Le haïku est une poésie japonaise de seulement 17 syllabes. Le Japon compterait 10 millions de haïkistes principalement non professionnels. Chacun compose des haïkus et les montre à des confrères en recherchant une reconnaissance. Mais est-il judicieux de qualifier le haïku d’activité d’amateurs?

ArgumentHijōji was an important keyword in the militarist Japan of the 1930s. Previous scholarship has assumed that such language sprung from the global financial crisis of 1929, and subsequent diplomatic events. Our article demonstrates, however, that a full-bodied language of emergency was crafted well before the collapse of the global economy, and against the backdrop of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed the Japanese capital. While previous “great earthquakes” had been opportunities to strengthen Japanese participation in the global (...) project of science, this one led more dramatically to a crisis of reason, and indirectly contributed to the spiritual, anti-western, and anti-rational rhetoric of what became the “Showa Restoration.” This and other post-disaster landscapes, we argue, should be examined as compelling sites for the crafting of political language – sites of opportunity and meaning as well as trial. While the phrase “state of emergency” was coined under very different circumstances in post-war Britain, it gained power and charisma in Japan, and likely other places around the world, by its association with natural catastrophe. Thus did modern politics establish a new connection with the traditional realm of the sublime, and in the case of Japan, the supernatural. Emergency's ability to associate politics with nature would never disappear, and has perhaps even strengthened in the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

Field's claim that we have a notion of consistency which is neither model-theoretic nor proof-theoretic but primitive, is examined and criticized. His argument is compared to similar examinations by Kreisel and Etchemendy, and Etchemendy's distinction between interpretational and representational semantics is employed to reveal the flaw in Field's argument.

I interpret Mill?s view on logic as the instrumentalist view that logical inferences, complex statements, and logical operators are not necessary for reasoning itself, but are useful only for our remembering and communicating the results of the reasoning. To defend this view, I first show that we can transform all the complex statements in the language of classical first-order logic into what I call material inference rules and reduce logical inferences to inferences which involve only atomic statements and the material (...) inference rules. Then I explain why we introduce logical operators and logical inference rules into a system of the latter kind. In the end I determine what kind of negation is justified from this point of view. (shrink)

Bien que John Stuart Mill et Jeremy Bentham aient été considérés comme d’illustres exemples de « Philosophes radicaux », leurs exigences en matière de réforme sociale et politique étaient basées sur des points de vue différents. Comparée à celle de Bentham, l’analyse de Mill concernant le principe d’utilité et de démocratie représentative présente certains traits « perfectionnistes » et « élitistes ». La présente étude se propose d’examiner ceci à la lumière de la réception et de la réponse de Mill (...) aux idées de Bentham sur la politique. Bien que Mill fût, en partie, un partisan enthousiaste de Bentham, et qu’il lui attribuât le mérite de promouvoir les réformes juridiques et politiques, il semble avoir commencé, à partir de 1833, à évaluer ouvertement Bentham de façon critique. Ceci peut être perçu dans ses discussions et sa relation intellectuelle avec George Grote, qui était aussi un politicien et un historien utilitariste. L’accent mis par Mill sur le rôle essentiel de « l’éducation sociale du peuple » dans la promotion de l’esprit public fut développé dans des dialogues avec Grote et l’examen de ses études historiques. La présente étude conclut que Grote fit preuve de plus de sympathie envers Bentham que Mill, dans l’approche théorique aussi bien que dans l’approche pratique. Bien que tous les trois fussent vraiment dévoués à la même cause radicale, ils avaient toutefois des visions différentes de la crise de la démocratie parlementaire. L’examen du contexte de sa relation intellectuelle avec Grote fournit l’une des sources permettant de comprendre le défi jeté par Mill aux idées de Bentham relatives à la réforme politique. (shrink)

This is a book about the need for redemptive narratives to ward off despair and the dangers these same narratives create by raising expectations that are seldom fulfilled. The quasi-messianic expectations produced by the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, and their diminution, were stark reminders of an ongoing struggle between ideals and political realities. Redemptive Hope begins by tracing the tension between theistic thinkers, for whom hope is transcendental, and intellectuals, who have striven to link hopes for redemption (...) to our intersubjective interactions with other human beings. Lerner argues that a vibrant democracy must draw on the best of both religious thought and secular liberal political philosophy. By bringing Richard Rorty's pragmatism into conversation with early-twentieth-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch, Lerner begins the work of building bridges, while insisting on holding crucial differences in dialectical tension. Only such a dialogue, he argues, can prepare the foundations for modes of redemptive thought fit for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Coherentism in epistemology has long suffered from lack of formal and quantitative explication of the notion of coherence. One might hope that probabilistic accounts of coherence such as those proposed by Lewis, Shogenji, Olsson, Fitelson, and Bovens and Hartmann will finally help solve this problem. This paper shows, however, that those accounts have a serious common problem: the problem of belief individuation. The coherence degree that each of the accounts assigns to an information set (or the verdict it gives as (...) to whether the set is coherent tout court) depends on how beliefs (or propositions) that represent the set are individuated. Indeed, logically equivalent belief sets that represent the same information set can be given drastically different degrees of coherence. This feature clashes with our natural and reasonable expectation that the coherence degree of a belief set does not change unless the believer adds essentially new information to the set or drops old information from it; or, to put it simply, that the believer cannot raise or lower the degree of coherence by purely logical reasoning. None of the accounts in question can adequately deal with coherence once logical inferences get into the picture. Toward the end of the paper, another notion of coherence that takes into account not only the contents but also the origins (or sources) of the relevant beliefs is considered. It is argued that this notion of coherence is of dubious significance, and that it does not help solve the problem of belief individuation. (shrink)

Persons with visual impairments (hereafter PVI) detect and discover obstacles and road conditions by touching with a white cane when walking on the streets. In one training session, an Orientation and Mobility specialist (hereafter SPT) guided a PVI by grasping and moving the cane that the PVI was holding. We conducted a multimodal analysis of two instruction sequences, one a "proving and achieving" demonstration (Sacks in Lectures on conversation, Blackwell, 1992) and the other a "learnable" (Zemel and Koschmann, in Discourse (...) Stud 16:163–183, 2014) demonstration. The achieving demonstration proved the assessment of the PVI's performance. In the "learnable" demonstration, the PVI was able to receive and perform the most critical part of the "learnable" of the long contact touch without the aid of talk. Sharing a single cane touch is an efficient way for both the guiding SPT and the guided PVI to jointly experience and understand the environmental features. The SPT did not need to verbally confirm that the guided touch was accountable to the PVI and seemed confident that intersubjectivity with the PVI had been established. A unique form of being with others and achieving intersubjectivity in society was identified. In traditional learning instruction, it has been assumed that the learnable is presented and communicated visually and audibly. However, through guided touch learnable is presented and conveyed effectively in the cases of this paper. It seems that the sense of touch has been considered to be just for the occasion, but this is an example of something that is not just for the occasion but is consequential, that is, usable for further occasions. The data is in Japanese. (shrink)

We investigate splitting number and reaping number for the structure (ω) ω of infinite partitions of ω. We prove that ${\mathfrak{r}_{d}\leq\mathsf{non}(\mathcal{M}),\mathsf{non}(\mathcal{N}),\mathfrak{d}}$ and ${\mathfrak{s}_{d}\geq\mathfrak{b}}$ . We also show the consistency results ${\mathfrak{r}_{d} > \mathfrak{b}, \mathfrak{s}_{d} < \mathfrak{d}, \mathfrak{s}_{d} < \mathfrak{r}, \mathfrak{r}_{d} < \mathsf{add}(\mathcal{M})}$ and ${\mathfrak{s}_{d} > \mathsf{cof}(\mathcal{M})}$ . To prove the consistency ${\mathfrak{r}_{d} < \mathsf{add}(\mathcal{M})}$ and ${\mathfrak{s}_{d} < \mathsf{cof}(\mathcal{M})}$ we introduce new cardinal invariants ${\mathfrak{r}_{pair}}$ and ${\mathfrak{s}_{pair}}$ . We also study the relation between ${\mathfrak{r}_{pair}, \mathfrak{s}_{pair}}$ and other cardinal invariants. We show (...) that ${\mathsf{cov}(\mathcal{M}),\mathsf{cov}(\mathcal{N})\leq\mathfrak{r}_{pair}\leq\mathfrak{s}_{d},\ma thfrak{r}}$ and ${\mathfrak{s}\leq\mathfrak{s}_{pair}\leq\mathsf{non}(\mathcal{M}),\mathsf{non}(\mathcal{N})}$. (shrink)

Elizabeth Barnes and J. Robert G. Williams claim to offer a new ontic theory of vagueness, the kind of theory which considers vagueness to exist not in language but in reality. This paper refutes their claim. The possible worlds they employ are ersatz possible worlds, i.e., sets of sentences. Unlike reality, they don’t contain concrete and often material objects. As a result, there is nothing in Barnes and Williams’s description of the theory that the semanticist cannot or does not accept. (...) Thus, they have failed to establish their theory as a genuine intelligible ontic alternative to semantic theories. (shrink)

We present several models which satisfy CH and some ♦-like principles while others fail, answering a question of Moore, Hrušák and Džamonja.

We study the Mathias–Prikry and Laver–Prikry forcings associated with filters on ω. We give a combinatorial characterization of Martinʼs number for these forcing notions and present a general scheme for analyzing preservation properties for them. In particular, we give a combinatorial characterization of those filters for which the Mathias–Prikry forcing does not add a dominating real.

仏教とは「超越と実存」のせめぎ合いの歴史である――「恐山の禅僧」が、ブッダから道元までの思想的変遷に迫る、かつてない仏教史。.

By using finite support iteration Suslin c.c.c forcing notions we construct several models which satisfy some ♢-like principles while other cardinal invariants are larger than ω1.

This unique anthology of new, contributed essays offers a range of perspectives on various aspects of ontic vagueness. It seeks to answer core questions pertaining to onticism, the view that vagueness exists in the world itself. The questions to be addressed include whether vague objects must have vague identity, and whether ontic vagueness has a distinctive logic, one that is not shared by semantic or epistemic vagueness. The essays in this volume explain the motivations behind onticism, such as the plausibility (...) of mereological vagueness and indeterminacy in quantum mechanics and they offer various arguments both for and against ontic vagueness; onticism is also compared with other, competing theories of vagueness such as semanticism, the view that vagueness exists only in our linguistic representation of the world. Gareth Evans’s influential paper of 1978, “Can There Be Vague Objects?” gave a simple but cogent argument against the coherence of ontic vagueness. Onticism was subsequently dismissed by many. However, in recent years, researchers have become aware of the logical gaps in Evans’s argument and this has triggered a new wave of interest in onticism. Onticism is now widely regarded as at least a coherent view. Reflecting this growing consensus, the present anthology for the first time puts together essays that are focused on onticism and its various facets and it fills in the lacuna in the literature on vagueness, a much-discussed subject in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This unique anthology of new, contributed essays offers a range of perspectives on various aspects of ontic vagueness. It seeks to answer core questions pertaining to onticism, the view that vagueness exists in the world itself. The questions to be addressed include whether vague objects must have vague identity, and whether ontic vagueness has a distinctive logic, one that is not shared by semantic or epistemic vagueness. The essays in this volume explain the motivations behind onticism, such as the plausibility (...) of mereological vagueness and indeterminacy in quantum mechanics and they offer various arguments both for and against ontic vagueness; onticism is also compared with other, competing theories of vagueness such as semanticism, the view that vagueness exists only in our linguistic representation of the world. Gareth Evans’s influential paper of 1978, “Can There Be Vague Objects?” gave a simple but cogent argument against the coherence of ontic vagueness. Onticism was subsequently dismissed by many. However, in recent years, researchers have become aware of the logical gaps in Evans’s argument and this has triggered a new wave of interest in onticism. Onticism is now widely regarded as at least a coherent view. Reflecting this growing consensus, the present anthology for the first time puts together essays that are focused on onticism and its various facets and it fills in the lacuna in the literature on vagueness, a much-discussed subject in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The view that mathematical objects are indefinite in nature is presented and defended, hi the first section, Field's argument for fictionalism, given in response to Benacerraf's problem of identification, is closely examined, and it is contended that platonists can solve the problem equally well if they take the view that mathematical objects are indefinite. In the second section, two general arguments against the intelligibility of objectual indefiniteness are shown erroneous, hi the final section, the view is compared to mathematical structuralism, (...) and it is shown that a version of structuralism should be understood as embracing the same view. (shrink)

According to alethic pluralism, sentences belonging to different domains of discourse can be true by having different alethic (i.e., truth-constituting) properties. Against this pluralistic view, Jamin Asay has recently argued that pluralists' appeal to multiple alethic properties is ill-motivated because the main advantages of pluralism can already be obtained within the framework of standard truthmaker theory. In response to this objection, this paper argues that Asay's claim does not hold with respect to one of the central advantages of pluralism, namely, (...) the ability to offer a proper understanding of the realism/anti-realism debate. This is because, first, when simply construed, truthmaker theory can only provide an inadequate understanding of the debate, and second, when construed in certain ways that allow it to avoid inadequacy, it becomes committed to multiple alethic properties. (shrink)

It is usually held that what distinguishes a good inference from a bad one is that a good inference is truth-preserving. Against this view, this paper argues that a logical inference is good or bad depending not on whether it is truth-preserving or not, but whether it belongs to a logical system the addition of which makes a deductively conservative extension of the derivation relations among the atomic statements. To so argue, the paper first contends that the meaning of the (...) logical operators of classical logic is determined not by their connections to truth, but by their inferential roles. It is claimed in conclusion that there is no genuine issue over which logic, classical or intuitionistic, is the correct logic, for they are both conservative in the relevant sense. (shrink)

This is a review essay on Daisuke Kachi’s recent book, Agents: Contemporary Substance Ontology (sic. Shunjusha, 2018). The book develops and partially defends an ontology that takes the category of substance as the most fundamental one. The author provides in it a new perspective on substance, which consists in characterizing substances as bearers of what he calls “substance modalities” (of which there are four kinds, that stem from the factors of essence, power, past persistence, and future persistence respectively). The first (...) part of this review essay gives an extended overview of Kachi’s book while the second discusses some problems it may face. (shrink)

A number of philosophers today endorse the view that material substances (e.g., cats, stones, atoms) can be analyzed as bundles of “particular properties” or “tropes”. Among several developments, the theory that Peter Simons proposed is seen as the most successful one. Simons’ theory seems to owe its high reputation to mainly two advantages which he claims for his theory: the capacity for avoiding infinite regress, and the explanatory adequacy for the phenomenon of change. In this paper, however, I try to (...) object to this high appraisal, by showing that the two alleged advantages in fact cannot be simultaneously secured by Simons’ position. To this aim, I proceed as follows: First, I present Simons’ theory and explain its alleged two advantages. Next, I take up Arda Denkel’s criticism and show that the explanatory adequacy will be lost unless Simons accepts a certain revision of his theory. Finally, I show that as a result of the revision needed, Simons’ position comes to lose the capacity for avoiding infinite regress in turn. (shrink)

Many philosophy majors are shocked by the gap between the relative ease of lower-level philosophy courses and the difficulty of upper-division courses. This book serves as a necessary bridge to upper-level study in philosophy by offering rigorous but concise and accessible accounts of basic concepts and distinctions that are used throughout the discipline. It serves as a valuable advanced introduction to any undergraduate who is moving into upper-level courses in philosophy. While lower-level introductions to philosophy usually deal with popular topics (...) accessible to the general student in a piecemeal fashion, The Philosophy Major's Introduction to Philosophy offers coverage of important general philosophical concepts, tools, and devices that may be used for a long time to come in various philosophical areas. The volume is helpfully divided between a focus on the relation between language and the world in the first three chapters and coverage of mental content in the final two chapters, but builds a coherent narrative from start to finish. It also provides ample study questions and helpful sign-posts throughout, making it a must-have for any student attempting to engage fully with the problems and arguments in philosophy. Key Features Integrates topics from various areas of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical logic Provides descriptions of logico-mathematical tools necessary for philosophical studies, such as propositional logic, predicate logic, modal logic, set theory, mereology, and mathematical functions Makes connections with modern philosophy, including discussions of Descartes's skepticism and dualism, Locke's theory of personal identity, Hume's theory of causation, and Kant's synthetic a priori. Includes well-known entertaining puzzles and thought experiments such as the Ship of Theseus, the Statue and the Clay, a Brain in a Vat, and Twin Earth Lists helpful Exercise Questions and Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter and answers selected questions at the back of the book. (shrink)

On the one hand, philosophers have presented numerous apparent examples of indeterminate individuation, i.e., examples in which two things are neither determinately identical nor determinately distinct. On the other hand, some have argued against even the coherence of the very idea of indeterminate individuation. This paper defends the possibility of indeterminate individuation against Evans’s argument and some other arguments. The Determinacy of Identity—the thesis that identical things are determinately identical—is distinguished from the Determinacy of Distinctness—the thesis that distinct things are (...) determinately distinct. It is argued that while the first thesis holds universally and there is no case of indeterminate identity, there are reasons to think that the second thesis does not hold universally, and that there are cases of indeterminate distinctness. (shrink)

This paper introduces Richard Montague's theory of determiner phrases to the philosophically oriented readers who are familiar with Russell's traditional treatment. Determiner phrases include not only quantifier phrases in the narrow sense, such as every man, some woman, and nothing, but also DP conjunctions such as Adam and Betty and Adam or Betty, and even proper names such as Adam and Betty. Montague treats all determiner phrases as belonging to type t, i.e., the type of functions from properties of individuals (...) to truth values. This paper also introduces the simply typed lambda-calculus for the explication of Montague's theory. Two major problems with Montague's theory, one more philosophical and the other more linguistic, are discussed. (shrink)

According to the subset view of realization, a property realizes another if the causal powers of the latter are a subset of those of the former. Against this view, some authors (in particular, Kevin Morris and Paul Audi) have argued that it has an untenable consequence that realizing properties are less fundamental than the properties they realize, because the subset view characterizes realized properties as parts (subsets) of their realizers whereas it is generally true that a part is prior to (...) its whole. This paper defends the subset view from this “part-whole” objection, by arguing that if we compare individual powers of realizer and realizee with particular attention to their manifestation conditions, it turns out that each power of a realizee is grounded in some power of its realizer. This grounding relation between powers, I shall argue, allows subset theorists to explain why a realizer is more fundamental than its realizee, even while having the latter as a part. (shrink)

According to the “truthmaker maximalism”, every true contingent proposition is made true by something in the world, called its truthmaker. Although at first sight the maximalism seems to be a natural position, it has serious difficulties, especially concerning negative truths. In view of this, many truthmaker theorists adopt some non-maximalist position. It is not clear, however, whether these non-maximalists are justified, since existing reasons to justify the non-maximalism are not good enough. In this paper, then, I shall propose a new (...) reason for the non-maximalism, which consists in the observation that the maximalism cannot acknowledge the widely accepted view that certain inferences involving logical constants are valid in the properly logical sense. (shrink)

The Boolean many-valued approach to vagueness is similar to the infinite-valued approach embraced by fuzzy logic in the respect in which both approaches seek to solve the problems of vagueness by assigning to the relevant sentences many values between falsity and truth, but while the fuzzy-logic approach postulates linearly-ordered values between 0 and 1, the Boolean approach assigns to sentences values in a many-element complete Boolean algebra. On the modal-precisificational approach represented by Kit Fine, if a sentence is indeterminate in (...) truth value in some world, it is taken to be true in one precisified world accessible from that world and false in another. This paper points to a way to unify these two approaches to vagueness by showing that Fine’s version of the modal-precisificational approach can be combined with the Boolean many-valued approach instead of supervaluationism, one of the most popular approaches to vagueness. (shrink)

The strong immanent realism (i.e., the view that there exist universals as entities capable of being wholly present wherever their instances are located) has been traditionally criticized for having certain absurd consequences. Although Gilmore (2003) replied to these criticisms by taking spatial relations involving universals as relativized to their locations, his reply has been rebutted by Keskinen et al. (2015). This paper aims to defend the strong immanent realism by proposing a new version of the relativization strategy, according to which (...) a spatial relation is to be relativized just to the extent that it contains universals or concrete particulars among its terms. This version, it will be argued, can satisfactorily address the objections hitherto posed to the strong immanent realism. (shrink)

This paper offers the Boolean many-valued solution to the Sorites Paradox. According to the precisification-based Boolean many-valued theory, from which this solution arises, sentences have not only two truth values, truth (or 1) and falsity (or 0), but many Boolean values between 0 and 1. The Boolean value of a sentence is identified with the set of precisifications in which the sentence is true. Unlike degrees fuzzy logic assigns to sentences, Boolean many values are not linearly but only partially ordered; (...) so there are values that are incomparable. Despite this fact, the sentences in a sorites series can be taken as having values in a linear order, and losing (or gaining) value as we move from sentence to sentence in the series. So there is no sharp borderline between 0 and 1. Assigning Boolean many values instead of the two truth values to sentences for their vagueness values is analogous to assigning propositions instead of the truth values to sentences for their semantic values, as propositions are, from our viewpoint, also Boolean many values. (shrink)

Deflationists cannot make sense ofthe notion of referential indeterminacybecause they deny the existence of substantivereference. One way for them to make sense ofthe objective existence of linguisticindeterminacy is by embracing theworldly (or objectual) view ofindeterminacy, the view that indeterminacyexists not in reference relations but in the(non-linguistic) world itself. On this view,the entire world is divided into precisified worlds, just as it is dividedinto temporal slices and (arguably) alethicpossible worlds. Supervaluationism proves tobe neutral with respect to the debate betweenthe worldly view (...) and the referential view ofindeterminacy. (shrink)