Socially responsible investors buy financial securities with two goals: to make a market-based return, and to make companies act in a more socially responsible way. Most research on socially responsible investment deals with investing in stocks traded on major exchanges. We add the case of loaning small amounts of funds to microentrepreneurs through a discussion of a particular case. The case is that of Calmeadow which, in conjunction with the Royal Bank of Canada, set up a microlending project in rural (...) Nova Scotia (Canada). Using Hirschman’s analysis of “exit” and “voice”, we show that while socially responsible investors may make market-based returns for their investments in stocks traded on major exchanges, they have no effect on corporate behaviour because their action consists of exit, and they are easily replaced by other investors. They attain their first goal but not their second. On the other hand, in the Calmeadow/Royal Bank of Canada case, we see that those who lend money to microenterprises can more easily use voice. The relative power difference between the lender and the microentrepreneur enables the lender to make the microentrepreneur act in a more socially responsible way, although only marginally. But because of the market imperfections existing in this case (the very high transactions costs associated with administering small loans), the lender concluded it could not attain a market rate of return. In this case, then, the lender attained its second goal but not its first. (shrink)

This paper argues for two theses: that degrees of belief are context sensitive; that outright belief is belief to degree 1. The latter thesis is rejected quickly in most discussions of the relationship between credence and belief, but the former thesis undermines the usual reasons for doing so. Furthermore, identifying belief with credence 1 allows nice solutions to a number of problems for the most widely-held view of the relationship between credence and belief, the threshold view. I provide a sketch (...) of a formal framework on which both theses are true. This is a modified Bayesian framework; I argue that despite making credences context-sensitive, the framework lets Bayesians hold on to their signature explanatory successes. The sort of context-sensitivity claimed for credences here mirrors the sort of context-sensitivity I have elsewhere claimed for outright belief: one's credences depend, in part, on the space of alternative possibilities one takes seriously in a context. (shrink)

What is music, what is its value, and what does it mean? In this stimulating volume, Roger Scruton offers a comprehensive account of the nature and significance of music from the perspective of modern philosophy. The study begins with the metaphysics of sound. Scruton distinguishes sound from tone; analyzes rhythm, melody, and harmony; and explores the various dimensions of musical organization and musical meaning. Taking on various fashionable theories in the philosophy and theory of music, he presents a compelling (...) case for the moral significance of music, its place in our culture, and the need for taste and discrimination in performing and listening to it. Laying down principles for musical analysis and criticism, this bold work concludes with a theory of culture--and a devastating demolition of modern popular music. "A provocative new study."--The Guardian. (shrink)

Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

It seems odd to say that photography is not a mode of representation. For a photograph has in common with a painting the property by which the painting represents the world, the property of sharing, in some sense, the appearance of its subject. Indeed, it is sometimes thought that since a photograph more effectively shares the appearance of its subject than a typical painting, photography is a better mode of representation. Photography might even be thought of as having replaced painting (...) as a mode of visual representation. Painters have felt that if the aim of painting is really to reproduce the appearances of things, then painting must give way to whatever means are available to reproduce an appearance more accurately. It has therefore been said that painting aims to record the appearances of things only so as to capture the experience of observing them and that the accurate copying of appearances will normally be at variance with this aim. Here we have the seeds of expressionism and the origin of the view that painting is somehow purer when it is abstract and closer to its essence as an art. Roger Scruton is the author of Art and Imagination, The Aesthetics of Architecture, The Meaning of Conservatism, From Descartes to Wittgenstein, and The Politics of Culture and Other Essays. (shrink)

This paper argues for a treatment of belief as essentially sensitive to certain features of context. The first part gives an argument that we must take belief to be context-sensitive in the same way that assertion is, if we are to preserve appealing principles tying belief to sincere assertion. In particular, whether an agent counts as believing that p in a context depends on the space of alternative possibilities the agent is considering in that context. One and the same doxastic (...) state may amount to belief that p in one context but not another. The second part of the paper gives a formal treatment of doxastic states, according to which belief is context-sensitive along just these lines. The model is applied to characterize (but not to refute) skeptical arguments. (shrink)

In an influential recent paper, Hawthorne, Rothschild, and Spectre (“HRS”) argue that belief is weak. More precisely: they argue that the referent of believe in ordinary language is much weaker than epistemologists usually suppose; that one needs very little evidence to be entitled to believe a proposition in this sense; and that the referent of believe in ordinary language just is the ordinary concept of belief. I argue here to the contrary. HRS identify two alleged tests of weakness – the (...) neg-raising and weak upper bounds tests, as I call them – which they claim believe and think pass. But I identify several other expressions in ordinary English for attributing belief, all of which fail both tests. Therefore, even if HRS are correct that believe and think refer to a weak attitude, it does not follow that the ordinary concept of belief is weak. I conclude by raising some problems for the accounts of belief as guessing, building on HRS's arguments, due to Kevin Dorst, Matt Mandelkern, and Ben Holguín. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

Uses a comparative hermeneutical method to explain the most important terms in the classical Confucian philosophical texts, in an effort to allow the tradition to speak on its own terms.

This is the first comprehensive biography of John Locke to be published in nearly a half century. Setting Locke's life within exciting historical and intellectual contexts, which included the English Civil War, religious persecution, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Roger Woolhouse interweaves an account of Locke's life with a summary and development of his ideas in theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, medicine, economics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. Systematic and encyclopedic in its coverage, Woolhouse's biography offers (...) both an account and explanation of Locke's ideas, while treating seriously his emotional relationship with Elinor Parry. Based on broad research and many years of study of Locke's philosophy, this volume is an authoritative biography on one of the most significant early modern philosophers. (shrink)

Based on ten years of research, The Touch of the Past considers how historically traumatic events uniquely summon forgetting and remembrance. Within a specific focus on events of systemic mass violence, Roger Simon examines how testimonies of historic events influence learning as communities struggle with "difficult histories." The Touch of the Past is a serious and compelling contribution to research in education, historical consciousness, and memory/trauma studies.

Philosopher Roger Scruton offers a wide-ranging perspective on philosophy, from logic to aesthetics, written in a lively and engaging way that is sure to stimulate debate. Rather than producing a survey of an academic discipline, Scruton reclaims philosophy for worldly concerns.

Henry Rosemont, Jr., in his Against Individualism has mounted a compelling argument that foundational individualism in its various iterations has become a malevolent ideology implicated in and aggravating many of the pressing problems of our time. The overall thrust of his thesis can be stated rather simply. The industrial democracies and most of the rest of the world are dominated by a corporate capitalism the interests of which are served largely by a procedural justice grounded in a foundational individualism that (...) compounds the benefits of a few and marginalizes the possibility of realizing a distributive justice for the many. Hence, the more that academic and political forces are successful in defending... (shrink)

Discover for yourself the pleasures of philosophy! Written both for the seasoned student of philosophy as well as the general reader, the renowned writer Roger Scruton provides a survey of modern philosophy. Always engaging, Scruton takes us on a fascinating tour of the subject, from founding father Descartes to the most important and famous philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He identifies all the principal figures as well as outlines of the main intellectual preoccupations that have informed western (...) philosophy. Painting a portrait of modern philosophy that is vivid and animated, Scruton introduces us to some of the greatest philosophical problems invented in this period and pursued ever since. Including material on recent debates, _A Short History of Modern Philosophy_ is already established as _the_ classic introduction. Read it and find out why. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:First Order Relationality and Its Implications:A Response to David ElsteinRoger T. Ames (bio)David Elstein has asked a series of important questions about Human Becomings that provide me with an opportunity to try to bring the argument of the book into clearer focus. Let me begin by thanking David for his always generous and intelligent reflection on not only my new monograph [End Page 181] but also on Henry Rosemont's (...) and my best efforts to expand upon the idea of "role ethics" as a productive way to read Confucian ethics.David asks: Is relationality truly a part of original Confucian thought? Does relationality rule out any notion of essential human nature, and does it necessarily imply or entail role ethics? Is relationality true or merely a useful way of thinking (if these can be distinguished)? Do we know that it's useful?I think the answer to these questions turns on two very different ways of understanding relationality, namely the doctrines of first and second order relationality. The term 'ontology' as "the science of being per se or in itself" gives us a doctrine of external, second order relations. Ontology was introduced into our philosophical vocabulary as a new term for an old way of thinking at the beginning of the seventeenth century by two German philosophers.1 For the classical Greeks, "the science of being per se" (to on he on) was posited as their "first philosophy" with all of its implications for metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, philosophy of religion, and so on. Ontology is that branch of metaphysics that seeks to classify and explain the things that exist, with its underlying assumption that there are unchanging substances or essences internal to things that are available to us to classify them as this and not that. Ontology privileges "being per se" with its categorical language and its "substance" and "attribute" dualism, giving us a grammar of substances as property-bearers and properties that are borne, respectively.Such ontological thinking animates Plato's pursuit of formal, "real" definitions in his quest for certainty (that is, definitions not of words but of what really is), and underlies Aristotle's taxonomical science of knowing "what is what." For these classical Greek philosophers, only what is real and is thus true can be the proper object of knowledge, giving us a logic of the changeless. Corollary to ontology is causal thinking, formal definitions, and, important for David's question, a doctrine of external, second order relationality in which relations conjoin discrete and self-sufficient things, such as human "beings." As the contemporary philosopher Zhao Tingyang 趙汀陽 avers, this kind of substance ontology defining the real things that constitute the content of an orderly and structured cosmosprovides a "dictionary" kind of explanation of the world, seeking to set up an accurate understanding of the limits of all things. In simple terms, it determines "what is what," and all concepts are footnotes to "being" or "is."2In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary making explicit cosmological assumptions that stand in stark contrast to this substance ontology and that brings with it a doctrine of first order, constitutive relations. This alternative "first philosophy" has prompted me to create the neologism "zoetology," with the Greek zoe- "life" and -logia "discourse," as my own new term for an old way of thinking that we might translate into modern Chinese as shengshenglun 生生論: "the art of living." The starting point in this zoetological cosmology, then, is that nothing does anything by [End Page 182] itself; association is a fact. Since the very nature of life is associative and transactional, the vocabulary appealed to in defining Confucian cosmology is irreducibly dyadic and collateral: always multiple, never one.And further, it is the nature of life itself that it seeks to optimize the available conditions for its continuing growth, where such growth has a persistent existential and thus intentional aspect. "Life" is the productive correlation between organism and environment that gives rise to correlative, relational, ecological thinking that many of our best sinologists (Marcel Granet, David Keightley, Tang Junyi, K. C. Chang, A. C. Graham, and many others) would ascribe to the earliest semblances of Chinese... (shrink)

‘To translate’ means quite literally ‘to carry across, to bring across,’ that is, ‘to remove from one place to another.’ The questions I want to address in this essay are: To what extent have we been successful in, first, understanding the Chinese philosophical narrative and, then, in ‘carrying it across’ into the western academy? To what extent have we been able to grow and ‘appreciate’ our own philosophical parameters by engaging with this antique tradition? The self-conscious strategy of translation, then, (...) must be to go beyond word-for-word translation and attempt to enable students of Chinese philosophy to read the seminal texts by providing them with a means of developing their own sophisticated understanding of a set of critical Chinese philosophical terms. The premise is that there is no real alternative but to cultivate a nuanced familiarity with the key Chinese vocabulary itself. It is in this effort to take Chinese philosophy on its own terms, then, that we must begin from the interpretive context by taking into account the tradition’s own indigenous presuppositions and its own evolving self-understanding. We must be aware of the ambient, persistent assumptions that have given the Chinese philosophical narrative its unique identity over time. (shrink)

The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh which had flourished for a few years after 1738 was as good as dead in 1748. Lord Morton, its President, now lived most of the time in London whence he wrote to Sir John Clerk in 1747 that he regarded the Society as ‘annihilated’, apparently thinking that the death of Colin MacLaurin in 1746 and the temporary retirement to the countryside of its other Secretary, Andrew Plummer, had put an end to it. Sir John had (...) hoped to revive it through association with the Royal Society of London, but Morton did not encourage him in this scheme, about which he had ‘great doubts’. The Society needed a mathematician and an experimenter who could carry on the consulting work which MacLaurin had done, but Morton glumly wondered if ‘the new professor of Mathematics [Matthew Stewart] will be as zealous as MacLaurin had been.’ The Society's other officers, Dr John Clerk and Alexander Lind, are not known to have tried to revive the Society. Perhaps they were discouraged by the fact that ten of the members of the Society were dead, and that six more had left the kingdom. At least three others were likely to have been habitually absent from meetings because they lived some distance from Edinburgh. Of the remaining forty-five known members in 1748, nine were over sixty-one years of age with four being between seventy-one and seventy-six. In 1737 the average age of thirty-eight of the founders had been 46.0, but by 1748 it had risen to 53.9 for the thirty-three men for whom it can be calculated. Disruption, death, and age had diminished enthusiasm for the Society and jeopardized its survival. Only two meetings are known to have been held in 1746. Sir John's letter to Morton about affiliation with the Royal Society is the only clear sign of life in 1747. We may well ask why this floundering body survived, to whom and to what it owed its revival? The answers to these questions tell us something about the intellectual needs and interests of the Edinburgh intelligentsia of the mid-eighteenth century. (shrink)

Roger A. Shiner; VII*—Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 103–124, ht.

In this lucid and engaging introductory volume on the nature of society, Roger Trigg examines the scientific basis of social science and shows that philosophical presuppositions are a necessary starting point for the study of society.

The story of the end of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh in 1783, is linked with that of the founding of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh , both of which were given Royal Charters sealed on 6 May 1783. It is a story which has been admirably told by Steven Shapin. He persuasively argued that the P.S.E. was a casualty of bitter quarrels rooted in local Edinburgh politics, in personal animosities and in disputes (...) about the control of cultural property and intellectual leadership. In all this he was surely correct just as he was in finding the principal actors in this controversy to be: David Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan; the Reverend Dr John Walker, Professor of Natural History in Edinburgh University; Dr William Cullen, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice-President of the P.S.E.; Mr William Smellie, Printer to the Society of Antiquaries; Henry Home, Lord Kames, S.C.J. and President of the P.S.E.; Sir George Clerk-Maxwell, Vice-President of the P.S.E.; John Robison, Professor of Natural Philosophy and Secretary to the P.S.E.; Edinburgh University's Principal, William Robertson; the Curators of the Advocates Library: Ilay Campbell, Robert Blair, Alexander Abercromby, Alexander Fraser Tytler, Professor of Public Law; Henry Dundas, Lord Advocate and M.P. for Midlothian. In a peripheral way, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons were probably also involved; so too were Lord Buchan's brothers, Henry and Thomas Erskine, Foxite Whigs who opposed Dundas politically. Henry Erskine displaced Dundas as Lord Advocate in August 1783. After the change of ministry on 18 December 1783 he was ousted, but became Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1785. National as well as burgh politics touched these disputes and gave the parties of the Erskines and Dundas and his friends some leverage in London. (shrink)

Critical analysis of development of concept of jus ante bellum.

The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh Throughout the years 1768–1783 looked to the outside world like a flourishing and important body. By 1771 it had sponsored the publication of five volumes of papers which had gone through several printings and translations. It had a distinguished foreign membership which assured its recognition abroad as one of the important academic bodies in the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. From its foundation in 1737 until his death in 1768, its President had been the Earl of (...) Morton, better known as the President of the Royal Society of London and as an astronomer who had been active in the practical work of the London society. Another member, Sir John Pringle, became President of the Royal Society in 1772. It was also known abroad that among the Edinburgh philosophers were to be found the most important professors of the town's university, not only those of its distinguished medical faculty but also men like William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and later John Robison. David Hume had been at one time a Secretary of the Society and probably remained a member to the end of his life in 1776. In the British colonies, the Society could point to members in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Jamaica and other West Indian islands and it had contacts in a far-flung network reaching from China and Siberia in the east to places less remote in Europe and America. Within Britain, the Society had members in London and in provincial towns of whom William Brownrigg was the most important. From these men and from others scattered in Scotland, the Society drew information and projected its image as a successful learned society. These appearances, however, are far clearer than the Society's record of accomplishment during its last years. It is not accidental that so little pertaining to its work survives. The Society in reality had a career far from brilliant and by 1778 hardly deserved the reputation it had acquired. During its last five years it revived but even then it probably did not reach the level of activity seen in the early and mid 1750s. (shrink)

People espousing human moral equality encompassing every conspecific have been unumbrageous being labeled ‘speciesists’ and likened to Nazis and Klansmen, despite the insult’s being indefensible, and, if meant seriously, enraging. Perhaps their equanimity is unruffled because anti-speciesist acquaintances are remarkably chummier with them than with real racists. -/- Anti-speciesists confuse two questions: (1) Is the bare fact of an individual’s being a human in itself a reason for us humans to deal with it as we'd like to be dealt with? (...) (2) Have we enough reason, apart from human well-being, to impose on each other protections of other animals? Speciesism, perspicuously specified, says ‘yes’ to (1) and nothing about (2). World-wide, human fantasy is filled with nonhuman persons, alien morally accountable agents, thought worthy of being treated as we would wish to be treated, or better. The idea of human equality is consistent with both rapaciously using animals and radical animal protectionism. We meat-eaters discount animal interests, not because they’re nonhuman, but because we know no compelling reason to count them more. -/- Anti-speciesist literature is surveyed and seen to specify ‘speciesism’ capriciously. Terminology aside, anti-speciesist criticisms are specious. Anti-speciesists hope to shift the justificatory burden by denying species membership any moral relevance, but that denial cannot motivate their protectionism. Their ad hominem dismissal of speciesism as a self-serving prejudice is unsustainable. Their avowed inability to imagine any justification of speciesism is hardly probative. Their alleged refutations are baldly question-begging assertions of theses of hallowed ethical theories speciesism denies. They derive anti-speciesism from “anti-biologism” (a radical denial of any biological relation’s having any intrinsic moral relevance), which is fallaciously extrapolated from anti-racist and anti-sexist ideas. Appeals to taxonomical controversies glibly and disingenuously assume the relevance of those controversies, which anti-biologism denies. (shrink)

Early in the 1240s the University of Paris hired a recent graduate from Oxford, Roger Bacon by name, to teach the arts and introduce Aristotle to its curriculum. Along with eight sets of questions on Aristotle's natural works and the Metaphysics he claims to have authored another eight books before he returned to Oxford around 1247. Within the prodigious output of this period we find a treatise on logic titled Summulae dialectices, and it is this that is here annotated (...) and presented in translation. The book is unique in several respects. First, there is the breadth of its sources. Not only do we find explicit reference to the usual authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Boethius, Porphyry, Cicero, and Priscian, we also find unexpected reference to Augustine, Bernardus Silvestris, Donatus, Terence, and Themistius, along with mention of the Muslim philosophers Algazel and Ibn Rushd. Second, it is clear that Bacon is drawing on or reacting to an extraordinarily wide variety of medieval sources: Garland the Computist, Hugh of St. Victor, Master Hugo, Hugutius of Pisa, Isidore of Seville, Nicholas of Damas, Nicholas of Paris, Richard of Cornwall, Robert Kilwardby, Robert of Lincoln, and Robert the Englishman. Third, it unexpectedly presents a full-blown treatment of Aristotle's theory of demonstration. And finally, Bacon reveals a highly unorthodox view of the signification of common terms. Bacon, here, takes his students and us deeper into medieval sources and controversy than any of his rivals do. (shrink)

Post-Fregean theorists use 'quotation' to denote indifferently both colloquially called quotations (repetitions of prior utterances) and what I call 'displays': 'Rot' means red. Colloquially, quotation is a strictly historical property, not semantic or syntactic. Displays are semantically and syntactically distinctive sentential elements. Most displays are not quotations. Pure echo quotations (Cosmological arguments involve "an unnecessary shuffle") aren't displays. Frege-inspired formal languages stipulate that enquotation forms a singular term referring to the enquoted expression (type). Formalist enquotations differ semantically and syntactically from (...) natural language displays. Call them autonomes, and mark them with stars: *Rot* means red. In formal languages, an unenstarred expression has only one meaning, and an autonome has only one meaning viz., a name (or indexical) designating the unenstarred expression (type). Stars have semantic content and can’t disambiguate. Display punctuation only disambiguates; it says only: This material is displayed. Displays have a semantic function; their marks don't.nDisplays are not terms or lexical items. Displays are objects incorporable into utterances. Such incorporation enables them to be linguistically appropriated much as we appropriate speech-external objects by extrasentential supplementation (e.g., gesturing) to identify the extension of a term by ostending the object -- but now without any extrasentential supplement. Displays are always adjunctive to an (implicit or explicit) ostensionable term, a term whose extension is identifiable by ostending an object. The display-ostensionable term extension relations are various. A display may (1) be the term's referent, or (2) represent the term's extension by (a) replicating or (b) instantiating or (c) expressing the term's referent, or (e) instantiating the property the term predicates. (shrink)

The classical Greeks give us a substance ontology grounded in ‘being qua being’ or ‘being per se’ (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. With the combination of eidos and telos as the formal and final cause of independent things such as persons, this ‘substance’ necessarily persists through change. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being, and is defining of the ‘what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind’ of any particular thing in setting (...) a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for it to be this, and not that.In the Yijing 易經 or Book of Changes we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology, and provides the interpretive context for the Confucian canons by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or ‘being’ we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or ‘life’ and create the neologism ‘zoe-tology’ as ‘the art of living’. This cosmology begins from ‘living’ (sheng 生) itself as the motive force behind change, and gives us a world of boundless ‘becomings’: not ‘things’ that are, but ‘events’ that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of the human ‘being’ and a process conception of what I will call human ‘becomings’. (shrink)

critical analysis of logical form of predications of truth vs predications of fact.

Talking about objects requires talking with objects, presenting objects in speech to identify a term's referent. I say This figure is a circle while handing you a ring. The ring is a prop, a perceptual object referenced by an extra-sentential event to identify the extension of a term, its director ('This figure'). Props operate in speech acts and their products, not in sentences. Intra-sentential objects we talk with are displays. Displayed objects needn't be words but must be like words, perceptually, (...) reproductively, and syntactically. Displays are presented by their syntactical position, as terms, with a term-like function. Semantically they are props. The O in FOD (This figure O is a circle) is a prop-like referent, not a term. The O in OD (O is a circle) may be that of FOD, but that display may have semantically and syntactically diverse directors, and without a specific one OD has no determinate sense Describing the display of quotations demands distinguishing displays from quotations. Quotations are repetitions of something said. Displays are perceptual objects, linguistic and non-linguistic, reproductions and originals, presented in sentences to identify a referent. Display markers are disambiguators that say: Read this as a prop. They may mark direct speech from indirect speech. Markers of quotation say: Someone said this. That historical claim is outside a sentence's propositional content. Those marks don't say: This is a display. They do make it true. Calling displays quotations muddies the study of speaking with speech. Calling both displays and intranyms quotations muddies the study of meaning and truth. Intranyms are terms, consisting of an expression flanked by lines, that denote that interior expression. Intranyms are created by stipulation to formalize a metalanguage. Formalization of a metalanguage replaces displays with intranyms. Formalized metalanguages lack the logical form and subject matter of our natural metalanguage. (shrink)