After a brief review of the notions of necessity and a priority, this paper scrutinizes Kripke's arguments for supposedly contingent a priori propositions and necessary a posteriori propositions involving proper names, and reaches a negative conclusion, i.e. there are no such propositions, or at least the propositions Kripke gives as examples are not such propositions. All of us, including Kripke himself, still have to face the old question raised by Hume, i.e. how can we justify the necessity and universality of (...) general statements on the basis of sensory or empirical evidence? (shrink)
This article systematically challenges Kripke's modal argument and Soames's defence of this argument by arguing that, just like descriptions, names can take narrow or wide scopes over modalities, and that there is a big difference between the wide scope reading and the narrow scope reading of a modal sentence with a name. Its final conclusions are that all of Kripke's and Soames's arguments are untenable due to some fallacies or mistakes; names are not “rigid designators”; if there were rigid designators, (...) description(s) could be rigidified to refer fixedly to objects; so names cannot be distinguished in this way from the corresponding descriptions. A descriptivist account of names is still correct; and there is no justification for Kripke's theory of rigid designation and its consequences. (shrink)
Farm animal welfare is a knowledge domain that can be regarded as a model for new ways of organizing learning and making higher education more responsive to the needs of society. Global concern for animal welfare has resulted in a great demand for knowledge. As a complement to traditional education in farm animal welfare, higher education can be more demand driven and look at a broad range of methods to make knowledge available. The result of an inventory on farm animal (...) welfare, e-learning, learning resources, and open educational resources in three different search engines is presented. A huge amount of information on animal welfare is available on the Internet but many of the providers lock in the knowledge in a traditional course context. Only a few universities develop and disseminate open learning resources within the subject. Higher education institutions are encouraged to develop open educational resources in animal welfare for the benefit of teachers, students, society, and, indirectly, animal welfare. (shrink)
The so-called ‘morning-after pill’ is a drug that prevents pregnancy if taken no later than 72 hours after presumably fertile sexual intercourse. This article argues against a right of conscientious objection for pharmacists with regard to dispensing this drug. Some arguments that might be advanced in support of this right will be considered and rejected. Section 2 argues that from a philosophical point of view, the most relevant question is not whether the morning-after pill prevents implantation nor is it whether (...) preventing implantation is tantamount to abortion. Section 3 suggests a more general philosophical question as most pertinent, namely whether and to what extent a pharmacist can justifiably be exempted from dispensing the morning-after pill when to do so would entail participating in something that goes against his or her deepest moral or religious convictions. Section 4 explains why, within liberal institutions, pharmacists should not have the right to conscientious objection to dispensing the morning-after pill. (shrink)
Jin Yuelin (1895?1984), a Chinese logician and philosopher, is greatly influenced by Hume's and Russell's philosophies. How should we respond to Hume's problem of induction? This is an important clue to understand Jin's whole philosophical career. The first section of this paper gives a brief historical review of Russell and Jin. The second section outlines Hume's skeptical arguments against causality and induction. The third section expounds Russell's justification of induction by discussing his views on Hume's skepticism, causality, principle of induction, (...) and empirical postulates. The fourth section clarifies Jin's justification of induction by discussing his critique of Hume's epistemology and his arguments for the reliability of causality and the eternal truth and apriority of the principle of induction. The final section compares Jin's justification of induction with Russell's and concludes that there are similarities and differences between their projects and that both their attempts fail. This paper takes the similar responses to the problem of induction by Jin and Russell to demonstrate the communication that there has been between Chinese philosophers and the Western ones. (shrink)
Abstract During 1745?1755 Bo?kovi? explicitly used the concept of scientific theory in three cases: the theory of forces existing in nature, the theory of transformations of geometric loci, and the theory of infinitesimals. The theory first mentioned became the famous theory of natural philosophy in 1758, the second was published in the third volume of his mathematical textbook Elementorum Universae Matheseos (1754), and the third theory was never completed, though Bo?kovi? repeatedly announced it from 1741 on. The treatment of continuity (...) and infinity in natural philosophy, geometry and infinitesimal analysis brought about inter?theory relations in Bo?kovi?'s work during his Roman period. The two constructed theories of Bo?kovi?, the theory of forces and the theory of geometric transformations, directly influenced the idea for the construction of his third theory. These written theories refer to understanding and effective application of continuity and infinity in natural philosophy and geometry, and this task, according to Bo?kovi?, requires methodological support from the theory of infinitesimals. (shrink)
Proxies of mate value must be evolutionarily salient. Gangestad & Simpson (G&S) have made a good case that fluctuating asymmetry is an important proxy of male mate value that correlates well with genetic and developmental quality. The use of financial variables as proxies for male investment ability by Gangestad, Simpson, and virtually every other investigator of human mating in evolutionary perspective, is, however, more problematic. Correspondence:a1 Address correspondence to the first author. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (...) 93106 hagen@sscf.ucsb.edu www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/hagen. (shrink)
We know things that entail things we apparently cannot come to know. This is a problem for those of us who trust that knowledge is closed under entailment. In the paper I discuss the solutions to this problem offered by epistemic disjunctivism and contextualism. The contention is that neither of these theories has the resources to deal satisfactory with the problem.
We conceive of the natural world as populated by relatively persistent material things standing in spatio-temporal relations to each other. They come into existence, exist for a time, and then pass away. We locate them relative to landmarks and to other material things in the landscape which they, and we, inhabit. We characterize them as things of a certain kind, and identify and re-identify them accordingly. The expressions we typically use to do so are, in the technical terminology derived from (...) Aristotle, names of substances.1 The term ‘substance’ has two distinct, but importantly linked, meanings. In the Aristotelian sense, a substance (more accurately, ‘a primary substance’) is a concrete individual thing of a given kind, such as a particular human being (Socrates), a given tree (such as Gautama’s Bo-tree) or a certain stone (the Kohinoor). The general kind (the ‘secondary substance’ in Aristotle’s terminology) to which the individual substance belongs is specified by a substance-name (‘human being’, ‘pipal tree’, ‘diamond’). Individual substances are the basic objects of reference and subjects of predication in our conceptual scheme. They are things of one kind or another (specified by a substance-name, as when we say that Socrates is a man). They are qualified by numerous properties, specified by non-substantial predicates (for example, is in the agora, is snub-nosed, or is a philosopher), but they are not themselves predicable of things – Socrates cannot be said to qualify anything or to be true of anything (as opposed to being like Socrates, which is a relational property some rare people may have) . Nor can the proper name ‘Socrates’ be said to be true of anything, by contrast with the identifying phrase ‘is Socrates’, which is true of the teacher of Plato, and tells us who he is. Characterizing an individual as a thing of a given kind by using such a (secondary) substance-name answers the question of what the thing is. Grasp of the substance name implies knowledge of what being a such-and-such consists in, in so far as that is logically (or, in the extended sense of the term, grammatically) determined.. (shrink)
This paper features a detailed philosophical classification of the four types of deists that Samuel Clarke presents in the second series of the Boyle Lectures for promoting Christianity (1705). In the course of this paper I determine, for each type of deist, the truth values of twelve important propositions, and I show that these four types of deists may be categorized as (1) ‘no-providence’, (2) ‘physical-laws-providence’, (3) ‘moral-but-no-afterlife’, and (4) ‘moral-and-afterlife’. Using an accompanying table of propositions as a visualization tool, (...) I also show that Clarke's account of these four types of deists may be thought of as ‘progressively Christian’: for each type of deist, from lower-number deists to higher-number deists, there is an increasing number of truth values that are Christian-like. (shrink)
We review recent anticipatory looking and violation-of-expectancy studies suggesting that infants and young preschoolers have spontaneous (implicit) understanding of mind despite their known problems until later in life on elicited (explicit) tests of false-belief reasoning. Straightforwardly differentiating spontaneous and elicited expressions of complex mental state understanding in relation to an implicit-explicit knowledge framework may be challenging; early action predictions may be based on behavior rules that are complementary to the mentalistic attributions under consideration. We discuss that the way forward for (...) diagnosing early mentalism is to analyze whether young candidate mind-readers’ visual orienting cohere across different belief-formation by belief-use combinations. Adopting this formal cognitive analysis, we conclude that whilst some studies come tantalizingly close to sign-posting mentalism in infants and young children’s spontaneous responses, the bulk of evidence for early mentalism grades into behaviorism. (shrink)
In 1910–11 Axel Hägerström introduced an emotive theory of ethics asserting moral propositions and valuations in general to be neither true nor false. However, it is less well known that he modified his theory in the following year, now making a distinction between what he called primary and secondary valuations. From 1912 onwards, he restricted his emotive theory to primary valuations only, and applied an error theory to secondary ones. According to Hägerström, secondary valuations state that objects have special value (...) properties, that we believe we become acquainted with in primary valuations. But, in fact, we do not have any such acquaintance. There are no, and cannot be any such, properties in objects. What we take to be a property is a projection of a feeling. Therefore, all secondary valuations are false. In 1917 he developed his theory further and distinguished between different types of secondary valuations with different structures. Yet he argued that they all are false. Hägerström's discussion is interesting because, among other reasons, it is historically a very early version of error theory in ethics. In a way it can also be said to be a precursor to later versions, e.g., John Mackie's (1946 and 1977). There are obvious resemblances between their accounts. Mackie's discussion is, of course, independent of Hägerström's. (shrink)
The debate on the yan-yi relation was carried out by Chinese philosophers collectively, and the principles and methods in the debate still belong to a living tradition of Chinese philosophy. From Yijing (Book of Changes), Lunyu (Analects), Laozi and Zhuangzi to Wang Bi, “yi” which cannot be expressed fully by yan (language), is not only “idea” or “meaning” in the human mind, but is also some kind of ontological existence, which is beyond yan and emblematic symbols, and unspeakable. Thus, the (...) debate on the yan-yi relation refers firstly to metaphysics, secondly to moral philosophy, and then to epistemology and philosophy of language. Guided by this view, this paper recalls the source of the debate on the yan-yi relation to Yijing and Lunyu, distinguishes four meanings of “yi” in Chinese philosophy, and reconstructs three arguments. These arguments are the “yan cannot express yi fully” argument, “forget yan once you get yi” argument, and “yan can express yi fully” argument. Finally, this paper exposes and comments on those principles, methods and the general tendency shown in the debate from the following five aspects: starting point, value-preference, methodology, texts (papers and books), and influences. (shrink)
This reconciliation of the dialectical and contemplative approaches to the buddha-essence is related to and closely resembles Shakchok’s reconciliation of the two approaches to ultimate reality advocated respectively by Niḥsvabhāvavāda ( ngo bo nyid med par smra ba , “Proponents of Entitylessness”) system of Madhyamaka and Alīkākāravāda ( rnam rdzun pa , “False Aspectarians”) system of Yogācāra. These approaches in turn are connected respectively to the explicit teachings ( dngos bstan ) of the second dharmacakra ( chos ’khor , “Wheel (...) of Dharma”) and the definitive teachings ( nges don, nītārtha ) of the third dharmacakra that he also presents in a reconciliatory manner. In the same way as the teachings of the last two dharmacakras, as well as the Niḥsvabhāvavāda and Alīkākāravāda systems that derive from them, come to the same point, the dialectical and contemplative traditions also come to the same point. This point is the above-mentioned naturally pure primordial mind luminous by nature, the ultimate reality. In Shakchok’s opinion, application of non-affirming negations is a powerful tool for accessing direct realization of that reality, while its identification as primordial mind ( ye shes, jñāna ) is important for maintaining that realization and turning it into the basis of unfolding positive qualities on the path to buddhahood. When in the passage above Shakchok says that the two traditions are not contradictory, and when he reconciles the two last dharmacakras together with Alīkākāravāda and Niḥsvabhāvavāda, he is not arguing that their words are non-contradictory. They obviously are! Nevertheless, those systems are non-contradictory in terms of complementing each other in getting access to and maintaining realization of the ultimate reality of primordial mind. (shrink)
This paper is concerned with the issue of how predication is possible, as a significant common concern in the philosophy of language, metaphysics and semantics. A ‘subject-comment’ account is suggested in view of its constructive engagement with two relevant competing approaches, i.e., the traditional ‘subject-categorization’ account and the ‘topic-comment’ account. The suggested account views predication as a unifying two-level predication: the primary level of predication is made through recognizing and commenting on some particular attribute(s) of the subject’s semantic referent as (...) a thick object (resulting in a weaker version of Russellian proposition) and the secondary level of predication through categorizing the subject’s semantic referent into a certain group via the Fregean conceptual content of the predicate. (shrink)
In the history of ideas some researchers have recently coined the term psycho-utopianism, denoting the notion that the ideal society presupposes a “new man,” that is, the psychological nature of man must change before society can change. Cultural studies have noted this line of thinking also within the so-called New Age movement. However, the notion of a New Age is not really new; it occurred already at the beginning of the Modern Epoch; in seventeenth-century Europe. At that time, the educational (...) philosopher J. A. Comenius was writing his canonical work _Didactica Magna_ and other texts on education, science, and philosophy, with the ultimate aim of contributing to a new world order. Comenius was one of the first modern educators to argue for a general education of both boys and girls irrespective of social class. Three hundred years later, B. F. Skinner suggested psychological methods of education and upbringing, also with the ultimate aim to transform society. In this article I will look closer at the similarities and differences between these two thinkers regarding their psycho-utopian notions. I will conclude with similar reflections on psycho-utopian tendencies in present discourses on information and communication technology (ICT) and education. (shrink)
Through a comparative case analysis regarding the Chinese language, it is discussed how the structure and functions of a natural language would bear upon the ways in which some philosophical problems are posed and some ontological insights shaped. Disagreeing with Chad Hansen's mass-noun hypothesis, a collective-noun hypothesis is argued for: (1) the denotational semantics and relevant grammatical features of Chinese nouns are like those of collective nouns; (2) their implicit ontology is a mereological ontology of collection-of-individuals with both part-whole and (...) member-class structure; and (3) encouraged and shaped by the folk semantics of Chinese nouns, classical Chinese theorists of language take this kind of mereological nominalism for granted. (shrink)
In this note we shall describe the lattice of the congruences on a balanced Ockham algebra with the pseudocomplementation whose quotient algebras are boolean. This is an extension of the result obtained by Rodrigues and Silva who gave a description of the lattice of congruences on an Ockham algebra whose quotient algebras are boolean.
Reading these essays has shown me a great deal, both about the substantive issues I have dealt with and about how to do philosophy. On the former front, they show that I have missed some points and overstated others, and sometimes just been unable to penetrate the fog. On the latter front, they show how hard it is to write philosophy that works--and this is the point that stands out for me as I reflect on these rich and varied essays. (...) Philosophical books and articles routinely fail to achieve their manifest goal of persuading their intended audiences of their main points. Does this make philosophy any worse off than other writing endeavors? Most published novels are failures of one sort or another, and the press has reported a recent study (whose methodology I wonder about) that concludes that the median number of readers of any paper published in a psychology journal is zero. But it seems to me that philosophy displays a particularly feckless record, with such a huge gap between authorial pretense and effect achieved that it is perhaps more comic than pathetic. In one weak moment I found myself thinking that perhaps some of our French colleagues have the right idea: deliberate obscurantism and the striking of stylized poses--since the goal of persuading by clear, precise analysis and argument is so manifestly beyond us. But that worldly weariness passed, I'm happy to say, and my cock-eyed American optimism returned. My ambition continues to be to change people's minds, and not just to win people over to my way of doing philosophy, as Bo Dahlbom suggests. But I admit that it is harder than I had thought. It's hard enough to get a good idea, but sometimes it's even harder, apparently, to get others to see what the idea is, and why it's good. (shrink)
