Online research in philosophy

A liberal antinomy of parenting exists: strong liberal intuitions militate in favor of both denying special resources to parenting projects (on grounds of project-neutrality) and granting them (on grounds of respect for personhood). I show that we can reconcile these two claims by rejecting a premise common to both--viz. that liberalism is necessarily committed to extensive procreative liberties--and limiting procreation and subsequent parenting to adults who meet certain psychological and especially financial criteria. I also defend this argument, which provides a Kantian complement to utilitarian arguments for restricting procreation, against a variety of objections.

In a recent paper, Eckart Förster challenges interpreters to explain why in the first Critique practical reason has a canon but no dialectic, whereas in the second Critique, there is not only a dialectic, but an antinomy of practical reason. In the Groundwork, Kant claims that there is a natural dialectic with respect to morality (4:405), a different claim from those advanced in the first and second Critiques. Förster's challenge may therefore be reformulated as the problem of explaining why practical reason has a canon in the first Critique, a dialectic in the Groundwork, and an antinomy in the second Critique. In this paper, I answer this challenge. I argue that these differences are due to the different aims and scope of the works, and in particular, the different place of the inclinations in their arguments.

This volume documents for the first time the enormous variety of diverging interpretations and presents a text-oriented analysis of antinomy and its resolution ...

The paper discusses whether there are strictly inexpressible properties. Three main points are argued for: (i) Two different senses of ‘predicate t expresses property p ’ should be distinguished. (ii) The property of being a predicate that does not apply to itself is inexpressible in one of the senses of ‘express’, but not in the other. (iii) Since the said property is related to Grelling’s Antinomy, it is further argued that the antinomy does not imply the non-existence of that property.

It is not my claim that the ‘L¨ owenheim-Skolem paradox’ is an antinomy in formal logic; but I shall argue that it is an antinomy, or something close to it, in philosophy of language. Moreover, I shall argue that the resolution of the antinomy—the only resolution that I myself can see as making sense—has profound implications for the great metaphysical dispute about realism which has always been the central dispute in the philosophy of language.

A new semantical antinomy, the antinomy of designation, is introduced into a metalanguage M with respect to a modal object language L. Carnap's device of restricting the principle of interchangeability for L does not suffice to prevent occurrence of this new antinomy. To achieve this result it seems most natural to replace the rules of designation for L by more complicated rules. This replacement suffices to prevent occurrence of the antinomy with respect to L. Moreover, it seems likely that analogous replacement will suffice to prevent occurrence of the antinomy with respect to languages which in means of expression are richer than L.