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.

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)

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)

This book contains 21 essays by leading authorities on aspects of contemporary logic, ranging from foundations of set theory to applications of logic in computing and in the theory of fields. In computer science and mathematics, this gap between foundations and applications is small, as illustrated by essays on the proof theory of non-classical logics, lambda calculus, relating logic programs to inductive definition, and definability in Lindenbaum algebras. Other chapters discuss how to apply model theory to field theory, complex geometry (...) and groups, and how to recover from its automorphism group. (shrink)

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given (...) in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history. (shrink)

From this starting point, and assuming no previous knowledge of logic, Wilfrid Hodges takes the reader through the whole gamut of logical expressions in a ...

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

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

In 1975 the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape crystallized a new view of the American West: the sublime “American” vistas of Ansel Adams were replaced and subverted by images of a landscape inundated with banal symbols of humanity. Organized by William Jenkins for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, New Topographics showcased such photographers as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke. Their pictures, illustrating the vernacular, human-made world of contemporary America, punctured the myth (...) of the pristine, wild American landscape—and definitively changed the course of landscape photography. Reframing the New Topographics offers the first substantive analysis of this shift and the continuing influence of an exhibition that not only reshaped the look and subject matter of landscape photography, but also foreshadowed environmentalism’s expansion beyond the mere preservation of wilderness. The essays in this anthology will add an important new dimension to the studies of art history and visual culture. (shrink)

[Wilfrid Hodges] During the last forty or so years it has become popular to offer explanations of logical notions in terms of games. There is no doubt that many people find games helpful for understanding various logical phenomena. But we ask whether anything is really 'explained' by these accounts, and we analyse Paul Lorenzen's dialogue foundations for constructive logic as an example. The conclusion is that the value of games lies in their ability to provide helpful metaphors and representations, (...) rather than in any true conceptual analysis. In fact some of the standard explanations of logical notions in terms of competitive games simply don't work. /// [Erik C. W. Krabbe] In an attempt to redeem the Lorenzen-type dialogues from their detractors, it is perhaps best first to provide a survey of the various benefits these dialogues have been supposed to yield. This will be done in Section I. It will not be possible, within the confines of this paper, to scrutinize them all, but in Section II we shall delve deeper into the capacity of this type of dialogue to yield a model for the immanent criticism of philosophical positions. Section III will extend the concept of a dialogue in such a way as to conform better with our intuitive conceptions of what a rational discussion of a position should contain. This will be followed up by a concept of 'winning a dialogue' that takes position midway between the old conception of 'winning one play' and that of the full-fledged presentation of a winning strategy. Concepts of 'rational discussion' are thus shown to be, plausibly, more fundamental than those of proof. In Section IV, I shall discuss the specific problems about dialogical foundations put forward by Wilfrid Hodges. (shrink)

The laws of distribution follow at once from Lyndon's interpolation theorem and the fact that the fallacy of many terms is a fallacy.

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.

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect (...) to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred. (shrink)

Inference and meaning -- Some reflections on language games -- Language as thought and as communication -- Meaning as functional classification : a perspective on the relation of syntax to semantics -- Naming and saying -- Grammar and existence : a preface to ontology -- Abstract entities -- Being and being known -- The lever of Archimedes -- Some reflections on thoughts and things -- Mental events -- Phenomenalism -- The identity approach to the mind-body problem -- Philosophy and the (...) scientific image of man -- "...this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks..." -- Some remarks on Kant's theory of experience -- The role of imagination in Kant's theory of experience. (shrink)

Wilfrid Hodges; VIII*—Truth in a Structure, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986, Pages 135–152, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

We consider two formalisations of the notion of a compositionalsemantics for a language, and find some equivalent statements in termsof substitutions. We prove a theorem stating necessary and sufficientconditions for the existence of a canonical compositional semanticsextending a given partial semantics, after discussing what features onewould want such an extension to have. The theorem involves someassumptions about semantical categories in the spirit of Husserl andTarski.

Wind, water, and molten rock constantly tear apart and resculpt the natural world we live in, and people have always struggled to create structures that will permanently establish their existence on the land. Frank Golhke has committed his camera lens to documenting that fraught relationship between people and place, and this retrospective collection of his work by John Rohrbach reveals how people carve out their living spaces in the face of constant natural disruption. An acclaimed master of landscape photography, (...) Golhke explores in Accommodating Nature how people configure the places where they live, work, and commune, both on an everyday level and in the aftermath of catastrophic destruction. Whether a ranch house anchored fast on an endless Texas plain, the shattered buildings and whipped trees left by a category 5 tornado, or the jagged cliffs of ash and rock created by the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens, the photographs unearth the ways in which new homes and lives emerge from the fragments of the old. Thought-provoking essays by Rebecca Solnit, Frank Gohlke, and John Rohrbach expand upon the issues raised by the images, contemplating the complexities of human and cultural geography and the relationships we have with our respective place. An arresting and vibrant visual essay combining magnificent vistas with intimate emotional detail, Accommodating Nature exposes the intricate threads that bind our lives to the land surrounding us. (shrink)

We consider two formalisations of the notion of a compositionalsemantics for a language, and find some equivalent statements in termsof substitutions. We prove a theorem stating necessary and sufficientconditions for the existence of a canonical compositional semanticsextending a given partial semantics, after discussing what features onewould want such an extension to have. The theorem involves someassumptions about semantical categories in the spirit of Husserl andTarski.

The short-lived emperor Macrinus had a son whose name, inscriptions reveal, was M. Opellius Antoninus Diadumenianus. Little is known about this figure, who is remembered through brief references in the late Roman breviaries and in Herodian, and in a short biography in the collection of imperial lives now known as the Historia Augusta. In 1889, Dessau argued that the lives of the Historia Augusta, which present themselves as written by six different authors in the Age of Constantine, were in fact (...) written by a single writer closer to the year 400, an argument that has now all but prevailed in scholarly circles. Some of the biographies depend on reliable sources, at least in part, and thus can provide actual historical information; others do not, and are mostly or entirely the result of authorial invention. The life of Diadumenianus fits clearly in the latter category. The secondary lives of the Historia Augusta contain no original information, but rather are constructed from a combination of information derived from their ‘parent’ life and invented fiction. So, for example, the life of the Caesar Aelius combines information from the life of Hadrian with fiction, the life of the usurper Avidius Cassius combines information from the life of Marcus Aurelius with fiction, and the lives of Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus combine information from the life of Severus with fiction. In the case of Diadumenianus, the life is even more thoroughly fictional, since the life of Macrinus from which it is derived is itself a kind of secondary life; Cameron suggests that Marius Maximus, the probable source for the author of the Historia Augusta, treated Macrinus as a usurper in the life of Elagabalus. Almost every detail of the life of Diadumenianus is therefore the fictive invention of the author. (shrink)

A distinctive feature of the biographies of Suetonius is his methodical and detailed description of the physical appearances of the emperors. This feature was adopted by two fourth-century Latin writers, Ammianus Marcellinus and the anonymous author of the Historia Augusta. This study will explore how ancient theories of the relationship between appearance and character intersect with the physical descriptions of emperors the authors provide. These authors reveal themselves to be engaged with contemporary approaches to the question without being bound by (...) any one theory, and thus presuppose a readership for whom physiognomic questions were both interesting and debatable. The approaches of the authors to this minor feature in their work also offer broader insight into their biographical style and purpose. (shrink)

À Jean-Luc Nancy, un maître qui m’a donné la chiquenaude initiale et dont la salutation m’a introduit à la pensée. Une des clés pour la lecture de cet ouvrage se trouve à la page 23. Nous y lisons qu’il ne s’agit pas de thématiser l’adoration, c’est-à-dire aussi bien d’en faire la théorie, d’en construire un concept ou d’en proposer une analyse méthodique. Même si l’analyse méthodique n’est pas absente, loin s’en faut, du livre de Jean-Luc Nancy! Mais cette analyse ne (...) fait que frayer un chem... (shrink)

We consider two formalisations of the notion of a compositionalsemantics for a language, and find some equivalent statements in termsof substitutions. We prove a theorem stating necessary and sufficientconditions for the existence of a canonical compositional semanticsextending a given partial semantics, after discussing what features onewould want such an extension to have. The theorem involves someassumptions about semantical categories in the spirit of Husserl andTarski.