There has recently been a growing interest in the topic of vagueness and indeterminacy in contemporary metaphysics, with two views taking center stage. The semantic view holds that indeterminacy is due to vagueness in the extension of concepts, while the ontological view holds that indeterminacy is due to the vagueness of certain objects. There has, however, been little research on discussions of vagueness and indeterminacy in early-modern philosophy despite the relevance of vagueness and indeterminacy for issues such as real and (...) nominal definitions, clear and distinct ideas, and the principle of complete determination. In this paper, I survey discussions of vagueness in Locke, Leibniz, and Kant and point to ways in which the problem of vagueness and indeterminacy touches on broader issues in their respective philosophies. Although Locke, Leibniz, and Kant all suggest that vagueness is a semantic phenomenon, Kant also appears to countenance an ontological view according to which objects as appearances may sometimes be indeterminate. (shrink)

In the marketplace of opinions concerning the metaphysics of mind and consciousness panqualityism (PQ) occupies an interesting position. It is a distinct variant of neutral monism, as well as of protophenomenalism, and as such it strives to carve out a conceptual niche midway between physicalism and mentalism. It is also a brand of Russellian monism, advocated by its supporters as a less costly and less extravagant alternative to panpsychism. Being clearly articulated and relatively well-developed it constitutes an intriguing view. Nonetheless, (...) the present paper takes a decisively critical stance towards PQ. In particular, it challenges it on two principal grounds. First, I argue that PQ's analysis of experience, and of the qualities tasked with constituting the phenomenal character of experience, is fundamentally flawed. Second, I argue that PQ's attempt to explain phenomenal consciousness as a function of reflective awareness is equally misguided. Along the way, the paper also points the shortcomings of previously established critiques of PQ. All in all, the discussion identifies some difficulties that are likely to generalize beyond PQ's specific circumstances, raising concerns regarding the viability of a "middle of the road" solution to the mind–body problem. (shrink)

I thank the editors for inviting me to contribute to this issue on critical views of logic. Kant invented the critical philosophy. He fashioned its doctrines (Understanding versus Reason, synthetic...

In this article, I first reconsider the personal links between Comenius and Leibniz, searching for how Comenian texts and ideas may have reached Leibniz. For that reason, I outline a constellation of thinkers within Central European Protestantism, since a vast majority of the important intellectuals with some noteworthy link both to Comenius and Leibniz were based there. Second, I investigate more closely one particular intellectual link between Comenius and Leibniz, namely their common combinatorial standpoint, because the striking parallels, connections and (...) similarities between Comenius’s and Leibniz’s ideas on combinatorics, universal language and relational metaphysics have been largely overlooked thus far. (shrink)

How do humans manage to keep track of a gradually changing object or person as the same persisting individual despite the fact that the extraction of information about this individual must often rely on heterogeneous information sources and heterogeneous tracking methods? The article introduces the Empirical Tracking of Individuals theory to address this problem. This theory proposes an analysis of the concept of integrated tracking, which refers to the capacity to acquire, store, and update information about the identity and location (...) of individuals in our environment. It hypothesizes that certain functions of attention are a key to explaining how the cognitive flexibility of the human mind overcomes the heterogeneity of sources and methods in integrated tracking. At least two premises lend support to this hypothesis. First, heterogeneity of tracking sources is overcome by the combination of information from multiple perceptual modalities and a phenomenon of multisensory 'transparency'. Second, heterogeneity of tracking sources and methods may also be overcome by inferences that combine information across domains to acquire reasons to believe propositions about the target's location and identity. (shrink)

In this paper I concentrate on Euclidean diagrams, namely on those diagrams that are licensed by the rules of Euclid’s plane geometry. I shall overview some philosophical stances that have recently been proposed in philosophy of mathematics to account for the role of such diagrams in mathematics, and more particularly in Euclid’s Elements. Furthermore, I shall provide an original analysis of the epistemic role that Euclidean diagrams may have in empirical sciences, more specifically in physics. I shall claim that, although (...) the world we live in is not Euclidean, Euclidean diagrams permit to obtain knowledge of the world through a specific mechanism of inference I shall call inheritance. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the mechanical inexplicability of natural ends in the third Critique is best understood against the background of a fairly traditional picture of the metaphysics of living things, one embraced by Kant himself. On this picture, the distinctive unity of a living thing was to be explained by a soul, form, or monad. The constraints placed on the understanding in the first Critique, however, make such an explanation impossible: because the principle of a living thing (...) in virtue of which it constitutes a whole—rather than a mere aggregate of things—is simple, it cannot be met with in space. By ruling out a widely accepted explanans for a well-recognized explanandum, in other words, Kant’s first Critique makes living things inexplicable in precisely those ways suggested by the third. (shrink)

This paper addresses D. C. Williams’s question, “How can Leibniz know that he is a member of the actual world and not merely a possible monad on the shelf of essence?” A variety of answers are considered. Ultimately, it is argued that no particular perception of a state of affairs in the world can warrant knowledge of one’s actuality, nor can the awareness of any property within oneself; rather, it is the nature of experience itself, with the flow of perceptions, (...) that guarantees our actuality. A consequence of this view is that no non-actual individuals can truly be said to experience their worlds, nor can they ask the question if they are actual or not. (shrink)

Voluntary acts are preceded by electrophysiological (RPs). With spontaneous acts involving no preplanning, the main negative RP shift begins at about200 ms. Control experiments, in which a skin stimulus was timed (S), helped evaluate each subject's error in reporting the clock times for awareness of any perceived event.

Leibniz’s universal characteristic is a fundamental aspect of his theory of cognition. Without symbols or characters it would be difficult for the human mind to define several concepts and to achieve many demonstrations. In most disciplines, and particularly in mathematics, the mind must then focus on symbols and their combinatorial rules rather than on mental contents. For Leibniz, mental perception is most of the time too confused for attaining distinct notions and valid deductions. In this paper, I argue that the (...) functions of symbolization differ depending upon the kind of concepts that are replaced with characters. In my view, most commentators did not sufficiently underline the distinction between two main functions of formal substitution in Leibniz’s characteristic: either increasing our knowledge or simply structuring it. In the first case, we complete our knowledge because formal substitution makes sensible and imaginary concepts more distinct. In the second case, symbolization helps to organize contents that are already conceived of by reason. Thus the process of substitution is not always identically applicable, for symbols replace different types of concepts. (shrink)

The standard approach to solve prediction tasks is to apply inductive methods such as, e.g., the straight rule. Such methods are proven to be access-optimal in specific prediction settings, but not in all. Within the optimality-approach of meta-induction, success-based weighted prediction methods are proven to be access-optimal in all possible continuous prediction settings. However, meta-induction fails to be access-optimal in so-called demonic discrete prediction environments where the predicted value is inversely correlated with the true outcome. In this paper the problem (...) of discrete prediction environments is addressed by embedding them into a synchronised prediction setting. In such a setting the task consists in providing a discrete and a continuous prediction. It is shown that synchronisation constraints exclude the possibility of demonic environments. (shrink)

In attempts to come to grips with Kant’s thought, the influence of the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) is often neglected. In this paper, I consider three topics in Kant’s philosophy of mind, broadly construed, where Wolff’s influence is particularly visible: consciousness, self-consciousness, and psychology. I argue that we can better understand Kant’s particular arguments and positions within this context, but also gain a more accurate sense of which aspects of Kant’s accounts derive from the antecedent traditions and which constitute (...) genuine philosophical innovations. (shrink)

The view of language is greatly changed from early modern philosophy to later modern philosophy and to postmodern philosophy. The linguistic question in early modern philosophy, which is characterized by rationalism and empiricism, is discussed in this paper. Linguistic phenomena are not at the center of philosophical reflections in early modern philosophy. The subject of consciousness is at the center of the philosophy, which makes language serve purely as an instrument for representing thoughts. Locke, Leibniz and Descartes consider language from (...) a representationalist point of view. To them, language itself is idealized and represents thought as if it were thought representing itself. Like the structural linguist Saussure, the founders of phenomenology and analytical philosophy give much attention to the logical or static structure of language, and stick up for the representationalism of early modern philosophy. However, their successors refuse to accept this attitude, meaning the final collapse of representationalism. /// 从早期现代哲学到后期现代哲学再到后现代哲学，在语言观上产生了重大的 变化。早期现代哲学以唯理论和经验论为典型形式。语言现象没有成为该时期哲学 反思的中心问题; 意识主体处于哲学的中心，这使得语言仅仅充当着表象思想的工 具。洛克、莱布尼茨和笛卡尔都从表象论的角度看待语言，在他们那里，语言本身 被观念化了，它们表象思想，就像思想在表象它自身。正像结构语言学家索绪尔一 样，现象学和分析哲学的创始人关注的都是语言的逻辑结构或静态结构，他们延续 了早期现代哲学的表象论，但他们的后继者拒绝接受这种态度，而这意味着最终突 破表象论。. (shrink)

We present a formal system, E, which provides a faithful model of the proofs in Euclid's Elements, including the use of diagrammatic reasoning.

Philosophers have long believed that if the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles were logically true, there would be no problem of individuation. I show (a) that if spatial relations are, as seems plausible, of such a nature that it makes no sense to say of one thing that it is related to itself, then the Principle is a logical truth, asserting that a certain kind of state of affairs is impossible because the kind of sentence purporting to express it (...) is ill-formed and (b) that even if the Principle were such a truth the problem of individuation would remain. I then examine some of what Leibniz and Wittgenstein have said about the notions of individuation, difference and nonidentity. (shrink)