v. 1. A noetic prelude to a united world.--v. 2. An ethical prelude to a united world.

The purpose of this article is to bring to the fore the theme of sartre's "critique of dialectical reason", at present available in a very good english translation. according to sartre, marxism in its materialist and positivist interpretation, as understood by moscow, needs the correction as proposed by existentialism. what matters for sartre is to show that at the center of all sociological structures, stands the "totalizing" power of the free individual self. all in all a very impressive and profoundly (...) original book, sartre's best philosophical work. (shrink)

I will explore the paradoxical nature of epistemic access. By critiquing the traditional conception of mental states that are labelled as ’knowledge’, I demonstrate the susceptibility of these states to an infinite regress, thus, challenging their existence and validity. I scrutinise the assumption that an epistemic agent can have complete epistemic access to all facts about a given object while simultaneously being ignorant of certain truths that impact the very knowledge claims about the object. I further analyse the implications of (...) this paradox when attempting to fine-grain the parameters of epistemic access, which happens to reveal the vacuity of such definitions and the inevitability of the regress. (shrink)

1. The lever in question is, of course, that with which, provided that an appropriate fulcrum could be found, Archimedes could move the world. In the analogy I have in mind, the fulcrum is the given, by virtue of which the mind gets leverage on the world of knowledge.

We introduce a new theorem in social choice theory built on a path integral approach which will show that, under some reasonable conditions, there is a unique way to aggregate individual preferences based on fuzzy sets into a social preference based on probabilities, and that this way is invariant under any permutation of alternatives. We then apply this theorem to the case of democratic decision making with data of the behaviour and voting preferences of voting agents and show that there (...) is a tradeoff between fairness and efficiency and that no voting system can achieve both simultaneously. (shrink)

I defend J. L. Austin's direct realism against the colour delusion argument by employing epistemic logic to demonstrate that perceiving colours does not necessitate an intermediary such as sense-data, thus preserving the directness of perception.

A collection of some of Sellars' lectures and articles from 1951 to 1962.