¿Do we need to reform the old t-scheme?

Este artículo comenta de manera crítica el análisis de Stephen Read del esquema T ofrecido en su artículo: “The  Liar and the new T-scheme”. Sostengo que Read malinterpreta los planteamientos de Tarski en algunos puntos  y que el esquema A que introduce Read en su artículo, es o bien reducible al viejo esquema T (tarskiano) o bien  plantea una serie de dudas esenciales.This paper critically comments Stephen Read’s analysis of the T-scheme offered in his paper: “The Liar and the  new T-scheme”. I argue that Read misinterprets Tarski in some points and that the A-scheme introduced in  Read’s paper is either reducible to the old (Tarskian) Tscheme or raises essential doubts. &nbsp

Mείναντα κενεόν: un locus criticus e una citazione omerica in una lettera di Demetrio Calcondila a Marco Musuro

The author demonstrates that a passage of a Greek letter written by Demetrius Chalcondylas to the famous scholar and editor Marcus Musurus, which was considered corrupted by the editor, is actually genuine, and it contains an allusion to Homer, Iliad, 2.298. Analysing the manuscript which preserves this letter (Par. gr. 2966), he restores the correct reading, and explains the meaning of the sentence in this context.

Foreknowledge, Free Will, and the Divine Power Distinction in Thomas Bradwardine\u27s De futuris contingentibus

Thomas Bradwardine (d. 1349) was an English philosopher, logician, and theologian of some note; but though recent scholarship has revived an interest in much of his work, little attention has been paid to an early treatise he wrote on the topic of future contingents, entitled De futuris contingentibus. In this thesis I aim to address this deficit, arguing in particular that the treatise makes original use of the divine power distinction to resolve the apparent conflict between God’s foreknowledge on the one hand, and human free will on the other. Bradwardine argues that God’s foreknowledge operates in accord with God’s ordained power, and so relative to God’s ordained power, our actions are indeed compelled; however, because of Bradwardine’s appeal to the distinction in power, he is able to maintain that our actions remain free relative to God’s absolute power, and are thus free, absolutely speaking. This solution is, I argue, unique to Bradwardine, although it seems to be abandoned in his later writing. Bradwardine’s approach to the problem is heavily influenced by three figures in particular — Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury, and John Duns Scotus — each of whose solutions I discuss in some detail. Furthermore, Bradwardine explicitly places his own solution in opposition to that of William Ockham, and so I give substantial attention to examining Ockham’s position. But while I agree with Bradwardine’s assessment that Ockham’s position undermines God’s foreknowledge in ways that should be untenable to someone of 14th-century Christian commitments, I argue that Bradwardine’s solution amounts to an equally untenable determinism. An appendix contains excerpts from my own English translation of the De futuris contingentibus (the first into any modern language), in parallel with the original Latin

Paradoxes of signification

Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine's "multiple-meanings'' account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. Bradwardine's solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of an utterance. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine's successors in the fourteenth century. It is shown that Bradwardine's account of signification turns not on a distinction between principal and consequential signification, but between partial and total signification, and that accordingly his solution, unlike those of his successors, does not fall prey to Rumfitt's paradoxes.PostprintPeer reviewe

Paradoxos Semânticos

The semantic paradoxes are a family of arguments – including the liar paradox, Curry’s paradox, Grelling’s paradox of heterologicality, Richard’s and Berry’s paradoxes of definability, and others – which have two things in common: first, they make an essential use of such semantic concepts as those of truth, satisfaction, reference, definition, etc.; second, they seem to be very good arguments until we see that their conclusions are contradictory or absurd. These arguments raise serious doubts concerning the coherence of the concepts involved. This article will offer an introduction to some of the main theories that have been proposed to solve the paradoxes and avert those doubts. Included is also a brief history of the semantic paradoxes from Eubulides to Tarski and Curry

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