logical analysis toward contextual explication, and even more in undermining the dominance of epistemology in mainstream philosophy. However, since a majority of academic philosophers continue to work in ways that Wittgenstein disdained, it is unclear how much he affected the discipline.

This book describes a novel conception of reality, one that uniquely incorporates an idealistic view of existence with an account of objectivity. It introduces a general model of conceptual analysis and demonstrates its effectiveness in exposing and establishing the existence of conceptual ties. The book begins by introducing the tools and principles needed for the conceptual analysis undertaken in chapters that follow. Next, it presents a detailed examination into existence, contingency, idealism, self-consciousness and natural laws. In the process, the author (...) critically examines the conceptions of existence held by Kant, Frege and Russell; argues that the determinations of past, present and future are subjective in the sense that they imply the existence of consciousness in relation to which they are fixed; shows that every possible reality includes sufficient conditions for self-consciousness; and confronts the question of the "uniformity of nature," which states that reality is subject to natural laws. In the end, the idealistic conception of reality developed in this book implies that existence is relative, rather than absolute, in the sense that it is determined in relation to a point of view internal to reality. This view of existence implies that reality necessarily exists. (shrink)

The objective of this dissertation is to write the first pages of the biography of paleobiological data. I will focus on i) the genesis of this kind of data as it emerged in German stratigraphy and paleontology between the mid 19th and the early 20th centuries and ii) how the conceptualization of the paleontological data was reformulated and taken as the starting point for studying the patterns of the diversity of life in deep time between the 1940s and 70s. This (...) is the turning point that marks the ‘coming into being’ of specifically paleobiological data. I will reconstruct in detail how it was possible to transform an incomplete and misleading material object — the fossil record that can be admired in a museum —into a no longer misleading source of knowledge. I will namely describe the genesis of the paleobiological practice by retracing the encounter of two different approaches to the fossil record between the mid 19th and early 20th centuries in German academia and their later diffusion into English-speaking countries. (shrink)

The article tries to show, from the phenomenological posi­tion, that it must be possible to reflect on so called pre-linguistic experience. The argumenta­tion is based on a disputation with a symptomatic example used by Wittgen-stein to substan­tiate his language games theory. The analysis of the example at­tempts to indicate that the language games theory, which has to justify the rejection of the existence of pre-linguistic experience, meets with discre-pancies and difficulties which limit the range of this theory to a certain (...) extent. Because it presupposes the existence of „private“, experiential sphere in which – even before language and verbali­zation enter the game – the struc­turing of the world, identifi­cation of things and an elementary under-stan­ding of these processes must be realized. It seems that the dis-cussion on this topic is not only a spe­cific polemic over one problem that can be found in Wittgenstein, but has wider implications because the language games concept in the form of various „discourses“, „vocabularies“ or „cultures“ has found great favour in contemporary postmo­dern philo­sophy. On its basis postmodern philosophy very radi­cally crosses out the world, profanes its rational, objec­tive description and calls for free variation of different interpretations – their legitimacy is authenti­cated only by a consensus of their users. In this dispute, phe­nome­nology does not declare that there is a single true description of the world and that it is possible to find a reliable criterion for its definite legiti­mization. It does, however, draw on the fact that so called pre-linguistic expe­rience does not succumb to the variability of langu­age games and the interests of its users, but that it more and more cle­arly reflects the unitary and scru­table style of showing the real, ob­jectively given world even though this al­ways happens in se­emingly impalpable subjective acts. (shrink)

A significant and interesting part of the post-Gettier literature regarding the analysis of propositional knowledge is the attempt to supplement the traditional tripartite analysis by employing a fourth condition regarding the defeasibility of evidence and thus to preclude the counterexamples displayed in Gettier’s original article. My aim in this paper is to critically examine the sort of externalism that accompanies the most promising of the proposed fourth conditions, due to Pollock, in order to offer some fresh insights on this old (...) epistemological issue. I argue that Pollock’s paradigmatic treatment of the matter gives rise to a critical problem with regard to the exact role of the fourth condition and its relation with the onto-semantic or alethic condition of propositional knowledge, to wit, truth. In the light of this discussion, I draw certain conclusions about epistemic externalism and point out some of its theoretical shortcomings. (shrink)

I analyze Wittgenstein’s criticism of several assumptions that are crucial for a large part of cognitive science. These involve the concepts of computational processes in the brain which cause mental states and processes, the algorithmic processing of information in the brain (neural system), the brain as a machine, psycho physical parallelism, the thinking machine, as well as the confusion of rule following with behavior in accordance with the rule. In my opinion, the theorists of cognitive science have not yet seriously (...) considered Wittgenstein’s criticism so they, quite surprisingly, frequently confuse the question “how does it work?” with “what does it do?” But their most “deleterious” mistake is their confusion of the internal computational (or parallel) processes taking place in the brain (which possibly cause mental states) with socially-based, everyday criteria of recognition and classification of, and knowledge about, the content of mental states. (shrink)

Desde que Tarski publicó su estudio sobreel concepto de verdad en los años 30, hasido una práctica ortodoxa el considerarque t oda i nst anci a del esquema T esverdadera. Sin embargo, algunas instanciasdel esquema son falsas. Éstas incluyen lasi nst anci as paradój i cas ej empl i f i cadaspor la oración del mentiroso. Aquí sedemuestra que un esquema mejor permiteun tratamiento uniforme de la verdad enel que las paradojas semánticas resultanser simplemente falsas.Si nc e Ta r s (...) ki publ i s he d hi s s t udy ofthe concept of truth in the 1930s, it hasbeen orthodox practice to suppose thatevery instance of the T-schema is true.However, some instances of the schemaare false. These include the paradoxicalinstances exemplified by the Liar sentence.It is shown that a better schema allows auniform treatment of truth in which thesemantic paradoxes turn out to be simplyfalse. (shrink)

This paper takes distances from two influential images of Wittgenstein's philosophy: the image of a primarily ethical philosopher defended by the so-called «resolute» interpreters and that of an ascetically "analytical" philosopher transmitted by the standard interpretation. Instead of contrasting images (that of Wittgenstein as an "aesthetic" philosopher and that of the "ethical" Wittgenstein), this paper focuses on the analysis of the fractures and tensions characterizing not only the relationship between Wittgenstein's philosophy and aesthetics, but also the very style of Wittgenstein's (...) thought. Addressing a specific issue from a conceptual and textual standpoint (the unity of Ethics and Aesthetics in the Tractatus) seems to the author to be a fruitful strategy that allows us not only to understand whether and how determinant and central the aesthetic problem is for Wittgenstein, but also to see how aesthetics itself can be radically reshaped through the filter offered by his thought. In the first place, then, it is clarified what the Tractatus claim that ethics and aesthetics «sind eins» might entail. Secondly, it is checked if and how the conceptual consistency of the «being one» of ethics and aesthetics is transformed during the 1930s, to the point that it requires a different configuration: the metamor¬phosis of the logical unity between the two conceptual fields into an analogical affinity. Analyzing this conceptual metamorphosis the paper considers also the idea of an asymmetry of the aesthetic over the ethical as already evident, despite appearances, in the 1929 Lecture on Ethics. This asymmetry is then developed focusing the image of grammatical mechanism with its degrees of freedom of which Wittgensteins writes from 1930. In connection with this image the author outlines finally the idea of an aesthetic mechanism arising from primitive reactions and strictly related with the genesis of language games. (shrink)

Purpose – This paper aims to explore whether philosophical insights from Plato's dialogue “Parmenides” on the complex and often paradoxical nature of change can illuminate the nature of information retrieval (IR). IR is modelled as a dialectic process involving mutually dependent yet conflicting forces between the subjective and the objective. These forces operate to produce change in the subjective experience of users (becoming informed) through facilitating a relationship with objective documents. Accurately modelling, predicting and enabling this process remains a persistent (...) problem for IR and this paper seeks to examine the extent to which this is because of the nature of change. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a conceptual analysis and literature review. Findings – The problem of change (what it is, how it happens and how we can know it has happened) is essential to our understanding of information as information normally implies some kind of change in knowledge state. Any process of change, however, on examination of its qualities, appears to necessitate the combination of irreconcilable and conflicting forces. The apparent contradictions within the existence of change as discussed in “Parmenides” also exist in IR on both a theoretical and a technical level. Research limitations/implications – Change is a central concept for information in general and IR in particular. A deeper understanding of the paradoxical nature of change can provide new insights into IR theory and practice. Originality/value – The paper presents a new historical philosophical perspective on the nature of change and applies it to current IR problems. (shrink)

The main purpose of the following inquiry is to emphasise the importance of a phenomenon long neglected by the majority of the human sciences, the artefact; each one of us, no matter what age, sex or culture, is in contact with artefacts every moment of our lives yet despite this they have received scant attention. The study begins by outlining a definition of the artefact, highlighting those characteristics which, in combination, ensure its centrality to social life before, through a discussion (...) of Popper's ideas, proceeding to see how material culture can be conceptualised as meaningful. In order to understand how meaning becomes attached to the artefact the notion of objectification will be analysed and, consequently, so shall the importance of both the type of activity and the physical nature of the materials involved in the artefact's production. Picking up on the theme of materiality this aspect of material culture will be shown to pose major problems to any interpretation of the artefact along semiological lines; language and material culture are evinced to possess fundamentally distinct characteristics which make comparisons between them far from straightforward. These differences will be analysed further, concentrating specifically on the role of context in the establishment of meaning. This leads on to the proposal that our understanding of artefacts can occur on three levels; three forms of knowledge are thus described of which a linguistically formulated type constitutes just one kind. The penultimate chapter tackles the ways in which artefacts affect us, how they are active elements in our relationships with them; therefore, a dialectical position is postulated in which both artefacts and agents take part. Finally, the study concludes by stressing some of its wider implications and suggests a few of the practical situations to which it can be applied. (shrink)

Different accounts of Skinner's work are often in conflict. Some interpretations, for example, regard Skinner as a mechanist. Other interpretations regard Skinner as a selectionist. An alternative interpretation is to see Skinner as employing both views with changes in these views and their proportionate relations over time. To clarify these distinctions, it is helpful to see Skinner's work against the background of similar changes that have been taking place in Western Culture. An extended and overlapping shift in cultural values has (...) occurred from modernism to postmodernism. Some key distinctions in this shift are that modernism emphasizes abstract simplicity, permanent necessity, and absolutely certain sources of truth. Postmodernism emphasizes complex and concrete contexts, probability, and explanations of change in terms of consequences. Skinner shows a similarly extended and overlapping shift over time that results in separate sets of responses which may be regarded as two sides or two selves of Skinner: one an organized collection of responses aligned with modernism, another an organized collection of responses aligned with postmodernism. (shrink)

Cette publication, la trois cent vingt-troisième de la série, a été rendue possible grâce à la contribution financière du FQRSC (Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture).

Brandom's book Making It Explicit defends Davidson's claim that conceptual thought can arise only on the background of a practice of mutual interpretation, without endorsing the further view that one can be a thinker only if one has the concept of a concept. This involves giving an account of conceptual content in terms of what Brandom calls practical deontic attitudes. In this paper, I make a plea for the conclusion that these practical attitudes are best seen as intentional, but non-conceptually (...) contentful. In particular, I argue that the hypothesis that Brandom's practical deontic attitudes are non-conceptually contentful wouldn't conflict with his view that non-conceptual intentionality is merely derivative. I then explore some of the implications which this hypothesis might have with respect to various forms of «intentional ascent». (shrink)

Sir Michael Dummett belongs to a small group of the greatest analytical philosophers of the second half of the 20th century, and presumably it would be no exaggeration to consider him the most prominent and influential British philosopher over the last three decades. He has published numerous articles, not only in the field of philosophy. However, a reader willing to learn his recent views is going to face some problems. Although Dummett’s most extended monograph — The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (...) — being a systematic exposition of his own views, was published relatively not so long ago, large parts of it, presented as The William James Lectures at the Harvard University, originally have even come from 1976. From this earlier material, the reader can hardly separate what Dummett has added when preparing this monograph to publication, at the end of the 1980s. (shrink)

The U.S.-led military incursion in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has been filled with myriad examples of the Bush Administration using misleading statements in an effort to win the support of American citizens, and in a secondary sense, the international community and the Iraqis. This situation provides many opportunities to analyze the use of sophistry and linguistic sleight of hand. In this paper, I draw upon the insights offered by Hannah Arendt in the earlier context of her critiques of totalitarianism (...) during the 1930s and 1940s, and her later critique of the United States upon the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Her insights regarding truth and lying in politics shed light on what is wrong with U.S. approaches today. Similar methods continue to be used today since people have continued to be gullible to these methods. (shrink)

This paper considers the charge that fictions and metaphors are non-normal, non-serious, non-primary uses of communication. This charge was made when Plato undertook the first critique of narrative art; and, ever since Aristotle’s Poetics, what there is that might be called a philosophy of narrative art has always seemed duty-bound to worry about it. This apologetic predicament has limited the development of a philosophy of fiction. The complementary charge—that literal, non-fictional uses have normal, serious and primary status in human communication, (...) and that fictions and metaphors are parasitic uses—is widely held; and, as expressed by John Austin in his theory of speech acts, it drew a response from Jacques Derrida, setting off a curious little debate between two philosophical traditions that have normally been as oil and water to one another. This paper investigates the relation between literal and non-fictional uses on the one hand, and metaphorical and fictional uses on the other. In the matter of determining the status of priority, it looks to the history of selection—both natural and social selection—of communicative traits and functions. Though it deals mainly with language, it argues that the questions should be generalised to cover human symbolic communication generally, if only because human symbolic communication has not evolved in isolation from mimetic acts and linguistic acts are themselves so often mimetic. And it argues that, because of the nature of conditional inferences involved in symbolic communication, metaphorical and fictive forms are inseparable from normal, serious, primary use. This ‘defence of poesy’ as contemporary with and inseparable from reason is offered not simply as a contribution to the philosophy of language, but primarily as a contribution to a philosophy of fiction. (shrink)

Although Wilfrid Sellars's work holds a prominent place in recent analytic philosophy, little work has been done to situate his early approaches to normativity and the philosophy of language in their proper context. What little work has been done tends to emphasize Sellars's connection to a then dominant logical empiricism at the expense of marginalizing other American philosophical schools. On top of this historical issue, most scholars attempting to explain Sellars's systematic philosophy tend to ignore a developmental picture of Sellars's (...) positions and focus on explicating the systematic character of his thought. My dissertation attempts to correct both of these tendencies by offering a historically situated account of Sellars's early papers that presents his views in relation to logical empiricism, the "Iowa School" of philosophy as embodied in Gustav Bergmann's and Everett Hall's writings, and some aspects of traditional American philosophy. By fleshing out the context of Sellars's early papers, it becomes clear that the "strong" normativist project present in his later essays developed out of his shift from his attempt to fit "traditional" philosophical problems into a formalist approach to language. My thesis acts as a "correction" to the previous interpretive points by presenting a more complex characterization of the contextual influences on Sellars's early papers and creating a foundation for a developmental account of Sellars's later views. I do this by examining evidence from Sellars's unpublished correspondence and works from a myriad of archival sources in conjunction with an analysis of his early publications. (shrink)

I offer an interpretation of Wittgenstein's claim that Russell's theory of judgment fails to show that it's not possible to judge nonsense.

This book is a synthesis of more than three decades of research into the concept of time and its semiotic nature. If traditional philosophy – and philosophy of time should be no exception – in the shadow of advancing biology can be said to have reached an impasse, one important reason for this, in harmony with Wittgenstein’s vision, appears to have been its lack of appropriate tools for explicating language. The present theory of time proceeds, accordingly, from the exploration of (...) temporal expressions in language as an evolutionary fact. It derives in a hypothetical, coherent feedback process of hierarchically ordered distinctions the semantics of time from its biologically dictated perceptual and cognitive-pragmatic origins. The corresponding abductive-regulative model is anchored in the assumption of biological rhythmization as the very foundation of perception and mental/physical action. Understood to originate in space and spatial perspective, time reveals itself as an instrument for temporal perspective on motion (events and situations) in a process of analysis, i.e., discontinuation of chaos made divisible and continuous by the rhythmical screen. Whereas traditional philosophy of time paid attention almost exclusively to the temporal category of tense, the biopragmatic model sees strong evidence in the perspectival nature of time for ascribing the decisive, and probably universal, role in temporal analysis to the linguistic category of aspect. Aspect may, according to the present findings, be assumed to partake already of change-of-state and cause-effect analysis without which man’s adaptation to new situations – and precondition for survival – would be inconceivable. The proposed model of space/time cognition, inspired by Hegelian dialectics, Heidegger-Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle and Peircean logic, makes Kantian a priori superfluous and liberates time from its enigmatic appearance. For the first time in temporal studies it thus appears possible to derive hypothetically linguistic expressions of time all the way from pretemporal, homogeneous continuity effected by biological rhythmization, via pretemporal metonymic (Gestalt), chunk-wise partitioning – as a general precondition for the perception and, based on primary metaphorization, the cognition of things, space and motion – to temporal analysis/discontinuation proper, primarily by aspectual perspective, and the subsequent synthesized, heterogeneous continuity of temporally ordered events. The conception of time, so disastrous for modern temporal logic, i.e., as moving object assigned extension, divisible continuity (‛linearity’) and direction, can be shown to have emerged as a result of secondary metaphorization. (shrink)

Summary. I do not think there is one true answer to the question What is logic?. There are, clearly, good and less good answers, and there are answers which are plainly wrong; but the term 'logic' has been employed, throughout the history of the subject matter, in such diverse ways that no single one of the uses can be said to be the correct one. However, even among the answers which are acceptable on historico-semantical grounds there are still, without doubt, (...) good and less good ones, in the sense of more and less useful. In this paper, I will argue for a certain, rather narrow conception of logic; and I am going to argue that it is not only an acceptable answer, but also one which is more useful and fruitful than its alternatives. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es el de explorar las principales características del ensayo como genus dicendi filosófico y cómo se cumplen en las obras de Ortega. En consecuencia, analizo en primer lugar las cuatro características principales del búsqueda de la verdad, valor cognitivo de las opiniones, rechazo del argumento de autoridad y tolerancia intelectual. Y, en segundo lugar, demuestro cómo se han tenido en cuenta en los escritos filosóficos de Ortega. ENGLISH: The aim of this paper is to explore (...) the main characteristics of the essay as philosophical genus dicendi and how they are fulfilled in Ortega’s works. Consequently, I firstly analyze the main four characteristics of the essay, namely, search for truth, cognitive value of opinions, rejection of the argument from authority, and intellectual tolerance. And secondly, I demonstrate how they have been taken into account by Ortega in his philosophical writing. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to argue that the ontological setting of objects in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a version of structural realism. According to our plan, one of the opening statements of the Tractatus – The world is the totality of facts, not of things – introduces structuralist perspective: structures are superior to their constituents. However, structuralists use the notion ‘superior’ in various senses, but this paper argues that the Tractatus places its objects within the framework of ontic structural (...) realism in its moderate form. That form puts structures and individuals on the same ontological footing. Such thesis contradicts traditional object-ontology that dominates Tractarian literature. (shrink)

This paper argues that Cora Diamond's interpretation of Wittgenstein's early and later work, and her specific attempts to apply it in religious and ethical contexts, show a willingness to sacrifice elements of Wittgenstein's signature concepts to the demands of what she calls his 'realistic spirit'. The paper also argues that this willingness relates her project to a certain understanding of modernism in the arts.

This paper deals with the question whether science and philosophy are continuous, as Quine thought, or whether they are completely separated, as Wittgenstein held. Reconstructing the reasons why the latter kept a sharp distinction between science and philosophy, it examines the attempts of the former to resolve philosophical problems in scientific terms. It maintains that Quine’s scientism is misconceived and presents further reasons for making a distinction (if not a separation) between science and philosophy.