In this paper we introduce a novel way of building arithmetics whose background logic is R. The purpose of doing this is to point in the direction of a novel family of systems that could be candidates for being the infamous R#1/2 that Meyer suggested we look for.

Here's the thing: when you look at it from just the right angle, it's entirely obvious how semantics for second-order relevant logics ought to go. Or at least, if you've understood how semantics for first-order relevant logics ought to go, there are perspectives like this. What's more is that from any such angle, the metatheory that needs doing can be summed up in one line: everything is just as in the first-order case, but with more indices. Of course, it's no (...) small matter finding the magical angle from which everything becomes obvious. And even having found this perspective, one cannot assume one's audience will find things as obvious as oneself. All that to say this: if the results in the paper below strike you as obvious, pay attention to the perspective that makes that possible. And if they don't, feel free to ignore this preamble in its entirety. (shrink)

This paper aims to establish the importance of mathematical thinking in the work of Vilém Flusser. For this purpose highlights the concept of escalation of abstraction with which the Czech German philosopher finishes by reversing the top of the traditional pyramid of knowledge, we know from Plato and Aristotle. It also assumes the implicit cultural revolution in the refinement of the numerical element in a process of gradual abandonment of purely alphabetic code, highlights the new key code, together with the (...) technological and telematic culture and uses the concepts of game theory, of probability theory and computing to analize the society and culture. Of particular importance is the affirmation of a new kind of imagination, a projective one, ranging from the model to the world. Today's society and culture can´t be understood without resorting to the concepts and results coined and made ​​in the course of developing a type of thinking entirely dominated by the mathematics. The limits and boundaries of scientific disciplines overlap under number development, requiring reflection and rethinking traditional concepts of social and natural sciences. (shrink)

As artforms, film and street art seem incompatible. Contra this incompatibility, I investigate their combination: cinematic street art. Two promising cases are the artworks MUTO and Repopulate, but I argue neither is suitable. MUTO only counts if I accept the transparency thesis, the claim that photographs allow us to literally see their depicta. Repopulate only counts if we reject Noel Carroll’s requirement that a cinematic performance token isn’t itself an artwork. However, these imperfect cases demonstrate what is required in order (...) to have cinematic street art: the artwork is a 1) aconsensual artwork that 2) does not merely use street art as imagery or 3) merely use the street as a performance space. I introduce two hypothetical artworks inspired by this approach and discuss their merits, as well as their pitfalls relevant to my own desiderata. As such, this article serves as the foment for broader discussion within the philosophy of street art. (shrink)

When considering the value of friendship, most philosophers ignore the negatives. Most assume that humans need friends to flourish, and some argue that friendships can be good, no matter the risks entailed. This makes conversations about the value of friendship one-sided. Here, I argue that Cynics and Pessimists have an important view on friendship, despite it being ignored. They hold that: (a) friendship is unnecessary for flourishing, and (b) friendship presents ethical risks, especially to one’s own self-sufficiency. I defend these (...) views. Then I conclude with reflections on why Cynics and Pessimists actually make great friends. By helping people to focus on vulgar human nature and the flaws that humans have, they create an unpretentious basis for friendship. (shrink)

There is a natural story about what logic is that sees it as tied up with two operations: a ‘throw things into a bag’ operation and a ‘closure’ operation. In a pair of recent papers, Jc Beall has fleshed out the account of logic this leaves us with in more detail. Using Beall’s exposition as a guide, this paper points out some problems with taking the second operation to be closure in the usual sense. After pointing out these problems, I (...) then turn to fixing them in a restricted case and modulo a few simplifying assumptions. In a followup paper, the simplifications and restrictions will be removed. (shrink)

Formal symptoms of relevance usually concern the propositional variables shared between the antecedent and the consequent of provable conditionals. Among the most famous results about such symptoms are Belnap’s early results showing that for sublogics of the strong relevant logic R, provable conditionals share a signed variable between antecedent and consequent. For logics weaker than R stronger variable sharing results are available. In 1984, Ross Brady gave one well-known example of such a result. As a corollary to the main result (...) of the paper, we give a very simple proof of a related but strictly stronger result. (shrink)

Aristotle argued that you need some wealth to live well. The Stoics argued that you could live well with or without wealth. But the Cynics argued that wealth is a hinderance. For the Cynics, a good life consists in self-sufficiency, or being able to rule and help yourself. You accomplish this by living simply and naturally, and by subjecting yourself to rigorous philosophical exercises. Cynics confronted people to get them to abandon extraneous possessions and positions of power to live better. (...) And while the Cynics were experts in living in this way, their ascetic lifestyles made their message curious to some audiences. This paper reflects on Cynic ascetic practices and the ways others perceived them. (shrink)

Relevant logics infamously have the property that they only validate a conditional when some propositional variable is shared between its antecedent and consequent. This property has been strengthened in a variety of ways over the last half-century. Two of the more famous of these strengthenings are the strong variable sharing property and the depth relevance property. In this paper I demonstrate that an appropriate class of relevant logics has a property that might naturally be characterized as the supremum of these (...) two properties. I also show how to use this fact to demonstrate that these logics seem to be constructive in previously unknown ways. (shrink)

Recent authors, emphasizing Newman’s distaste for natural theology—especially William Paley’s design argument—have urged us to follow Newman’s lead and reject design arguments. But I argue that Newman’s own argument for God’s existence (his argument from conscience) fails without a supplementary design argument or similar reason to think our faculties are truth-oriented. In other words, Newman appears to need the kind of argument he explicitly rejects. Finding Newman’s rejection of natural theology to stem primarily from factors other than worries about cogency, (...) however, I further argue that there is little reason not to pursue design arguments in order to save the argument from conscience. (shrink)

What is the role of affect in moral epistemology? Sentimentalists assert that moral knowledge is rooted in knowledge of specific situational moral truths, which affect is a necessary means for attaining. Rationalists claim moral knowledge is rooted in moral principles, knowledge of which is acquired a priori through reason alone; affect is unnecessary. Note that in this way of framing the debate, the issue concerns solely moral knowledge. Recent epistemology, however, has also highlighted the importance of understanding as an epistemic (...) good separate from knowledge. As such, moral understanding might have value over and above mere moral knowledge. Some philosophers have pointed to the importance moral understanding possesses for reliably doing the right thing, justifying yourself to others, developing virtue, and performing morally worthy action. In this paper, I argue that the sentimentalist account of understanding both specific moral truths and moral principles has significant advantages over, and can ground, the rationalist alternative. (shrink)

In 1988, Kit Fine published a semantic theory for quantified relevant logics. He referred to this theory as stratified semantics. While it has received some attention in the literature, 1–20, 1992; Mares & Goldblatt, Journal of Symbolic Logic 71, 163–187, 2006), stratified semantics has overall received much less attention than it deserves. There are two plausible reasons for this. First, the only two dedicated treatments of stratified semantics available are, 27–59, 1988; Mares, Studia Logica 51, 1–20, 1992), both of which (...) are quite dense and technically challenging. Second, there are a number of prima facie reasons to be worried about stratified semantics. The purpose of this paper is to revitalize research on stratified semantics. I will do so by giving a ‘user friendly’ presentation of the semantics, and by giving reasons to think that the prima facie reasons to be worried about it are too simplistic. (shrink)

For some years now, Michael Bergmann has urged a dilemma against internalist theories of epistemic justification. For reasons I explain below, some epistemologists have thought that Michael Huemer’s principle of Phenomenal Conservatism can split the horns of Bergmann’s dilemma. Bergmann has recently argued, however, that PC must inevitably, like all other internalist views, fall prey to his dilemma. In this paper, I explain the nature of Bergmann’s dilemma and his reasons for thinking that PC cannot escape it before arguing that (...) he is mistaken: PC can indeed split its horns. (shrink)

Stoicism deserves everything that Broic$ are doing to its movement. This is because Stoics stuff the value of everything into their own heads, thus denying that external things are good and that other people have intrinsic value. Stoics are psychopathic narcissists and axiological solipsists. And this makes Stoicism easy to coopt into bro-y, shallow, self-help-y garbage.

In this chapter, we argue for a phenomenal conservative perspective on religious epistemology and attempt to answer some common criticisms of this perspective.

This paper presents a new semantics for the weak relevant logic DW that makes the role of the infamous Routley star more explicable. Central to this rewriting is combining aspects of both the American and Australian plan for understanding negations in relevance logics.

It is still a live question in epistemology and philosophy of science as to what exactly evidence is. In my view, evidence consists in experiences called “seemings.” This view is a version of the phenomenal conception of evidence, the position that evidence consists in nonfactive mental states with propositional content. This conception is opposed by sense-data theorists, disjunctivists, and those who think evidence consists in physical objects or publicly observable states of affairs—call it the courtroom conception of evidence. Thomas Kelly (...) has recently argued that the phenomenal conception cannot play all the roles evidence plays and is thus inadequate. Having first explained the nature of seemings, in this essay I utilize Kelly’s own understanding of the four major roles of evidence and argue that the phenomenal conception can play each one. Experience is a good candidate for evidence. (shrink)

Nietzsche (1844–1900) struggles with complexity and many-sidedness throughout his life. He is a nuanced thinker who offers fragments instead of a rigid philosophical system, yet he admires the ‘virtuous energy’ with which systematic thinkers, especially the pre-Socratic philosophers, express themselves. His ability to write with comparable energy is hindered by university philosophy, which privileges restraint and consistency. Therefore, he adopts a practice of spontaneous life writing in order to become simple and honest in thought and life. Inspired by figures such (...) as Emerson, Diogenes, and Sterne, he grasps the ‘nearest shoddy words’ and continually produces new insights in disjointed monologues and aphorisms. Nietzsche's vague metaphors, loose language, inconsistency, and hyperbole stem from this practice, and his autobiography, Ecce Homo (1888), is the closest that he ever comes to rekindling the energy of the pre-Socratics. (shrink)

I present a version of Kit Fine's stratified semantics for the logic RWQ and define a natural family of related structures called RW hyperdoctrines. After proving that RWQ is sound with respect to RW hyperdoctrines, we show how to construct, for each stratified model, a hyperdoctrine that verifies precisely the same sentences. Completeness of RWQ for hyperdoctrinal semantics then follows from completeness for stratified semantics, which is proved in an appendix. By examining the base category of RW hyperdoctrines, we find (...) reason to be worried about the ontology of stratified models. (shrink)

In this chapter, Logan Paul Gage examines the only real attempt to disprove God’s existence by a New Atheist: Richard Dawkins’s “Ultimate 747 Gambit.” Central to Dawkins’s argument is the claim that God is more complex than what he is invoked to explain. Gage evaluates this claim using the main extant notions of simplicity in the literature. Gage concludes that on no reading does this claim survive scrutiny. Along the way, Dawkins claims that there are no good positive arguments (...) for God’s existence. Gage attempts to show that Dawkins’s argument depends upon distinctively philosophical assumptions that do not appear to withstand scrutiny. (shrink)

Linnebo and Pettigrew present some objections to category theory as an autonomous foundation. They do a commendable job making clear several distinct senses of ‘autonomous’ as it occurs in the phrase ‘autonomous foundation’. Unfortunately, their paper seems to treat the ‘categorist’ perspective rather unfairly. Several infelicities of this sort were addressed by McLarty. In this note I address yet another apparent infelicity.

In this paper, I’ll present two objections against Robert Kane’s (2024) libertarian account of free will. First, to accommodate deliberative libertarian views, Kane must reconceptualize how indeterminism operates in deliberation. Second, in light of a discussion concerning the time indeterminism terminates in deliberation, we do not have good reason to prefer Kane’s account over deliberative views. I leave it open as to which view better captures libertarian free will. I only wish to show that deliberative views are no less plausible (...) than Kane’s account. NOTE THAT THIS WORK IS UNPUBLISHED/IN PROGRESS. A better version is coming soon :) . (shrink)

Abstractionism in the philosophy of mathematics aims at deriving large fragments of mathematics by combining abstraction principles (i.e. the abstract objects $\S e_1, \S e_2$, are identical if, and only if, an equivalence relation $Eq_\S$ holds between the entities $e_1, e_2$) with logic. Still, as highlighted in work on the semantics for relevant logics, there are different ways theories might be combined. In exactly what ways must logic and abstraction be combined in order to get interesting mathematics? In this paper, (...) we investigate the matter by deriving the axioms of second-order Peano Arithmetic from Frege's Basic Law V (the extension of $F$ is identical with the extension of $G$ if, and only if, $F$ and $G$ are extensionally equivalent) in the presence of a relevant higher-order logic. The results are interesting. Not only must we take on logic as true, and not only must we apply our logic to abstraction principles, but also we have to apply our theory of abstraction back to the logic in order to arrive at arithmetic. Thus, what Abstractionism gives us is not simply what we get from abstraction via logic, but also what we get from logic via abstraction. (shrink)

This paper does two things. First, it interprets the work of W. E. B. Du Bois to reveal that the meanings of race terms are grounded by both a historical and an aspirational component. Race terms refer to a backward-looking component that traces the history of the group to its present time, as well as a forward-looking component that sets out values and goals for the group. Race terms thus refer to a complex cluster of concepts that involve biological, sociological, (...) historical, moral, and political properties. Second, the paper defends W. E. B. Du Bois’s conservationist thesis about races, which holds that we should maintain race talk and racial distinctions. But instead of offering philosophical evidence, this paper defends the plausibility of the conservationist thesis with evidence from contemporary biology and psychology. It argues that, instead of eliminating race terms or concepts, we should conserve and revise them. (shrink)

A discussion of several tensions between Thomistic philosophy and modern Darwinian theory as well as several recent Thomistic criticisms of intelligent design.

The role of certitude in our mental lives is, to put it mildly, controversial. Many current epistemologists (including epistemologists of religion) eschew certitude altogether. Given his emphasis on certitude, some have maintained that John Henry Newman was an infallibilist about knowledge. In this paper, we argue that a careful examination of his thought (especially as seen in the Grammar of Assent) reveals that he was an epistemic fallibilist. We first clarify what we mean by fallibilism and infallibilism. Second, we explain (...) why some have read Newman as an infallibilist. Third, we offer two arguments that Newman is at least a fallibilist in a weak sense. In particular, the paradox he seeks to resolve in the Grammar and his dispute with John Locke both indicate that he is at least a weak fallibilist. We close with a consideration of whether Newman is a fallibilist in a much stronger sense as well. (shrink)

This essay shows how John Henry Newman reconciled the certitude of faith with a fallibilist epistemology. While Newman holds that many of our beliefs are held with certitude, he does not conceive of all certitude as Cartesian, apodictic certitude. In this way, he walks a middle road between rationalism and fideism.

In this paper, we provide a semantics for a range of positive substructural logics, including both logics with and logics without modal connectives. The semantics is novel insofar as it is meant to explicitly capture the computational flavor of these logics, and to do so in a way that builds in both nondeterministic and nonconcurrent computational processes.

Consider the set of inferences that are acceptable to use in all our theory building endeavors. Call this set of inferences the universal theory building toolkit, or just ’the toolkit’ for short. It is clear that the toolkit is tightly connected to logic in a variety of ways. Beall, for example, has argued that logic just is the toolkit. This paper avoids making a stand on that issue and instead investigates reasons for thinking that, logic or not, the toolkit is (...) substructural. It is presented as a dialogue for the simple reason that it summarizes a range of dialogues on this subject that the author has had with various folks over the past few years. The method I use to investigate the toolkit is inspired in both philosophical and technical details by Alasdair Urquhart’s work on semantics for relevance logics from the early 1970s. (shrink)

Contextualism (the view that ‘knowledge’ and its variants are context-sensitive) has been supported in large part through appeal to intuitions about Keith DeRose’s Bank Cases. Recently, however, the contextualist construal of these cases has come under fire from Kent Bach and Jennifer Nagel who question whether the Bank Case subject’s confidence can remain constant in both low- and high-stakes cases. Having explained the Bank Cases and this challenge to them, I argue that DeRose has given a reasonable reply to this (...) initial challenge. However, I proceed to argue that the current stalemate can be broken. Seeking to extend the Bach-Nagel critique, I offer a novel interpretation of the Bank Cases according to which the subject’s evidence changes between low- and high-stakes cases. If I am correct, then, given the amount of support the Bank Cases have been thought to lend contextualism, the case for contextualism is seriously weakened. (shrink)

In a time when conservatives believe that the traditional family is under increasing fire, some think an appeal to Darwinian science may be the answer. I argue that these conservatives are wrong to maintain that Darwinian theory can serve as the intellectual foundation for the traditional conception of the family. Contra Larry Arnhart and James Q. Wilson, a Darwinian philosophy of nature simply lacks the stability the traditional family requires; it cannot support the traditional conception of human nature and the (...) normativity it was thought to contain. If conservatives are to maintain these traditional ideas, the theoretical foundation must lie elsewhere. (shrink)

We criticize the approach of covenantal epistemology to religious epistemology as articulated by Scott Oliphint from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

We criticize the proper functionalist approach to religious epistemology as articulated by Tyler McNabb from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

In this essay, I describe my journey to Catholicism and explain one of the many reasons I became Catholic--namely, an argument from the canon of Scripture.

A brief introduction to the life and key work of Rudolf Carnap with special attention to his work on inductive logic.

Consider the set of inferences that are acceptable to use in all our theory building endeavors. Call this set of inferences the universal theory building toolkit, or just ’the toolkit’ for short. It is clear that the toolkit is tightly connected to logic in a variety of ways. Beall, for example, has argued that logic just is the toolkit. This paper avoids making a stand on that issue and instead investigates reasons for thinking that, logic or not, the toolkit is (...) substructural. It is presented as a dialogue for the simple reason that it summarizes a range of dialogues on this subject that the author has had with various folks over the past few years. The method I use to investigate the toolkit is inspired in both philosophical and technical details by Alasdair Urquhart’s work on semantics for relevance logics from the early 1970s. (shrink)

A brief introduction to the life and work of William Paley, including a discussion of the structure of his famous design argument.

This paper explores personal identity and persistence through time in the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics (QM). First, I will motivate the MWI’s relevance in the domain of metaphysics. Second, I will define endurantism. Third, I will explain the foundational physics underlying the MWI which entails branching worlds. Finally, I will argue that the privileged branch view best captures endurantist judgments about personal identity and persistence through time in the many-worlds framework. (Note that this work is in its (...) early draft stages - later versions will be updated and revised). (shrink)

In this chapter, Gage and McAllister respond to various objections to the phenomenal conservative position in religious epistemology. In particular, they respond to the objections that seemings are the ultimate source of justification, that PC makes epistemic justification too easy, that PC involves conceptual circularity, and that PC lacks an objective connection to truth.

Categorial logic, as its name suggests, applies the techniques and machinery of category theory to topics traditionally classified as part of logic. We claim that these tools deserve attention from a greater range of philosophers than just the mathematical logicians. We support this claim with an example. In this paper we show how one particular tool from categorial logic---hyperdoctrines---suggests interesting metaphysics. Hyperdoctrines can provide semantics for quantified languages, but this account of quantification suggests a metaphysical picture quite different from the (...) one suggested by standard model-theoretic semantics. (shrink)

We critique MacIntyre's traditions-based perspectivalist approach to religious epistemology as articulated by Erik Baldwin from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

We criticize the classical evidentialist approach to religious epistemology as articulated by John DePoe from the perspective of phenomenal conservatism.

A brief introduction to a diverse and interesting group of papers in contemporary epistemology.