‘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)

Dewey provides a useful analysis of what he calls historic liberalism and an interesting version of liberalism. A doctrine that he believes is useful for his time. This is a reconstituted liberalism with a holistic approach to society and nature. Dewey's “transactional” approach sees the fault of traditional liberalism as separating the individual as an entity outside an evolving social and natural context. This doctrine, while attending to greater individual freedom like all liberalism, emphasizes cooperation in a constantly evolving context (...) guided by and modelled upon science. (shrink)

Kant's ethics demand suppositions where a noumenal freedom does not contradict natural causality. A rational faith in God makes this possible, through a progressive program in nature, including history, through strife, culminating in the doctrine that the republican form of government represents man's essential ethical essence. This captures many traditional religious views but Kant asserts them as a rational exposition in response to modern and contemporary intellectual currents, especially Hume, Rousseau and Herder.