Online research in philosophy

Outline: 1. Why Judgment? 2. Inverse Psychologism: General Issues 3. Inverse Psychologism in the Phenomeno-Logic of Judgment 4. Judgment and Language 5. [De-]stabilizing Kant’s Inverse Psychologism..

ACT, CONTENT, AND OBJECT THE TITLE I have chosen for this work is a mere label for a set of problems; the controversial views that have historically been ...

. ACT, CONTENT, AND OBJECT OF THE PRESENTATION It is one of the best known positions of psychology, hardly contested by anyone, that every mental phenomenon ...

It is not usual to think of Fichte as a logician, nor indeed to think of him as leaving a legacy that shaped the subsequent history of symbolic logic. But I argue here that there is such a legacy, and that Fichte formulated an agenda in formal logic that his students (and their students in turn) used to spark a logical revolution. That revolution arguably reached its culmination in the logical writings of Franz Brentano, better known as a founding figure of the phenomenological movement. In logical writings that were published only posthumously, but that were fully elaborated in the decade prior to the publication of Frege’s Begriffschrift, Brentano (together with his collaborator Anton Marty) developed a radically innovative logical calculus that was explicitly designed to overthrow the orthodox logical analysis of judgment and inference. At the center of this revolution was the notion of thetic judgment [thetische Urteil], a form of judgment upon which Fichte had insisted in the first published version of the Wissenschaftslehre, and which his students subsequently set out to accommodate within the framework provided by Kant’s general logic. But thetic judgment proved resistant to such assimilation, and it was left to Brentano to use the analysis of thetic judgment in his attempt to topple a long-standing logical tradition. In what follows I reconstruct the main episodes in this century-long drama in the logical theory of judgment. My discussion is divided into four sections. I begin with a review of Fichte’s most explicit call for logical revolution, together with his introduction of the notion of thetic judgment, set against the backdrop of an anomaly.

In several manuscripts, written between 1894 and 1897, Twardowski developed a new theory of judgement with two types of judgement: existential and relational judgements. In Zur Lehre he tried to stay within a Brentanian framework, although he introduced the distinction between content and object in the theory of judgement. The introduction of this distinction forced Twardowski to revise further Brentano'stheory.His changes concerned judgements about relations and about non-present objects. The latter are considered special cases of relational judgements. The existential judgements are analysed in a Brentanian way; whereas relational judgements are analysed in a Brentanian way only as far as the act is concerned, but not when it comes to the object: the object of a relational judgement is a relationship. With this notion of relationship Twardowski comes close to introducing a concept of state of affairs for the object of (relational) judgements.

In several manuscripts, written between 1894 and 1897, Twardowski developed a new theory of judgement with two types of judgement: existential and relational judgements. In Zur Lehre he tried to stay within a Brentanian framework, although he introduced the distinction between content and object in the theory of judgement. The introduction of this distinction forced Twardowski to revise further Brentano'stheory.His changes concerned judgements about relations and about non-present objects. The latter are considered special cases of relational judgements. The existential judgements are analysed in a Brentanian way; whereas relational judgements are analysed in a Brentanian way only as far as the act is concerned, but not when it comes to the object: the object of a relational judgement is a relationship. With this notion of relationship Twardowski comes close to introducing a concept of state of affairs for the object of (relational) judgements.

We construct a faithful interpretation of ukasiewicz's logic in product logic (both propositional and predicate). Using known facts it follows that the product predicate logic is not recursively axiomatizable.We prove a completeness theorem for product logic extended by a unary connective of Baaz [1]. We show that Gödel's logic is a sublogic of this extended product logic.

Intentionality, as Brentano originally introduced the term in modern philosophy, was meant to provide a distinctive characteristic definitively separating the mental from the physical.(1) Mental states have an intrinsic relationship to an object, to that which they are "about." Physical entities just are what they are, they cannot, by their very essence, refer to anything, they have no "outreach", as one might put it. Mental states have, as it were, an incomplete essence, they cannot exist at all unless they are completed by something other than themselves, their object. Brentano's position is opposed to all theories which represent the mental as only extrinsically related to the world, that is, to all theories in which mental states are themselves self-sufficient for their own existence and only secondarily relate to the world by means of something external to their nature, e.g., neurological causation, divine intervention, or pre-established harmony. In these later cases, any mental act whatsoever could be related to any object, or indeed to none, for the relation is external to the nature of the act, it is superimposed on it by outside forces. Brentano's point is that a mental act has, by its very essence, an Intentional object without which it would not be a mental act. It would therefore appear that since causality is an external relationship which could in principle relate any two things regardless of their nature, the Intentional relation between an act and its object cannot be a causal relation.

Richard Tieszen's new book 1 is a collection of fifteen articles and reviews, spanning fifteen years, presenting the author's approach to philosophical questions about logic and mathematics from the point of view of phenomenology, as developed by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) in the later phase 2 of his philosophical thinking known as transcendental phenomenology , starting in 1907 with the Logical Investigations and characterized by the introduction of the (various) notions of ‘reduction’. Husserlian transcendental phenomenology as philosophy of mathematics is described (p. 50) as one that ‘cuts across’ different philosophical positions, such as platonism, nominalism, fictionalism, Hilbertian formalism, etc. but, at the same time, as having built in the conceptual tools which allow one not to incur the kinds of problems which are usually related to one's preferred approach. Phenomenology centers around the notion of intentionality3or aboutness, i.e. the characteristic of acts of cognition (such as believing, desiring, knowing) of being about something. The ‘something’ a cognitive act is about is called its ‘intentional object’, meaning the object of an intentional act. Any kind of (putative) object can be seen as an intentionalobject irrespective of whether it is concrete, illusory, abstract, etc. Indeed the emphasis is on the intentional act, as it is in the intentional act that the object—which need not be claimed to exist—is (intentionally) present. In order to achieve knowledge of an object the phenomenologist investigates the consciousness of the knowing subject when performing the act directed to that particular object.