Online research in philosophy

Roderick Chisholm provides, in different places, two formulations of Brentano's thesis about the relation between the psychological and the intentional: (1) all and only psychological sentences are intentional; (2) no psychological intentional sentence is equivalent to a nonintentional sentence. Chisholm also presents several definitions of intentionality. Some of these allow that a sentence is intentional while its negation is nonintentional, which ruins the prospects of defending the more plausible and interesting thesis (2). A generalization of the notion of logical independence to any number of mutually independent sentences permits a revision of Chisholm's criteria of intentionality that ensures that a sentence is intentional on a criterion exactly when its negation is as well.

In "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics" Wittgenstein discusses an argument that goes from Gödel’s incompleteness result to the conclusion that some truths of mathematics are unprovable. Wittgenstein takes issue with this argument. Wittgenstein’s remarks in this connection have received very negative reaction from some very prominent people, for example, Gödel and Dummett. The paper is a defense of what Wittgenstein has to say about the argument in question.

Roderick Chisholm argued that ‘look’ can be used in three different ways: epistemically, comparatively and non-comparatively. Chisholm’s non-comparative sense of ‘look’ played an important role in Frank Jackson’s argument for the sense-datum theory. The question remains..

Roderick M. Chisholm (1916-1999) was one of the most important philosophical thinkers of the 20th century. His influence on epistemology (the theory of knowledge) and metaphysics cannot be understated; indeed, it is difficult to conceive of what these fields would be like today without the impact of Chisholm. Were there a Nobel Prize in philosophy, Chisholm surely would have won it.

The background of these remarks is that in 1967, in ‘’Constructive reasoning” [27], I sketched an argument that finitist arithmetic coincides with primitive recursive arithmetic, P RA; and in 1981, in “Finitism” [28], I expanded on the argument. But some recent discussions and some of the more recent literature on the subject lead me to think that a few further remarks would be useful.

In “Human Freedom and the Self”, Roderick Chisholm defends a form of libertarianism, and defends it from objections. Your assignment is to discuss a certain one of those objections. Specifically, you must i) briefly formulate Chisholm’s Libertarianism, and then ii) present, explain and evaluate the argument against Chisholm’s Libertarianism that Chisholm discusses in section 7 of his paper (pp. 360-361).