Članek prinaša štiri poglede na hermenevtiko glasbe, ki so osredotočeni na 1) vzpostavljanje hermenevtičnega obzorja, 2) zgodovinske umestitve hermenevtike glasbe, 3) teoretsko razmejitev glasbene povednosti v muzikologiji in 4) spoznavoslovne razmejitve glasbene povednosti. Osrednja pozornost pri vseh štirih pogledih je naravnana k vprašanju: katere epistemološke ravni kaže upoštevati, ko govorimo o hermenevtiki glasbe kot muzikološkem pojmu v najširšem smislu?Različne fasete, ki tvorijo hermenevtiko glasbe, zato narekujejo za glavni cilj prispevka: očrtati meje med hermenevtiko kot teoretskim sistemom, ki temelji na metodah (...) vzporejanja glasbenega stavka z "zunajglasbenimi" pojavi, in hermenevtiko kot "kulturno institucijo" ali pragmatičnim pristopom, ki poleg spoznavoslovnih prednosti prinaša tudi vrsto pasti.Four different sketches of musical hermeneutics are given, focused respectively on 1) the formation of the hermeneutical horizon, 2) historical framings of the musical hermeneutics, 3) theoretical division of the musical meaning within musicology, and 4) epistemological layering of the musical narrativity. The main focus of the four sketches is to discuss single issues arising from the following question: which levels of epistemology should be considered to define hermeneutics of music as a musicological term.Because of the various facets involved, the main aim of this article is to sketch the boundaries between hermeneutics as a theoretical system founded on comparative methods and hermeneutics as the "cultural institution", or a pragmatic approach, bringing about not only epistemological advantages but also a number of issues. (shrink)

What does woman mean? According to two competing views, it can be seen as a sex term or as a gender term. Recently, Jennifer Saul has put forward a contextualist view, according to which woman can have different meanings in different contexts. The main motivation for this view seems to involve moral and political considerations, namely, that this view can do justice to the claims of trans women. Unfortunately, Saul argues, on further reflection the contextualist view fails to do justice (...) to those moral and political claims that motivated the view in the first place. In this article I argue that there is a version of the contextualist view that can indeed capture those moral and political aims, and in addition, I use this case to illustrate an important and more general claim, namely, that moral and political considerations can be relevant to the descriptive project of finding out what certain politically significant terms actually mean. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task.

A posteriori physicalism is the combination of two appealing views: physicalism (i.e. the view that all facts are either physical or entailed by the physical), and conceptual dualism (i.e. the view that phenomenal truths are not entailed a priori by physical truths). Recently, some philosophers such as Goff (2011), Levine (2007) and Nida-Rümelin (2007), among others, have suggested that a posteriori physicalism cannot explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal the nature of phenomenal properties. In this paper, I wish to defend (...) a posteriori physicalism from this new and interesting challenge, by arguing that a posteriori physicalists have the resources to explain how phenomenal concepts can reveal at least something of what it would take for the corresponding phenomenal property to be instantiated. (shrink)

The inference from conceivability to possibility has been challenged in numerous ways. One of these ways is the so-called phenomenal concept strategy, which has become one of the main strategies against the conceivability argument against physicalism. However, David Chalmers has recently presented a dilemma for the phenomenal concept strategy, and he has argued that no version of the strategy can succeed. In this paper, I examine the dilemma, and I argue that there is a way out of it. I conclude (...) that Chalmers has not posed any serious problem for the phenomenal concept strategy to succeed in blocking the conceivability argument. In doing so, my aim is not only to show that Chalmers’s argument has not refuted the phenomenal concept strategy, but also to clarify what any version of the strategy should achieve in order to be successful. (shrink)

Even though disquotationalism is not correct as it is usually formulated, a deep insight lies behind it. Specifically, it can be argued that, modulo implicit commitment to reflection principles, all there is to the notion of truth is given by a simple, natural collection of truth-biconditionals.

One of the main strategies against conceivability arguments is the so-called phenomenal concept strategy, which aims to explain the epistemic gap between physical and phenomenal truths in terms of the special features of phenomenal concepts. Daniel Stoljar has recently argued that the phenomenal concept strategy has failed to provide a successful explanation of this epistemic gap. In this paper my aim is to defend the phenomenal concept strategy from his criticisms. I argue that Stoljar has misrepresented the resources of the (...) strategy, which can indeed accomplish the required explanatory task, once it is properly understood. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Chalmers and Jackson’s defence of the a priori entailment thesis, that is, the claim that microphysical truths a priori entail ordinary non-phenomenal truths such as ‘water covers 60% of the Earth surface’, which they use as a premise for an argument against the possibility of a reductive explanation of consciousness. Their argument relies on a certain view about the possession conditions of macroscopic concepts such as WATER, known as ascriptivism. In the paper I distinguish two (...) versions of ascriptivism: reductive versus non-reductive ascriptivism. According to reductive ascriptivism, competent users of a concept have the ability to infer truths involving such concept from lower-level truths, whereas according to non-reductive ascriptivism, all that is required in order to be a competent user of a concept is to be able to infer truths involving that concept from other truths, which need not be lower-level truths. I argue, first, that the a priori entailment thesis is committed to reductive ascriptivism, and secondly, that reductive ascriptivism is problematic because it trivializes the notion of a priori knowledge. Therefore, I conclude that Chalmers and Jackson have not presented a convincing case for the claim that microphysical truths entail ordinary non-phenomenal truths a priori, especially when we understand this claim in the sense that is relevant for their argument against the possibility of a reductive explanation of consciousness. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness is about how we could explain in physicalist terms why we are conscious. The meta-problem of consciousness is about how we could explain why we have a hard problem of consciousness. In this note I argue that the phenomenal concept strategy can in principle provide a satisfactory solution to the meta-problem.

One way to theorize about we-identities—the identities that individual subjects have as ‘one of us’—is in terms of the uniformity, interchangeability, and prototypicality of group members. The social-psychological theory of self-categorization epitomizes this approach, which has strongly influenced contemporary phenomenological research on the we. This paper argues that this approach has one important and largely overlooked limitation: the we-identities tied to close personal relationships—exemplified by long-term friendships and romantic partnerships—are based on patterns of interpersonal interaction and integration through which individuals (...) tend to grasp their non-substitutability and complementarity. This limitation suggests that another approach is needed to tackle the we-identities characteristic of close personal relationships. I outline such an approach, by combining resources from classical phenomenology and ongoing research on the socially extended mind. (shrink)

§1. Introduction. This paper deals with aspects of my doctoral dissertation which contributed to the early development of model theory. What was of use to later workers was less the results of my thesis, than the method by which I proved the completeness of first-order logic—a result established by Kurt Gödel in his doctoral thesis 18 years before.The ideas that fed my discovery of this proof were mostly those I found in the teachings and writings of Alonzo Church. This may (...) seem curious, as his work in logic, and his teaching, gave great emphasis to the constructive character of mathematical logic, while the model theory to which I contributed is filled with theorems about very large classes of mathematical structures, whose proofs often by-pass constructive methods.Another curious thing about my discovery of a new proof of Gödel's completeness theorem, is that it arrived in the midst of my efforts to prove an entirely different result. Such “accidental” discoveries arise in many parts of scientific work. Perhaps there are regularities in the conditions under which such “accidents” occur which would interest some historians, so I shall try to describe in some detail the accident which befell me.A mathematical discovery is an idea, or a complex of ideas, which have been found and set forth under certain circumstances. The process of discovery consists in selecting certain input ideas and somehow combining and transforming them to produce the new output ideas. The process that produces a particular discovery may thus be represented by a diagram such as one sees in many parts of science; a “black box” with lines coming in from the left to represent the input ideas, and lines going out to the right representing the output. To describe that discovery one must explain what occurs inside the box, i.e., how the outputs were obtained from the inputs. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that some features, such as gender, race and sexual orientation, are socially constructed? Many scholars claim that social constructionism about a kind is a version of realism about that kind, according to which the corresponding kind is a social construction, that it, it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructionism, then, is a version of realism about a kind that asserts that the kind is real, and puts forward a particular view about (...) the nature of the kind, namely, that it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructivists about human kinds such as gender, race and sexual orientation often make an additional claim, namely, that these kinds are social constructions but they are typically believed to be biological kinds (that is, people are typically wrong about the nature of these kinds). Ron Mallon (2017) calls social constructions that are (falsely) taken to be biological kinds covert social constructions. This paper is about how we could have terms in our natural language that come to refer to covert social constructions. (shrink)

In this article, we reflect on the use of formal methods in the philosophy of science. These are taken to comprise not just methods from logic broadly conceived, but also from other formal disciplines such as probability theory, game theory, and graph theory. We explain how formal modelling in the philosophy of science can shed light on difficult problems in this domain.

_Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach_ offers a new, short term psychotherapeutic approach to working dynamically with children who suffer from irritability, oppositional defiance and disruptiveness. _RFP-C_ enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child’s externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child. Using clinical examples throughout, Hoffman, Rice and Prout demonstrate that in many dysregulated children, _RFP-C_ can: Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of (...) gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component. Diminish the child’s use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively. Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions. Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school. This handbook is the first to provide a manualized, short-term dynamic approach to the externalizing behaviors of childhood, offering organizing framework and detailed descriptions of the processes involved in _RFP-C_. Supplying clinicians with a systematic individual psychotherapy as an alternative or complement to PMT, CBT and psychotropic medication, it also shifts focus away from simply helping parents manage their children’s misbehaviors. Significantly, the approach shows that clinical work with these children is compatible with understanding the children’s brain functioning, and posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation, promoting an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology. Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach is a comprehensive tool capable of application at all levels of professional training, offering a new approach for psychoanalysts, child and adolescent counselors, psychotherapists and mental health clinicians in fields including social work, psychology and psychiatry. (shrink)

In this article we investigate similarities between the role that ineffability of Absolute Infinity plays in class theory and in theology.

The relationship between aesthetic value and other moral and cognitive values has been a key theme within contemporary aesthetic discussion. In this article, I explore once again the implications of this relationship, but from what I think might be a different angle. With few exceptions, notably Dominic Lopes, most of the contributions to this issue have dealt with the impact that moral or cognitive values could possibly have on the overall aesthetic value of a work of art. In this article, (...) I explore instead how aesthetic properties or merits could play a role in explaining moral and cognitive properties. To do so, I first offer some examples that I think may reasonably exemplify the phenomenon we are considering. Second, I argue that a proper account of interactionism should meet at least two constraints: the relevance constraint and the autonomy constraint. Finally, I try to clarify how it is possible that aesthetic properties substantially contribute to other values by appealing to the notions of expression and the affective character of aesthetic properties. (shrink)

In this article ideas from Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects are applied to questions regarding mathematical structuralism. I discuss how sui generis mathematical structures can be viewed as generic systems of mathematical objects, where mathematical objects are conceived of as arbitrary objects in Fine’s sense.

Inspired by Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects, we explore some ways in which the generic structure of the natural numbers can be presented. Following a suggestion of Saul Kripke’s, we discuss how basic facts and questions about this generic structure can be expressed in the framework of Carnapian quantified modal logic.

This article contains an overview of the main problems, themes and theories relating to the semantic paradoxes in the twentieth century. From this historical overview I tentatively draw some lessons about the way in which the field may evolve in the next decade.

The article examines a number of methodological and conceptual features in the philosophical work of S.L. Rubinstein of the early (Marburg) period. It is assumed that the copies of Rubinstein’s doctoral inaugural dissertation available at the university of Marburg (Germany) and it the private archive of K.A. Abulkhanova represents two parts of one research, which understated expect in it’s first part (the text submitted for defense) an interpretation and criticism of Hegel’s absolute rationalism, and in the second part an exposition (...) of the author’s own concept. It is proved that Rubinstein overcomes the logical limitation the Hegelian philosophical absolutization – the opposition of being and consciousness, the author fuses object and subject in a single being as a domain of accommodation of both, the construction of the internal consistent picture of being as the actual being of a leaving subject. Acknowledgement of Sources. The author is sincerely grateful to the D. Sc. in Philosophy, Professor, Academician of the Russian Academy of Education K.A. Abulkhanova for the materials provided from her personal archive. (shrink)

The apparatus theory is used to challenge the interpretation of religion and also to determine whether religion is a factor to contend with in modern society. Religion could be the element that keeps the city intact or could be the one element that is busy ruining our understanding of reality and the way this interacts with society in the urban environment. Paradigms determine our relationships. In this case, the apparatus theory would be a more precise way of describing not only (...) our relationship towards the city but also the way in which we try to perceive our relationship with religion and the urban conditions we live in. This article gives theoretical background to the interpretation and understanding of the relationship between various entities within the city. The apparatus of the city creates space for religion to function as a binding form. Religion could bind different cultures, diverse backgrounds and create space for growth. (shrink)

Kripke’s notion of groundedness plays a central role in many responses to the semantic paradoxes. Can the notion of groundedness be brought to bear on the paradoxes that arise in connection with abstraction principles? We explore a version of grounded abstraction whereby term models are built up in a ‘grounded’ manner. The results are mixed. Our method solves a problem concerning circularity and yields a ‘grounded’ model for the predicative theory based on Frege’s Basic Law V. However, the method is (...) poorly behaved unless the background second-order logic is predicative. (shrink)

An epistemic formalization of arithmetic is constructed in which certain non-trivial metatheoretical inferences about the system itself can be made. These inferences involve the notion of provability in principle, and cannot be made in any consistent extensions of Stewart Shapiro's system of epistemic arithmetic. The system constructed in the paper can be given a modal-structural interpretation.

Trust, as a philosophical concept in education, seems largely taken for granted, either because it is embedded in other discourses, or is self-evidently assumed to be one on which there is general agreement and understanding. Its associated notions, such as confidence and belief, have counters in such concepts as disappointment and betrayal. These various notions come to the fore in interpersonal relations that require openness and self-critique. Critically reflective practice in professional teaching contexts is one such example, where openness means (...) that people involved may experience vulnerability. I will argue that the development of critically reflective practice is impossible in the absence of trust, and will take the position that trust requires the trustor to be vulnerable to betrayal. I draw on some findings of an ongoing research study in a selection of New Zealand schools, during which I have found that many participants attempt to connect reflective practice to appraisal, a move which, in light of what I present in relation to trust, I argue should be resisted. (shrink)