In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, Dummett articulates and develops his “fundamental assumption” that the introduction rules for a logical constant determine its meaning. According to Dummett, logical laws in harmony with the introduction rules are justified, while logical laws not in harmony with the introduction rules are unjustified. This powerful picture enables Dummett to criticise certain aspects of our linguistic practice, such as the Law of Excluded Middle and the metaphysics of realism he believes it embodies, as not remaining (...) responsible to the meanings of the logical constants. Against Dummett's fundamental assumption, I bring to bear what in the Tractatus Wittgenstein describes as his “fundamental thought” that the logical constants do not represent. Properly understood, Wittgenstein's point is that since the logical constants may be eliminated from the propositional signs of a fully precise logical notation, the constants do not express meanings to which our use of expressions containing the constants is responsible. I then apply Wittgenstein's fundamental thought to Dummett's proof‐theoretic notation to show that far from determining the meanings of the logical constants, the introduction rules merely allow the constants to be edited from certain inferences, leaving Dummett with no semantic kernel with which to criticise other sentences or inferences featuring the constants. Thus, his picture of what it is to make clear the working of our language collapses. (shrink)

Deflationism about truth is the claim that the concept of truth is completely explicated by the disquotational view of truth, where the latter is the specification of a device of semantic ascent that avoids the semantical paradoxes. Over the last twenty years, the plausibility of deflationism has been intensely debated by philosophers of language. A number of writers have argued that even though deflationism is a coherent view, it is false. Some maintain that this is because a complete account of (...) truth must reduce truth to purely physical concepts but that the disquotational view of truth provides no such reduction. Others hold that there are important uses of the truth predicate that cannot be assimilated to its use as a device of semantic ascent. (shrink)

Using Martin Heidegger’s later philosophy as his springboard, Peter S. Dillard provides a radical reorientation of contemporary Christian theology. From Heidegger’s initially obscure texts concerning the holy, the gods, and the last god, Dillard extracts two possible non-metaphysical theologies: a theology of Streit and a theology of Gelassenheit. Both theologies promise to avoid metaphysical antinomies that traditionally hinder theology. After describing the strengths and weaknesses of each non-metaphysical theology, Dillard develops a Gelassenheit theology that ascribes a (...) definite phenomenology to the human encounter with divinity. This Gelassenheit theology also explains how this divinity can guide human action in concrete situations, remain deeply consonant with Christian beliefs in the Incarnation and the Trinity, and shed light on the Eucharist and Religious Vocations. Seminal ideas from Rudolf Otto and Ludwig Wittgenstein are applied at key points. Dillard concludes by encouraging others to develop an opposing Streit theology within the non-metaphysical, Heidegerrian framework he presents. (shrink)

I examine two arguments for the conclusion that thinking is not a physical process. James F. Ross argues that thinking is determinate in a manner that nopurely physical process can be. Peter Geach argues that thinking is a basic activity that, unlike basic physical processes, cannot be assigned a precise position in time. I present two objections to Ross’s argument. I then show that even if Geach’s argument avoids these objections, it is vulnerable to two other objections. I conclude (...) that neither argument establishes the immateriality of thinking. (shrink)

The Franciscan thesis maintains that the primary motive of the Incarnation is to glorify the triune God in the person of Jesus Christ: though Christ atones for human sins, his coming isn't relative to our need for redemption but rather has an absolute primacy. The Franciscan thesis is sometimes associated with the counterfactual claim that Christ would have come even if humans hadn't sinned. In recent work on the Franciscan thesis, an attempt is made to prove the counterfactual claim on (...) the basis of a purely logical argument drawn from the writings of Bl. John Duns Scotus. After showing that this proof fails, I construct an axiological argument for the Franciscan thesis that disentangles it from unsubstantiated counterfactual claims while respecting the subtle interplay between natural and revealed theology. I then provide a metaphysical interpretation of the axiological argument that builds upon Scotist notions. Seen through this interpretive lens, Scotus's logical argument can be understood not as attempting to prove a counterfactual claim but as articulating Scotus's vision of what is required of any created order that is radically contingent on God's will yet perfectly glorifies its Creator. Thus understood, the Franciscan thesis challenges a powerful and influential picture in philosophical theology. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

Introduction -- Early Heidegger and scholasticism -- Heidegger's atheology of appropriation -- Heideggerian atheology and the Scotist causal argument -- Appropriation and the problem of sufficient comprehension -- Heidegger's atheology of nothingness -- Nothingness and the problem of possibility -- A positive application.

Mass incarceration has become a flashpoint in a number of recent political and public policy debates. Consensus about how to balance the just punishment of offenders with the humanitarian goal of providing inmates with genuine opportunities for reconciliation, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society is lacking. Unfortunately, a dualistic “us-versus-them” narrative surrounding these issues has become entrenched, occluding fruitful dialogue and obscuring our ability to see the detrimental effects that our nation’s punitive turn has created. In this essay, we affirm the (...) insights of Wacquant, Clear, and other sociologists and introduce a theological narrative of solidarity and vulnerability that undermines the “us-versus-them” dichotomy and opens up a path for cultivating a “we” community. (shrink)

Drawing upon Saul Kripke’s discussion of rules, James F. Ross deduces the immateriality of thinking from the metaphysical determinacy of thinking and the metaphysical indeterminacy of any physical process. It has been objected that Ross does not establish the metaphysical indeterminacy of what function a physical process realizes, that Ross does not show the incoherence of a highly deflationary view of our talk about thinking, and that Ross opens up an unbridgeable gulf between sui generis thinking and behavior. Edward Feser (...) has recently defended Ross’s argument from these objections. The present paper explains why Ross’s argument remains vulnerable to all three objections. (shrink)

Drawing upon Saul Kripke’s discussion of rules, James F. Ross deduces the immateriality of thinking from the metaphysical determinacy of thinking and the metaphysical indeterminacy of any physical process. It has been objected that Ross does not establish the metaphysical indeterminacy of what function a physical process realizes, that Ross does not show the incoherence of a highly deflationary view of our talk about thinking, and that Ross opens up an unbridgeable gulf between sui generis thinking and behavior. Edward Feser (...) has recently defended Ross’s argument from these objections. The present paper explains why Ross’s argument remains vulnerable to all three objections. (shrink)

The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor encourages the study of many disciplines in order for the soul to acquire knowledge that aids in the restoration of human nature. However, according to Hugh's epistemology much of the acquired knowledge depends upon sensory qualities internalized as images which distract the soul and cause it to degenerate from its original unity. This essay explores the tension between Hugh's educational optimism and Hugh's epistemological pessimism. After considering and rejecting two unsuccessful strategies the soul (...) might pursue for avoiding degeneration and distraction, we shall utilize Hugh's non-representational conception of cognition to develop a plausible intellectual strategy. We shall also build upon some of Hugh's remarks about music to sketch a model of self-knowledge as a kind of proportionality in the soul. (shrink)

In his article “What Do We Think With?” Peter Geach develops an argument for the non-materiality of thinking. Given that basic thinking activity is not clockable in physical time, whereas basic material or bodily activity is so clockable, it follows that basic thinking activity is non-material. Peter Dillard’s attack on this temporality proof takes “thoughts” in the proof to refer to non-occurrent states. The present note shows this reading to be mistaken and so rectifies a misunderstanding of (...) Geach’s argument. It takes no stand on the question of whether the argument succeeds. (shrink)

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

A complete system of classical Aristotelian logic intended for honors high school and college.

Ohne Rücksicht auf disziplinäre Schranken bringt dieses Buch verschiedene nicht-reduktionistische Lerntheorien miteinander ins Gespräch. In einem offenen Diskurs, der die Konzepte zueinander in Beziehung setzt, werden die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven kritisch abgewogen und hinsichtlich ihrer Stärken und Schwächen diskutiert.

Delo se loteva vprašanja aktualnosti pojma subjekta v filozofiji in politiki skozi analizo tistih avtorjev, ki so ga domnevno najbolj radikalno pokopali: pokaže, da vznik radikalno novega in problematika subjekta zavzema osrednje mesto v Deleuzovi filozofiji, kakor tudi v Lyotardovi pozni misli posvečeni praznini, v Foucaultovi obravnavi biopolitike in biooblasti, v delu Negrija in Hardta o Imperiju, ter nazadnje v Badioujevi predelavi temeljnih filozofskih kategorij biti, resnice in subjekta, na osnovi katerih je dandanes znova možna renesansa filozofije. Ta ima po (...) Badiouju štiri razsežnosti, ki se v delu Vznik subjekta nenehno prepletajo: »V osnovi želja filozofije implicira razsežnost upora: ni filozofije brez nezadovoljstva mišljenja v njegovem soočenju s svetom, kakršen je. Pa vendar želja filozofije vključuje tudi logiko: to je, prepričanje v moč argumenta in uma.«. (shrink)

Resistance is a concept understudied in the context of health and healthcare. This is in part because visible forms of social protest are sometimes understood as incongruent with professional identity, leading healthcare workers to separate their visible actions from their working life. Resistance takes many forms, however, and focusing exclusively on the visible means more subtle forms of everyday resistance are likely to be missed. The overarching aim of this study was to explore how resistance was enacted within the workplace (...) amongst a sample of twelve healthcare workers, based in the United Kingdom; exploring the forms that such action took and how this intersected with health and healthcare. In depth-interviews were conducted and results were analysed utilizing Lilja’s framework ( 2022 ). Our findings suggest that resistance took a number of forms, from more direct confrontational acts, to those which sought to avoid power or which sought to create alternative or prefigurative practices or norms. These findings speak to the complexities, ambiguities, and contradictions of resistance, as carried out by healthcare workers in the workplace. While many acts had clear political motives, with issues like climate change in mind for example, participants also described how the act of providing care itself could be an act of resistance. While saying something about our participants, this also said something about the healthcare systems in which they worked. These findings also raise a range of normative issues. Perhaps needless to say, there appears to be substantial scope to expand and interrogate our findings and apply the idea of resistance to health and healthcare. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

In the crucible of the pandemic, it has never before been clearer that, to ensure the relevance and even the survival of the discipline, nursing must cultivate a radical imagination. In the paper that follows, I trace the imperative for conjuring a radical imagination for nursing. In this fever dream for nursing futures, built on speculative visions of what could be, I draw on anarchist, abolitionist, posthuman, Black feminist, new materialist and other big ideas to plant seeds of generative insurrection (...) and creative resistance. In thinking through a radical imagination, I unpack the significance of reparatory history for nursing, a discipline founded on normative whiteness. From there, I consider what it would take to shift the capitalist frame of healthcare to one of mutual aid, which requires the deep work of abolition. With a radical imagination that breaks down the enclosures that contain us through reparatory history, mutual aid and abolition, kinship becomes urgently possible. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

Stimulated by our conversations at the 2018 International Philosophy of Nursing Society Conference and our shared interests, the coauthors present an argument for augmenting the broader discussion of “missed care” with our synthesized concept called structural missingness. We take the problem of missed care to be largely grounded on a particular economic construction of the healthcare system within an era of what some are calling the Capitalocene, capturing the pervasive influence of capitalism on nature, humanity and the world order. Our (...) perspective is that of the United States, however, extrapolations can be made to the social and healthcare systems in other countries. We are concerned with the underlying conditions that structurally reify inequality and ultimately undermine nursing practice. To situate the discussion, we briefly review existing literature on the contextualization of missed care. We understand contemporary circumstances of missed care as a function of the neoliberalization of healthcare, including the idea of nursing as a commodity. From this, we discuss the implications of missed care, which forms the basis of our critique. Synthesizing the term “structural missingness, we locate a moral imperative in the professional and disciplinary commitments of nursing to consider who and what have been left out. This moral imperative for the nursing profession, along with other social and health related professions, underscores our obligation to be involved in uncovering inequities and conceptualizing upstream solutions for structural missingness. (shrink)

Narrative thinking -- Narrative thinking about one's past -- Grief : a case study -- Narrative thinking about one's future -- Self-forgiveness : a case study -- The narrative sense of self -- Narrative, truth, life, and fiction.

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at (...) an opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

While Hermann Levin Goldschmidt didn’t read Yiddish anarchists, there seems to have been a convergent evolution in their thinking. Goldschmidt’s looking up to Jewish lore as a source of liberating creativity is commonly encountered in Yiddish anarchist texts. His view of action as a constant response to internal and external challenges in the struggle for an open future is developed by Isaac Nachman Steinberg on the basis of nineteenth-century vitalism. Goldschmidt’s theory of anarchist individualism as willed self-limiting solidarity has a (...) compelling parallel in Hillel Solotaroff’s view of history. His use of impressionism and photography to eternalize the immediacy of human actuality is akin to Rudolf Rocker’s championing of decadent literature. In both cases, the goal of anarchism is not a dictatorship of the former downtrodden, but a continuous and contradictory evolution of freedom in ever-changing contexts. (shrink)

. The accounting profession’s image and reputation is built upon the members of the profession acting with the “highest sense of integrity” in “the public interest” (AICPA, 2003, www.aicpa.org/about). The Enron debacle initiated the latest crisis facing the profession regarding its image and reputation. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) is the largest professional body representing the accounting profession and the one to which regulators have looked in establishing and upholding professional standards relating to the public practice of (...) accounting and auditing. One of the AICPA’s responsibilities is to “promote public awareness and confidence in the integrity, objectivity, competence and professionalism of CPAs ....” (AICPA, 2003, www.aicpa.org/about). We analyze the public statements issued by the AICPA (i.e., press releases, speeches of officers, testimony, published articles) during this ethical and identity crisis beginning with the AICPA’s first public statement on the Enron debâcle (AIPCA 2001) and concluding with the AICPA recognizing the need for a “new accounting culture” (Melancon 2002). In order to better understand the public discourse, we use image restoration theory (Benoit, 1995), because it provides a typology of strategies for dealing with the public face of crises. We identify the three most common strategies the AICPA employs during this period. Proposals for taking corrective action represent the most commonly employed strategy, but the analysis also indicates an attempt to evade responsibility by claiming defeasibility and to reduce the offensiveness of the situation by employing a bolstering strategy. A second analysis using DICTION, a software package useful in revealing latent dimensions in a text, indicates that early statements tend to use language related to accomplishing specific action while the later statements tend more toward general language that relates to peoples’ everyday lives. The findings raise questions as to substantive nature of the changes proposed by the AICPA, and thus, the extent to which the public interest is being served by them. (shrink)

Annual reports are an important element in the genre of corporate public discourse. The reporting practices mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for all publicly traded corporations are intended to render the annual reports a legitimate and trustworthy medium through which management communicates information related to the financial performance of the firm. The following discussion represents an inaugural attempt to investigate the ethical characteristics of the discourse found in corporate annual reports using Habermas' principles of communicative action. In preparing (...) the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) portion of the report, managers are charged with providing narrative information for investors and other interested third parties relevant to assessing the firm's financial condition. Previous rhetorical studies of the narrative portions of annual reports argue that they serve as means for both legitimate and distorted communication. We investigate this communication medium through the lens of Habermas' norms for communicative action, which require communicators to be comprehensible, truthful, sincere, and legitimate. The study represents an initial attempt to operationalization Habermas' principles of communicative action and to employ a methodology that facilitates their application to research within a business context. From one perspective, consistent with agency theory as specified by neoclassical economics, it would seem that firms anticipating worse-than-expected financial performance would be less likely to exhibit the Habermasian principles necessary for undistorted communication because they would attempt to strategically influence the message being communicated about the firm's financial position. Instead, employing rhetorical analysis software, Diction 5.0, we found that firms expecting both good and bad earnings surprises exhibited a higher level of communicative action than a composite average firm. Although preliminary in nature, our findings suggest that firms anticipating large earnings surprises, either high or low, use the narrative portion of the annual report as a vehicle through which to communicate information about managements' veracity and trustworthiness as well as the firm's financial position. (shrink)

This text provides a unique and compelling account of Wittgenstein's impact upon twentieth century analytic philosophy, from its inception at the turn of the ...