Abraham Lincoln and the Doctrine of Necessity

Abraham Lincoln was a fatalist. That, at least, was what he told many people over the course of his life. I have all my life been a fatalist, Lincoln informed his Illinois congressional ally, Isaac Arnold. Mr. Lincoln was a fatalist, remembered Henry Clay Whitney, one of his Springfield law clerks, he believed ... that the universe is governed by one uniform, unbroken, primordial law. His Springfield law partner William Henry Herndon, likewise, affirmed that Lincoln believed in predestination, foreordination, that all things were fixed, doomed one way or the other, from which there was no appeal. Even Mary Todd Lincoln acknowledged that her husband had been guided by the conviction that what is to be will be, and no cares of ours can arrest nor reverse the decree. What this meant in practical terms, as Herndon discovered, was that Lincoln believed that there was no freedom of the will, that men had no free choice : Things were to be, and they came, irresistibly came, doomed to come; men were made as they are made by superior conditions over which they had no control; the fates settled things as by the doom of the powers, and laws, universal, absolute, and eternal, ruled the universe of matter and mind.... [Man] is simply a simple tool, a mere cog in the wheel, a part, a small part, of this vast iron machine, that strikes and cuts, grinds and mashes, all things, including man, that resist it. [excerpt

Utility and beyond : a critical examination of certain established reasons given for learning mathematics

In the Introduction I explore the reasons for my enquiry, and outline the inadequacies of\ud some of the existing attempts to determine the aims and purposes of mathematics in\ud education. In Part 1 I discuss the scope and validity of the justification of mathematics\ud on the basis of its supposed usefulness. From there I defend the view that, in principle at\ud least, there are different kinds of reasons for learning mathematics.\ud In Parts 2 and 3 I attempt to explain whether or not mathematics is fit for two particular\ud non-utility purposes claimed by various writers, and if so, how. Thus, in Part 2, I\ud examine the rather strong claim that mathematics is afine art, and hence or otherwise\ud that it is a source of aesthetic satisfaction. In Part 3, I explore the claim that\ud mathematics provides mental training. Here I shall show that 'mental training', is a\ud broad notion ranging from the rather moral character training to the more restricted\ud notion of training in logic. Between these extremes lies a more modest notion which I\ud argue is the most plausible.\ud The thesis is thus both a history of ideas and a clarification of the concepts used in\ud describing fairly established purposes and rejecting those that seem to me to be\ud unattainable or at least scarcely attainable by studying mathematics. The reason for the\ud study is twofold. I see it as a particular case of the general enquiry into the aims of\ud education. So that my conclusions should inform those who want to justify the place of\ud mathematics on the curriculum. Also, however, I want to suggest that the purposes of\ud mathematics education are internally related to understanding the subject, so that the\ud pupil will gain understanding from a clearer notion of what he or she is doing\ud mathematics for

Intuitionism and logical revision.

The topic of this thesis is logical revision: should we revise the canons of classical reasoning in favour of a weaker logic, such as intuitionistic logic? In the first part of the thesis, I consider two metaphysical arguments against the classical Law of Excluded Middle-arguments whose main premise is the metaphysical claim that truth is knowable. I argue that the first argument, the Basic Revisionary Argument, validates a parallel argument for a conclusion that is unwelcome to classicists and intuitionists alike: that the dual of the Law of Excluded Middle, the Law of Non-Contradiction, is either unknown, or both known and not known to be true. As for the second argument, the Paradox of Knowability, I offer new reasons for thinking that adopting intuitionistic logic does not go to the heart of the matter. In the second part of the thesis, I motivate an inferentialist framework for assessing competing logics-one on which the meaning of the logical vocabulary is determined by the rules for its correct use. I defend the inferentialist account of understanding from the contention that it is inadequate in principle, and I offer reasons for thinking that the inferentialist approach to logic can help model theorists and proof-theorists alike justify their logical choices. I then scrutinize the main meaning-theoretic principles on which the inferentialist approach to logic rests: the requirements of harmony and separability. I show that these principles are motivated by the assumption that inference rules are complete, and that the kind of completeness that is necessary for imposing separability is strictly stronger than the completeness needed for requiring harmony. This allows me to reconcile the inferentialist assumption that inference rules are complete with the inherent incompleteness of higher-order logics-an apparent tension that has sometimes been thought to undermine the entire inferentialist project. I finally turn to the question whether the inferentialist framework is inhospitable in principle to classical logical principles. I compare three different regimentations of classical logic: two old, the multiple-conclusions and the bilateralist ones, and one new. Each of them satisfies the requirements of harmony and separability, but each of them also invokes structural principles that are not accepted by the intuitionist logician. I offer reasons for dismissing multiple-conclusions and bilateralist formalizations of logic, and I argue that we can nevertheless be in harmony with classical logic, if we are prepared to adopt classical rules for disjunction, and if we are willing to treat absurdity as a logical punctuation sign

BEHAVIORISM AND LOGICAL POSITIVISM: A REVISED ACCOUNT OF THE ALLIANCE (VOLUMES I AND II)

The primary aim of this work is to show that the widespread belief that the major behaviorists drew importantly upon logical positivist philosophy of science in formulating their approach to psychology is ill-founded. Detailed historical analysis of the work of the neobehaviorists Edward C. Tolman, Clark L. Hull, and B. F. Skinner leads to the following conclusions: (1) each did have significant contact with proponents of logical positivism; but (2) their sympathies with logical positivism were quite limited and were restricted to those aspects of logical positivism which they had already arrived at independently; (3) the methods which they are alleged to have imported from logical positivism were actually derived from their own indigenous conceptions of knowledge; and (4) each major neobehaviorist developed and embraced a behavioral epistemology which, far from resting on logical positivist assumptions, actually conflicted squarely with the anti-psychologism that was a cornerstone of logical positivism. It is suggested that the myth of an alliance between behaviorism and logical positivism arose from the incautious interpretations of philosophical reconstructions as historical conclusions. This and other historiographical issues are discussed in the concluding chapter, where it is argued that the anti-psychologism of the logical positivists is an unnecessary impediment to a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of knowledge

Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania and the Neurological Condition of Modernité

In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how aesthetic representations of the dancing girl were indulging the decadent and neurologically degenerate nature of modernist culture. Within the context of New York, Salome quickly became a vehicle by which U.S. culture could negotiate its own relationship to the modern experience. In the three years following the Met’s closure of its production of Strauss’s opera, the figure of Salome would appear on variety stages around the city in increasing numbers. These performances, using many of the European representations of the dancing girl as their model, embodied, I argue, a significant number of the neuropathological traits that were proving so threatening to western culture. This dissertation examines this explosion of Salome performances in New York from 1907 to 1909. It looks to how in their performative celebration of the archetype of the dancing girl they engaged new medical models of neurological impairment circulating at the time. The chapters in this dissertation illuminate what I see as the process by which the archetype of Salome became increasingly neuropathologized. In chapter one, I position the dancing girl inside a modernist landscape where neurological concepts were freely circulating. I do so by examining how changes to individual experiences with the physical and social environments of modern life coincided with the rise of neurology as a medical sub-discipline. In chapter two, I provide a preliminary discussion of the Salome phenomenon in New York, what has come to be known as the city’s period of Salomania. This is followed by an explication of how the modernist archetype that became so popular in the city gained its neuropathological character. To do so, I look to the archetype’s fin de siècle past in Europe. The final chapter examines more closely the dynamics of New York’s Salomania. It considers how the popular performances embodied the neurological nature of modernist culture through their representation of neuropathological conditions. The chapter concludes with two case studies. I first examine the performance style of Gertrude Hoffmann, a successful vaudeville performer who was one of the first to present a Salome act at a major variety venue. I study her work for how it embodies traits associated with the neurological condition of generalized hysteria. Next I examine the contortionist/dancer La Sylphe for how her iteration of Salome corresponded with behaviors and gestures associated with the neurological condition of epilepsy

A Relativistic Theory of Phenomenological Constitution: A Self-Referential, Transcendental Approach to Conceptual Pathology

The principal objective of the work is to construct an analytically precise methodology which can serve to identify, eliminate, and avoid a certain widespread conceptual fault or misconstruction, called a "projective misconstruction" or "projection" by the author. It is argued that this variety of error in our thinking (i) infects a great number of our everyday, scientific, and philosophical concepts, claims, and theories, (ii) has largely been undetected, and (iii) when remedied, leads to a less controversial and more rigorous elucidation of the transcendental preconditions of human knowledge than has traditionally been possible. The dissertation identifies, perhaps for the first time, a projective variety of self-referential inconsistency, and proposes an innovative, self-reflexive approach to transcendental argument in a logical and phenomenological context. The strength of the approach lies, it is claimed, in the fact that a rejection of the approach is possible only on pain of self-referential inconsistency. The argument is developed in the following stages: A general introduction identifies the central theme of the work, defines the scope of applicability of the results reached, and sketches the direction of the studies which follow. The preliminary discussion culminates in a recognition of the need for a critique of impure reason