This chapter picks up on what Heidegger in his 1949 ‘Letter on ‘Humanism’’ calls ‘the historical in being’, that dimension of being within which, for Heidegger, a ‘productive dialogue’ between phenomenology and existentialism, on the one hand, and Marxism, on the other, ‘first becomes possible.’ It introduces the possibility of this dialogue through a particular, and particularly revealing, problem with The German Ideology: namely, Marx and Engels offer no analysis of the relationship between time, temporality and their materialist concept of (...) history. (shrink)

Review of Kostas Axelos, 'Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger' Translated by Kenneth Mills, Edited and Introduced by Stuart Elden Meson Press, Luneburg, 2015. 180 pp., £10.60 / $16.70 pb. 9783957960054.

Review Essay of G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978, 2000).

Review of Fred Moseley and Tony Smith, eds, Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2014. vii + 336 pp., £98.00 hb., 9789004209527.

Review of Frank Ruda, 'For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism', Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2015. xxiv + 200pp., £32.50 pb., 9780810130975.

The integration of Internet Protocol and Embedded Systems can enhance the communication platform. This paper describes the emerging smart technologies based on Internet of Things (IOT) and internet protocols along with embedded systems for monitoring and controlling smart devices with the help of WiFi technology and web applications. The internet protocol (IP) address has been assigned to the things to control and operate the devices via remote network that facilitates the interoperability and end-to-end communication among various devices c,onnected over a (...) network. The HTTP POST and HTTP GET command that supports the RESTful service have been used to ensure the transmission and reception of packets between the IOT Gateway and Cloud Database. The emerging smart technologies based on the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitated features like automation, controllability, interconnectivity, reliability which in turn turn paved the way for a wide range of acceptance amongst the masses. The Internet of Things (IoT) has brought in many new emerging technologies into varoius field like our daily lives, industry, agricultural sector, and many more. The world is experiencing the explosive growth with the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) these years. The potential growth of IoT is enoromous which is evidenced by all the human beings in our day to day life. (shrink)

This paper provides a new approach to a family of outstanding logical and semantical puzzles, the most famous being Frege's puzzle. The three main reductionist theories of propositions (the possible-worlds theory, the propositional-function theory, the propositional-complex theory) are shown to be vulnerable to Benacerraf-style problems, difficulties involving modality, and other problems. The nonreductionist algebraic theory avoids these problems and allows us to identify the elusive nondescriptive, non-metalinguistic, necessary propositions responsible for the indicated family of puzzles. The algebraic approach is also (...) used to defend antiexistentialism against existentialist prejudices. The paper closes with a suggestion about how this theory of content might enable us to give purely semantic (as opposed to pragmatic) solutions to the puzzles based on a novel formulation of the principle of compositionality. (shrink)

This article starts by identifying the phenomena that Hume thought to explain the need, hence utility, of a rudimentary system of property. Then, and prominently, it considers Hume’s arguments for believing that only a system of private property is justifiable. Hume argues that only in a society with adequate but not absolute abundance and altruism does property have a point or purpose. Property’s basic job, then, is that of addressing conflict and disagreement among persons of limited altruism and means, and (...) so property’s primary purpose is regulative and adjudicative. This point is not disturbed by fluctuations in altruism or the extent of abundance that might result from differing social arrangements. Thus Hume’s explanation of property is logically separable from the question of what kind of system of ownership is justifiable. This raises the central topic of the paper: Does Hume provide arguments showing not only that a system of private property is justifiable but that only such a system will suffice to avoid a condition of chaos and savagery? As argued here, while Hume’s arguments to this conclusion repay careful consideration, they fail and to show that only a system of ownership dominated by private property is justifiable. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen’s pathbreaking book, Karl Marx‘s Theory of History: A Defence (1978), prompted extensive reconsideration of historical materialism. This effort recast ongoing debates about Marx‘s theory of history by defending the view that historical materialism embodies a set of substantive claims as appropriately subject to analytical scrutiny as those of any other viable theory. Specifically, Cohen advances one central substantive claim that summarizes his reading of the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. “History is, fundamentally, (...) the growth of productive power, and forms of society rise and fall according as they enable or impede that growth.” This premise affirms that the same set of factors that explain changes societies undergo within a given historical epoch also explain transitions between historical epochs. The theoretical account of intraepochal historical development suffices equally to cover interepochal, revolutionary change. In this paper we reject this premise and argue that even on the most plausible reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history—a reconstruction that employs, among other things, a careful ownership-based criterion of historical epochs and the use of functional explanations—Marx’s theory of history cannot explain social revolutions. -/- . (shrink)

This paper offers a brand storytelling, that is a narratological account of Covid-19 pandemic’s emergence phase. By adopting a fictional ontological standpoint, the virus’ deploying media story-world is identified with a process of narrative spacing. Subsequently, the brand’s personality is analyzed as a narrative place brand. The narrative model that is put forward aims at outlining the main episodes that make up the virus’ brand personality as process and structural components (actors, settings, actions, relationships). A series of deep or ontological (...) metaphors are singled out as the core DNA of this place brand, by applying metaphorical modeling to the tropical articulation of Covid-19’s narrative. The virus’ kernel is identified with terror, as a menacing force that wipes out existing regimes of signification due to its uncertain motives, origins and operational mode. In this context, familiar urban spaces, cultural practices and intersubjective communications are redefined, repurposed and reprogrammed. This process is called terrorealization, as the desertification and metaphorical sublation of all prior territorial significations. This study contributes to the narrative sub-stream of place branding by approaching a globally relevant sociocultural phenomenon from a brand storytelling perspective. (shrink)

The U.S. FDA has issued emergency use authorizations for monoclonal antibodies for non-hospitalized patients with mild or moderate COVID-19 disease and for individuals exposed to COVID-19 as post-exposure prophylaxis. One EUA for an oral antiviral drug, molnupiravir, has also been recommended by FDA’s Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee, and others appear likely in the near future. Due to increased demand because of the Delta variant, the federal government resumed control over the supply and asked states to ration doses. As future variants (...) with increased infectivity and/or severity emerge, further rationing may be required. We identify relevant ethical principles and priority groups for access to therapies based on an integrated approach to population health and medical factors. Using priority categories to allocate scarce therapies effectively operationalizes important ethical values. This strategy is preferable to the current approach of categorical rules based on vaccination, immunocompromise status, or older age, or the ad hoc consideration of clinical risk factors. (shrink)

The Fifth Element (1997) is a French science-fiction film in English, directed and co-written by Luc Besson. The title and the plot of the film refer to a central notion of Greek philosophy, that is, pemptousia, or quintessence. Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes and others, were convinced that all natural beings – in fact, nature itself – consist in four primary imperishable elements or essences (ousiai), i.e., fire, earth, water, and air. To these four, Aristotle added aether, a (...) fifth essence (pemptousia). The introduction of aether gave birth to a great tradition in late Antique and Medieval philosophy, and eventually it came to signify not an additional primary element, but the core-essence of all beings, their fundamental ontological structure. Besson’s film draws its inspiration on this philosophical tradition but its cinematographic rendering of the concept of Quintessence is typical of the contemporaneous views on the core characteristics of matters. The modernity that stimulates the film is equally anti-transcendentalist and anti-essentialist. Thus, the fifth element of the film is existentially personified and genderized making the traditional philosophical significance of the term to be adjusted by modernity in an immanent and temporal context where in addition aesthetics plays a crucial role. (shrink)

Karl Popper discovered in 1938 that the unconditional probability of a conditional of the form ‘If A, then B’ normally exceeds the conditional probability of B given A, provided that ‘If A, then B’ is taken to mean the same as ‘Not (A and not B)’. So it was clear (but presumably only to him at that time) that the conditional probability of B given A cannot be reduced to the unconditional probability of the material conditional ‘If A, then B’. (...) I describe how this insight was developed in Popper’s writings and I add to this historical study a logical one, in which I compare laws of excess in Kolmogorov probability theory with laws of excess in Popper probability theory. (shrink)

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed (...) asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

The role of metaphysics in critique stands as a defining issue for the Frankfurt School theorists. Max Horkheimer himself claims that metaphysics serves as an instrument of domination, leading him to develop an interdisciplinary mate- rialism as a postmetaphysical alternative. Critics such as Georg Lohmann con- tend, however, that Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason is aporetic insofar as it undermines all metaphysical claims while implicitly making them. Since Horkheimer narrowly equates metaphysics with identity thinking, this article argues that his appeal (...) to nonidentity thinking as the foundation for critique is better understood as a form of antimetaphysics. This, however, leaves Horkheimer no better situated, since antimetaphysics remains a variant of metaphysics. While Horkheimer reproduces the techniques of domination he sought to avoid, this lapse into metaphysics warns of the difficult path that postmetaphysical thinking must navigate between the antipodes of metaphys- ical and antimetaphysical positions. (shrink)

The persistent interpretation problem for quantum mechanics may indicate an unwillingness to consider unpalatable assumptions that could open the way toward progress. With this in mind, I focus on the work of David Bohm, whose earlier work has been more influential than that of his later. As I’ll discuss, I believe two assumptions play a strong role in explaining the disparity: 1) that theories in physics must be grounded in mathematical structure and 2) that consciousness must supervene on material processes. (...) I’ll argue that the first assumption appears to lead us toward Everett’s many worlds interpretation, which suggests a red flag. I’ll also argue that the second assumption is suspect due to the persistent explanatory gap for consciousness. Later, I explore ways that Bohm’s later work holds some promise in providing a better fit with our world, both phenomenologically and empirically. Also, I’ll address the possible problem of realism. (shrink)

The eighteenth century philosopher David Hume was much influenced by Greek philosophy and literature. His favourite writer was the satirist Lucian. What is David Hume’s thanatotherapy (therapy of the fear of death)? Is he an Epicurean or Pyrrhonian thanatotherapist? I argue that, while he is in part an Epicurean who is sceptical about his Epicureanism, he is primarily a Lucianic thanatotherapist. A Lucianic thanatotherapist uses self and other deprecating irony as a form of therapy. He also ruthlessly satirises religious consolations. (...) I use Hume’s deathbed allusions to Lucian’s Kataplous (floating downwards) and the Dialogues of the Dead to explain my view. (shrink)

Heidegger develops his reading of a-lētheia as privative un-concealment (Unverborgenheit) in tandem with his early phenomenological theory of truth. He is not simply reinterpreting a word, but rather reading Greek philosophy as having a primordial understanding of truth which has itself been concealed in interpretation. After shedding medieval and modern presuppositions of truth as correspondence, the existential truth-experience shows itself, no longer left puzzlingly implicit in unsatisfactory conventional readings of Greek philosophy. In Sein und Zeit §44, Heidegger resolves interpretive difficulties (...) in Parmenides through his interpretation of alētheia and philologically grounds this reading in Heraclitus’s description of the unconcealing logos. Although this primordial sense of the word has already been obscured in Plato and Aristotle, the structural gradation of their theories of truth conserves the primordial pre-Socratic sense of truth as the experience of unconcealment. (shrink)

The paper begins with a clarification of the notions of intuition (and, in particular, modal intuition), modal error, conceivability, metaphysical possibility, and epistemic possibility. It is argued that two-dimensionalism is the wrong framework for modal epistemology and that a certain nonreductionist approach to the theory of concepts and propositions is required instead. Finally, there is an examination of moderate rationalism’s impact on modal arguments in the philosophy of mind -- for example, Yablo’s disembodiment argument and Chalmers’s zombie argument. A less (...) vulnerable style of modal argument is defended, which nevertheless wins the same anti-materialist conclusions sought by these other arguments. (shrink)

The topic of a priori knowledge is approached through the theory of evidence. A shortcoming in traditional formulations of moderate rationalism and moderate empiricism is that they fail to explain why rational intuition and phenomenal experience count as basic sources of evidence. This explanatory gap is filled by modal reliabilism -- the theory that there is a qualified modal tie between basic sources of evidence and the truth. This tie to the truth is then explained by the theory of concept (...) possession: this tie is a consequence of what, by definition, it is to possess (i.e., to understand) one’s concepts. A corollary of the overall account is that the a priori disciplines (logic, mathematics, philosophy) can be largely autonomous from the empirical sciences. (shrink)

This paper constructs a model of metaphysical indeterminacy that can accommodate a kind of ‘deep’ worldly indeterminacy that arguably arises in quantum mechanics via the Kochen-Specker theorem, and that is incompatible with prominent theories of metaphysical indeterminacy such as that in Barnes and Williams (2011). We construct a variant of Barnes and Williams's theory that avoids this problem. Our version builds on situation semantics and uses incomplete, local situations rather than possible worlds to build a model. We evaluate the resulting (...) theory and contrast it with similar alternatives, concluding that our model successfully captures deep indeterminacy. (shrink)

Criticism and recommendations are very much welcome. Please don't hesitate to contact me with them. -/- .

Žižek has argued in his books on Christianity and modernity that institutional Catholic Christianity has placed its members in a double bind by insisting on belief in a nonexistent God of Being. The laws of this God of the Symbolic are perverse in that they impose impossible requirements on all believers. By the mid-twentieth century, however, Catholicism was experiencing the revolutionary reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Law at this time gave way to a renewed emphasis on the community (...) of love associated in early Christianity with the Holy Spirit. This God of the Real is inherently Trinitarian: God-Father-Thing, Spirit as community of believers, and Christ as the imaginary Real gap between them. The American gothic writer Flannery O’Connor in her short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” provides a meditation on this Real Trinity. In O’Connor’s story a hermaphroditic circus freak becomes an emblem of the deadlock of sexual difference and a monstrous Christ-figure in the Žižekian sense. Its place is theologically incoherent and represents the passion for the Real emerging out of the perverse situation of mid-century Catholic orthodoxy. (shrink)

Radical empiricism is the view that a person's experiences (sensory and introspective), or a person's observations, constitute the person's evidence. This view leads to epistemic self-defeat. There are three arguments, concerning respectively: (1) epistemic starting points; (2) epistemic norms; (3) terms of epistemic appraisal. The source of self-defeat is traced to the fact that empiricism does not count a priori intuition as evidence (where a priori intuition is not a form of belief but rather a form of seeming, specifically intellectual (...) as opposed to sensory). Moderate rationalism, by contrast, avoids self-defeat. (shrink)

Cicero’s "Academica" offers a particularly rich demonstration of how the unhappy dialectic between stoicism and skepticism engages Roman historical self-consciousness. The Hegelian thesis of philosophy as mediated through historical development is given a clear articulation in the “derivative” Romans, precisely through their reception of a tradition, their experience of philosophy as inseparable from the self-consciousness of historical relation. The dispute happening in the "Academica" between a dogmatic stoicism and academic skepticism thus directly echoes the problems of contemporary 21st century philosophy (...) insofar as the structures of the unhappy consciousness endure in the “academic” give and take between the authority of received doctrine (say, of mainstream post-classical analytic philosophy) and their subversion in skeptical critique. (shrink)

Reber and Alcock have recently made a sharp attack on the entire psi literature, and in particular a recent overview by Cardeña of the meta-analyses across various categories of psi. They claim the data are inherently fl awed because of their disconnect with our current understanding of the world. As a result, they ignore the data and identify key scientific principles that they argue clash with psi. In this Commentary, I argue that these key principles are diffi cult to apply (...) in areas where our understanding remains poor, especially quantum mechanics and consciousness. I also explore how the psi data may fi t within these two domains. (shrink)

Ontological functionalism's defining tenet is that mental properties can be defined wholly in terms of the general pattern of interaction of ontologically prior realizations. Ideological functionalism's defining tenet is that mental properties can only be defined nonreductively, in terms of the general pattern of their interaction with one another. My Self-consciousness Argument establishes: ontological functionalism is mistaken because its proposed definitions wrongly admit realizations into the contents of self-consciousness; ideological functionalism is the only viable alternative for functionalists. Michael Tooley's critique (...) misses the target: he offers no criticism of - except for an incidental, and incorrect, attack on certain self-intimation principles - and, since he himself proposes a certain form of nonreductive definition, he tacitly accepts. Finally, as with all other nonreductive definitions, Tooley's proposal can be shown to undermine functionalism's ultimate goal: its celebrated materialist solution to the Mind-Body Problem. The explanation of these points will require a discussion of: Frege-Russell disagreements regarding intensional contexts; the relationship between self-consciousness and the traditional doctrine of acquaintance; the role of self-intimation principles in functionalist psychology; and the Kripke-Lewis controversy over the nature of theoretical terms. (shrink)

Many anthropologists interpret neoliberalism as a radical break from and dangerous rupture in post-war societies that featured Keynesian economic policies and welfare provision. The allure of a mythic welfare state has boosted John Maynard Keynes’s popularity to many who embrace certain facets of socialism. Many critical social scientists have embraced Keynesianism in ways that overlook how the US used Keynesian policies to reengineer and redeploy state power. Keynes’s liberal synthesis inspired managers in the US Treasury Department to understand depression-era problems (...) of unemployment and poverty in ways that were consonant with the expansion of corporate power. For understanding Keynesianism, as it actually existed during the Cold War, we must analyse how the US Treasury and State Departments used Keynesian principles to rebuild the social reproductive capacities necessary for capitalist accumulation both domestically and in Western Europe. I focus on how the architects of postwar capitalism used full employment policies, labour laws and welfare provision to renovate the nexus of political practices and institutional structures in ways that formed a benevolent and caring image of ‘the state’ and the myth of a class compromise. Through these reforms, governmental planners and administrators used the ‘state idea’ to reorganize capital accumulation as if the post-war economy would represent ordinary people’s best interests. In the process, these sophisticated practices of power became reified as the ‘welfare state’ and the ‘Keynesian compromise’ in ways that endow these institutions and policies with a character divorced from practices of power. The post-war state embodied a dialectic of repression and reform that combined criminalizing dissent with full employment policies and welfare provision. Taking these aspects of power into account, we can see post-war Keynesianism in ways that inspire a robust and far-reaching criticism of the contemporary predicament of economic uncertainty, political instability and environmental degradation. (shrink)

The review argues that Plato makes a valid distinction between inferior hypothetical and superior unhypothetical methods. Given the distinction, the book confuses the hypothetical for unhypothetical dialectic.

Scientific essentialism is the view that some necessities can be known only with the aid of empirical science. The thesis of the paper is that scientific essentialism does not extend to the central questions of philosophy and that these questions can be answered a priori. The argument is that the evidence required for the defense of scientific essentialism is reliable only if the intuitions required by philosophy to answer its central questions is also reliable. Included is an outline of a (...) modal reliabilist theory of basic evidence and a concept-possession account of the reliability of a priori intuition. (shrink)

The paper elaborates upon various points and arguments in the author’s “A Priori Knowledge and the Scope of Philosophy” (Philosophical Studies, 1993), in which the author defends the autonomy of philosophy from the empirical sciences. It provides, for example, an extended defense of the modal reliabilist theory of basic evidence, including a new argument against evolutionary explanations of the reliability of intuitions. It also contains a fuller discussion of how to neutralize the threat of scientific essentialism to the autonomy of (...) philosophy. (shrink)

Amidst the constantly augmenting gastronomic capital of celebrity chefs, this study scrutinizes from a critical discourse analytic angle how Jamie Oliver has managed to carve a global brand identity through a process that is termed (dis)placed branding. A roadmap is furnished as to how Italy as place brand and Italianness are discursively articulated, (dis)placed and appropriated in Jamie Oliver’s travelogues which are reflected in his global brand identity. By enriching the CDA methodological toolbox with a deconstructive reading strategy, it is (...) shown that Oliver’s celebrity equity ultimately boils down to supplementing the localized meaning of place of origin with a simulacral, hyperreal place of origin. In this manner, the celebrity’s recipes become more original than the original or doubly original. The (dis)placed branding process that is outlined in the face of Oliver’s global branding strategy is critically discussed with reference to the employed discursive strategies, lexicogrammatical and multimodal choices. (shrink)

The paper begins with an argument against eliminativism with respect to the propositional attitudes. There follows an argument that concepts are sui generis ante rem entities. A nonreductionist view of concepts and propositions is then sketched. This provides the background for a theory of concept possession, which forms the bulk of the paper. The central idea is that concept possession is to be analyzed in terms of a certain kind of pattern of reliability in one’s intuitions regarding the behavior of (...) the concept. The challenge is to find an analysis that is at once noncircular and fully general. Environmentalism, anti-individualism, holism, analyticity, etc. provide additional hurdles. The paper closes with a discussion of the theory’s implications for the Wittgenstein-Kripke puzzle about rule-following and the Benacerraf problem concerning mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

God is dead, but, contrary to Nietzsche’s diagnosis, ‘we’ didn’t kill him; he died of cancer. This perhaps crudely cold and off-putting opening does not refer to a naively metaphorically constituted transcendental abstraction, but to a spatio-temporally situated rock legend, Ronnie James Dio. This study aims at contributing to the burgeoning research field of memory and collective identity by providing a sociosemiotic account of the formation of collective narrative identity. By drawing on the three major categories whereby collective memory is (...) formed, that is artifacts, processes, places, as well as on the three key sociosemiotic metafunctions which are responsible for shaping a cultural event as sign system, the pursued interpretive route seeks to effectively contextualize how collective memory is fleshed out situationally in the context of Dio’s memorial. At the same time, by expanding the interpretive canvass to incorporate phenomenological perspectives on the mode of formation of collective memory, the offered analytic is intent on tracing invisible structures that point to operative mechanisms beyond the formal constraints of a sociosemiotic reading. Both phenomenological and sociosemiotic approaches are reinscribed within an overarching narrativity paradigm, wherein their relative merits in addressing the scrutinized phenomenon are discussed in an attempt to formulate a hybrid sociosemiotic phenomenological perspective of memorial events. (shrink)

Functionalism would be mistaken if there existed a system of deviant relations (an “anti-mind”) that had the same functional roles as the standard mental relations. In this paper such a system is constructed, using “Quinean transformations” of the sort associated with Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. For example, a mapping m from particularistic propositions (e.g., that there exists a rabbit) to universalistic propositions (that rabbithood is manifested). Using m, a deviant relation thinking* is defined: x thinks* p iff (...) x thinks m(p). Such deviant relations satisfy the commonly discussed functionalist psychological principles. Finally, a more complicated system of deviant relations is constructed, one satisfying sophisticated principles dealing with the self-conscious rational mind. (shrink)

Hilbert's ε-calculus is based on an extension of the language of predicate logic by a term-forming operator εx. Two fundamental results about the ε-calculus, the first and second epsilon theorem, play a rôle similar to that which the cut-elimination theorem plays in sequent calculus. In particular, Herbrand's Theorem is a consequence of the epsilon theorems. The paper investigates the epsilon theorems and the complexity of the elimination procedure underlying their proof, as well as the length of Herbrand disjunctions of existential (...) theorems obtained by this elimination procedure. (shrink)

Presented here is an argument for the existence of universals. Like Church's translation- test argument, the argument turns on considerations from intensional logic. But whereas Church's argument turns on the fine-grained informational content of intensional sentences, this argument turns on the distinctive logical features of 'that'-clauses embedded within modal contexts. And unlike Church's argument, this argument applies against truth-conditions nominalism and also against conceptualism and in re realism. So if the argument is successful, it serves as a defense of full (...) ante rem realism. The argument emphasizes the need for a unified treatment of intensional statements -- modal statements as well as statements of assertion and belief. The larger philosophical moral will be that ante rem universals are uniquely suited to carry a certain kind of modal information. Linguistic entities, mind-dependent universals, and instance-dependent universals are incapable of serving that function. (shrink)

Social scientists, political scientists and philosophers debate key concepts such as democracy, power and autonomy. Contested concepts like these pose questions: Are terms such as “democracy” hopelessly ambiguous? How can two theorists defend alternative accounts of democracy without talking past each other? How can we understand debates in which theorists disagree about what democracy is? This paper first discusses the popular strategy to answer these questions by appealing to Rawls’s distinction between concepts and conceptions. According to this approach, defenders of (...) rival conceptions of, e.g. justice can disagree without talking past each other because they share the concept of justice. It is argued that this idea is attractive but limited in application and that it fails to do justice to the dynamic and normative aspects of concept formation. Reflective equilibrium is then suggested as an alternative approach. It replaces the static contrast between a conceptual ‘core’ and competing conceptions by a dynamic perspective of concept formation as a partly normative undertaking: pre-theoretic language use and commitments can provide a shared starting point for developing alternative accounts which yield different concepts of, e.g. justice. This perspective provides a new understanding of how it is possible that different theorists defend rival accounts of, e.g. justice, without talking past each other. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in state power has tended to focus on the state’s coercive powers rather than its expressive powers. I consider an underexplored aspect of the state’s expressive capacity: its capacity to use symbols (such as monuments, memorials, and street names) to promote political ends. In particular, I argue that the liberal state’s deployment of symbols to promote its members’ commitment to liberal ideals is in need of special justification. This is because the state’s exercise of its capacity to use (...) symbols may be in tension with respecting individual autonomy, particularly in cases in which the symbols exert influence without engaging citizens’ rational capacities. But despite the fact that the state’s deployment of symbols may circumvent citizens’ rational capacities, I argue that it may nonetheless be permissible when surrounded by certain liberal institutions and brought about via democratic procedures. (shrink)

Written in the fourth century BCE, Philebus is likely one of Plato’s last Socratic dialogues. It is also famously difficult to read and understand. A multilayered inquiry into the nature of life, Philebus has drawn renewed interest from scholars in recent years. Yet, until now, the only English-language commentary available has been a work published in 1897. This much-needed new commentary, designed especially for philosophers and advanced students of ancient Greek, draws on up-to-date scholarship to expand our understanding of Plato’s (...) complex work. In his in-depth introduction, George Rudebusch places the Philebus in historical, philosophical, and linguistic context. As he explains, the dialogue deals with the question of whether a good life consists of pleasure or knowing. Yet its exploration of this question is riddled with ambiguity. With the goal of facilitating comprehension, particularly for students of philosophy, Rudebusch divides his commentary into twenty discrete subarguments. Within this framework, he elucidates the significance—and possible interpretations—of each passage and dissects their philological details. In particular, he analyzes how Plato uses inference indicators (that is, the Greek words for “therefore” and “because”) to establish the structure of the arguments, markers difficult to present in translation. A detailed and thorough commentary, this volume is both easy to navigate and conducive to new interpretations of one of Plato’s most intriguing dialogues. (shrink)

Aristotle argues that provided we have moderate luck, we can attain eudaimonia through our own effort. He claims that it is crucial to attaining eudaimonia that we aim at an overall target in our lives to which all our actions are directed. He also claims that the proper target of a eudaimon human life is virtuous activity, which is a result of effort not chance. He criticises Theognis for saying that the most pleasant thing is to chance on love, arguing (...) instead that virtuous activity is the most pleasant thing. I argue that although Aristotle’s view is insightful and carefully worked out, he fails to show that Theognis is wrong. Effort is not necessarily the path to human eudaimonia and important things we attain by chance seem to have an irreplacable value. (shrink)

Modal intuitions are the primary source of modal knowledge but also of modal error. According to the theory of modal error in this paper, modal intuitions retain their evidential force in spite of their fallibility, and erroneous modal intuitions are in principle identifiable and eliminable by subjecting our intuitions to a priori dialectic. After an inventory of standard sources of modal error, two further sources are examined in detail. The first source - namely, the failure to distinguish between metaphysical possibility (...) and various kinds of epistemic possibility - turns out to be comparatively easy to untangle and poses little threat to intuition-driven philosophical investigation. The second source is the local misunderstanding of one's concepts . This pathology may be understood on analogy with a patient who is given a clean bill of health at his annual check-up, despite his having a cold at the time of the check-up: although the patient's health is locally disrupted, his overall health is sufficiently good to enable him to overcome the cold without external intervention. Even when our understanding of certain pivotal concepts has lapsed locally, our larger body of intuitions is sufficiently reliable to allow us, without intervention, to ferret out the modal errors resulting from this lapse of understanding by means of dialectic and/or a process of a priori reflection. This source of modal error, and our capacity to overcome it, has wide-ranging implications for philosophical method - including, in particular, its promise for disarming skepticism about the classical method of intuition-driven investigation itself. Indeed, it is shown that skeptical accounts of modal error are ultimately self-defeating. (shrink)

The communal characteristic of African Societies has frequently been juxtaposed with the individualistic tenets of Western polities. However, the evolution of African societies into liberal democracies with the obligation to promote and protect constitutionalism and individual liberties calls for a philosophical niche to bridge between communality and individuality. This paper argues that Africa’s moral and political philosophy is in an urgent need of a Kantian Copernican revolution to ameliorate the conflictual interface between sociality and individualism. The paper opines that the (...) revolution will help to harmonize the dilemmatic relationship between communitarianism and individual rights. The paper also contends that the Kantian categorical imperatives are necessary in eliminating the unclear deontological/teleological situatedness of African ideological philosophies. (shrink)

"Translating Key Terms Terms in Lu Cheng's Records in the Chuan xi lu: Some Preliminary Considerations" Draft paper for the 2024 Conference on [Wang] Yangming's Learning of Mind, Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Updated October 4, 2024. The final version will appear in the conference volume. -/- Criticism and suggestions welcome. Please do email.

The paper investigates Ernst Cassirer’s structuralist account of geometrical knowledge developed in his Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. The aim here is twofold. First, to give a closer study of several developments in projective geometry that form the direct background for Cassirer’s philosophical remarks on geometrical concept formation. Specifically, the paper will survey different attempts to justify the principle of duality in projective geometry as well as Felix Klein’s generalization of the use of geometrical transformations in his Erlangen program. The second aim (...) is to analyze the specific character of Cassirer’s geometrical structuralism formulated in 1910 as well as in subsequent writings. As will be argued, his account of modern geometry is best described as a “methodological structuralism”, that is, as a view mainly concerned with the role of structural methods in modern mathematical practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This 1974 paper builds on our 1969 paper (Corcoran-Weaver [2]). Here we present three (modal, sentential) logics which may be thought of as partial systematizations of the semantic and deductive properties of a sentence operator which expresses certain kinds of necessity. The logical truths [sc. tautologies] of these three logics coincide with one another and with those of standard formalizations of Lewis's S5. These logics, when regarded as logistic systems (cf. Corcoran [1], p. 154), are seen to be equivalent; (...) but, when regarded as consequence systems (ibid., p. 157), one diverges from the others in a fashion which suggests that two standard measures of semantic complexity may not be as closely linked as previously thought. -/- This 1974 paper uses the linear notation for natural deduction presented in [2]: each two-dimensional deduction is represented by a unique one-dimensional string of characters. Thus obviating need for two-dimensional trees, tableaux, lists, and the like—thereby facilitating electronic communication of natural deductions. The 1969 paper presents a (modal, sentential) logic which may be thought of as a partial systematization of the semantic and deductive properties of a sentence operator which expresses certain kinds of necessity. The logical truths [sc. tautologies] of this logic coincides those of standard formalizations of Lewis’s S4. Among the paper's innovations is its treatment of modal logic in the setting of natural deduction systems--as opposed to axiomatic systems. The author’s apologize for the now obsolete terminology. For example, these papers speak of “a proof of a sentence from a set of premises” where today “a deduction of a sentence from a set of premises” would be preferable. 1. Corcoran, John. 1969. Three Logical Theories, Philosophy of Science 36, 153–77. J P R -/- 2. Corcoran, John and George Weaver. 1969. Logical Consequence in Modal Logic: Natural Deduction in S5 Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 10, 370–84. MR0249278 (40 #2524). 3. Weaver, George and John Corcoran. 1974. Logical Consequence in Modal Logic: Some Semantic Systems for S4, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 15, 370–78. MR0351765 (50 #4253). (shrink)

I develop an account of the nature and value of being supportive in interpersonal relationships. In particular, I argue that the virtue of being supportive, construed as a modally demanding value, facilitates the autonomy of one's intimate and promotes a sense of unity in one's relationship. Moreover, the practice of being supportive plays an important role with regard to the familiar need to reconcile the normative demands of one's own projects with one's responsibilities to intimates.

Das deutsche Gesundheitswesen steht durch die schnell steigende Anzahl an CO- VID-19-Erkrankten vor erheblichen Herausforderungen. In dieser Krisensituation sind alle Beteiligten mit ethischen Fragen konfrontiert, beispielsweise nach gerech- ten Verteilungskriterien bei begrenzten Ressourcen und dem gesundheitlichen Schutz des Personals angesichts einer bisher nicht therapierbaren Erkrankung. Daher werden schon jetzt klinische und ambulante Ethikberatungsangebote verstärkt mit Anfragen nach Unterstützung konfrontiert. Wie können Ethikberater*innen Entscheidungen in der Krankenversorgung im Rahmen der COVID-19-Pandemie unterstützen? Welche Grenzen von Ethikberatung sind zu beachten? Bislang liegen hierzu (...) noch wenige praktische Erfahrungen vor. Angesichts der dynamischen Entwicklung erscheint es der Akademie für Ethik in der Medizin (AEM) wichtig, einen Diskurs über die angemessene Rolle der Ethikberatung bei der Bewältigung der vielfachen Heraus- forderungen durch die COVID-19-Pandemie zu führen und professionelle Hinweise zu geben. Mit dem vorliegenden Diskussionspapier möchte die AEM einen Beitrag zur Beantwortung wesentlicher Fragen leisten, die sich für die Ethikberatung in den verschiedenen Bereichen des Gesundheitswesens stellen. Sie regt an, diesen Dis- kurs weiter zu führen und hat ein Online-Forum (s. unten) eingerichtet, in dem Ethikberater*innen ihre Erfahrungen teilen und die professionelle Selbstreflexion der Ethikberatung in Pandemiezeiten mit Anregungen fördern können. (shrink)