Authority qua empowerment is the weak reading of authority in Hans Kelsen's writings. On the one hand, this reading appears to be unresponsive to the problem (...) class='Hi'>of authority as we know it from the tradition. On the other hand, it squares with legal positivism. Is Kelsen a legal positivist?Not without qualification. For he defends a normativity thesis along with the separation thesis, and it is at any rate arguable that the normativity thesis mandates a stronger reading of authority than that modelled on empowerment. I offer, in the paper, a prima facie case on behalf of a stronger reading of authority in Kelsen. I go on to argue, however, that the textual evidence weighs heavily in favour of the weak reading. Both nomostatics and nomodynamics are pervasive points of view in the Pure Theory of Law, and both reflect species of empowerment as the endpoint of Kelsen's reconstructions. (shrink)
: T. L. Short's Peirce's Theory of Signs offers a strong interpretation of semeiotic, advocating a developmental and naturalistic position. This commentary examines some of the (...) class='Hi'>main features of Short's approach, raising a number of critical questions concerning the growth of Peirce's thought and the problem of anthropomorphism. First, two possible weaknesses in Short's account of the development of semeiotic, connected to the treatment of the "New List of Categories" and the role of the index, are noted. Next, the menace of anthropomorphism is placed in the context of Peirce's startling affirmation of this point of view. Finally, the article draws attention to Short's bold claim that Peirce's theory of signs needs to be modified in order to accommodate a plurality of final interpretants in view of varying purposes. (shrink)
: According to T.L. Short, Peirce's early thought-sign account of semeiotic engenders fatal flaws. On the one hand, it entails an infinite regressus of representation that (...) class='Hi'> cannot feasibly explain the connection between signs and objects and, on the other, an infinite progressus, leaving Peirce's theory without the wherewithal to account for the sign's meaning and significance. According to Short, Peirce overcomes the first flaw through the robust development of the notion of the index and the concept of collateral experience. The second flaw is overcome through the pragmatic theory of meaning, connected as it is to the notion of purpose and, ultimately, a complex theory of teleology. My commentary focuses primarily on Short's important analysis of Peirce's teleology. I argue that he is successful in giving a plausible, naturalistic account of Peirce's theory without straying from the spirit of Peirce's systematic thought. Although, in my view, the book is the best account of Peirce's semiotic grammar in print, it fails to give a sufficient systematic analysis of the other two branches of Peirce's semeiotic—critical logic and formal rhetoric. (shrink)
T. L. Short's Peirce's Theory of Signs offers a strong interpretation of semeiotic, advocating a developmental and naturalistic position. This commentary examines some of the main (...) class='Hi'> features of Short's approach, raising a number of critical questions concerning the growth of Peirce's thought and the problem of anthropomorphism. First, two possible weaknesses in Short's account of the development of semeiotic, connected to the treatment of the "New List of Categories" and the role of the index, are noted. Next, the menace of anthropomorphism is placed in the context of Peirce's startling affirmation of this point of view. Finally, the article draws attention to Short's bold claim that Peirce's theory of signs needs to be modified in order to accommodate a plurality of final interpretants in view of varying purposes. (shrink)
This article aims to disrupt received views about the significance of J. L. Austin's contribution to philosophy of language. Its focus is Austin's 1955 lectures How (...) class='Hi'> To Do Things With Words . Commentators on the lectures in both philosophical and literary-theoretical circles, despite conspicuous differences, tend to agree in attributing to Austin an assumption about the relation between literal meaning and truth, which is in fact his central critical target. The goal of the article is to correct this misunderstanding and to show that Austin is deeply critical of a picture of correspondence between language and the world which nearly half a century after he delivered his lectures continues to structure philosophical discussions of language. (shrink)
In Derrida's last book (posthumously published in 2006), L'animal que donc je suis, there is a kind of refrain: “il ne suffit pas de …” (it (...) class='Hi'>is not sufficient or enough to . . . ). Derrida utters this refrain in relation to all the discourses on animality and animal suffering found in the Western philosophical tradition. None of these discourses are sufficient. This last book revolves then around the idea of an insufficient (not enough) response. The idea of an insufficient response is not restricted to the problem of animal suffering; it extends to what we must call, following Derrida, “the problem of the worst.” The worst is the end, in the sense of total violence or total suicide: apocalypse. In this essay, I have tried to construct the beginnings of a more sufficient response that urges us to move toward the least amount of violence towards all living beings, while recognizing nevertheless that even this response is not sufficient. The more sufficient response is based on Derrida's transformation of the concept of waiting into being late found in Aporias. This transformation is at the heart of Derrida's thought of the messianic. We are so late in relation to the problem of the apocalypse that we can no longer wait for someone else to come and save us. We are so late that we—there's no one else coming—must take action now. (shrink)
Remodel[l]ing Reality is an inquiry into Wittgenstein's notion of uebersichtliche Darstellung and the phenomenon of installation in visual art. In a sense, both provide a (...) perspicuous overview of a particular part of our complex world, but the nature of the overview differs. Although both generate knowledge, philosophy via the uebersichtliche Darstellung gives us a view of how things stand for us, while the installation shows an unexpected, exiting point of view. The obvious we tend to forget and the ambiguity of reality are related to each other in a dynamic way. It is in this reflexive dynamics that we constantly remodel our reality. Tools we use are our creative abilities and our powers of imagination. In our choices and solutions we show which aspects of reality we find important and how we communicate these values. The outcome of this investigation is a new perspective on the art of installation and a new insight in Wittgenstein's notion of uebersichtliche Darstellung. Because of this combination, the book is itself an artwork: an InstallationPackage.<br>The book is distributed by Ideabooks, Amsterdam. Isbn 978 90 804240 3 6. (shrink)
In this paper, I present a new reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s first major work, L’Invitée ( She Came to Stay ), in order to reveal the (...) text as a vital place of origin for feminist phenomenological philosophy. My reading of L’Invitée departs from most scholarly interpretations of the text in three notable respects: (1) it is inclusive of the “two unpublished chapters” that were excised from the original manuscript at the publisher’s request, (2) it takes seriously Beauvoir’s claim that phenomenological philosophy is often better expressed in novels than essays or treatises, and (3) it views the novel’s main characters, Françoise and Xavière, as one woman who has multiple, contradictory, excessive selves. Thus approached, L’Invitée provides us with a thick description of one woman’s embodied consciousness and thereby shows us with specificity what a consciousness whose underlying structures reflect sexual difference looks like. This consciousness not only experiences itself as being both gendered, categorized, disciplined, and defined and in excess of these genders, categories, disciplines, and definitions at the same time, but also experiences its own self-relation through the presence of multiple selves who are each simultaneously attracted to and negating of the other. As such, the defining features of this consciousness involve experiences that I have respectively labeled “ontological multiplicity” and “auto-jealousy.”. (shrink)
w a y s h a v e b e e n . W e a l l r e m e m b e r M a (...) class='Hi'> r x ' s p o l e m i c a g a i n s t P r o u d h o n , t h e Manifesto's critique of "historical action [yielding] to personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual spontaneous class organizations of the proletariat to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors" (Marx and Engels, 1986, 64), and the numerous other occasions when the fathers of "scientific socialism" went a f t e r t h e " u t o p i a n s . " I n general this Marxian aversion to drawing up blueprints has been healthy, fueled at least in part by a respect for the concrete specificity of the revolutionary situation and for the agents engaged in revolutionary activity: it is not the business of Marxist intellectuals to tell the agents of revolution how they are to construct their postrevolutionary economy. (shrink)
T. L. S. Sprigge produced an eclectic yet highly original system of metaphysics and ethics, a synthesis of panpsychism, absolute idealism, and utilitarianism, at a time in (...) which orthodox analytical philosophy could only view this system as an anachronism of the nineteenth century. His critics claim that his philosophy has only historical interest to a small group of specialists in the relatively dormant tradition of British Idealism, that an attempt to defend his view of consciousness is a hopeless nonstarter, and that his Spinozistic monism can have no relevance in our intellectual culture.1 Yet others have defended Sprigge as the "most independent of thinkers within the field of metaphysics" and salute him as "a .. (shrink)
This paper proposes a critical analysis of that interpretation of the Nāgārjunian doctrine of the two truths as summarized—by both Mark Siderits and Jay L. Garfield—in (...) class='Hi'> the formula: “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”. This ‘semantic reading’ of Nāgārjuna’s theory, despite its importance as a criticism of the ‘metaphysical interpretations’, would in itself be defective and improbable. Indeed, firstly, semantic interpretation presents a formal defect: it fails to clearly and explicitly express that which it contains logically; the previously mentioned formula must necessarily be completed by: “the conventional truth is that nothing is conventional truth”. Secondly, after having recognized what Siderits’ and Garfield’s analyses contain implicitly, other logical and philological defects in their position emerge: the existence of the ‘conventional’ would appear—despite the efforts of semantic interpreters to demonstrate quite the contrary—definitively inconceivable without the presupposition of something ‘real’; moreover, the number of verses in Nāgārjuna that are in opposition to the semantic interpretation (even if we grant semantic interpreters that these verses do not justify a metaphysical reconstruction of Nagarjuna’s doctrine) would seem too great and significant to be ignored. (shrink)
L S Penrose’s Limit Theorem <span class='Hi'>span>– which is implicit in Penrose <span class='Hi'>span>[7,<span class='Hi'>span> p.<span class='Hi'>span> 72]<span (...) class='Hi'>class='Hi'>span> and for which he gave no rigorous proof <span class='Hi'>span>– says that,<span class='Hi'>span> in simple weighted voting games,<span class='Hi'>span> if the number of voters increases indefinitely and the relative quota is pegged,<span class='Hi'>span> then <span class='Hi'>span>– under certain conditions <span class='Hi'>span>– the ratio between the voting powers of any two voters converges to the ratio between their weights.<span class='Hi'>span> Lindner and Machover <span class='Hi'>span>[4]<span class='Hi'>span> prove some special cases of Penrose’s Limit Theorem.<span class='Hi'>span> They give a simple counter-example showing that the theorem does not hold in general even under the conditions assumed by Penrose;<span class='Hi'>span> but they conjecture,<span class='Hi'>span> in effect,<span class='Hi'>span> that under rather general conditions it holds <span class='Hi'>span>‘almost always’<span class='Hi'>span> –<span class='Hi'>span> that is with probability 1 <span class='Hi'>span>– for large classes of weighted voting games,<span class='Hi'>span> for various values of the quota,<span class='Hi'>span> and with respect to several measures of voting power.<span class='Hi'>span> We use simulation to test this conjecture.<span class='Hi'>span> It is corroborated with respect to the Penrose–Banzhaf index for a quota of 50%<span class='Hi'>span> but not for other values;<span class='Hi'>span> with respect to the Shapley–Shubik index the conjecture is corroborated for all values of the quota <span class='Hi'>span>(short of 100%<span class='Hi'>span>). (shrink)
Abstract G.L.S. <span class='Hi'>Shacklespan> stood at the historic crossroads where the economics of Hayek and Keynes met. <span class='Hi'>Shacklespan> fused these opposing (...) class='Hi'> lines of thought in a macroeconomic theory that draws Keynesian conclusions from Austrian premises. In <span class='Hi'>Shacklespan>'s scheme of thought, the power to imagine alternative courses of action releases decision makers from the web of predictable causation. But the spontaneous and unpredictable choices that originate in the subjective and disparate orientations of individual agents deny us the possibility of rational expectations, and therewith the logical coherence of market equilibrium over time. (shrink)
Social conditions of race and class continue to combine in ways that raise systemic questions about the adequacy and legitimacy of liberal, capitalist democracy in America. More (...) radical alternatives, however, are still generally held to be irrelevant in the American context. The following is an effort to correct this widespread misrepresentation of socialism’s relevance to America generally, and to matters of race in particular. I consider the work of C.L.R. James who, fifty years ago, developed a class-oriented, explicitly Marxist theory in which the aspirations and struggles of African-Americans were given a central place, both analytically and politically. (shrink)
This paper demonstrates that L'Étranger , Camus's famous novel about an outsider, had by as early as 1946 become just as much of an 'insider' in (...) class='Hi'>terms of its affiliation to the Parisian literary tradition. More than an insider simply by virtue of its contemporary place in the French canon, then, the novel is also intertextually bound to a tradition of oxymoronic poetics dating back to Charles Baudelaire's Paris Spleen ( Les Petits poèmes en prose ). I shall examine the way in which L'Étranger performs its prose poetics, thereby establishing it as exemplary of a Parisian model of modernity. Additionally, the famous scene on the beach will be considered as a liminal space and as a literary translation of Paris into the desert, which, once a joke for Paris's relationship to provincial France, became after the Second World War a new allegory for the capital's self-alterity. (shrink)
Jürgen Habermas derives his political theory and discourse ethics from a view of language based upon “universal pragmatics.” Universal pragmatics is identified by Habermas to reveal universal (...) conditions of possible understanding with the belief that not only syntactic and semantic characteristics of language, but also pragmatic characteristics of utterances related to speech should be reconstructed to build an undistorted communication. Nevertheless, the communicative competence, which is supposed to be related to pragmatics of language, is derived from the misinterpretation of J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances. Linguistic as well as communicative competences have a universal core in universal pragmatics, which paves the way for the essentialist depiction of language having the Chomskyian overtones. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, on the other hand, does not have a universalistic claim. Because Habermas derives universal pragmatics from the misinterpretation of Austin’s theory of performative utterances, it is important to evaluate Austin and Habermas’s views of language by comparing and contrasting them with one another. The first part of the paper consists of the articulation of universal pragmatics. The second part of the paper focuses on Habermas’s unjustified critique of Austin. (shrink)
Contemporary liberal democracy employs a conception of legitimacy according to which political decisions and institutions must be at least in principle justifiable to all citizens. This conception (...) of legitimacy is difficult to satisfy when citizens are deeply divided at the level of fundamental moral, religious, and philosophical commitments. Many have followed the later Rawls in holding that where a reasonable pluralism of such commitments persists, political justification must eschew appeal to any controversial moral, religious, or philosophical premises. In this way, the Rawlsian account of public political justification involves a politics of omission, where citizens are expected to bracket off their most fundamental commitments and seek justifications that draw only from uncontroversial premises. This politics of omission is necessary, Rawls argues, for political stability. But there is good social epistemic evidence for the view that the politics of omission encourages insularity among like-minded groups, and that this insularity in turn generates extremism. So omission is likely to lead to instability, not stability. (shrink)
The general chemistry curriculum includes a prelude that consumes nearly all of the first semester and occupies the first third of the typical textbook. This necessary prelude (...) to the main event is comparable in scope to precalculus though not broken out as a formal ‘prechemistry’ course. Atomic orbitals account for much of this prelude-to-chemistry. By tradition, orbital theory is conveyed to the student in three disjunct pieces, presented in the following illogical order: the Pauli principle, the Aufbau principle, and Hund’s rule. (Often the n + l rule is tossed into the mix as well, though with no fixed place in the scheme). In the early twentieth century, as various researchers announced new insights into the atom at unpredictable intervals, no one could have been faulted for teaching orbitals in such a manner, catch-as-catch-can. A hundred years on, the vestiges of that (presumed) practice look wrong, and are indefensible. In the approach advocated here, orbitals would be taught as a single hierarchical rule-set, with the parts coherently sequenced as Aufbau–Hund–Pauli (and with Madelung’s n + l rule rehabilitated as part of Aufbau, no longer a free-floating mnemonic aid only). Logic aside, pragmatism offers its own argument for adopting this scheme: A tighter approach to Aufbau can lighten the ‘prechemistry’ burden significantly and bring the student that much sooner to chemistry itself. (shrink)
: This paper is a commentary on some topics discussed by Thomas Short in his recent book Peirce's Theory of Signs: Peirce's distinction between iconic and (...) class='Hi'>indexical signs, the objects of propositions, and different ways of interpreting the distinction between the immediate and dynamic objects of signs. Peirce's distinction between immediate and dynamic objects is in certain respects analogous to Alexius Meinong's distinction between the "auxiliary objects" and the "ultimate objects" ("target objects") of mental representations. It is suggested that the models of a theory can be regarded as its immediate objects, and the real systems represented by the models are the dynamic objects of the theory. (shrink)
This paper is a commentary on some topics discussed by Thomas Short in his recent book Peirce's Theory of Signs: Peirce's distinction between iconic and indexical (...) class='Hi'> signs, the objects of propositions, and different ways of interpreting the distinction between the immediate and dynamic objects of signs. Peirce's distinction between immediate and dynamic objects is in certain respects analogous to Alexius Meinong's distinction between the "auxiliary objects" and the "ultimate objects" ("target objects") of mental representations. It is suggested that the models of a theory can be regarded as its immediate objects, and the real systems represented by the models are the dynamic objects of the theory. (shrink)
: My contribution to the present symposium on Short's book is an assessment of it as an attempt to provide a reliable starting understanding of Peirce's (...) class='Hi'>semeiotic for anyone interested in its relevance to contemporary philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, which is the special (but somewhat limited) perspective from which Short himself views Peirce's work. I suggest that although the central core of the book—meaning those chapters (3 through 9) which present the basic conceptions of Peirce's theory of thought as representation—is successful in providing an unusually lucid account of its basic process conceptions (subject to important qualification), and is clearly of special interest in that part of it in which Short applies Peirce's conceptions in the context of current problematics in analytic philosophy (Chs. 10–12), it is seriously flawed as a book by the gratuitous inclusion (in Ch. 2) of a methodologically unsound and implausibly argued thesis about the development of Peirce's thought which serves no useful purpose relative to the rest of the book. As regards the qualification referred to above the one provided here concerns his account of Peirce's conception of symbolism in particular, which is based on a misunderstanding of its proper interpretant. (shrink)
In the concluding pages of his first major book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, René Girard asserts that “Toutes les conclusions romanesques sont des conversions. Personne ne (...) peut en douter” (All novelistic conclusions are conversions; it is impossible to doubt this).1 By this he means simply that there comes a moment when both the great novelists whom he studies and their characters recognize a fundamental truth that dramatically changes them: a life founded on human desire alone can end only in misery and failure. Although not necessarily religious in nature, this novelistic conversion, as Robert Doran puts it in his recent edition of Girard’s uncollected writings on literature and literary theory .. (shrink)
This critical editorial introduction summarizes and explicates Frederick Will’s pragmatic realism and his account of the nature, assessment, and revision of cognitive and practical norms in (...) class='Hi'>connection with: the development of Will’s pragmatic realism, Hume’s problem of induction, the oscillations between foundationalism and coherentism, the nature of philosophical reflection, Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’, the open texture of empirical concepts, the correspondence conception of truth, Putnam’s ‘internal realism’, the redundancy theory of truth, sociology of knowledge, the governance of practice by norms and the assessment and revision of norms in practice, scientific realism, the alleged independence of reason and tradition, rule-following, legal realism, ethical intuitionism and moral relativism, the regress problem (both in epistemology and in moral theory), the paradox of analysis, and culminating in Will’s account of the philosophical governance of norms. These issues are discussed in close consideration of the views of: William Alston, John Dewey, Descartes, Leibniz, Waismann, Austin, Russell, Schlick, Ayer, Richard Rorty, Michael Williams, Hempel, Carnap, Simon Blackburn, Ramsey, Strawson, Kuhn, Wilfrid Sellars, Wittgenstein, Nozick, Dretske, Quine, Barbara Herman, Hardy Jones, Marcus Singer, and Gerd Buchdahl. (shrink)
William Rowe’s a posteriori arguments for the non-existence of God are well-known. Rather less attention has been given, however, to Rowe’s intriguing a priori (...) class='Hi'>argument for atheism. In this paper, I examine the three published responses to Rowe’s a priori argument (due to Bruce Langtry, William Morris, and Daniel and Frances Howard-Snyder, respectively). I conclude that none is decisive, but I show that Rowe’s argument nevertheless requires more defence than he provides. (shrink)
This paper deals with the rationalist assumptions behind researches of artificial intelligence (AI) on the basis of Hubert Dreyfus’s critique. Dreyfus is a leading American philosopher (...) class='Hi'>known for his rigorous critique on the underlying assumptions of the field of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence specialists, especially those whose view is commonly dubbed as “classical AI,” assume that creating a thinking machine like the human brain is not a too far away project because they believe that human intelligence works on the basis of formalized rules of logic. In contradistinction to classical AI specialists, Dreyfus contends that it is impossible to create intelligent computer programs analogous to the human brain because the workings of human intelligence is entirely different from that of computing machines. For Dreyfus, the human mind functions intuitively and not formally. Following Dreyfus, this paper aims to pinpointing the major flaws classical AI suffers from. The author of this paper believes that pinpointing these flaws would inform inquiries on and about artificial intelligence. Over and beyond this, this paper contributes something indisputably original. It strongly argues that classical AI research programs have, though inadvertently, falsified an entire epistemological enterprise of the rationalists not in theory as philosophers do but in practice. When AI workers were trying hard in order to produce a machine that can think like human minds, they have in a way been testing—and testing it up to the last point—the rationalist assumption that the workings of the human mind depend on logical rules. Result: No computers actually function like the human mind. Reason: the human mind does not depend on the formal or logical rules ascribed to computers. Thus, symbolic AI research has falsified the rationalist assumption that ‘the human mind reaches certainty by functioning formally’ by virtue of its failure to create a thinking machine. (shrink)
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and (...) class='Hi'> Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. (shrink)
Aristotle's ethical theory is often seen as instructing agents in the prudent pursuit of their own well-being, and therefore labeled egoistic. Yet it is also subject (...) class='Hi'> to the opposing charge of failing to direct agents to their well-being, directing them instead to perfection. I am here concerned chiefly with the second criticism, and proceed as follows: I first articulate Sumner's version of the criticism, and second assess his argument for his own (subjective) account of well-being. Third, I present reasons motivating a more objective account of well-being, reasons for taking another look at Aristotle. Finally, granting that Aristotle does indeed direct agents to pursue their perfection, I argue that perfection includes well-being within it. This shows how Aristotle escapes the second criticism, while at the same time pointing the way toward a defense against the first. (Published Online August 21 2006). (shrink)
In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining (...) class='Hi'> characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)
This article is a brief commentary on Donald Turner and Ford Turrell’s “The Non-Existent God: Transcendence, Humanity, and Ethics in Emmanuel Levinas.” While I agree with (...) class='Hi'> Turner and Turrell’s general presentation of Levinas’s existential conception of God and ethics, I reflect primarily on the reference the authors make to Kierkegaard as an existentialist forefather of Levinas. I show certain basic similarities between Levinas and Kierkegaard as existentialist thinkers, but also note their differences, also taking into consideration the influence of Hegel. This paper was delivered in the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)
<span class='Hi'>span><span class='Hi'>span><span class='Hi'>span><span class='Hi'>span><span class='Hi'>span><span class='Hi'>span><span class='Hi'>span> readers of Greek ethics tend to (...) class='Hi'> favour those accounts of the virtuous ideal according to which virtue involves the development of our non-rational—appetitive and emotional—<span class='Hi'>span> motivations as well as of our rational motivations.<span class='Hi'>span> So our contemporaries find much of interest and sympathy in Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a condition in which reason does not simply override our appetites and emotions,<span class='Hi'>span> but these non-rational motivations themselves <span class='Hi'>span>‘speak with the same voice as reason’<span class='Hi'>span>.2 By contrast,<span class='Hi'>span> the Stoic.<span class='Hi'>span>. (shrink)
Readers of Sartre's biographies often have the impression that they reveal more about Sartre than about Baudelaire, Flaubert or Genet. The reason for this is our (...) class='Hi'>awareness of Sartre's philosophy which serves as an explicit paradigm for the construction and explicitation of his literary and his biographical works. We speak of a Sartrean play, a Sartrean biography, because they lay bare not only characteristic features of the genre but also of the author and this also is true of a Hegelian or Marxist history or a Freudian psychology. These writers have all invented their own paradigms and if one decides to use their paradigm one is considered a Hegelian, Marxist or Sartrean follower. These followers are judged by some to have been persuaded by a vision, a way of seeing, a style. (shrink)
A B S T R AC T:<span class='Hi'>span> In this paper I consider an interpretation of future contingents which motivates a unification of a Łukasiewicz- (...) class='Hi'>style logic with the more classical supervaluational semantics.<span class='Hi'>span> This in turn motivates a new non-classical logic modelling what is <span class='Hi'>span>“made true by history up until now.<span class='Hi'>span>” I give a simple Hilbert-style proof theory,<span class='Hi'>span> and a soundness and completeness argument for the proof theory with respect to the intended models. (shrink)
In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of "the subject in process/on trial" from her semiotic works of the 1960s (...) class='Hi'> to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this "subject in process/on trial" as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics. (shrink)
Evidence Theory is a branch of mathematics that concerns combination of empirical evidence in an individualâs mind in order to construct a coherent picture of reality. (...) class='Hi'>Designed to deal with unexpected empirical evidence suggesting new possibilities, evidence theory is compatible with Shackleâs idea of decision-making as a creative act. This essay investigates this connection in detail, pointing to the usefulness of evidence theory to formalise and extend Shackleâs decision theory. In order to ease a proper framing of the issues involved, evidence theory is compared with sub-additive probability theory and Ewensâs infinite alleles model. Furthermore, the original version of evidence theory is presented along with its most recent developments. (shrink)
American Catholic Philosophical Association President James Marsh is calling for a “Philosophy after Catonsville.” This paper begins by examining Catonsvilleas specifically American, Catholic, and philosophical. “Wildness” is (...) then presented as it has emerged recently as a category in environmental philosophy andis shown to necessitate a social ecology for Catonsville. Finally, Marsh’s problematic relationship to ecology will be presented and resolved by discussing the necessary entailment of social ecology by his trilogy of Post-Cartesian Meditations, Critique, Action, and Liberation, and Process, Praxis, and Transcendence. By the end of this paper, wildness will have established a crucial connection between Catonsville, Marsh’s “greened” critical theory, and social ecology as a necessary condition for the possibility of a “Philosophy after Catonsville.”. (shrink)
In this comment on Firestone and Jacobs’s book, In Defense of Kant’s Religion, I take issue with (1) the authors’ strategy in demonstrating that it is (...) class='Hi'> possibleto positively incorporate religion and theology into Kant’s critical corpus, and (2) their intention to focus on the coherence of Kant’s theory without necessarily recommending it for Christianity. Regarding (1), I argue that in pursuing their strategy the authors ignore the fact that Kant has transposed what appear to be traditional religious doctrines to a completely different level of reflection, in effect turning them into imaginary tropes intended to mask otherwise irreducible contradictions in his view of human agency. As for (2), I claim that the authors’ intention runs the risk of being disingenuous, since Kant presented his religion as the true religion, opposing it to historical Christianity (unless the latter, of course, is re-interpreted according to his own precepts). (shrink)
The first three sections of this study explain the debt that Karl Rahner’s metaphysics of symbol owes to the influence of Maurice Blondel and Joseph Maréchal. (...) class='Hi'>The concluding section suggests that a Blondel-inspired renewal of the metaphysics of symbol could challenge the restricted claim for reason offered by secular and religious post-modernity. (shrink)
