Commercial lawyers working across borders know that globalization has changed commercial law. To think of commercial law as only the law of states is to have an inadequate understanding of the norms governing commercial transactions. Some have argued for a transnational conception of commercial law, but their grounds of justification have been unpersuasive, often grounded on claims about the common content among national legal systems. Legal positivism is a rich literature on the concept of a legal system and the validity (...) conditions for rules in legal systems, but it has not been used to understand legal order outside or beyond the state. This article aims to use legal positivism to conceptualize a transnational commercial law order. Prevailing positivist accounts at least implicitly condition legal order on state sovereignty. The article offers a cosmopolitan conception of legal positivism, in which the state is no longer an enabling condition for law. The cosmopolitan conception provides the means by which to adequately describe a transnational commercial law order. There are limits to the conceptual analysis this article provides, one of which is that it does not purport to evaluate the justice or morality of transnational legal order. But the cosmopolitan conception of legal positivism elucidated in this article stands on its own as a way of understanding a number of transnational legal orders other than commercial law. The attractiveness of the account is that it describes law as a human social practice even when it is not solely the product of the state, so that we do not have to rely on natural law theories to understand legal rules that states do not maintain. (shrink)

Almost twenty years ago, a genuinely new school of thought emerged in the field of jurisprudential methodology. It is a pragmatist school. Roughly, the pragmatists contend that, when inquiring about the nature of law, we should evaluate potential answers based on practical criteria. For many legal philosophers, this contention seems both unclear and unhinged. That appearance is lamentable. The pragmatist approach to jurisprudential methodology has received insufficient attention for at least two reasons. First, the pragmatists do not conceive of themselves (...) as comprising a school; in fact, these proponents have different names for their common position, which makes it hard to see the commonalities. Second, the most famous statement of the pragmatist view has received withering criticism, criticism that has not been sufficiently answered, a fact that may lead opponents of pragmatism, as well as potential supporters, to doubt that a viable view of this kind can be held. This Essay aims to serve as a corrective. (shrink)

African jurisprudence, like African philosophy, continues to be hotly debated. This article contends that the debate straddles the uniqueness claim which either emphasises the existence or possibility of a peculiar legal framework on the continent, and a historical co-extensional position reiterating that African jurisprudence is a continuum of other legal traditions. The article argues that there is no uniquely African jurisprudence, and that what obtains within the structures of jurisprudence on the continent also exists within various (...) legal traditions elsewhere, and as such can at best be described as ‘jurisprudence in Africa’ rather than ‘African jurisprudence’. It defends this thesis through analytic and comparative explications of the content of natural law theory and legal positivism as experienced on the continent. It concedes that relics of the colonial legal experience create contestations that inform scholars’ calls for a return to traditional legal systems. It concludes that a reconstructive jurisprudence in Africa must take cognisance of the continent’s historical and evolutionary legal experiences, but that a unified or monolithic theory may not be sufficient to address the choice of functional jurisprudence. Keywords African jurisprudence, jurisprudence in Africa, African legal evolution, diffused legal theories. (shrink)

Some Anglophone legal theorists look to analytic philosophy for core presuppositions. For example, the epistemological theories of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Willard Quine shape the theories of Dennis Patterson and Brian Leiter, respectively. These epistemologies are anti-foundational since they reject the kind of certain grounding that is exemplified in Cartesian philosophy. And, they are coherentist in that they seek to legitimate truth-claims by reference to entire linguistic systems. While these theories are insightful, the current context of information and communication technologies (...) (ICT) has created new informational concepts and issues. As a result, the analytic epistemologies are increasingly challenged by alternative perspectives. One such alternative is Structural Realism (SR), which is influential among the natural sciences, and especially physics. “Informational Structural Realism,” (ISR) is a variant of SR that was introduced by Luciano Floridi. Unlike the coherentist theories, ISR promotes examination of the connections among types of information and informational structures. It is an important shift for legal theory today, since the challenges that the ICT presents have to do with pattern recognition across vast domains of diverse data. An informational jurisprudence is now required to understand the issues emerging from the ICT. (shrink)

This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates human rights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Human rights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. Words have been thought (...) to copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in human rights laws, I begin by outlining how universal human rights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of human rights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of human rights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether human rights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law. (shrink)

This article aims to present the WEIRD character – acronym to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – of the central intuitions used by Analytic Jurisprudence, providing evidence to the critique made by Leiter’s Naturalized Jurisprudence in relation to ethnographic constraints of the Jurisprudence. We conclude that the intuitions about Law used by the Analytic Jurisprudence match a style of thinking situated at the extreme analytic end of the “analytic x holistic” scale (...) that doesn’t correspond to the pattern of all human populations, and do not allow universal inferences about the concept of Law. (shrink)

This essays argues that Freud’s vision of the rule of law may be worthwhile pondering by legal scholars. It can heighten awareness of its unconscious dimensions and point to a variety of ways in which the law functions as part of culture or civilization, rather than as a system with its own rules. The first two parts of the essay seek to reconstruct Freud’s notion of the rule of law as a dialectical or paradoxical civilizatory force, restraining the passions even (...) though they drive it. These two parts retrace Freud’s genealogy of the law’s prehistoric origins and unconscious dynamics, which can be found in Totem and Taboo and, in summary form, in Moses and Monotheism. Then, the third section critically assesses the problems and limitations of some of the uses legal scholars made of Freud’s genealogy. Finally, the essay returns to the intellectual context of Freud’s conception of the rule of law, concluding with the claim that a Freudian perspective implies, in fact, that legal studies should be conceived as cultural studies. (shrink)

Legal philosophers make a number of bold, contentious claims about the nature of law. For instance, some claim that law necessarily involves coercion, while others disagree. Some claim that all law enjoys presumptive moral validity, while others disagree. We can see these claims in at least three, mutually exclusive ways: (1) We can see them as descriptions of law’s nature (descriptivism), (2) we can see them as expressing non-descriptive attitudes of the legal philosophers in question (expressivism), or (3) we can (...) see them as practical claims about how we should view law or order our society (pragmatism). This paper argues that we should understand these claims in the pragmatist way, as claims about how we should view law or order society. (shrink)

La propuesta metodológica de la «Analytical Jurisprudence» o escuela analítica del Derecho encabezada por H. L. A. Hart (1907-1992) abrió un nuevo espacio de reflexión en el ámbito jurídico anglosajón al emplear el análisis del significado de las palabras como medio para dilucidar la estructura del pensamiento jurídico. Hart, miembro del grupo de Oxford, aplicó una nueva sensibilidad por las distinciones lógicas y lingüísticas a la filosofía del derecho (PANNAM, 2008) y aportó a la discusión de los teóricos del (...) derecho de la segunda mitad del siglo XX una de las convicciones centrales que guiaron su trabajo: la de que las interrogantes más complejas de la teoría del derecho podían dilucidarse esclareciendo el modo en que los términos jurídicos se utilizan en la práctica (ETCHEVERRY, 2009). -/- El objetivo de este artículo es exponer cómo esta propuesta metodológica ha marcado la discusión en las actuales teorías analíticas anglosajonas de la interpretación jurídica, más específicamente, entre las denominadas teorías convencionalistas y teorías realistas del significado. Aspiramos a mostrar cómo una teoría realista del lenguaje jurídico —que incluya una teoría sobre el significado de los términos y enunciados jurídicos— sigue siendo una tarea pendiente que podría ser decisivamente enriquecida mediante la recuperación del pensamiento analógico desarrollado por Mauricio Beuchot. (shrink)

This brief essay describes what critical legal scholars said – or perhaps more accurately – would have said – about the concept of the rule of law. Describing critical legal studies as a project in American legal thought rather than analytical jurisprudence, it argues that “the rule of law” is an ideological project, and can come in various versions – liberal, social democratic, and more. It addresses Morton Horwitz’s critique of E.P. Thompson’s assertion that the rule of law is (...) an unqualified human good, and situates the CLS critique of the rule of law within more general discussion of the rule of law by Hayek and Fuller. It concludes by applying ideology-critique to the rule of law, arguing that in whatever form it takes the rule of law contributes to a culture of justification, which may indeed be an unqualified human good. (shrink)

The article is concerned with the general characteristics of Aristotle’s theory of a genus-differentia definition. The authors examine the validity of the definitions in the framework of legal language and present some objections against the definitions of per genus proximum et differentia specificam as they are considered by Aristotle. At the same time, through the objections to the position of genus-differentia definition critics, it is proved that in a number of cases Aristotle’s theory is more preferable than the approach offered (...) by Herbert Hart, the proponent of analytical legal philosophy. The argument of Peter Hacker is used to reinstate Aristotle’s genus-differentia definitions. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that differences between the ‘new moral science’ of the seventeenth century and scholastic natural law theory originated primarily from the skeptical challenge the former had to face. Pufendorf’s project of a scientia practica universalis is the paramount expression of an anti-skeptical moral science, a ‘science’ that is both explanatory and normative, but also anti-dogmatic insofar as it tries to base its laws on those basic phenomena of human life which, supposedly, are immune to skeptical doubt. (...) The main scholastic legacy to the new moral science is the dichotomy between an ‘intellectualist’ and a ‘voluntarist’ view of natural law (or between lex immanens and lex imposita). Voluntarism lies at the basis of both theological views, such as Calvinism, and political views, such as those of Hobbes and Locke. The need to counterbalance the undesirable implications of extreme voluntarism may account for much of the developments in ethics and politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Scottish natural jurisprudence, which tried to find a middle way between skepticism and extreme voluntarism, is less secular and more empirical than received wisdom admits. There emerged, as one of its ‘accidental’ outcomes, a systematic, self-contained and empirical economic theory from the search for an empirically based normative theory of social life. The basic assumption of such a theory, namely, the notion of societal laws as embedded in trans-individual mechanisms, derives from the voluntarist view of natural law as ‘imposed’ law.Later discussions of social issues in terms of ‘economic’ and ‘ethical’ reasons originated partly from a misreading ofthe Scottish natural jurisprudential framework of economic theory. Starting with this reconstruction, I try to shed some light on recent discussions about the role of ethics in economics. (shrink)

In an important new Article, titled A Matter of Facts: The Evolution of the Copyright Fact-Exclusion and Its Implications for Disinformation and Democracy, Professor Jessica Silbey argues provocatively that we “‘only” know that facts are excluded from copyright protection because Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service “says so.” She argues that both the nature and importance of facts has been underdefined and is in flux, nonetheless tracing it to the foundational cases of United States (U.S.) copyright law, and argues for (...) a stronger exclusion of facts, which are publici juris, and belong in the public domain. This central thesis is most agreeable, as is her analysis of doctrine and legislative history. The Article’s rich study of American pragmatism, legal realism, the Cambridge school of analytic philosophy, and the “new social scientists,” which Professor Silbey uses to support a strong fact-exclusion, is a tour de force. The Article ends with a list of proposals for a strong Feist application to evaluations, catalogs, manuals, and legal documents. It also includes a call not to allow for industrial dilution of copyright’s framework, including the facts and ideas exclusion. Both are laudable and timely in the era of generative artificial intelligence (AI), where proposals to protect non-authorial quasi-expression or to prevent copying of non-expressive subject matter abound. -/- While I agree with a call for a robust public domain and strong fact-exclusion, and devote Part II of this Response to explore further doctrinal grounds for them, in Part III I explore Silbey’s argument that “pragmatist philosophy’s challenge to universal truths combined with legal realist challenges to formalist jurisprudence eventually shape what is (or should be) copyright law’s broad public domain in ‘facts.’” It is not immediately clear if pragmatism and realism are a solid ground for justifying strong legal principles and axioms. Engaging with this provocative argument allows us to uncover what realism means to Professor Silbey and the much more radical consequences of her arguments. Part IV concludes. (shrink)

According to the common view, conscientious objection is grounded in autonomy or in ‘freedom of conscience’ and is tolerated out of respect for the objector's autonomy. Emphasising freedom of conscience or autonomy as a central concept within the issue of conscientious objection implies that the conscientious objector should have an independent choice among alternative beliefs, positions or values. In this paper it is argued that: (a) it is not true that the typical conscientious objector has such a choice when they (...) decide to act upon their conscience and (b) it is not true that the typical conscientious objector exercises autonomy when developing or acquiring their conscience. Therefore, with regard to tolerating conscientious objection, we should apply the concept of autonomy with caution, as tolerating conscientious objection does not reflect respect for the conscientious objector’s right to choose but rather acknowledges their lack of real ability to choose their conscience and to refrain from acting upon their conscience. This has both normative and analytical implications for the treatment of conscientious objectors. (shrink)

This essay is an examination of the relationship between phenomenology and analytic method in the philosophy of law. It proceeds by way of a case study, the requirement of compliance in Raz’s theory of mandatory norms. Proceeding in this way provides a degree of specificity that is otherwise neglected in the relevant literature on method. Drawing on insights from the philosophy of art and cognitive neuroscience, it is argued that the requirement of compliance is beset by a range of (...) epistemological difficulties. The implications of these difficulties are then reviewed for method and normativity in practical reason. A topology of normativity emerges nearer the end of the paper, followed by a brief examination of how certain normative categories must satisfy distinct burdens of proof. (shrink)

“Experimental jurisprudence” draws on empirical data to inform questions typically associated with jurisprudence or legal theory. Scholars in this flourishing movement conduct empirical studies about a variety of legal language and concepts. Despite the movement’s growth, its justification is still opaque. Jurisprudence is the study of deep and longstanding theoretical questions about law’s nature, but “experimental jurisprudence,” it might seem, simply surveys laypeople. This Article elaborates and defends experimental jurisprudence. Experimental jurisprudence, appropriately understood, is (...) not only consistent with traditional jurisprudence; it is an essential branch of it. (shrink)

The proposed theoretical motivation for legal fictionalism begins by focusing upon the seemingly supernatural powers of creation and control that mere mortals exercise over legal things, as a subclass of socially constructed things. This focus brings to the fore a dilemma of uncharitableness concerning the ontological commitments expressed in the discourse of whole societies about such things. Either, there is widespread equivocation as to the fundamental concept expressed by terms such as ‘existence’ or our claims about legal and other institutional (...) things are never really true. When stated as a dilemma, rather than assuming either horn from the outset, our broader social practice of fiction-telling yields a reason to prefer the fictionalist horn. -/- I differentiate three grades of legal fictionalism and contrast strong legal fictionalism with Horacio Spector’s weak form. Only the stronger form has it that engagement in a fictional discourse of law can provide reasons for legal decision-making independent of moral opinions or policy considerations. This stance relies on the claim that maintaining a fictional discourse with respect for its integrity justifies inferences to conclusions about a fictional domain beyond what is described in existing expressions of the discourse. Focusing on ontology allows an analogy between a fictional discourse of law and literary or popular fiction, in which context such inferences are more obviously persuasive. I argue that this notion of respect for the integrity of such a discourse saves legal formalist jurisprudence from the indeterminacy objections of legal realists. (shrink)

Analytic theology is often seen as an outgrowth of analytic philosophy of religion. It isn’t fully clear, however, whether it differs from analytic philosophy of religion in some important way. Is analytic theology really just a sub-field of analytic philosophy of religion, or can it be distinguished from the latter in virtue of fundamental differences at the level of subject matter or metholodology? These are pressing questions for the burgeoning field of analytic theology. The (...) aim of this article, then, will be to map out several forms that analytic theology might (and in some cases actually does) take before examining the extent to which each can be thought to be distinct from analytic philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Academia is a competitive environment. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are limited in experience and resources and especially need achievements to secure and expand their careers. To help with these issues, this book offers a new approach for conducting research using the combination of mindsponge innovative thinking and Bayesian analytics. This is not just another analytics book. 1. A new perspective on psychological processes: Mindsponge is a novel approach for examining the human mind’s information processing mechanism. This conceptual framework is used (...) to construct models in studies. The framework is highly flexible and widely applicable for many different types of information processes. The mindsponge approach can help researchers discover interesting ideas or even formulate their very own theories when investigating psychosocial phenomena. This approach brings a fresh wind to the current landscape of social sciences and humanities (SSH). 2. Easy-to-follow analysis protocol: The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF analytics) is useful in terms of computing and visualizing power but also easy to learn and apply. Contrary to being intimidating, the Bayesian analytics section of this book is presented in a reader-friendly manner with a detailed yet clear step-by-step procedure. Examples are from published BMF articles, allowing readers to immediately practice the method and quickly create their own applications. With educational purposes in mind, the book is very suitable for ECRs who are looking to innovate their research methods. 3. Advocating for low-cost, high-quality research: Doing science can be very costly. Mindsponge innovative thinking and BMF analytics help produce impactful studies using openly available data on online repositories. This is based on the authors’ previous works and experiences. The book presents examples of employing the open R package bayesvl on secondary data from different sources. With less financial constraints, researchers can have more freedom of thought to pursue their curiosity and creativity. ECRs in low- and middle-income countries may find this aspect crucial in their careers. 4. Support and collaboration: The authors share their insights from experiences in the academic publishing system to help readers get through the processes of manuscript writing and peer-reviewing more easily. The authors are also ready to support other researchers with further inquiries and collaboration opportunities at the following website, mindsponge(dot)info. This book is for: a) ECRs whose only abundant resources are their innovation capacity and strength of will; b) Researchers in SSH who want to explore a novel approach to thinking and study conducting; c) Low- and middle-income countries’ researchers looking for a cost-effective research protocol; and, d) Innovative thinkers who want to turn their interesting thoughts into good publications. (shrink)

This paper shows that during the first half of the 1960s The Journal of Philosophy quickly moved from publishing work in diverse philosophical traditions to, essentially, only publishing analytic philosophy. Further, the changes at the journal are shown, with the help of previous work on the journals Mind and The Philosophical Review, to be part of a pattern involving generalist philosophy journals in Britain and America during the period 1925-1969. The pattern is one in which journals controlled by (...) class='Hi'>analytic philosophers systematically promote a form of critical philosophy and marginalise rival approaches to philosophy. This pattern, it is argued, helps to explain the growing dominance of analytic philosophy during the twentieth century and allows characterising this form of philosophy as, at least during 1925-1969, a sectarian form of critical philosophy. (shrink)

The first and only jurisprudence textbook to put African ideas, authors, and texts into conversation with those from the Western tradition, now with revised and expanded discussions of especially natural law theory, legal realism, postmodernism, critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminism, and the philosophy of punishment, along with new lists of additional readings and of web resources. 445 pp.

It is possible and thereby feasible to develop and implement a pragmatic methodology for a preemptive evidentiary system of ‘Paraphysical Jurisprudence’ for mediating the occurrence of massacres. A required comprehensive completion and formalizing of the tools of epistemology (theory of knowledge) already exists and has been tested both ecumenically and scientifically. The evolution of epistemology has followed the historical progression from myth and superstition to logic and reason to empiricism and now finally to the utility of ‘transcendence’ as a (...) tool in knowledge acquisition. An inspiring example from popular culture is illustrated in the 2002 Hollywood film noir “Minority Report” designed by its director to present a ‘plausible future world’ for the year 2054 wherein an elaborate ‘Precrime Unit’ is tested to prevent murder by utilizing a trio of ‘precogs’ bathed in a ‘photonic milk’ able to presciently predetermine impending occurrences of homicide for which the Precrime Police Unit then intervenes to prevent. Disdain for a putative so-called scientific metaphysics by natural philosophers is deeply rooted in modern pragmatic societies; perhaps rightly so as consistency, credibility and lack of a comprehensive theory has been heretofore emphatically lacking. In addition to the major problem of repeatability is the perceived distinction between domains of the physical and so-called ‘spiritual’ as mutually exclusive. In this work a strong case is made for the rigorous viability and near term putative implementation of a system of paraphysical jurisprudence drawing on the utility of a panoply of concepts. The remaining question is when does feasible become practical in the face of a steady increase in the heinous massacre of innocents? (shrink)

The relevance of analytic metaphysics has come under criticism: Ladyman & Ross, for instance, have suggested do discontinue the field. French & McKenzie have argued in defense of analytic metaphysics that it develops tools that could turn out to be useful for philosophy of physics. In this article, we show first that this heuristic defense of metaphysics can be extended to the scientific field of applied ontology, which uses constructs from analytic metaphysics. Second, we elaborate on a (...) parallel by French & McKenzie between mathematics and metaphysics to show that the whole field of analytic metaphysics, being useful not only for philosophy but also for science, should continue to exist as a largely autonomous field. (shrink)

In this paper I aim at explaining how analytic philosophical theology developed into a thriving field of research. In doing so, I place analytic philosophical theology into a larger intellectually narrative that is deeply influenced by the philosophy of Enlightenment. This larger framework shows that analytic philosophical theology aims at providing answers to concerns raised by a philosophical tradition that shaped fundamentally the making of our modern Western secular world.

/Analyticity theorists/, as I will call them, endorse the /doctrine of analyticity in ontology/: if some truth P analytically entails the existence of certain things, then a theory that contains P but does not claim that those things exist is no more ontologically parsimonious than a theory that also claims that they exist. Suppose, for instance, that the existence of a table in a certain location is analytically entailed by the existence and features of certain particles in that location. The (...) doctrine implies that the table's existence requires nothing more of the world than that those particles exist and bear the features in question. Analyticity theorists have alleged that this idea may be used to defend controversial existence claims against a battery of objections. I argue that this style of defense fails, because the doctrine faces counter-examples. An existence claim may be analytically entailed by some truth and still report a substantial further fact. (shrink)

Kant refers to analytic cognition in several prominent places. The prevailing wisdom, however, denies the possibility of analytic cognition within his theory of cognition. I shall argue that this is mistaken. I show that we can account for analytic cognition’s possibility by appealing to variants of the more familiar conditions on the cognition of objects. I also highlight analytic cognition’s connection to insight and analytic knowledge. In the process, I provide a fuller account of Kant’s (...) view of our mental lives than has been typically acknowledged. (shrink)

Drawing upon Martha Fineman’s vulnerability theory, the paper argues that the legal claims of homeless appellants before and during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrate our universal vulnerability which stems from the essential, life-sustaining activities flowing from the ontological status of the human body. By recognizing that housing availability has constitutional significance because it provides for life-sustaining activities such as sleeping, eating and lying down, I argue that the legal rationale reviewed in the paper underscores the empirical, ontological reality of the body (...) as the basis for a jurisprudence of universal vulnerability. By tracing the constitutional basis of this jurisprudence from Right to Travel to Eighth Amendment grounds during COVID-19, the paper outlines a distinct legal paradigm for understanding vulnerability in its universal, constant and essential form – one of the central premises of vulnerability theory. (shrink)

Acceptable analyticities, i.e. contradictions or tautologies, constitute problematic evidence for the idea that language includes a deductive system. In recent discussion, two accounts have been presented in the literature to explain the available evidence. According to one of the accounts, grammatical analyticities are accessible to the system but a pragmatic strengthening repair mechanism can apply and prevent the structures from being actually interpreted as contradictions or tautologies. The proposed data, however, leaves it open whether other versions of the meaning modulation (...) operation are required. Novel evidence we present argues that a loosening version of the repair mechanism must be available. Our observation concerns acceptable lexical contradictions that cannot be rescued if only a strengthening version of the pragmatic strategy is available. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, if ‘the overrepresentation of Christian theists in analytic philosophy of religion is unhealthy for the field, since they would be too much influenced by prior beliefs when evaluating religious arguments’ (De Cruz and De Smedt (2016), 119), then a first step toward a potential remedy is this: analytic philosophers of religion need to restructure their analytical tasks. For one way to mitigate the effects of confirmation bias, which may be influencing how (...) class='Hi'>analytic philosophers of religion evaluate arguments in Analytical Philosophy of Religion (APR), is to consider other points of view. Applied to APR, this means considering religious beliefs, questions, and arguments couched in non-Christian terms. In this paper, I focus on Islam in particular. My aim is to show that Islam is a fertile ground of philosophical questions and arguments for analytic philosophers of religion to engage with. Engaging with questions and arguments couched in non-Christian terms would help make work in APR more diverse and inclusive of religions other than Christianity, which in turn would also be a first step toward attracting non-Christians to APR. (shrink)

Philosophy is often divided into two traditions: analytic and continental philosophy. Characterizing the analytic-continental divide, however, is no easy task. Some philosophers explain the divide in terms of the place of argument in these traditions. This raises the following questions: Is analytic philosophy rife with arguments while continental philosophy is devoid of arguments? Or can different types of arguments be found in analytic and continental philosophy? This paper presents the results of an empirical study of a (...) large corpus of philosophical texts mined from the JSTOR database (n = 53,260) designed to find patterns of argumentation by type. Overall, the results suggest that there are no significant differences between the types of arguments advanced in analytic and continental philosophy journal articles. The findings, therefore, provide no empirical support to the hypothesis that the divide between analytic and continental philosophy has to do with the place of argument in these traditions. (shrink)

Explores the failure of analytic aesthetics to examine the question of the capacity of art to transcend time, and its own commitment – seldom explicitly acknowledged – to the assumption that this capacity functions through the traditional, but no longer viable, notion of timelessness inherited from Enlightenment aesthetics.

This two-part paper reconstructs the analytic turn in American philosophy through a comparative longitudinal study of three major philosophy departments: Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. I trace their hiring policies, tenure decisions, curriculum designs, and the external pressures that forced them to continuously adapt their strategies; and I use those analyses to distill some of the factors that contributed to the rapid growth of analytic philosophy between 1940 and 1970. In this first part, I show that philosophers at Princeton, (...) Yale, and Columbia actively tried to promote a ‘humanistic’ conception of philosophy until the early 1950s. I argue that logical positivism and related ‘scientific’ approaches were seen as a fundamental threat to the discipline and that this opposition influenced decision making at all three institutions. While many students and recent graduates saw philosophy as a scientific discipline, senior members of the community deplored the decline of the humanities and appointed mostly humanistic philosophers. I show that this generational conflict was reinforced by demographic, political, and economic developments and argue that these discriminatory practices helped forge a coalition between logical empiricists, scientific pragmatists, and ordinary language philosophers, who all began to identify as ‘analytic’ philosophers after the war. (shrink)

This paper continues a reconstruction of the analytic turn in American philosophy between 1940 and 1970. The first part of this paper argued that philosophers at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia sought to stimulate ‘humanistic’ approaches to philosophy in their hiring policies and tenure decisions, thereby marginalizing the ‘scientific’ philosophies that were in vogue among their students. This second part unearths some of the mechanisms that contributed to the analytic turn once the movement’s fiercest opponents retired. I argue that (...) a new generation of deans and chairmen initially tried to craft ‘balanced’ departments but that various external variables— competition between elite universities, a shortage of graduates with training in modern logic, and the explosive growth of American higher education—eventually led to major policy shifts. Within a decade, I show, the distorted job market helped tip the balance into the other direction, strongly advantaging departments that had invested in analytic philosophy. By the late 1960s, the movement became so successful that the traditional division between humanistic and scientific approaches began to be replaced by a distinction between analytic and ‘continental’ philosophy, referring to the schools of philosophy that were popular across the Atlantic. American philosophy, by then, just was analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of the history of the notion of essence in 20th century analytic philosophy, focusing on views held by influential analytic philosophers who discussed, or relied on essence or cognate notions in their works. It in particular covers Russell and Moore’s different approaches to essence before and after breaking with British idealism, the (pre- and post-)logical positivists’ critique of metaphysics and rejection of essence (Wittgenstein, Carnap, Schlick, Stebbing), the tendency to loosen the notion of (...) logical necessity to accommodate certain metaphysical truths in Wittgenstein and others, Quine’s logical rehabilitation of metaphysics and criticism of de re modality, the modal view of essence promoted by the development of quantified modal logic (C. I. Lewis, Barcan Marcus, Kripke) and direct reference theory (Barcan Marcus, Kripke, Putnam), and the emergence of the notion of metaphysical necessity (Kneale, Kripke), and finally Fine’s re-establishment of a Neo-Aristotelian, hyperintensional notion of essence in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

Most analytic philosophers are atheists, but is there a deep connection between analytic philosophy and atheism? The paper argues a) that the founding fathers of analytic philosophy were mostly teenage atheists before they became philosophers; b) that analytic philosophy was invented partly because it was realized that the God-substitute provided by the previously fashionable philosophy - Absolute Idealism – could not cut the spiritual mustard; c) that analytic philosophy developed an unhealthy obsession with meaninglessness which (...) led to a new kind of atheism that dismissed talk of God as factually meaningless (neither true nor false) rather than meaningful but false; but d) that this new-fangled atheism (unlike the old-fashioned atheism of the founders) is false, since it relies on theories of meaning – verificationism and falsificationism – which are themselves false. The primary focus is on Bertrand Russell, though other analytic philosophers such as Ayer, Neurath and Flew are also extensively discussed. (shrink)

I consider the claim that analytic statements are "true in virtue meaning", giving the claim a ground-theoretic interpretation.

The expression "analytic narratives" is used to refer to a range of quite recent studies that lie on the boundaries between history, political science, and economics. These studies purport to explain specific historical events by combining the usual narrative approach of historians with the analytic tools that economists and political scientists draw from formal rational choice theories. Game theory, especially of the extensive form version, is currently prominent among these tools, but there is nothing inevitable about such a (...) technical choice. The chapter explains what analytic narratives are by reviewing the studies of the major book Analytic Narratives (1998), which are concerned with the workings of political institutions broadly speaking, as well as several cases drawn from military and security studies, which form an independent source of the analytic narratives literature. At the same time as it gradually develops a definition of analytic narratives, the chapter investigates how they fulfil one of their main purposes, which is to provide explanations of a better standing than those of traditional history. An important principle that will emerge in the course of the discussion is that narration is called upon not only to provide facts and problems, but also to contribute to the explanation itself. The chapter distinguishes between several expository schemes of analytic narratives according to the way they implement this principle. From all the arguments developed here, it seems clear that the current applications of analytic narratives do not exhaust their potential, and in particular that they deserve the attention of economic historians, if only because they are concerned with microeconomic interactions that are not currently their focus of attention. (shrink)

Analytic theology has sometimes been criticized as ahistorical. But what this means, and why it is problematic, have often been left unclear. This essay explicates and supports one way of making that charge while simultaneously showing this ahistoricity, although widespread within analytic theology, is not essential to it. Specifically, some analytic theologians treat problematic doctrines as metaphysical puzzles, constructing speculative accounts of phenomena such as the Trinity or Incarnation and taking the theoretical virtues of such accounts to (...) be sufficient in themselves to defend traditional doctrines with no need for additional, historical premises. But due to the different epistemic structures of metaphysical and theological puzzles, I argue that importing this methodology into philosophical theology results in invalid or question-begging arguments, and it is unclear how a virtue-centric methodology could be repaired without collapsing into a more historical methodology, which some of the best (but unfortunately not all) analytic theologians follow. (shrink)

In his influential Naming and Necessity lectures, Saul Kripke made new sense of modal statements: “Kant might have been a bachelor”, “Königsberg is necessarily identical with Kaliningrad”. Many took the notions he introduced-metaphysical necessity and rigid designation -- to herald new metaphysical issues and have important consequences. In fact, the Kripkean insight is at bottom semantic, rather than metaphysical: it is part of how proper names work that they purport to refer to individuals to whom modal properties can be ascribed. (...) We can see this by reflecting on analytic truths that ground modal claims like the two examples above. (shrink)

Comparative religion scholar Thomas Berry’s influential concept of “Earth jurisprudence” has been helpfully elaborated in three principal books. My first section identifies four of their common themes, deriving therefrom an implicit narrative: (1) the basis of ecology is autopoiesis, which (2) originally generated human communities and Indigenous vernacular laws, which were (3) later reasserted by forest defenders who fought to create the Magna Carta’s “Charter of the Forest,” which is (4) now championed globally by the Indian physicist and eco-activist (...) Vandana Shiva’s Earth Democracy movement. My next three sections identify mutually exclusive elements of the three books, deriving the following alternative narrative: self-conscious new dancing rituals (Cullinan) could empower an historically informed reconstruction of private property (Burdon) via commons-based vernacular law (Weston and Bollier). And my conclusion offers one template for such a strategy, namely a new environmental variation on my dancing-poetic conception of legal justice, christened “emerald star-law.”. (shrink)

Paul Boghossian (1997) has argued that there is much to be said on behalf of the notion of analyticity so long as we distinguish epistemic analyticity and metaphysical analyticity. In particular, (1) epistemic analyticity isn’t undermined by Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, (2) it can explain the a prioricity of logic, and (3) epistemic analyticity can’t be rejected short of embracing semantic irrealism. In this paper, we argue that all three of these claims are mistaken.

A phenomenological turn has occurred in contemporary philosophy of mind. Some philosophers working on the nature of intentionality and consciousness have turned away from views that construe the basic ingredients of intentionality in terms of naturalistic tracking relations that hold between thinkers and external conditions in their environment in favor of what has been called the “Phenomenal Intentionality Theory” (PIT). According to PIT, all “original” intentionality is either identical to or partly grounded in phenomenal consciousness. A central claim for PIT (...) is the inseparatism thesis, which asserts that the phenomenal and the intentional are inseparable. In this article, I will situate this thesis within a methodological context I call “analytic phenomenology” and then show why proponents of PIT should take seriously our phenomenology of temporal experience. But I am not aiming to disprove PIT or defend it against views of intentionality that reject inseparatism. Rather, I want to understand what PIT says and how to approach the view, assuming that our goal is to test the theory using the assumptions and methods endorsed by proponents of the theory. (shrink)

I discuss problems with Martin-Löf's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments in constructive type theory and propose a revision of his views. I maintain that a judgment is analytic when its correctness follows exclusively from the evaluation of the expressions occurring in it. I argue that Martin-Löf's claim that all judgments of the forms a : A and a = b : A are analytic is unfounded. As I shall show, when A evaluates to a dependent function (...) type (x : B) → C, all judgments of these forms fail to be analytic and therefore end up as synthetic. Going beyond the scope of Martin-Löf's original distinction, I also argue that all hypothetical judgments are synthetic and show how the analytic-synthetic distinction reworked here is capable of accommodating judgments of the forms A type and A = B type as well. Finally, I consider and reject an alternative account of analyticity as decidability and assess Martin-Löf's position on the analytic grounding of synthetic judgments. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of 'analytic' philosophy of religion. It begins with a historical sketch. It then examines some of the kinds of questions that are investigated by 'analytic' philosophers of religion. It concludes with brief discussion of possible futures for 'analytic' philosophy of religion. There is also a very short appendix on the treatment of Islam and Arabic philosophy within 'analytic' philosophy of religion.

On the political nature of the analytic - continental distinction in professional philosophy and the general tendency to discredit continental philosophy while redesignating the rubric as analytically conceived.

ABSTRACT: It is a familiar story that Kant’s defence of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant’s outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the (...) American philosophers C. I. Lewis (1883–1964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989), most notably in Lewis’s 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order, followed by Sellars’ critical reworking of Lewis’s outlook in ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ (1953) and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant’s analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant’s view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars’ answer to his question, ‘Is There a Synthetic A Priori?’ thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis’s pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars’ account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a significant improvement upon the previous ‘analytic’ defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains. (shrink)

Although written in Japanese, 分析性について（On Analyticity） pursues the problem of analyticity discussed in philosophy of language from a Kantian perspective.

The apparent chasm between two camps in metaphysics, analytic metaphysics and scientific metaphysics, is well recognized. I argue that the relationship between them is not necessarily a rivalry; a division of labour that resembles the relationship between pure mathematics and science is possible. As a case study, I look into the metaphysical underdetermination argument for ontic structural realism, a well‐known position in scientific metaphysics, together with an argument for the position in analytic metaphysics known as ontological nihilism. I (...) argue that we can ascribe the same schema to both arguments, which indicates that analytic metaphysics can offer an abstract model that scientific metaphysics may find useful. (shrink)

In this paper we shall open a perspective from which the relatedness between the early analytic philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology is so close that we can call the two programs with one name: “rigorous philosophy”, or “theory of forms”. Moreover, we shall show that the close relatedness between the two most influential philosophical movements of the 20th century has its roots in their common history. At the end of the paper we shall try to answer the question why being (...) rather related at the beginning, their ways parted in the subsequent years. (shrink)