In “Naming with Necessity”, it is argued that Kripke’s thesis that proper names are rigid designators is best seen as being motivated by an individual-driven picture of modality, which has two parts. First, inherent in proper-name usage is the expectation that names refer to modally robust individuals: individuals that can sustain modal predications like ‘is necessarily human’. Second, these modally robust individuals are the fundamental building blocks on the basis of which possible worlds should be conceived in a modal semantics (...) intended to mirror the conceptual apparatus behind ordinary modal talk. The individual-driven picture is distinct from two views inspired by Kripke, direct reference theory and Millianism. The former covers only the first half of the picture, while the latter explicitly gives up on that half even, opting to remain neutral about what expectation expressions impose on the nature of their referents. (shrink)

Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates authorial creation. To that end, I will be exploring (...) Kripke’s fleeting remarks in his “Naming and Necessity” lectures (1972, 156–7) about expressions like ‘unicorn’ and ‘Harry Potter’. Elsewhere, Kripke motivates artifactualism by suggesting that incorporating authorial creation (as artifactualism does) is a move that is intuitive and natural; but beyond this, he doesn’t provide any arguments in favor of such a move. My purpose in this paper is to construct such an argument based on considerations about Kripke’s general view about proper names, in particular, his seminal causal-historical chain account of reference determination. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a line of argument against one form of realism about fictional characters : abstract artifact theory, the view according to which fictional characters like Harry Potter are part of our reality, but, they are abstract objects created by humans, akin to the institution of marriage and the game of soccer. I will defend artifactualism against an objection that Mark Sainsbury considers decisive against it: the category-mistake objection. The objection has it that artifactualism attributes to people (...) who produce and process sentences and thoughts about Harry Potter massive error, indeed, a category mistake about what kind of thing Harry Potter is; for an abstract object isn’t the sort of thing that can wear glasses, ride a double-decker bus, attend school. Given problems with this objection, artifactualism, I shall conclude, remains a tenable contender. (shrink)

My aim is to show that once we appreciate how Searle (1958) fills in the details of his account of proper names – which I will dub the presuppositional view – and how we might supplement it further, we are in for a twofold discovery. First, Searle’s account is crucially unlike the so-called cluster-of-descriptions view, which many philosophers take Searle to have held. Second, the presuppositional view he did hold is interesting, plausible, and worthy of serious reconsideration. The idea that (...) Searle’s account is a largely Fregean interlude between the Fregean description theory of proper names and Kripke’s proposals presented in “Naming and Necessity” is in major ways a myth, a mythical chapter in how the story of 20th-century philosophy of language is often told. (shrink)

It is traditionally thought that metaphorical utterances constitute a special— nonliteral—kind of departure from lexical constraints on meaning. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have been forcefully arguing against this: according to them, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specifi c to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metaphors as well. One of Sperber and Wilson’s central reasons for holding this is that metaphorical (...) utterances occupy one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic utterances with no sharp boundaries in between them. Call this the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors. My aim is to show that this continuum argument doesn’t work. For if it were to work, it would have an unwanted consequence: it could be converted into a continuum argument about interpreting linguistic errors, including slips of the tongue, of which malaprops are a special case. In particular, based on the premise that the literal–loose–metaphorical continuum extends to malaprops also, we could conclude that the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure for malaprops does not require details specifi c to linguistic errors, that is, details beyond those already in place for interpreting literal utterances. Given that we have good reason to reject this conclusion, we also have good reason to rethink the conclusion of the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors and consider what additional (metaphor-specifi c) details—about the role of constraints due to what is lexically encoded by the words used—might be added to relevance-theoretic comprehension procedures. (shrink)

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

This paper offers a unified, quantificational treatment of incomplete descriptions like ‘the table’. An incomplete quantified expression like ‘every bottle’ (as in “Every bottle is empty”) can feature in true utterances despite the fact that the world contains nonempty bottles. Positing a contextual restriction on the bottles being talked about is a straightforward solution. It is argued that the same strategy can be extended to incomplete definite descriptions across the board. ncorporating the contextual restrictions into semantics involves meeting a complex (...) array of desiderata, yet the apparently simpler pragmatic alternative faces severe problems and is therefore a nonstarter. (shrink)

This paper concerns a thorny problem posed by conditional requirements: we expect some modal conditionals of the form ‘if p, then it must be that p’ to be false, yet they all come out true given two basic assumptions needed to account for ordinary conditional requirement like ‘If the light turns red, then cars must stop’. The first assumption is a semantic expectation linking conditional requirements with absolute ones, the second is the possible-worlds-based definition of modal sentences. Keeping the former (...) means giving up the latter, a result with profound implications for Kratzer’s formal semantics, modifications thereof, as well as deontic logics. (shrink)

At the invitation of the Commission for World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in collaboration with different associations involved in mission and ecumenical studies, the Regional Center for Central and Eastern Europe convened at the Faculty of Orthodox Theology of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, through its Center for Mission and Nomocanonical Studies (CMNS, in collaboration with the Central and Eastern European Association for Mission Studies (CEEAMS). Its aim was to reflect on how the (...) International Missionary Council (IMC) has influenced mission theology and practice in Central and Eastern Europe, taking into account different contextual realities. (shrink)

This book provides a survey of the ethical aspects of health care resources distribution. It first distinguishes health from health care in an effort to clear up the ethical landscape. After this, still with the same purpose, it makes a distinction between problems of macro-allocation and micro-allocation. In the rest of the book two questions of macro-allocation are treated in some detail. First, several approaches – in particular: utilitarian, egalitarian, communitarian, and libertarian – to the question whether we have a (...) right to health care are assessed. Second, it is discussed how best, if we have such a right, health care resources are allocated given obvious budget constraints. Here again the major theories discussed are utilitarian, communitarian, and egalitarian. Although it is not the aim of the book to propose a new theory of the ethics of health care resource distribution, the critical approach throughout is broadly egalitarian in spirit. (shrink)

W artykule rozważana jest koncepcja nagiego substratu w kontekście problemu indywiduacji. Głównym celem tekstu jest obrona teorii nagiego substratu (TNS) przed klasycznymi oraz współczesnymi zarzutami. Tok rozważań jest następujący: Autor we wstępie definiuje problem jednostkowienia i systematyzuje obecną dyskusję nad tym zagadnieniem. Następnie skupia się na porównaniu teorii wiązki i teorii nagiego substratu, ujętych jako alternatywne wyjaśnienia jednostkowości przedmiotów. Celem porównania dwóch teorii jest przedstawienie motywacji stojących za przyjęciem TNS. Głównym elementem tekstu jest punkt 2, w którym analizuje podstawowe założenia (...) TNS oraz odpiera wytaczane wobec niej zarzuty. Autor wykazuje, że warunkiem możliwości przezwyciężenia zarzutów z przeludnienia i regresu jest modyfikacja TNS i postulat teorii identyczności. (shrink)

Departing from the fact that László Moholy-Nagy’s Von Material zu Architektur (1929), had been an important source of inspiration for Alvar Aalto, this article examines the affinities between László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto’s intellectual positions. The article places emphasis on two particular ideas: how Aalto and Moholy-Nagy conceived the connection of biology with standardization and technology and its relationship to light and perception. Special attention is paid to the notions of “flexible standardisation” and rationalisation in Aalto’s thought, (...) as well as to his belief that nature and standardization should be conceived are closely interconnected. In regard to their shared intellectual development, the article sheds light on the first encounters of the two men including: their meeting at the second Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in 1929; the June 1931 Finish meeting of Aino Marsio-Aalto, Alvar Aalto, Moholy-Nagy and Ellen Frank; the June 1931 exchanges between Aalto and Moholy-Nagy during the inner circle CIAM meeting in Berlin; and the common stay of the Aaltos and Moholy-Nagy in London in 1933 are discussed. Particular emphasis is placed on Aalto’s “The Reconstruction of Europe is the Key Problem for the Architecture of Our Time”, in which he argued that standardization in architecture should draw upon biological models. (shrink)

The first beginnings of modern logic in Croatia are recognizable as early as in the middle of the 19th century in Vatroslav Bertić. At the turn of the 20th century, Albin Nagy, who was teaching in Italy, made contributions to algebraic logic and to the philosophy of logic. At that time, a distinctive author Mate Meršić stood out, also working on algebraic logic. In the Croatian academic philosophy, until the publication of Gajo Petrović's textbook (1964) and the contributions by (...) Heda Festini, a critical or indifferent attitude toward modern logic prevailed. The first comprehensive modern logic textbook in Croatian was written by mathematician Vladimir Devidé (1964), known, for example, for his axiomatizations of natural numbers and classical propositional logic. In the Croatian philosophy of the 1980s and 1990s, influential logicians are Goran Švob and mathematician Zvonimir Šikić. At the turn of the 21st century, logical investigations are being intensified and extended to various branches of the contemporary logic. (shrink)