In a recent paper, Justin D’Ambrosio (2020) has offered an empirical argument in support of a negative solution to the puzzle of Macbeth’s dagger—namely, the question of whether, in the famous scene from Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth sees a dagger in front of him. D’Ambrosio’s strategy consists in showing that “seeing” is not an existence-neutral verb; that is, that the way it is used in ordinary language is not neutral with respect to whether its complement exists. In this paper, (...) we offer an empirical argument in favor of an existence-neutral reading of “seeing”. In particular, we argue that existence-neutral readings are readily available to language users. We thus call into question D’Ambrosio’s argument for the claim that Macbeth does not see a dagger. According to our positive solution, Macbeth sees a dagger, even though there is not a dagger in front of him. (shrink)

'When Macbeth comes from the murder of Duncan, his hands are covered in King's blood; he looks at them, and feels that all the waters in the ocean cannot wash away the blood, but that- "this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.,"... -/- (http://philpapers.org/profile/112741 ).

In her article, "Thinking and Moral Considerations," Hannah Arendt provides a provocative approach to the question of evil by suggesting that banal evil-the most common kind-may arise directly from thoughtlessness. If that is so, thinking may provide an antidote to evil. Learning to think would then offer the individual and society protection against the dangers of thoughtless evil. She further suggests that thinking may clear the way for a form of judging that "when the chips are down" may turn people (...) toward right rather than wrong, beauty rather than ugliness. In this essay I address her claim by noting an example of apparently thoughtless evil, the murder of Duncan by Macbeth, and by showing how this event clarifies Arendt's thesis, including both its weaknesses and its strengths. The use of Macbeth will amount to a sketch of certain features of the play particularly relevant to this ethical issue, followed by an analysis of ways Arendt's thesis connects with the murder of Duncan. (shrink)

This substantial book is a highly original and thorough work of synthetic first philosophy. Although it has some recognizable roots in the Kantian/Sellarsian tradition of the Pittsburgh school, it adds a wealth of precise discussion of examples from science and mathematics, made possible by Macbeth's dual training in arts and sciences. It presents a developmental story of human reason bootstrapping itself towards greater power and clarity through the Western tradition (which is the sole purview of the discussion). This development (...) is divided into three distinct stages, which might be summarized very roughly as knowledge of: i) Objects, ii) Concepts applied to Objects and iii) Concepts alone. (shrink)

In this paper I present an empirical solution to the puzzle of Macbeth's dagger. The puzzle of Macbeth's dagger is the question of whether, in having his fatal vision of a dagger, Macbeth sees a dagger. I answer this question by addressing a more general one: the question of whether perceptual verbs are intensional transitive verbs (ITVs). I present seven experiments, each of which tests a collection of perceptual verbs for one of the three features characteristic of (...) ITVs. One of these features is Nonexistence: the failure of sentences involving transitive verbs to entail the existence of their direct objects. The experiments reveal that with respect to all three of these features, "see" behaves much more like a paradigmatically extensional verb than an intensional one. But surprisingly, unlike "see", "perceive" behaves much more like a paradigmatically intensional verb. This shows that the category of perceptual verbs is not uniform with respect to the features of intensionality; while Macbeth does not see a dagger, he may still perceive one. (shrink)

A Mathematical Review by John Corcoran, SUNY/Buffalo -/- Macbeth, Danielle Diagrammatic reasoning in Frege's Begriffsschrift. Synthese 186 (2012), no. 1, 289–314. ABSTRACT This review begins with two quotations from the paper: its abstract and the first paragraph of the conclusion. The point of the quotations is to make clear by the “give-them-enough-rope” strategy how murky, incompetent, and badly written the paper is. I know I am asking a lot, but I have to ask you to read the quoted passages—aloud (...) if possible. Don’t miss the silly attempt to recycle Kant’s quip “Concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind”. What the paper was aiming at includes the absurdity: “Proofs without definitions are empty; definitions without proofs are, if not blind, then dumb.” But the author even bollixed this. The editor didn’t even notice. The copy-editor missed it. And the author’s proof-reading did not catch it. In order not to torment you I will quote the sentence as it appears: “In a slogan: proofs without definitions are empty, merely the aimless manipulation of signs according to rules; and definitions without proofs are, if no blind, then dumb.”[sic] The rest of my review discusses the paper’s astounding misattribution to contemporary logicians of the information-theoretic approach. This approach was cruelly trashed by Quine in his 1970 Philosophy of Logic, and thereafter ignored by every text I know of. The paper under review attributes generally to modern philosophers and logicians views that were never espoused by any of the prominent logicians—such as Hilbert, Gödel, Tarski, Church, and Quine—apparently in an attempt to distance them from Frege: the focus of the article. On page 310 we find the following paragraph. “In our logics it is assumed that inference potential is given by truth-conditions. Hence, we think, deduction can be nothing more than a matter of making explicit information that is already contained in one’s premises. If the deduction is valid then the information contained in the conclusion must be contained already in the premises; if that information is not contained already in the premises […], then the argument cannot be valid.” Although the paper is meticulous in citing supporting literature for less questionable points, no references are given for this. In fact, the view that deduction is the making explicit of information that is only implicit in premises has not been espoused by any standard symbolic logic books. It has only recently been articulated by a small number of philosophical logicians from a younger generation, for example, in the prize-winning essay by J. Sagüillo, Methodological practice and complementary concepts of logical consequence: Tarski’s model-theoretic consequence and Corcoran’s information-theoretic consequence, History and Philosophy of Logic, 30 (2009), pp. 21–48. The paper omits definitions of key terms including ‘ampliative’, ‘explicatory’, ‘inference potential’, ‘truth-condition’, and ‘information’. The definition of prime number on page 292 is as follows: “To say that a number is prime is to say that it is not divisible without remainder by another number”. This would make one be the only prime number. The paper being reviewed had the benefit of two anonymous referees who contributed “very helpful comments on an earlier draft”. Could these anonymous referees have read the paper? -/- J. Corcoran, U of Buffalo, SUNY -/- PS By the way, if anyone has a paper that has been turned down by other journals, any journal that would publish something like this might be worth trying. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the different strategies the Bard uses in order to evoke sympathy in the reader for Macbeth who is so persistent in the path of evil. What strategy does Shakespeare use in order to provoke such a deep emotional response from his readers? By using paradoxes in the play, the Bard creates a world of illusion, fear and wild imagination. The paradoxical world in Macbeth startles us into marvel and fear, challenges our commonly held (...) opinions, and reshapes our thought in the process (Platt 8). As the text involves the reader in the formation of illusion and the simultaneous formation of the means whereby the illusion is punctured, “reading reflects the process by which we gain experience. Once the reader is entangled, his own preconceptions are continually overtaken so that the text becomes his present while his own ideas fade into the past. As soon as it happens, he is open to the immediate experience of the text” (Iser, The Implied Reader 290). Mesmerised by Macbeth’s powerful imagination and poetic language, the reader engages in a dialogical interaction with the play and eventually finds light in the murky world of the text. Regardless of Macbeth’s diabolical world, the reader ventures into it, shares it with him and ultimately wakes up from its dizzying stupor. In reading Macbeth, the reader leaves behind the familiar world of his experience in order to participate in the adventure the text offers him. The edifying effect of the tragedy in the end is the reward the reader reaps after eventually waking up from the nightmarish dream of the text. (shrink)

Its oft I had been asked by students and many of others of the given topic. What I personally felt be its answer, referring obviously standard books, I answered my seekers including also analyzing myself many times just twelve lines of the opening scene, which is in fact, later I thought, is containing a very ‘partial fulfillment’ of the conversation among the witches- perhaps that figures out the destiny of a mortal being, destiny of our tragic hero, full of “profound- (...) mature -complexity of human materialistic nature’’. ( http://philpapers.org/profile/112741 ). (shrink)

Charles Peirce famously divided all signs into icons, indices and symbols. The past few decades have seen mainstream analytic philosophy broaden its traditional focus on symbols to recognise the so-called essential indexical. Can the moral now be extended to icons? Is there an “essential icon”? And if so, what exactly would be essential about it? It is argued that there is and it consists in logical form. Danielle Macbeth’s radical new “expressivist” interpretation of Frege’s logic and Charles Peirce’s existential (...) graphs are mobilized in support of this claim. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the metaphysical foundations of Throne of Blood , Kurosawa's reworking of Shakespeare's Macbeth . Using Hegel's theory of tragedy, I develop the distinction between Greek and modern tragedy, with their differing bases in ethical and subjective freedom. I then show that Noh drama also includes a very different metaphysical account, stemming from its theoretical roots in Buddhism. I then use these three differing accounts (Greek, modern and Noh drama) to explore the (...) effect of Kurosawa's use Noh aesthetics in Throne of Blood on the metaphysical ground of the film itself. (shrink)

contents -/- i. a game we can't abstain from ii. a sudden God, a Boltzmann God iii. the Hard Problem & Humean causation iv. Turing gave a recipe for consciousness v. the Honeymoon Algorithm vi. Tech Civ takes Earth in vii. Borges, the Compressor viii. Hollywood, where faeries enter ix. in the age of Macbeth, magic x. from King to this vile politician xi. Medieval blue not our color blue xii. the austerities prioritize braingrowth xiii. taste is tactile xiv. (...) if God is a Drama Lord xv. the Hero-Dragon story must be realized. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive critique of the Heidegger problem and while putting forward a critique of Heidegger; it establishes the sanctity of Levinas. In the process of doing so; the reviewer touches on the problems of not considering Edith Stein in a book of this sort. When I got my tenure in India, one wisecrack on the board of interviewers asked me how Kit Marole influenced Shakespeare. I knew that he was just quoting Wayne C Booth's stuff on Macbeth. (...) John E Drabinski and Eric S Nelson are not those wisecrack sorts. They are serious scholars and this review gives them their due. They have shown the Janus nature of the Nazi, Heidegger who was instrumental in gassing Edith Stein, who needs to be known more throughout the academy, which COVID 19 has successfully destroyed. And we need Levinas and Stein to rebuild a world which will be mediated soon by drones and inane webinars and contactless nonsense. This reviewer suggests that we read this book with great care. And not participate in meaningless online events. (shrink)

We advance a theory of the representational role of Euclidean diagrams according to which they are samples of co-exact features. We contrast our theory with two other conceptions, the instantial conception and Macbeth’s iconic view, with respect to how well they accommodate three fundamental constraints on theories of the Euclidean diagrammatic practice— that Euclidean diagrams are used in proofs whose results are wholly general, that Euclidean diagrams indicate the co-exact features that the geometer is allowed to infer from them (...) and that Euclidean diagrams play the same role in both direct proofs and indirect proofs by reductio—and argue that our view is the one best suited to account for them. We conclude by illustrating the virtues of our conception of Euclidean diagrams as samples by means of an analysis of Saccheri’s quadrilateral. (shrink)