Online research in philosophy

Robert Stalnaker has argued that mathematical information is information about the sentences and expressions of mathematics. I argue that this metalinguistic account is open to a variant of Alonzo Church's translation objection and that Stalnaker's attempt to get around this objection is not successful. If correct, this tells not only against Stalnaker's account of mathematical truths, but against any metalinguistic account of truths that are both necessary and informative.

There have been books written since 1997 both on Hume’s ethics and on metaethics generally which make no mention of Gerhard Schurz’s The Is-Ought Problem. I don’t say that they are ipso facto bad books since they may have merits which make up for this glaring defect. But Schurz’s magnificent The Is-Ought Problem is a major contribution to both logic and metaethics and ethicists who disregard it do so at their intellectual peril.

This statement by the late Franz Rosenthal is, in a sense, the uniting theme of the present volume's 35 articles by renowned scholars of Islamic Studies, Middle ...

This introduction provides an overview of the life, career, and social thought of Gerhard Lenski. Following a preliminary description of Lenski's contributions, this essay is divided into two sections. The first section examines the origins, education, and biographical influences on Lenski as a major social theorist as well as the intellectual foundation of his sociological theories. The second section presents Lenski's work, impact, and legacy and sets the stage for the original essays that are grouped around four of six (...) key areas of Lenski's work, which has had enormous impact on both American and international sociology: (1) teaching sociology; (2) "status crystallization" and "status inconsistency"; (3) sociology of religion and "the religious factor"; (4) social stratification, "power and privilege"; (5) gender stratification in comparative-historical perspective; and (6) ecological-evolutionary theory. While these six areas do not correspond neatly to the progressive phases of Lenski's theory development and sociological career, they are interconnected and reflect Lenski's central concerns in asking the big questions about human societies and in providing explanations for understanding the processes of social change, differentiation, and inequality among and within human societies, across time and space, from hunting and gathering to postindus trial societies. (shrink)

Authors have contrasted social change and history many times, especially in terms of the significance of the event in accounting for the broadest contours of human societies' evolution. After recasting Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory in a critical fashion, by emphasizing its engagement with alternativity and by introducing a different approach to structure, I reconsider the salience of the event in the developmentalist project and suggest that ecological-evolutionary theory can be quite helpful in posing new questions about an eventful sociology. (...) By rethinking communism's collapse in 1989 and terrorism's explosion in 2001 within Lenski's theoretical frame, one can suggest critical transformations of theory and research on the evolution of human societies. (shrink)

Written over the course of two months in early 2008, Art as "Night" is a series of essays in part inspired by a January 2007 visit to the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, London, with subsequent forays into related themes and art-historical judgments for and against theories of meta-painting. Art as "Night" proposes a type of a-historical dark knowledge (a-theology and theology, at once) crossing painting since Velázquez, but reaching back to the Renaissance, especially Titian and Caravaggio. (...) As a form of formalism, this "night" is also closely allied with forms of intellection that come to reside in art as pure visual agency or material knowledge while invoking moral agency, a function of art more or less bracketed in modern art for ethical and/or political agency. Not a theory of meta-painting, Art as "Night" restores coordinates arguably lost in painting since the separation of natural and moral philosophy in the Baroque era. It is with Velázquez that we see a turning point, an emphasis on the specific resources of painting as a form of speculative intellect, while it is with contemporary works by Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer that we see the return of the same after the collapse of modernism, and after subsequent postmodern maneuvers to make art discursive yet without the austerities of the formal means present in Art as Art. Art as "Night" argues for a nondiscursive form of intellection fully embodied in the work of art – and, foremost, painting. A synoptic and intentionally elusive and allusive survey of painting, through the collapse of the art market in late 2007, Art as "Night" suggests by way of this critique of an elective "night" crossing painting that the art world is an endlessly deferred version of pleroma (Hegel’s Absolute Knowledge), a fully synthetic world given to an exploration and appropriation of the given through classical mimesis and epistemology and its complete incorporation and transfiguration in a theory of knowledge and art as pure speculative agency. In effect, Art as "Night" is an incarnational theory of art as absolute knowledge. (shrink)