The author of this paper discusses some major points vital for two classical Indian schools of philosophy: (1) a significant feature of linguistic analysis in the Yoga tradition; (2) the role of the religious practice (iśvara-pranidhana) in the search for true self-identity in Samkhya and Yoga darśanas with special reference to their gnoseological purposes; and (3) some possible readings of ‘ahamkara’ and ‘asmita’ displayed in the context of Samkhya-Yoga phenomenology and metaphysics. The collision of language and metaphysics refers (...) to the risk of paralogism caused by the common linguistic procedures making the subject define its identity within the semantic order (i.e. verbal conventions and grammatical rules) which does not reflect the actual metaphysical situation of the self, though it determines one’s self-understanding in the empirical sense. Whereas, Samkhya-Yoga aims at recognizing, reorganizing and, finally, going beyond these procedures regarded as the obstacles on the path towards self-knowledge and liberation form metaphysical ignorance. (shrink)

A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic had been responsible for introducing the Vienna Circle’s ideas, developed within a Germanophone framework, to an Anglophone readership. Inevitably, this migration from one context to another resulted in the alteration of some of the concepts being transmitted. Such alterations have served to facilitate a number of false impressions of Logical Empiricism from which recent scholarship still tries to recover. In this paper, I will attempt to point to the ways in which LTL (...) has helped to foster the various mistaken stereotypes about Logical Empiricism which were combined into the received view. I will begin by examining Ayer’s all too brief presentation of an Anglocentric lineage for his ideas. This lineage, as we shall see, simply omits the major 19th century Germanophone influences on the rise of analytic philosophy. The Germanophone ideas he presents are selectively introduced into an Anglophone context, and directed towards various concerns that arose within that context. I will focus on the differences between Carnap’s version of the overcoming of metaphysics, and Ayer’s reconfiguration into what he calls the elimination of metaphysics. Having discussed the above, I will very briefly outline the consequences that Ayer’s radicalisation of the Vienna Circle’s doctrines had on the subsequent Anglophone reception of Logical Empiricism. (shrink)

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue (...) are artefacts of fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems. (shrink)

This paper determines the relation between philosophy and anthropology. It further shows the intimate correspondence on the basis of metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, language, culture and environment. This paper examines the evolution of anthropology with respect to history of philosophy which includes; Ancient Greek, Medieval and Modern philosophy. In this write up I assume to show that how philosophers have interpreted the subject matter anthropology. Since anthropology is the study of humans and what this science acquires has (...) been explained and clarified in the science of philosophy, whether it is a metaphysical study of human person, his ethical, aesthetic, rational, environmental, physical and psychological investigations. This paper exhibits the role and dimensions of humans within the scope of time, space, environment, existence and language. (shrink)

This paper asks: Is the quantifier variantist committed to metaphysical vagueness? My investigation of this question goes via a study of vague existence. I’ll argue that the quantifier variantist is committed to vague existence and that the vague existence posited by the variantist requires a puzzling sort of metaphysical vagueness. Specifically, I distinguish between (what I call) positive and negative metaphysical vagueness. Positive metaphysical vagueness is (roughly) the claim that there is vagueness in the world; negative metaphysical vagueness is (roughly) (...) the claim that there is vagueness that is not in our language or thought. I’ll argue that the quantifier variantist’s commitment to vague existence comes with positive metaphysical vagueness -- even if it doesn't require negative metaphysical vagueness. (shrink)

Recent advances in neuroscience lead to a wider realm for philosophy to include the science of the Darwinian-evolved computational brain, our inner world producing organ, a non-recursive super- Turing machine combining 100B synapsing-neuron DNA-computers based on the genetic code. The whole system is a logos machine offering a world map for global context, essential for our intentional grasp of opportunities. We start from the observable contrast between the chaotic universe vs. our orderly inner world, the noumenal cosmos. So far, (...) philosophy has been rehearsing our thoughts, our human-internal world, a grand painting of the outer world, how we comprehend subjectively our experience, worked up by the logos machine, but now we seek a wider horizon, how humans understand the world thanks to Darwinian evolution to adapt in response to the metaphysical gap, the chasm between the human animal and its environment, shaping the organism so it can deal with its variable world. This new horizon embraces global context coded in neural structures that support the noumenal cosmos, our inner mental world, for us as denizens of the outer environment. Kant’s inner and outer senses are fundamental ingredients of scientific philosophy. Several sections devoted to Heidegger, his lizard debunked, but his version of the metaphysical gap & his doctrine of the logos praised. Rorty and others of the behaviorist school discussed also. (shrink)

SUMMARY Major theories of philosophical psychology and philosophy of mind are examined on the basis of the fundamental questions of ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, semantics and logic. The result is the choice between language of eliminative reductionism and dualism, neither of which answers properly the relation between mind and body. In the search for a non–dualistic and non–reductive language, Wittgenstein’s notion of language–games as the representative links between language and the world is considered together with Peirce’s (...) semeiosis of cognition. The result is a redefined notion of cognition as the goal–oriented ability to instantiate strategies from the rules of the language–games. Cognition is considered within the four-dimensional languagegames: rules/strategies, primitive/complete language-games, family-resemblances/forms of life, and non-temporal continuum as the language-games’ modality. Cognition is seen as a continuum process of non–individualized elements that unites perception, volition, emotion, will and thought against the commonly accepted understandings of cognition in exclusive terms of perception and thinking. The alternative to the mind/body problem is the continuity of cognition where rules and strategies, syntax and semantics, are considered inseparable within language–games. This continuity of cognition is explained in terms of virtual (univocal) identity, replacing the old philosophical paradigm of the mind/body problem. -/- SOMMARIO Le teorie maggiori della psicologia filosofica e filosofia della mente sono esaminate a partire dalle questioni fondamentali di ontologia, metafisica, epistemologia, semantica e logica. Il risultato è la scelta tra un linguaggio riduzionista eliminativo e un dualismo che però non confronta in modo adeguato la relazione tra mente e corpo. Nella ricerca per un linguaggio non-dualistico e non-riduttivo, viene considerata la nozione del gioco linguistico di Wittgenstein come un legame rappresentativo tra il linguaggio e il mondo insieme con la semiosi cognitiva di Peirce. Il risultato è la nozione ridefinita della cognizione come abilità goal-orientata di creare le strategie dalle regole dei giochi linguistici. La cognizione è considerata entro le quattro dimensioni dei giochi linguistici: regole/strategie, giochi linguistici primitivi/completi, somiglianze di famiglia/forme di vita, e la continuità atemporale come la modalità dei giochi linguistici. La cognizione diventa un processo continuo degli elementi non-individualizzati che tende ad unificare la percezione, volizione, emozione, la volontà e il pensiero contro un concetto generalmente accettato di vedere la cognizione nei termini esclusivamente di percezione e di pensiero. L’alternativa al problema della mente/corpo è la continuità della cognizione, dove le regole e le strategie, la sintassi e la semantica, sono considerate inseparabili nei giochi linguistici. Questa continuità della cognizione è spiegata nei termini dell’identità virtuale (univoca) sostituendo un paradigma filosofico previo del problema della mente/corpo. (shrink)

The paper proposes a strategy for understanding metaphysical grounding in deflationary terms and, more generally, proposes a form of methodological deflationism with respect to the notions of ground. The idea is to define a deflationary is grounded in-predicate by appeal to the two-place non-causal connective ‘because’ and a deflationary truth predicate. To this end, we discuss the explanatory role of the truth-predicate in non-causal explanations and develop a theory of truth for the language of the ‘because’-connective. We argue that (...) at least from a logical perspective our deflationary notion of ground is up to the task. (shrink)

Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.

Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should (...) be expected to follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora. (shrink)

Thesis on metaphysics featuring Galen Strawson and Noam Chomsky. I discuss Strawsons' Materialism, panpsychism and the topic of reference. I compare Strawson's view with Chomsky's in relation to panpsychism, the nature of reference and the limits of human understanding by reviewing important historical events in the history of philosophy. I also cover some aspects of neuroscience to see if empirical evidence in any way contradicts the claims made by Strawson and Chomsky. I conclude by recasting the questions of metaphysics (...) under an epistemological framework. (shrink)

Yunkaporta’s 2019 text Sand Talk carves out a language of resistance to the McDonaldisation of Indigenous research. While historic scholarly engagement with Aboriginal culture has overemphasized content, Yunkaporta demonstrates how this has occurred to the exclusion of the processes of Indigenous knowledge transmission and creation. Yet a process view requires engagement with the how not only the what. Such knowledge transmission is discerned in daily lived relationship between land, spirit, and people; binding epistemology to participation in a specific landscape (...) embedded within a living culture. Place-making for Indigenous knowledges requires exploring how Indigenous ways of valuing, knowing and being, shaped by cultural activities on Country, offer new understandings for western metaphysics. -/- Through a close study of Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk this article explores: fractal thinking and the pattern of creation in Indigenous cosmology; the role of custodianship in respectful interaction between living systems; alternative Indigenous understandings of non-linearity, time and transience; the process-panpsychism and animism present in Indigenous perceptions of cosmos as living Country illustrated in the Dreaming and Turnaround creation event; the role of embodied-cognition, haptic- and situated- knowledge in Indigenous science; Indigenous holistic reasoning and the mind-body connection; the relational metaphysic embedded in ritual and yarning practice; the knowledge encoded in place-based totemic mythology, lore, and ritual; and Indigenous understandings of complex systems as adaptive, self-organising and patterned. This article does not offer a process reading of Indigenous thought but rather demonstrates the significant contribution to process metaphysics that may be provided by an Aboriginal Australian perspective. (shrink)

Objective The relations between thought and reality are studied in many fields of philosophy and science. Examples include ontology and metaphysics in general, linguistics, neuroscience and even mathematics. Each one has its postulates, its language, its methods and its own constraints. It would be unreasonable, however, for them to ignore each other. In the pages that follow we will try to identify areas of proximity between the ideas of contemporary philosophers of language and those issued mainly by (...) Ontology of Knowledge but also by mathematics and neuroscience. We will try to take advantage of the clarity and the perfect structuring of the lecture « La philosophie contemporaine du langage » (the contemporary philosophy of language) given by Professor Denis Vernant . We will make use of this lecture, both for the ideas presented and as a reference process. The goal of this article is to bring out, through a benevolent confrontation, new ideas for the benefit of knowledge in general. (shrink)

The way Whitehead speaks of God in his "philosophy of organism," and the evaluation thereof, is the subject of this article. The background of this issue is the position—broadly shared in theology, and here represented by Aquinas—that one should not speak "carelessly" about God. Does Whitehead violate this rule, or does his language for God express God's otherness and relatedness to the world in a new, intriguing way? In order to answer this question, an introduction into Whitehead's (...) class='Hi'>philosophy is given, and especially into his category of existence, the "actual entity." For Whitehead, God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence. His perception of the similarity and greater dissimilarity between God and the worldly actual entities (and clusters thereof) is analyzed. In the main and final section of this article, these insights are used as tools to decrypt Whitehead's God-language. Here, I compare the status of Whitehead's and Aquinas's statements about God, discuss Whitehead's ideas concerning the analogical character of concrete language, and argue that in Whitehead's philosophy too there is no discourse about God without a shift or breakdown of the "ordinary" meaning of language. (shrink)

According to ordinary language philosophy (OLP), philosophical problems can be solved by investigating ordinary language, often because the problems stem from its misuse. According to ideal language philosophy (ILP), on the other hand, philosophical problems exist because ordinary language is flawed and has to be improved or replaced by constructed languages that do not exhibit these flaws. OLP and ILP together make up linguistic philosophy, the view that philosophical problems are problems of (...) class='Hi'>language. Linguistic philosophy is opposed to what may be called, for lack of a better word, ‘traditional philosophy’ (TP), the view that philosophical problems can be solved by discovering non-linguistic facts. In the following, OLP, ILP, and TP are taken to be methodologies, that is, frameworks in which to interpret and evaluate different philosophical methods (i.e., argumentative strategies). The two linguistic methodologies are discussed separately with TP as a foil, and then used to interpret the status of different philosophical methods. While each of the methods discussed here finds a plausible interpretation in each methodology, there are other arguments for and against linguistic philosophy in general, and for and against ILP and OLP in particular. As none of these arguments is decisive, I conclude with a superficial moral about peaceful co-existence. (shrink)

Many political theorists believe that a state cannot be neutral when it comes to languages. Legislatures cannot avoid picking a language in which to conduct their business and teachers have to teach their pupils in a language. However, against that, some political liberals argue that liberal neutrality is consistent with the state endorsement of particular languages. Claims to the contrary, they say, are based on a misguided understanding of what neutrality is. I will argue that this line of (...) argument fails, for two reasons. First, the primary challenge to which political liberals should respond is not that of reconciling the promotion of languages with liberal neutrality but, rather, that of reconciling liberal neutrality with the fact that reasonable people disagree about the existence and nature of languages. Second, even if everyone accepted the existence of languages along essentialist lines, one should still doubt the possibility of state neutrality with respect to them, regardless of the conception of neutrality one prefers. The reason why is that human beings cannot care about or value languages so when a state promotes a particular language, it is not supporting the preferences of its citizens but, rather, acting on perfectionist or simply irrational grounds. (shrink)

Ordinary language and scientific discourse are filled with linguistic expressions for dispositional properties such as “soluble,” “elastic,” “reliable,” and “humorous.” We characterize objects in all domains – physical objects as well as human persons – with the help of dispositional expressions. Hence, the concept of a disposition has historically and systematically played a central role in different areas of philosophy ranging from metaphysics to ethics. The contributions of this volume analyze the ancient foundations of the discussion about disposition, (...) examine the problem of disposition within the context of the foundation of modern science, and analyze this dispute up to the 20th century. Furthermore, articles explore the contemporary theories of dispositions. (shrink)

A survey of popular textbooks and websites on philosophy produces a ­remarkable consensus on the great problems facing philosophers from ­ancient to modern times. They typically include metaphysics - what is there?, the problem of knowledge - how do we know what exists?, the mind/body problem - can an immaterial mind move the material body?, the “hard problem” of consciousness, freedom of the will, theories of ethics - is there an objective universal Good?, and problems from theology - does (...) God exist?, is God responsible for evil? This book introduces the Information Philosopher website, a work in progress on several classic questions in philosophy that ­logical positivists and analytic language philosophers thought they could ­­dis-solve as logical puzzles, pseudo-problems, or conceptual errors. (shrink)

This article offers an account of the philosophy of language expounded in the Cogitata de interpretatione (1692) of the Dutch philosopher Johannes De Raey (1620-1702). In this work, De Raey provided a theory of the formation and meaning language based on the metaphysics of René Descartes. De Raey distinguished between words signifying passions and sensations, ideas of the intellect, or external things. The aim of this article is to shift away the discussion of De Raey’s critique on (...) the application of the language of practical matters by Lodewijk Meijer and Spinoza, and to redirect modern interpretations to the originality of De Raey’s own reflections on the uses of language. In his linguistic thought, De Raey criticized philosophers such as Hobbes, who supposedly deprived Aristotelian terminology of any reference and meaningful use. The analysis of De Raey testifies to the emergence of the philosophy of language out of the double traditions of logic and metaphysics. It is to be interpreted as an effect of the emergence of an alternative worldview to Aristotelianism. This called for an update of the semantic catalogue of philosophy and practical disciplines. (shrink)

Philosophy, that most misunderstood of intellectual pursuits, is often mocked; and no part of philosophy is as often mocked as metaphysics. The image of the ‘speculative metaphysician’ dreaming up abstract pictures of the world has been held up for ridicule by poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists as well as by other philosophers. The Logical Positivists in the first half of the 20th Century rejected all metaphysical speculations as ‘meaningless’ since they could not be verified by scientific experiment; in the (...) later part of the century, Wittgenstein criticised systematic metaphysics as being a kind of intellectual disease resulting from our reading false pictures of the world into the grammar of our language. The common suspicion underlying many of these attacks is that ultimately, all metaphysics is a kind of nonsense, and that metaphysicians don’t really know what they are talking about. This suspicion is not new. Nicolas-Sébastien Chamfort commented in 1796, ‘I am tempted to say of metaphysicians what Scaliger used to say of the Basques: they are said to understand one another, but I don’t believe a word of it.’ Some contemporary philosophers may agree. (shrink)

In this book, John Searle brings concepts such as reality, truth, consciousness, and society from their abstract perch down to the world we all live in. He takes readers through the conceptual problems associate with basic metaphysics, the biology of the mind, the structure of consciousness, the paradox of intentionality, the nature of language and the structure of the social universe. Condemning the belief that our world is dependent on our perception of it, Searle stresses that there is a (...) real world, and discusses the ways in which philosophy can help us deal with it. In short, he takes questions apart, analyzes them and then places them together to present a "total philosophy". In Mind, Language and Society, Searle teaches us how to practice philosophy in the real world. Mind, language, society, consciousness, intentionality يسعى سيرل في هذا الكتاب إلى تفسير الظواهر الأساسية التي تلفت نظر الإنسان. وكانت الظاهرة الأولى المدهشة هي وجود الوعي في عالم مؤلف كلية من ذرات فيزيائية، والثانية هي قدرة العقل على توجيه ذاته نحو الأشياء وتمثيلها، وهي ظاهرة القصدية، والثالثة هي قدرة العقول أن تبدع واقعاً إجتماعياً موضوعياً، والرابعة هي وجود التواصل اللغوى الإنساني. (shrink)

Metaethics is the study of metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, insofar as they relate to the subject matter of moral or, more broadly, normative discourse – the subject matter of what is good, bad, right or wrong, just, reasonable, rational, what we must or ought to do, or otherwise. But out of these four ‘core’ areas of philosophy, it is plausibly the philosophy of language that is most central (...) to metaethics – and not simply because ‘metaethics’ was for a long time construed more narrowly as a name for the study of moral language. The philosophy of language is central to metaethics because both the advantages of and the open problems facing different metaethical theories differ sharply over the answers those theories give to central questions in the philosophy of language. In fact, among the open problems over which such theories differ, are included particularly further problems in the philosophy of language. This article briefly surveys a range of broad categories of views in metaethics and both catalogues some of the principal issues faced by each in the philosophy of language, as well as how those arise out of their answers to more basic questions in the philosophy of language. I make no claim to completeness, only to raising a variety of important issues. (shrink)

This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and the most important and longest within the last year. Also I have edited them to bring them up to date (2016). The copyright page has the date of this first edition and new editions will be noted there as I edit old articles or add new ones. All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having (...) a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds within the framework of our innate psychology as presented in the table of intentionality. As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important way, we are apes. If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., human ecology and psychology) in school, maybe civilization would have a chance. -/- In my view these articles and reviews have many novel and highly useful elements, in that they use my own version of the recently (ca. 1980’s) developed dual systems view of our brain and behavior to lay out a logical system of rationality (personality, psychology, mind, language, behavior, thought, reasoning, reality etc.) that is sorely lacking in the behavioral sciences (psychology, philosophy, literature, politics, anthropology, history, economics, sociology etc.). The philosophy centers around the two writers I have found the most important, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, whose ideas I combine and extend within the dual system (two systems of thought) framework that has proven so useful in recent thinking and reasoning research. As I note, there is in my view essentially complete overlap between philosophy, in the strict sense of the enduring questions that concern the academic discipline, and the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (behavior). Once one has grasped Wittgenstein’s insight that there is only the issue of how the language game is to be played, one determines the Conditions of Satisfaction (what makes a statement true or satisfied etc.) and that is the end of the discussion. -/- Now that I think I understand how the games work I have mostly lost interest in philosophy, which of course is how Wittgenstein said it should be. But since they are the result of our innate psychology, or as Wittgenstein put, it due to the lack of perspicuity of language, the problems run throughout all human discourse, so there is endless need for philosophical analysis, not only in the ‘human sciences’ of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, literature, religion, etc., but in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, mathematics, and biology. It is universal to mix the language game questions with the real scientific ones as to what the empirical facts are. Scientism is ever present and the master has laid it before us long ago, i.e., Wittgenstein (hereafter W) beginning principally with the Blue and Brown Books in the early 1930’s. -/- "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads the philosopher into complete darkness." (BBB p18) -/- Nevertheless, a real understanding of Wittgenstein’s work, and hence of how our psychology functions, is only beginning to spread in the second decade of the 21st century, due especially to P.M.S. Hacker (hereafter H) and Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (hereafter DMS),but also to many others, some of the more prominent of whom I mention in the articles. -/- When I read ‘On Certainty’ a few years ago I characterized it in an Amazon review as the Foundation Stone of Philosophy and Psychology and the most basic document for understanding behavior, and about the same time DMS was writing articles noting that it had solved the millennia old epistemological problem of how we can know anything for certain. I realized that W was the first one to grasp what is now characterized as the two systems or dual systems of thought, and I generated a dual systems (S1 and S2) terminology which I found to be very powerful in describing behavior. I took the small table that John Searle (hereafter S) had been using, expanded it greatly, and found later that it integrated perfectly with the framework being used by various current workers in thinking and reasoning research. -/- Since they were published individually, I have tried to make the book reviews and articles stand by themselves, insofar as possible, and this accounts for the repetition of various sections, notably the table and its explanation. I start with a short article that presents the table of intentionality and briefly describes its terminology and background. Next, is by far the longest article, which attempts a survey of the work of W and S as it relates to the table and so to an understanding or description (not explanation as W insisted) of behavior. -/- The key to everything about us is biology, and it is obliviousness to it that leads millions of smart educated people like Obama, Chomsky, Clinton and the Pope to espouse suicidal utopian ideals that inexorably lead straight to Hell On Earth. As W noted, it is what is always before our eyes that is the hardest to see. We live in the world of conscious deliberative linguistic System 2, but it is unconscious, automatic reflexive System 1 that rules. This is Searle’s The Phenomenological Illusion (TPI), Pinker’s Blank Slate and Tooby and Cosmides Standard Social Science Model. Democracy and equality are wonderful ideals, but without strict controls, selfishness and stupidity gain the upper hand and soon destroy any nation and any world that adopts them. The monkey mind steeply discounts the future, and so we sell our children’s heritage for temporary comforts. -/- The astute may wonder why we cannot see System 1 at work, but it is clearly counterproductive for an animal to be thinking about or second guessing every action, and in any case there is no time for the slow, massively integrated System 2 to be involved in the constant stream of split second ‘decisions’ we must make. As W noted, our ‘thoughts’ (T1 or the thoughts of System 1) must lead directly to actions. It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves an heuristic for how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) view it,includes both conscious deliberative System 2 and unconscious automated System 1 actions or reflexes. -/- Thus all the articles, like all behavior, are intimately connected if one knows how to look at them. As I note, The Phenomenological Illusion (oblivion to our automated System 1) is universal and extends not merely throughout philosophy but throughout life. I am sure that Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg and the Pope would be incredulous if told that they suffer from the same problem as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, but it’s clearly true. While the phenomenologists only wasted a lot of people’s time, they are wasting the earth. -/- My writings are available in updated versions as paperbacks and Kindles on Amazon. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) ASIN B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) ASIN B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) 2nd printing with corrections (Feb 2018) ASIN B0711R5LGX -/- Suicide by Democracy: an Obituary for America and the World (2018) ASIN B07CQVWV9C . (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Going Beyond Nature in Order to Explain it Technē, epistēmē and alēthēs doxa Mathematics, pure and applied Observation and Experimental Verification Bibliography.

Some philosophers maintain that physical properties are irreducibly modal: that properties are powers. Powers are then employed to provide explanations of other phenomena of philosophical interest such as laws of nature and modality. There is, however, a dispute among powers theorists about how far the powers ontology extends: are all manner of properties at all levels of fundamentality powers or are powers only to be found among the fundamental properties? This paper argues that the answer to this question depends on (...) the details of the metaphysics of powers. More specifically, this paper argues that if one understands powers as qualitative grounds of dispositions, as opposed to properties whose essences are constituted by dispositions, then all properties, be they fundamental or macro, are powers, i.e., pandispositionalism is true. The Conclusion: If qualitative dispositional essentialism is true, then pandispositionalism is true, is significant because there is increasing concern that orthodox dispositional essentialism is explanatorily deficient and perhaps even incoherent, meaning that qualitative dispositional essentialism is gaining increasing support in the literature on powers. All things considered, then, it is beginning to look more likely that pandispositionalism is true simpliciter. (shrink)

This paper has three objectives. The first is to show how David Lewis' influential account of how a population is related to its language requires that speakers be 'conceptually autonomous' in a way that is incompatible with content ascriptions following from the assumption that its speakers share a language. The second objective is to sketch an alternate account of the psychological and sociological facts that relate a population to its language. The third is to suggest a modification (...) of Lewis' account of convention that will allow one to preserve the claim that there are conventions of language. (shrink)

I am going to argue for a robust realism about magnitudes, as irreducible elements in our ontology. This realistic attitude, I will argue, gives a better metaphysics than the alternatives. It suggests some new options in the philosophy of science. It also provides the materials for a better account of the mind’s relation to the world, in particular its perceptual relations.

This book is invaluable as a synopsis of some of the work of one the greatest philosophers of recent times. There is much value in analyzing his responses to the basic confusions of philosophy, and in the generally excellent attempts to connect classical Chinese thought to modern philosophy. I take a modern Wittgensteinian view to place it in perspective. This book is a unique attempt to correlate classical Chinese philosophy with that of Searle (S), whom I regard (...) as the best since Wittgenstein (W) and his intellectual heir. The quality of the articles is unusually high for such a collection, which must be due to Mou’s careful selection of papers. Readers will find it instructive to compare this with another recent volume of papers on S’s philosophy – “Thinking About the Real World”— another book on which I have written one of the very few reviews. As with W, everything that S writes is a treasure, but sadly this tome has attracted so little attention that this appears to be the only review, even though it appeared 6 years ago. Its only real deficiency is the failure to print S’s reply to Allinson, since it would correct his numerous substantial mistakes. As noted in my other reviews, such mistakes are of interest since they are the universal defaults of our psychology due to the fact that our language lacks perspicuity, as W first noted in the BBB (Blue and Brown Books) ¾ of a century ago. As the conference was taped, I tried to get the video or a transcript of S’s reply from Mou, S, Allinson and 3 persons at HKUST but nobody would help. The issue of spirituality is inevitably mixed in with the language issues of philosophy in some of the papers here. The many subtleties on the road to dispelling the illusion of the ego and the attaining of enlightenment are another issue entirely, although as in all other arenas, philosophical confusions inevitably arise when talking about religion, as opposed to practicing it. That is, philosophy in the broad sense, as musing on ethics, religion, morality, how we ought to live or feel about our life and the world is not the narrower sense in which W and S are practicing it, though inevitably and almost universally the broad sense gets mixed with issues about how language (the mind as W showed us) works. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

First, I offer a short overview on the classical occidental philosophy as propounded by the ancient Greeks and the natural philosophies of the last 2000 years until the dawn of the empiricist logic of science in the twentieth century, which wanted to delimitate classical metaphysics from empirical sciences. In contrast to metaphysical concepts which didn’t reflect on the language with which they tried to explain the whole realm of entities empiricist logic of science initiated the end of metaphysical (...) theories by reflecting on the preconditions for foundation and justification of sentences about objects of investigation, i.e. a coherent definition of language in general, which was not the aim of classical metaphysics. Unexpectedly empiricist logic of science in the linguistic turn failed in the physical and mathematical reductionism of language and its use in communication, as will be discussed below in further detail. Nevertheless, such reflection on language and communication also introduced this vocabulary into biology. Manfred Eigen and bioinformatics, later on biolinguistics, used ‘language’ applied linguistic turn thinking to biology coherent to the logic of science and its formalisable aims. This changed significantly with the birth of biosemiotics and biohermeneutics. At the end of this introduction it will be outlined why and how all these approaches reproduced the deficiencies of the logic of science and why the biocommunicative approach avoids their abstractive fallacies. (shrink)

Modest pessimism about philosophical progress is the view that while philosophy may sometimes make some progress, philosophy has made, and can be expected to make, only very little progress (where the extent of philosophical progress is typically judged against progress in the hard sciences). The paper argues against recent attempts to defend this view on the basis of the pervasiveness of disagreement within philosophy. The argument from disagreement for modest pessimism assumes a teleological conception of progress, according (...) to which the attainment of true answers to the big philosophical questions, or knowledge of them, is the primary goal of philosophy. The paper argues that this assumption involves a misconception of the goal of philosophy: if philosophy has a primary goal, its goal is the understanding of philosophical problems rather than knowledge of answers to philosophical questions. Moreover, it is argued that if the primary goal of philosophy is such understanding, then widespread disagreement within philosophy does not indicate that philosophy makes little progress. (shrink)

This book is invaluable as a synopsis of some of the work of one the greatest philosophers of recent times. There is much value in analyzing his responses to the basic confusions of philosophy, and in the generally excellent attempts to connect classical Chinese thought to modern philosophy. I take a modern Wittgensteinian view to place it in perspective. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date account of Wittgenstein, Searle and their analysis of behavior from the modern (...) two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may download from this site my e-book ‘Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks (2016)- Articles and Reviews 2006-2016’ by Michael Starks First Ed. 662p (2016). -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX -/- . (shrink)

In his Treatise Hume makes a profound suggestion: philosophical problems, especially problems in metaphysics, are verbal. This view is most vigorously articulated and defended in the course of his investigation of the problem of the self, in the section “Of personal identity.” My paper is a critical exploration of Hume's arguments for this influential thesis and an analysis of the context that informs this 1739 version of the nature of philosophical problems that anticipates the linguistic turn in philosophy. -/- (...) . (shrink)

This paper develops Wittgenstein’s view of how experiences of ethical value contribute to our understanding of the world. Such experiences occur when we perceive certain intrinsic attributes of a particular being, object, or location as valuable irrespective of any concern for personal gain. It is shown that experiences of ethical value essentially involve a characteristic ‘listening’ to the ongoing transformations and actualizations of a given form of life—literally or metaphorically speaking. Such immediate impressions of spontaneous sympathy and agreement reveal ethics (...) and aesthetics as transcendental. Ultimately, I will attempt to show that from this point of view, forms of life are transcendental determinants of meaning and, as such, the principal objects of ethical value. Descriptive ontological grounding is thereby provided for the ethical value of species, languages, and cultures. (shrink)

Rondo Keele makes a foray into what he calls 'applied logic', investigating a complex argument strategy employed against Ockham by his greatest contemporary opponent, Walter Chatton. Chatton conceives a two-part strategy which attempts to force a kind of iteration of conceptual analysis, together with an infinite explanatory regress, in order to establish that one particular philosophical analysis is ultimately dependent on another. Chatton uses this strategy against Ockham in order to show that the latter's reductionist metaphysics depends ultimately upon a (...) deeper level of realist assumptions that he can neither evade nor explain away. Keele then shows how, earlier in his career, Chatton found himself on the receiving end of this same strategy, defending his own highly original solution to the problem of future contingents from the very iteration-regress attack he would subsequently use on Ockham. Keele concludes with an examination of Chatton's attempts to avoid the consequences of his own strategy, and draws some connections between this argument strategy and modal collapse in modern logics. (shrink)

How does one formalize the structure of structures necessary for the foundations of physics? This work is an attempt at conceptualizing the metaphysics of pregeometric structures, upon which new and existing notions of quantum geometry may find a foundation. We discuss the philosophy of pregeometric structures due to Wheeler, Leibniz as well as modern manifestations in topos theory. We draw attention to evidence suggesting that the framework of formal language, in particular, homotopy type theory, provides the conceptual building (...) blocks for a theory of pregeometry. This work is largely a synthesis of ideas that serve as a precursor for conceptualizing the notion of space in physical theories. In particular, the approach we espouse is based on a constructivist philosophy, wherein ``structureless structures'' are syntactic types realizing formal proofs and programs. Spaces and algebras relevant to physical theories are modeled as type-theoretic routines constructed from compositional rules of a formal language. This offers the remarkable possibility of taxonomizing distinct notions of geometry using a common theoretical framework. In particular, this perspective addresses the crucial issue of how spatiality may be realized in models that link formal computation to physics, such as the Wolfram model. (shrink)

Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as En lighten ment is the first book in the English language that seeks to place Carnap's philosophy in a broad cultural, political and intellectual context. According to the author, Carnap synthesized many different cur rents of thought and thereby arrived at a novel philosophical perspective that remains strik ing ly relevant today. Whether the reader agrees with Carus's bold theses on Carnap's place in the landscape of twentieth-century philosophy, and his even (...) bolder claims concerning the role that philosophy in Carnap's style should play in the thought of our century, does not matter so much as the excellent opportunity Carus's book offers to thoroughly rethink one's ideas about Carnap's philosophy. One reason why Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought might change one's ideas is that Carus has unearthed much hitherto unknown material from the archives that sheds new light on Carnap's early life and thought. Indeed, the many archival findings presented in CTT for the first time suffice to make the book re warding reading for philosophers and historians of philosophy alike. CTT exhibits a high standard of historical scholarship, and the book itself is a beautiful example of high-quality academic publishing. Up to now, Carnap has remained a controversial figure on the philo sophical scene. On the one hand, he has a solid reputation as a leading figure of logical positivism . According to conventional wisdom, this was a school of thought characterized by its formal and technical philosophy, as well as being rather dismissive of other ways of doing philosophy, dogmatically sticking to its own theses. As a typical example of this arrogant logical empiricist attitude, one usually refers to Carnap's notorious Overcoming Metaphysics by Logical Analysis of Language , written when the Vienna Circle's Logical Empiricism had entered its most radical phase. Self-proclaimed postpositivist philosophers of science dismissed logical positivism, in particular Carnap's, as the dogmatic and orthodox “received view.” The tendency to portray logical empiricism as an obsolete doctrine centering around certain “dogmas” started with Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism and reached its somewhat ridiculous culmination in the early 1980s when allegedly “six or seven dogmas” were discovered . Thereby an allegedly un brid geable gap between classical “dogmatic” logical em pi ricism and its modern “enlightened” suc ces sors was construed. (shrink)

Theorists who advocate worldly (metaphysical or ontological) indeterminacy—the idea that the world itself is indeterminate in one or more respects—should address how we understand the signifying nature and function of language in light of worldly indeterminacy. I first attend to Sengzhao and Jizang, two leading thinkers in Chinese Sanlun Buddhism, to reconstruct a Chinese Madhyamaka notion of ontic indeterminacy. Then, I draw on the thinkers’ views to propose a provisional (non-definitive) understanding of the nature and use of language. (...) Under this understanding, an expression signifying a thing is provisional in that the expression connotes no determinate feature of the thing. (shrink)

The present volume brings together work that will be of interest both to specialists in medieval philosophy and to those working in contemporary or more recent historical periods of metaphysics. Th...

Millikan and Her Critics offers a unique critical discussion of Ruth Millikan's highly regarded, influential, and systematic contributions to philosophy of mind and language, philosophy of biology, epistemology, and metaphysics. These newly written contributions present discussion from some of the most important philosophers in the field today and include replies from Millikan herself.

John Perry has argued that language, thought and experience often contain unarticulated constituents. I argue that this idea holds the key to explaining away the intuitive appeal of the A-theory of time and the endurance theory of persistence. The A-theory has seemed intuitively appealing because the nature of temporal experience makes it natural for us to use one-place predicates like past to deal with what are really two-place relations, one of whose constituents is unarticulated. The endurance view can be (...) treated in a similar way; the temporal boundaries of temporal parts of objects are unarticulated in experience and this makes it seem that the very same entity exists at different times. (shrink)

One of the vibrant topics of debate among African and non-African scholars in the 20th and 21st centuries centered on the existence of African philosophy. This debate has been described as unnecessary. What is necessary is, if African philosophy exists, we should show it, do it and write it rather than talking about it, or engaging in endless talks about it. A popular position on the debate is that what is expected to be shown, done and written is (...) philosophy tailored along the stereotyped and paradigmatic sense peculiar to Western philosophy. Interestingly, a non-African scholar, Barry Hallen argues that using the method of ordinary language philosophy, African philosophy is philosophy per se, and should be recognised as such. The focus of this paper is to analyse what Hallen refers to as ordinary language philosophy and explain how it authenticates African philosophy as unique ‘species’ of philosophy, thus, putting an end to the controversy on the ontology of African philosophy. (shrink)

The Polish philosophy of mathematics in the 19th century is not a well-researched topic. For this period, only five philosophers are usually mentioned, namely Jan Śniadecki, Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński, Henryk Struve, Samuel Dickstein, and Edward Stamm. This limited and incomplete perspective does not allow us to develop a well-balanced picture of the Polish philosophy of mathematics and gauge its influence on 19th- and 20th-century Polish philosophy in general. To somewhat complete our picture of the history of the (...) Polish philosophy of mathematics in those times, we here present the profiles of some lesser-known Polish Romantic philosophers of the 19th century, namely Karol Libelt, Bronisław Trentowski, and Józef Kremer. We discuss their contributions to the philosophy of mathematics and their metaphysical perspectives, and we also show how their metaphysical ideas have found some continuity in the studies of some Catholic philosophers. (shrink)

The idea that thought and language can be clarified through logical methods seems problematic because, while thought and language are not always exact, logic (by its very nature) must be. According to Kuusela, ideal (ILP, represented by Frege and Russell) and ordinary language philosophy (OLP, represented by Strawson) offer opposed solutions to this problem, and Wittgenstein combines the advantages of both. I argue that, given Kuusela’s characterisation of OLP, Strawson was not an OLP’er. I suggest that, (...) instead of seeing ILP and OLP as opposed to one another, it is better to regard OLP as an extension of ILP. (shrink)

This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting consequences. The view offers a novel (...) conception of metaphysical explanation that doesn’t rely on the notion of a “determinative” or “explanatory” relation; it allows us to draw a principled distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations; it implies that naturalness and fundamentality are distinct but intimately related notions; and perhaps most importantly, it re-establishes the unduly neglected link between explanation and understanding in the metaphysical realm. A number of objections can be raised against the view, but I will argue that none of these is conclusive. The upshot is that Metaphysical Unificationism provides a powerful and hitherto overlooked alternative to extant theories of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist (...) treatments, then the meanings of natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson contributed to many philosophical domains, including the philosophy of language, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, moral philosophy and philosophical methodology. Most of his contributions in these areas have influenced contemporary debates, either because his views are still defended or because they are still considered worthy of detailed responses. His views on the philosophy of logic have been only rarely discussed, however. My aim in this paper is threefold. First, I provide a systematic account (...) of Strawson’s philosophy of logic. I argue that Strawson is an important predecessor of logical expressivism, a contemporary position in the philosophy of logic most notably defended by Robert Brandom. My main focus is on Strawson’s largely-neglected 1982 paper ‘Logical Form and Logical Constants’, which contains his most mature ideas on the topic. Second, while Strawson’s position is of historical and independent philosophical interest, I argue that he leaves many points unclear. Finally, I propose several clarifications of Strawson’s position. (shrink)

Departing from the conventional readings of Karl Marx’s Capital and other of his works, by way of François Laruelle’s “radicalization of concepts,” Katerina Kolozova identifies a theoretical kernel in Marx’s thought whose critical and interpretative force can be employed without reference to its subsequent interpretations in the philosophical mainstream. The latter entails a process of abstracting a philosophical legacy — or rather, of putting it in brackets — and then codifying a history of a learned interpretation established in supposed fidelity (...) to the theoretical project of a “master.” Interpreting the master implies a mastery of doctrinal tools, which results in establishing a catechism of the Logos of the Master. And this catechism interferes, Kolozova argues, with more direct encounters with Marx’s writings. As we know, Marx’s rigorously descriptive language unravels the radical core of capitalist economic processes and, through that unraveling, also reveals capitalism’s necessary exploitation and subjugation of human labor. Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism attempts to recuperate and emancipate the notion of metaphysics in this scenario by virtue of radicalizing thought’s encounter with the Real. Kolozova argues that this metaphysical drama is at the origin of the social and economic injustices of contemporary global economic-political realities, and she illustrates this state of affairs in discussions of the problem of wage labor, automated speculation as the core of late capitalism, the post-2008 financial crisis, the status of technology in late capitalism, sexual difference and gender, and the human and non-human body’s subjugation capitalist automation. (shrink)

This paper explores three important interrelated themes in Putnam’s philosophy: language, meaning, and the context-sensitivity of “truth-evaluable content.” It shows how Putnam’s own version of semantic externalism is able to steer a middle course between an internalism about meaning that requires a “language of thought” (or “mentalese”) and a mind-independent realism about meaning that requires Platonic objects (or other such “abstract entities”), while doing justice to how ascriptions of meaning are causally related to the objective world. The (...) following account is able to allow for the primacy of language over thought while ensuring that the content of thought is partially fixed by the external world. The emphasis in Putnam’s later writings on the “context sensitivity” of meaning are often construed as marking a major departure from his earlier thought. It is here argued that such an interpretation involves a misunderstanding both of the commitments of Putnam’s original form of semantic externalism and of the implications of the version of context sensitivity he embraces. (shrink)

For many years I have maintained that I learned to philosophize by translating Francisco Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputation V from Latin into English. This surely is a claim that must sound extraordinary to the members of this audience or even to most twentieth century philosophers. Who reads Suárez these days? And what could I learn from a sixteenth century scholastic writer that would help me in the twentieth century? I would certainly be surprised if one were to find any references to (...) some of Suárez’s works in any of the works of twentieth-century major philosophers. One of the reasons for my claim is the great difficulty I had in figuring out what Suárez’s text means and how to render it understandable to English readers. Translating the text forced me to think in ways that were quite different from those I was used to think in Spanish, my native tongue, or English, my adoptive tongue. In fact, the translation I produced after having completed many drafts continued, and still continues to this day, to appear to me unsatisfactory, and that dissatisfaction was the key to understanding things I had understood very differently before. I hope to make clear why in what follows. The thesis that I defend is that semantic equivalence between texts of philosophy in different languages is difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to achieve and, therefore, that it is a mistake to restrict doing analytic philosophy to English, as Gustavo Rodríguez-Pereyra argues we should do in a recent article (2013). (shrink)