‘Game’ means ‘play within the construction of rules’. The sub-category ‘sport’ considers play as competition where the rules are known to the audience, under the following divide: fundamental constructive rules about the game's structure and less important or flexible rules facilitating and monitoring play. These provide athletes and audience with stable knowledge. The excitement of play comes from the vagaries of the actual engagement of the rules in the action of play. The social order can use this as a metaphor (...) of its ideal of civil law in relation to the citizen. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of the logical apparatus of Frege, where his use of Sinn suggests a modification of Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Then, it turns to Strawson's basic particulars with its essentially Kantian orientation. This brings forward the logical ground upon which the Identity Thesis rests. Finally, following Frege with some modifications, the paper suggests that an ontological list where concepts can be treated as objective (materially dependent) subsistent entities would be necessary in order (...) to avoid errors of J. J. C. Smart and other analytic philosophers who hold the Identity Thesis. (shrink)

Hobbes and Hume on the imagination can initiate a discussion of empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries: here, however, it provides the opportunity to focus on Kant's attempt to overcome the limits of their sense originating, naturalist ethics. I argue the general point that Kant's response to his predecessors, both empiricist and non-empiricists, is to modify their focus on nature without falling into skepticism; indeed, his speculative metaphysics also is a response to classical ontological metaphysics. Kant by providing two (...) realms or perspectives, a natural and a noumenal, avoids many difficulties resulting from Hobbes and Hume's starting point in sense leading to imagination and a non-normative reason. Yet, challenged by Herder and the romantics, he uses a sort of residual view of the imagination in relation to the freedom of the noumenal, which results in difficulties for his speculative, noumenal metaphysics. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Hobbes accepts only one proof for God's existence: God as first cause of nature. Thus, the laws of nature express God's will, nothing else is knowable about God. The state projects God's will because it responds to the deepest natural -- security and prosperity -- by opposing anti-social tendencies. Thus, the sovereign, by right reason, is the public measurer of religion. In private, religion is a matter of faith. Christianity is based on the sole proposition that salvation comes by Christ. (...) That scriptural message was attested to by miracles in the Apostolic era but is now a matter of faith. The contemporary assertion of miracles is suspect; especially, when it is institutionalized and endangers the power of the sovereign. (shrink)