8,230 research outputs found
LOGICAL ANALYSIS AND LATER MOHIST LOGIC: SOME COMPARATIVE REFLECTIONS [abstract]
Any philosophical method that treats the analysis of the meaning of a sentence or expression in terms of a decomposition into a set of conceptually basic constituent parts must do some theoretical work to explain the puzzles of intensionality. This is because intensional phenomena appear to violate the principle of compositionality, and the assumption of compositionality is the principal justification for thinking that an analysis will reveal the real semantical import of a sentence or expression through a method of decomposition. Accordingly, a natural strategy for dealing with intensionality is to argue that it is really just an isolable, aberrant class of linguistic phenomena that poses no general threat to the thesis that meaning is basically compositional. On the other hand, the later Mohists give us good reason to reject this view. What we learn from them is that there may be basic limitations in any analytical technique that presupposes that meaning is perspicuously represented only when it has been fully decomposed into its constituent parts. The purpose of this paper is to (a) explain why the Mohists found the issue of intensionality to be so important in their investigations of language, and (b) defend the view that Mohist insights reveal basic limitations in any technique of analysis that is uncritically applied with a decompositional approach in mind, as are those that are often pursued in the West in the context of more general epistemological and metaphysical programs
Are there Many Philosophies or is there Just âDoing Philosophyâ?
The term âphilosophyâ may be used in more than one sense to refer to both the subjective human activity of âdoing philosophyâ and its result, namely the production of systems of thought â philosophical theories â which history demonstrates as many and various. It will be argued that there is only one way of doing philosophy and that this is proceeding from the common principles of the human mind in the search for truth of what is real. The mark of true philosophy is unity. A unity of true philosophy may be sought from what seems disparate: Aquinas embodies this effort towards synthesis, convinced that reality is unified and ordered. âJust doing philosophyâ is what Thomism embodies
The art of being human : a project for general philosophy of science
Throughout the medieval and modern periods, in various sacred and secular guises, the unification of all forms of knowledge under the rubric of âscienceâ has been taken as the prerogative of humanity as a species. However, as our sense of species privilege has been called increasingly into question, so too has the very salience of âhumanityâ and âscienceâ as general categories, let alone ones that might bear some essential relationship to each other. After showing how the ascendant Stanford School in the philosophy of science has contributed to this joint demystification of âhumanityâ and âscienceâ, I proceed on a more positive note to a conceptual framework for making sense of science as the art of being human. My understanding of âscienceâ is indebted to the red thread that runs from Christian theology through the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment to the Humboldtian revival of the university as the site for the synthesis of knowledge as the culmination of self-development. Especially salient to this idea is scienceâs epistemic capacity to manage modality (i.e. to determine the conditions under which possibilities can be actualised) and its political capacity to organize humanity into projects of universal concern. However, the challenge facing such an ideal in the twentyfirst century is that the predicate âhumanâ may be projected in three quite distinct ways, governed by what I call âecologicalâ, âbiomedicalâ and âcyberneticâ interests. Which one of these future humanities would claim todayâs humans as proper ancestors and could these futures co-habit the same world thus become two important questions that general philosophy of science will need to address in the coming years
Menorah Review (No. 72, Winter/Spring, 2010)
A Philosopher Rediscovers His Jewish Roots -- An Extraordinary Rabbinic Life -- An Interpretation of Isiah 6.8-10 -- Books in Brief: New and Notable -- Moreshet: From the Classics -- The Noah Affair -- Who Owns and Who is Responsible for a Soul
Reasoning with Partial Knowledge
We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from the classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify meta-principles that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments and paves the way towards a complete classical theory
Dynamic Humeanism
Humean accounts of laws of nature fail to distinguish between dynamic laws and static initial conditions. But this distinction plays a central role in scientific theorizing and explanation. I motivate the claim that this distinction should matter for the Humean, and show that current views lack the resources to explain it. I then develop a regularity theory which captures this distinction. My view takes empirical accessibility to be one of the primary features of laws, and I identify features laws must have to be empirically accessible. I then argue that laws with these features tend to be dynamic
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