In this paper, two central questions will be addressed: ought we to implement medical AI technology in the medical domain? If yes, how ought we to implement this technology? I will critically engage with three options that exist with respect to these central questions: the Neo-Luddite option, the Assistive option, and the Substitutive option. I will first address key objections on behalf of the Neo-Luddite option: the Objection from Bias, the Objection from Artificial Autonomy, (...) the Objection from Status Quo, and the Objection from Inscrutability. I will thereafter present the Demographic Trends Argument and the Human Enhancement Argument in support of alternatives to the Neo-Luddite option. In the second half of the paper, I will argue against the Substitutive option and in favour of the Assistive option, given the existence of two chief formal deficits in medical AI technology: the causality deficit and the care deficit. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the claim that, as new types of neurointervention get developed allowing us to enhance various aspects of our mental functioning, we should work to prevent the use of such interventions from ever becoming the “new normal,” that is, a practice expected—even if not directly required—by employers. The author’s response to that claim is that, unlike compulsion or most cases of direct coercion, indirect coercion to use such neurointerventions is, per se, no more problematic than the pressure people (...) all find themselves under to use modern technological devices like computers or mobile phones. Few people seem to believe that special protections should be introduced to protect contemporary Neo-Luddites from such pressures. That being said, the author acknowledges that separate factors, when present, can indeed render indirect coercion to enhance problematic. The factors in question include lack of safety, fostering adaptation to oppressive circumstances, and having negative side effects that go beyond health. Nonetheless, the chapter stresses that these factors do not seem to be necessary correlates of neuroenhancement. (shrink)

Proponents of the problem of animal suffering claim that the millions of years of apparent nonhuman animal pain and suffering provides evidence against the existence of God. Neo-Cartesianism attempts to avoid this problem mainly by denying the existence of phenomenal consciousness in nonhuman animals. However, neo-Cartesian options regarding animal minds have failed to compel many. In this essay, I explore an answer to the problem of animal suffering inspired by the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. Instead of focusing on phenomenal consciousness, (...) the neo-Thomistic view of animal minds focuses on self-awareness. After proposing and providing evidence for this view, I conclude that nonhuman animal suffering is not morally significant. (shrink)

A standard way to explain the connection between ethical claims and motivation is to say that these claims express motivational attitudes. Unless this connection is taken to be merely a matter of contingent psychological regularity, it may seem that there are only two options for understanding it. We can either treat ethical claims as expressing propositions that one cannot believe without being at least somewhat motivated (subjectivism), or we can treat ethical claims as nonpropositional and as having their semantic content (...) constituted by the motivational attitudes they express (noncognitivism). In this paper, we argue that there is another option, which can be recognized once we see that there is no need to build the expression relation between ethical claims and motivational states of mind into the semantic content of ethical claims. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Employing utilitarian criteria, Jones and Felps, in “Shareholder Wealth Maximization and Social Welfare: A Utilitarian Critique” (Business Ethics Quarterly23[2]: 207–38), examined the sequential logic leading from shareholder wealth maximization to maximal social welfare and uncovered several serious empirical and conceptual shortcomings. After rendering shareholder wealth maximization seriously compromised as an objective for corporate operations, they provided a set of criteria regarding what a replacement corporate objective would look like, but do not offer a specific alternative. In this article, we draw (...) on neo-utilitarian thought to advance a refined version of normative stakeholder theory that we believe addresses a major remaining criticism of extant versions, their lack of specificity. More particularly, we provide a single-valued objective function for the corporation—stakeholder happiness enhancement—that would allow managers to make principled choices between/among policy options when stakeholder interests conflict. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that virtue ethics cannot accommodate the possibility of supererogation. In response, Rebecca Stangl proposes a neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation that, she argues, generates plausible verdicts, while also being compatible with the doctrine of the mean. I argue that Stangl’s response is unsuccessful. First, I demonstrate that the proposal in its current form is problematically indeterminate, meaning that we cannot know what verdicts would be produced in response to classic examples. Second, I argue that anyone attempting (...) to develop the account faces a dilemma, and that both options for responding to this dilemma generate problematic results. (shrink)

O'Brien & Opie unfairly restrict the classicist's range of options for explaining phenomenal consciousness. Alternative approaches that rely upon differences among representation types offer better prospects of success. The authors rely upon two distinctions: one between symbol processing and connectionist models, the other between process and vehicle models. In this context, neither distinction may be as clear as they assume.

Neo-logicism is, not least in the light of Frege’s logicist programme, an important topic in the current philosophy of mathematics. In this essay, I critically discuss a number of issues that I consider to be relevant for both Frege’s logicism and neo-logicism. I begin with a brief introduction into Wright’s neo-Fregean project and mention the main objections that he faces. In Sect. 2, I discuss the Julius Caesar problem and its possible Fregean and neo-Fregean solution. In Sect. 3, I raise (...) what I take to be a central objection to the position of neo-logicism. In Sect. 4, I attempt to clarify how we should understand Frege’s stipulation that the two sides of an abstraction principle qua contextual definition of a term-forming operator shall be “gleichbedeutend”. In Sect. 5, I consider the options that Frege might have had to establish the analyticity of Hume’s Principle: The number that belongs to the concept F is equal to the number that belongs to the concept G if and only if F and G are equinumerous. Section 6 is devoted to Frege’s two criteria of thought identity. In Sects. 7 and 8, I defend the position of the neo-logicist against an alleged “knock-down argument”. In Sect. 9, I comment on Frege’s description of abstraction in Grundlagen, §64 and the use of the terms “recarving” and “reconceptualization” in the relevant literature on Fregean abstraction and neo-logicism. I argue that Fregean abstraction has nothing to do with the recarving of a sentence content or its decomposition in different ways. I conclude with remarks on global logicism versus local logicisms. (shrink)

The paper discusses the arguments for and against animalism and concludes that a pluralist position which rejects animalism and embraces a multiplicity of thinkers is the best option.

What are the differences between cosmopolitanism and globalization? Are they “natural” historical processes or are they designed for specific purposes? Was Kant cosmopolitanism good for the entire population of the globe or did it respond to a particular Eurocentered view of what a cosmo-polis should be? The article argues that, while the term “globalization” in the most common usage refers and correspond to neo-liberal globalization projects and ambitions, and the Kantian concept of “cosmopolitanism” responded to the second wave, “de-colonial cosmopolitanism” (...) refers to global processes and conceptualizations delinking from both neo-liberal globalization and liberal cosmopolitan ideals. But it delinks also from theological and Marxist visions of a homogenous world center around religious ideals or state socialist regulations. De-colonial cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of multiple trajectories aiming at a trans-modern world based on pluriversality rather than on a new and good universal for all. (shrink)

Research has shown that individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits are likely to cause harm to others in the workplace. However, there is little academic literature on the potentially adaptive outcomes of corporate psychopathy, particularly because the “boldness” psychopathy domain has largely been under-acknowledged in this literature. This study aimed to elaborate on past findings by examining the associations between psychopathy, as operationalized using scales from the relatively new triarchic model of psychopathy, and both adaptive and maladaptive workplace (...) behaviors. Participants were 343 working community adults who completed a series of self-report questionnaires that measured psychopathy and various workplace behaviors, including counterproductive work behaviors, tactics of influence, unethical decision-making, leadership strategies, team play, and creativity. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the associations between latent constructs of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, and the eight different constructs related to workplace behaviors. It was found that boldness preferentially predicted the use of soft tactics of influence, adaptive leadership, and team play, and negatively predicted passive leadership. Meanness predicted unethical decision-making, poor team play, and hard tactics of influence. Disinhibition positively predicted CWB and passive leadership. Meanness also moderated the association between disinhibition and CWB, in that greater scores on both psychopathy domains indicated greater levels of CWB. These findings provide conceptual support for the triarchic model, including the “boldness” domain, which measures adaptive aspects of psychopathy in addition to maladaptive ones, as well as suggest that not all individuals high on psychopathy would be an overt menace to the workplace. The different psychopathy traits may also interact with each other to predict different types or levels of workplace behaviors. (shrink)

The administration or recognition of religious courts is a form of religious accommodation present in many constitutional states today commonly analysed in legal pluralism terms. This article contributes to the further analysis of the relationship between legal pluralism and rights in religiously diverse societies by examining the status of state religious courts and their interaction with state non-religious courts. In particular, I examine what Cover calls “jurisdictional redundancies” between the courts and conceptualize the allocation of power between religious and non-religious (...) courts as a potentially productive site of interlegality. In doing so, I support concurrent jurisdictional allocations, arguing that exclusive jurisdiction could result in what I call an interlegal gap, whereby instead of inter-penetration of norms and production of reconciliatory principles, there is a justice gap whereby litigants may find themselves unable to obtain appropriate legal recourse including when neither court is willing to assume jurisdiction over the matter. This requires us to see the relationship between religious courts and non-religious courts through the more mundane but more practical lens of jurisdictional overlaps and competition, rather than through the more abstract framing of normative or even civilizational clashes. Accordingly, I argue that concurrent jurisdiction and interlegality have greater potential to strike a balance between individual and group rights and could be more protective of religious diversity. In other words, I argue for a closer, rather than a more separate, relationship between religious and non-religious courts, while denying that a hierarchical relationship where religious courts are subordinated to non-religious courts is the only way to protect rights. (shrink)

Facing the possibility of a surge of COVID-19-infected patients requiring ventilatory support in Intensive Care Units, the Singapore Hospice Council and the Chapter of Palliative Medicine Physicians forward its position on the guiding principles that ought to drive the allocation of ICU beds and its role in care of these patients and their families.

Guided by Basic Psychological Need Theory, we investigated the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration and their relations with theoretically relevant correlates including mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and physical activity. The participants were Singapore-based school students who completed a cross-sectional survey. The results of the latent profile analysis identified four distinct need profiles: profile 1–average satisfaction and frustration ; profile 2–low satisfaction, above average frustration; profile 3–very high satisfaction, very low frustration ; and profile 4–high satisfaction, (...) very high frustration. Among these, profile 3 was the most adaptive one; it had the highest levels of mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Experiences of need satisfaction countered the negative effects of need frustration on these correlates. These findings enhance our understanding of students’ psychological need experiences and highlight the need for investigating the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration. (shrink)

_The rapid progress of AI technology prompts British novelists to speculate what a technologically advanced Britain will be like: a utopia or a dystopia? Or somewhere in between? Ian McEwan shows his concern over these questions in Machines Like Me (2019). It is suggested that this novel mainly reveals people’s technophobia and presents a techno-dystopian world, for which many people are ill-prepared. Technophobia and techno-dystopia represented in the selected novel echo the debates among the Neo-Luddites, especially the thoughts of Stephen (...) L. Talbott. From the theoretical angle of Neo-Luddism, the present study aims to explore people’s multifaceted technophobia and the features of techno-dystopia in Machines Like Me, so as to disclose people’s values behind their attitudes to technological advancements. Technophobia as depicted in this novel basically includes people’s dread of AI replacement of humans. Moreover, the world presented in the novel is characteristic of a techno-dystopia: the technological replacement of humans results in people’s obsolete status and poses security risks to human beings. The objective of the research is to arouse people’s awareness about adverse technological impacts and provide some insights into how to handle the tension between technophobia and technological development in the real world._ _The study concluded that to some degree, such technophobia and techno-dystopia disillusion technophiles who fervently believe that advances in technology will bring about a utopia or at least help to fulfill a utopian ideal. Serving as a warning alarm for the dystopian future, this novel counters cyber-hype in contemporary society and reflects the real world of profit-fueled technology._. (shrink)

_The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry_ develops many of the themes Gordon Graham presented in his highly successful radio series, _The Silicon Society_. Exploring the tensions between the warnings of the Neo-Luddites and the bright optimism of the Technophiles, Graham offers the first concise and accessible exploration of the issues which arise as we enter further into the world of Cyberspace. This original and fascinating study takes us to the heart of questions that none of us can afford to ignore: how (...) does the Internet affect our concepts of identity, moral anarchy, censorship, community, democracy, virtual reality and imagination? Free of jargon and full of stimulating ideas, this is essential reading for anyone wishing to think clearly and informatively about the complexities of our technological future. (shrink)

Recent restrictions of movement during the pandemic have forced people worldwide, even neo-luddites, to turn to communicating online. The virtualization of social processes that we are witnessing today, suggests constant rethinking of the role of the Internet for humanity so that we could optimize conditions of our existence that seem to be irreversibly transformed by technology, and integrate every individual with a unique set of features in the life of society. The author deals with the notions of cyberinclusion, virtual ghetto, (...) isolation and alienation to come to the conclusion that virtual communication allows one to form communities based not on segregation criteria of socio-demographics, but on unifying grounds of shared interest. Cyber inclusion already exists, along with virtual ghettoization; for the former to prevail, people must be ready to communicate beyond borders, regardless of their socio-demographical characteristics, state of health, or immediate benefit. (shrink)

This paper continues my discussion with Michael Dummett on Frege’s senses, published in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett and further developed in Diametros. In his reply to my original paper, Dummett came to agree with me that senses are neither objects nor functions, since they have a categorially different kind of linguistico-metaphysical function to perform. He then asks how we might quantify over senses, if they are neither objects nor functions. He discusses two main options, and finds one unviable and (...) the other “very un-Fregean.” I then offer a Fregean or neo-Fregean option in my rejoinder. And I still hold that this way out will do the job, or is at least plausible enough that the burden of persuasion is on those who disagree. But I hope to show in this paper that on a more complete examination of Frege, there are at least twenty Fregean or neo-Fregean ways out, with the one I proposed being option. (shrink)

In his paper in the same volume, Sider argues that, of maximalism and quantifier variance, the latter promises to let us make better sense of neo-Fregeanism. I argue that neo-Fregeans should, and seemingly do, reject quantifier variance. If they must choose between these two options, they should choose maximalism.

Neo-Aristotelian views of goodness hold that the goodness of something is strictly connected with its goal(s). In this article, I shall present a power-based, Neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. I shall claim that there are certain powers (i.e., Goodness-Conferring Powers, or GC-powers in short) that confer goodness upon their bearers and upon the resulting actions. And I shall suggest that GC-powers are strongly teleological tendencies. In Section 1, I shall present the kernel of Neo-Aristotelian conceptions of goodness. In Section 2, I (...) shall introduce strongly teleological powers and tendencies. In Section 3, GC-powers will be characterized. I shall also examine a number of options with regard to their number and features and how to single out their goodness value. In Section 4, I shall focus on good agents and on three distinct ways in which they may be good: tendential goodness, actual goodness, and purely actual goodness. Relatedly, among the actions connected with a certain GC-power, I shall also distinguish between primary and secondary actions and between pure and impure actions. In Section 5, good actions will be examined. Actions may be good in three distinct ways. Indeed, actions may be endowed with primary goodness, secondary goodness and preventative goodness. In Section 6, I shall face the remaining problems. (shrink)

Our late modernity has been characterized by Zygmunt Bauman and Hartmut Rosa as, respectively, “liquid” and “accelerated”. These are demanding aspects of reality that have elicited both adaptive and resisting responses. While the drive to adapt has generally been favoured, especially by the corporate sector, a certain resistance to the tendency is also notable among ordinary citizens. It will be argued in this paper, first, that while adaptation evokes Daoist insights, such an association is misleading and an unqualified kind of (...) adaptation is not a viable option; secondly, while many ritualistic and ceremonial practices are being revived as a part of the resistance, many of these are undesirable; thirdly, that an introduction of ritual inspired by the ancient Confucian understanding of li 禮 is a beneficial way to alleviate the harmful effects of late modernity; and fourthly, that this understanding of li can be strengthened and clarified through Neo-Daoist interpretations. (shrink)

The World Trade Organisation, and the international trade regime within which it operates, is regularly evaluated in terms of distributive outcomes or opportunities. A less-established concern is the extent to which the institutional structure of the trade regime enables agents to exert control over the economic forces to which they’re subject. This oversight is surprising, as trade negotiations amongst states have profound impacts upon what options remain open to those states and their citizens in regulating their economies. This article contributes (...) to filling this lacuna in the literature. Following on from recent neo-republican work on global and international justice, it argues that a major problem with the WTO is that it fails to effectively mitigate the domination of some states by others within its negotiations. Such domination prevails despite the employment of negative consensus as a decision-making procedure. (shrink)

The connotation of the “Luddite Imagination” refers to the concepts of the “Luddite Movement” and the “Luddites”, those events and individuals who are seen as conservatives behind the times. The negative connotation of the “Luddite Imagination” changed from the political connotation to cultural connotation. Neo-Luddism identifys the rational advocacy in defense of the old Luddite Movement; There are deep-seated issues involved behind the rehabilitation of thenegative connotation of the “Luddite Imagination”; It has comparative implications on (...) China’s modernization process. (shrink)

Introduction -- A default position -- Experience -- The character of experience -- Understanding-experience -- A note about dispositional mental states -- Purely experiential content -- An account of four seconds of thought -- Questions -- The mental and the nonmental -- The mental and the publicly observable -- The mental and the behavioral -- Neobehaviorism and reductionism -- Naturalism in the philosophy of mind -- Conclusion: The three questions -- Agnostic materialism, part 1 -- Monism -- The linguistic argument (...) -- Materialism and monism -- A comment on reduction -- The impossibility of an objective phenomenology -- Asymmetry and reduction -- Equal-status monism -- Panpsychism -- The inescapability of metaphysics -- Agnostic materialism, part 2 -- Ignorance -- Sensory spaces -- Experience, explanation, and theoretical integration -- The hard part of the mind-body problem -- Neutral monism and agnostic monism -- A comment on eliminativism, instrumentalism, and so on -- Mentalism, idealism, and immaterialism -- Mentalism -- Strict or pure process idealism -- Active-principle idealism -- Stuff idealism -- Immaterialism -- The positions restated -- The dualist options -- Frege's thesis -- Objections to pure process idealism -- The problem of mental dispositions -- Mental -- Shared abilities -- The sorting ability -- The definition of mental being -- Mental phenomena -- The view that all mental phenomena are experiential phenomena -- Natural intentionality -- E/c intentionality -- The experienceless -- Intentionality and abstract and nonexistent objects -- Experience, purely experiential content, and n/c intentionality -- Concepts in nature -- Intentionality and experience -- Summary with problem -- Pain and pain -- The neo-behaviorist view -- A linguistic argument for the necessary connection between pain and behavior -- A challenge -- The Sirians -- N.N. Novel -- An objection to the Sirians -- The Betelgeuzians -- The point of the Sirians -- Functionalism, naturalism, and realism about pain -- Unpleasantness and qualitative character -- The weather watchers -- The rooting story -- What is it like to be a weather watcher? -- The aptitudes of mental states -- The argument from the conditions for possessing the concept of space -- The argument from the conditions for language ability -- The argument from the nature of desire -- Desire and affect -- The argument from the phenomenology of desire -- Behavior -- A hopeless definition -- Difficulties -- Other-observability -- Neo-behaviorism -- The concept of mind. (shrink)

The issue of neo-kantism and modern criticism is one of the problems discussed by representatives of various philosophical currents in Poland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For neo-kantism — with its heteronomy and problems with the delineation of individual positions in it — and, in particular, a strongly undefined modern criticism, practically showing no ideological unity, led to the view that everyone who felt obliged to stick to a scientific discipline, i.e. proclaimed the need to make philosophy (...) more scientific, or only made a superficial accession or acceptance of a general idea, or only some element of it, could find a place within them. It is interesting that even today it is not easy to deal with this problem. It seems that, on the one hand, neo-kantism and modern criticism — primarily in Polish philosophy at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries — can be almost treated synonymously; on the other hand, they are, from one point of view, mutually exclusive options, and, from another, complementary in nature. The article attempts to present, mainly on the basis of two representatives of philosophical thought of that time, viz. Stanisław Kobyłecki and Marian Massonius, the similarities and differences that emerged in the understanding of modern criticism in connection with the publication entitled _Filozofia nowokrytyczna _[Modern Crititical Philosophy], in which “the turn to Kant” was even put into the formula of “modern criticism”. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a metaphysics of science in the sense of a naturalized metaphysics. It considers in the first place the interplay of physics and metaphysics in Newtonian mechanics, then goes into the issues for the metaphysics of time that relativity physics raises, shows that what one considers as the referent of quantum theory depends on metaphysical considerations and finally explains how the stance that one takes with respect to objective modality and laws of nature shapes the options that are (...) available for an ontology of quantum physics. In that way, this chapter seeks to make a case for a natural philosophy that treats physics and metaphysics as inseparable in the enquiry into the constitution of the world, there being neither a neo-positivist way of deducing metaphysics from the formalisms of physical theories, nor a neo-rationalist realm of investigation for metaphysics that is independent of physics. (shrink)

August Weismann rejected the inheritance of acquired characters on the grounds that changes to the soma cannot produce the kind of changes to the germ-plasm that would result in the altered character being transmitted to subsequent generations. His intended distinction, between germ-plasm and soma, was closer to the modern distinction between genotype and phenotype than to the modern distinction between germ cells and somatic cells. Recently, systems of epigenetic inheritance have been claimed to make possible the inheritance of acquired characters. (...) I argue that the sense in which these claims are true does not challenge fundamental tenets of neo-Darwinism. Epigenetic inheritance expands the range of options available to genes but evolutionary adaptation remains the product of natural selection of ‘random’ variation. (shrink)

Nicholas Rescher presents a critical reaction against two currently influential tendencies of thought. On the one hand, he rejects the facile relativism that pervades contemporary social and academic life. On the other hand, he opposes the rationalism inherent in neo-contractarian theory--both in the idealized communicative-contract version promoted in continental European political philosophy by J;urgen Habermas, and in the idealized social contract version of the theory of political justice promoted in the Anglo-American context by John Rawls. Against such tendencies, Rescher's pluralist (...) approach takes a more realistic and pragmatic line, eschewing the convenient recourse of idealization in cognitive and practical matters. Instead of a utopianism that looks to a uniquely perfect order that would prevail under ideal conditions, he advocates incremental improvements within the framework of arrangements that none of us will deem perfect but that all of us "can live with." Such an approach replaces the yearning for an unattainable consensus with the institution of pragmatic arrangements in which the community will acquiesce--not through agreeing on their optimality, but through a shared recognition among the dissonant parties that the available options are even worse. (shrink)

The first two sections of this paper investigate what Newton could have meant in a now famous passage from “De Graviatione” (hereafter “DeGrav”) that “space is as it were an emanative effect of God.” First it offers a careful examination of the four key passages within DeGrav that bear on this. The paper shows that the internal logic of Newton’s argument permits several interpretations. In doing so, the paper calls attention to a Spinozistic strain in Newton’s thought. Second it sketches (...) four interpretive options: (i) one approach is generic neo-Platonic; (ii) another approach is associated with the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More; a variant on this (ii*) emphasizes that Newton mixes Platonist and Epicurean themes; (iii) a necessitarian approach; (iv) an approach connected with Bacon’s efforts to reformulate a useful notion of form and laws of nature. Hitherto only the second and third options have received scholarly attention in scholarship on DeGrav. The paper offers new arguments to treat Newtonian emanation as a species of Baconian formal causation as articulated, especially, in the first few aphorisms of part two of Bacon’s New Organon. If we treat Newtonian emanation as a species of formal causation then the necessitarian reading can be combined with most of the Platonist elements that others have discerned in DeGrav, especially Newton’s commitment to doctrines of different degrees of reality as well as the manner in which the first existing being ‘transfers’ its qualities to space (as a kind of causa-sui). This can clarify the conceptual relationship between space and its formal cause in Newton as well as Newton’s commitment to the spatial extended-ness of all existing beings. While the first two sections of this paper engage with existing scholarly controversies, in the final section the paper argues that the recent focus on emanation has obscured the importance of Newton’s very interesting claims about existence and measurement in “DeGrav”. The paper argues that according to Newton God and other entities have the same kind of quantities of existence; Newton is concerned with how measurement clarifies the way of being of entities. Newton is not claiming that measurement reveals all aspects of an entity. But if we measure something then it exists as a magnitude in space and as a magnitude in time. This is why in DeGrav Newton’s conception of existence really helps to “lay truer foundations of the mechanical sciences.”. (shrink)

We argue that if one wishes to be a realist, one should adopt a Neo-Aristotelian ontology involving tropes instead of a Russellian ontology of property universals and objects. Either Russellian realists should adopt the relata-specific relational tropes of instantiation instead of facts, or convert to Neo-Aristotelian realism with monadic tropes. Regarding Neo-Aristotelian realism, we have two novel points why it fares better than Russellian realism. Instantiation of property universals by tropes and characterization or inherence between tropes and objects are more (...) transparent ontological notions than relational inherence, which is assumed in Russellian realism with the relational tropes of instantiation. Neo-Aristotelian realism makes better sense about abstract universals, which are a more viable option than concrete universals. (shrink)

Peter Munz, a former student of both Popper and Wittgenstein, begins his comparison of the two great twentieth-century philosophers, by explaining that since the demise of positivism there have emerged, broadly speaking, two philosophical options: Wittgenstein, with the absolute relativism of his theory that meaning is a function of language games and that social configurations are determinants of knowledge; and Popper’s evolutionary epistemology – conscious knowledge is a special case of the relationship which exists between all living beings and their (...) environments. Professor Munz examines and rejects the Wittgensteinian position. Instead, Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge , first published in 1985, elaborates the potentially fruitful link between Popper’s critical rationalism and Neo-Darwinism. Read in the light of the latter, Popper’s philosophy leads to the transformation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism into ‘Hypothetical Realism’, whilst the emphasis on the biological orientation of Popper’s thought helps to illumine some difficulties in Popper’s ‘falsificationism’. (shrink)

Peter Munz, a former student of both Popper and Wittgenstein, begins his comparison of the two great twentieth-century philosophers, by explaining that since the demise of positivism there have emerged, broadly speaking, two philosophical options: Wittgenstein, with the absolute relativism of his theory that meaning is a function of language games and that social configurations are determinants of knowledge; and Popper’s evolutionary epistemology – conscious knowledge is a special case of the relationship which exists between all living beings and their (...) environments. Professor Munz examines and rejects the Wittgensteinian position. Instead, _Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge_, first published in 1985, elaborates the potentially fruitful link between Popper’s critical rationalism and Neo-Darwinism. Read in the light of the latter, Popper’s philosophy leads to the transformation of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism into ‘Hypothetical Realism’, whilst the emphasis on the biological orientation of Popper’s thought helps to illumine some difficulties in Popper’s ‘falsificationism’. (shrink)

This article treats three aspects of Frege's discussions of definitions. First, I survey Frege's main criticisms of definitions in mathematics. Second, I consider Frege's apparent change of mind on the legitimacy of contextual definitions and its significance for recent neo-Fregean logicism. In the remainder of the article I discuss a critical question about the definitions on which Frege's proofs of the laws of arithmetic depend: do the logical structures of the definientia reflect the understanding of arithmetical terms prevailing prior to (...) Frege's analyses? Unless they do, it is unclear how Frege's proofs demonstrate the analyticity of the arithmetic in use before logicism. Yet, especially in late writings, Frege characterizes definitions as arbitrary stipulations of the senses or references of expressions unrelated to pre-definitional understanding. I conclude by examining some options for conceiving of the status of Frege's logicism in light of this apparent tension, and outline a suggestion for a philosophically fruitful way of resolving this tension. (shrink)

According to power theorists, properties are powers—i.e. they necessarily confer on their bearers certain dispositions. Although the power theory is increasingly gaining popularity, a vast majority of analytic metaphysicians still favors what I call ‘the nomic theory’—i.e. the view according to which what dispositions a property confers on its bearers is contingent on what the laws of nature happen to be. This paper argues that the nomic theory is inconsistent, for, if it were correct, then properties would not confer any (...) dispositions on their bearers—they would only appear to do so (just like how, in cases of mimicking, objects do not really have the relevant dispositions, they merely appear to have them). If my arguments are sound, then the nomic theory is incoherent and ultimately collapses into what I call ‘neo-occasionalism’ and powers turns out to be the only available option for those who believe that properties genuinely confer dispositions on their bearers. (shrink)

Versions of the “Idealist” position dominated twentieth century Continental Philosophy, although this position has recently come in for influential criticism from contemporary “Speculative Realists”. My paper shows, however, that the basis for a forceful critique of the Idealist position was already laid by two crucial but poorly understood figures in the twentieth century continental tradition: Levinas and Sartre. I propose to defend herea Neo-Realist view together with Levinas and Sartre based on a demonstration of a “transphenomenality of being” against the (...) Idealist option taken by the first phenomenologists. The goal of this work is to build arguments in favor of the Realist position against Husserl’s Idealism through a close reading of Levinas’ and Sartre’s ontological phenomenologies. (shrink)