This paper argues that we should solve paradoxes for propositions (such as the Russell–Myhill paradox) in essentially the same way that we solve Russellian paradoxes for sets. That is, the standard, iterative approach to sets is extended to include properties, and then the resulting hierarchy of sets and properties is used to construct propositions. Propositions on this account are structured in the sense of mirroring the sentences that express them, and they would seem to serve the needs of philosophers of (...) language and metaphysicians who rely on such propositions. The resulting account has limitations, comparable to those faced by the iterative approach to sets, but it is argued to be in important ways preferable to others that have been proposed. (shrink)

This handbook offers a deep analysis of the main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation from both a logical-philosophical and legal perspective. These forms are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and the handbook accordingly divides in three parts: the first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the main general forms of reasoning and argumentation relevant for legal discourse. The third one looks at their application in law as well as at (...) the different areas of legal reasoning. The handbook’s division in three parts reflects its conceptual architecture, since legal reasoning and argumentation are considered in relation to the more general types of reasoning. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to argue that all—or almost all—logical rules have exceptions. In particular, it is argued that this is a moral that we should draw from the semantic paradoxes. The idea that we should respond to the paradoxes by revising logic in some way is familiar. But previous proposals advocate the replacement of classical logic with some alternative logic. That is, some alternative system of rules, where it is taken for granted that these hold without exception. (...) The present proposal is quite different. According to this, there is no such alternative logic. Rather, classical logic retains the status of the ‘one true logic’, but this status must be reconceived so as to be compatible with (almost) all of its rules admitting of exceptions. This would seem to have significant repercussions for a range of widely held views about logic: e.g. that it is a priori, or that it is necessary. Indeed, if the arguments of the paper succeed, then such views must be given up. (shrink)

Plausibly, mathematical claims are true, but the fundamental furniture of the world does not include mathematical objects. This can be made sense of by providing mathematical claims with paraphrases, which make clear how the truth of such claims does not require the fundamental existence of mathematical objects. This paper explores the consequences of this type of position for explanatory structure. There is an apparently straightforward relationship between this sort of structure, and the logical sort: i.e. logically complex claims are explained (...) by logically simpler ones. For example, disjunctions are explained by their (true) disjuncts, while generalizations are explained by their (true) instances. This would seem as plausible in the case of mathematics as elsewhere. Also, it would seem to be something that the anti-realist approaches at issue would want to preserve. It will be argued, however, that these approaches cannot do this: they lead not merely to violations of the familiar principles relating logical and explanatory structure, but even to reversals of these. That is, there are cases where generalizations explain their instances, or disjunctions their disjuncts. (shrink)

European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking--the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life--is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and merely map out new subjects for discussion and investigation. In poetry, drama, and philosophy they in fact discovered the human mind. The stages in man's gradual (...) understanding of himself are revealed in the course of ancient literature from Homer to Virgil. A rational view of the nature of man slowly established itself in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, tragedy and literary criticism, pre-Socratic thought, and early Greek ethics all the way to the discovery of humanitas and the spiritual landscape of Virgil's Arcadia. The Discovery of the Mind is a landmark work in tracing this evolution of consciousness--one of the distinguishing characteristics of the history of man. (shrink)

This handbook offers a deep analysis of the main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation from both a logical-philosophical and legal perspective. These forms are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and the handbook accordingly divides in three parts: the first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the main general forms of reasoning and argumentation relevant for legal discourse. The third one looks at their application in law as well as at (...) the different areas of legal reasoning. The handbook’s division in three parts reflects its conceptual architecture, since legal reasoning and argumentation are considered in relation to the more general types of reasoning. (shrink)

O presente artigo propõe-se fazer uma releitura da actualidade paradoxal de Heidegger. Para além das inegáveis ambiguidades da sua vida, encontramos no seu caminho de pensamento a prova de uma vigorosa crítica da ideologia compreendida no seu sentido mais radical. O seu pensamento pode ser compreendido como uma destruição "sistemática" dos momentos fundadores em torno dos quais se constituiu uma parte da reflexão ocidental (ontoideológica), enquanto que afirmação ideológica (autoreferencial) de verdade e valores que mascaram e justificam o poder do (...) homem sobre e contra o outro homem. No coração desta Destruktion está uma experiência do pensamento que dispõe para a escuta de um ser cujo poder essencial é o de deixar-ser, sem revendicar um poder-saber sobre aquilo que é dado. Neste lugar de abertura ex-statica, que constitui o abismo (Ab-Grund) de todo o pensamento autocentrado e que não se dá sem riscos, abre-se a possibilidade de uma nova compreensão antropológica e ética. /// This article attempts to offer a re-reading of the paradoxical relevance of Heidegger for the present times. Beyond the undeniable ambiguities of his life, we can find in the course of his thought a vigorous critique of ideology in the most radical sense of the word. His thought may be understood as a u systematic" destruction of the foundational moments upon which Western thought (as onto-theological) is established. This is done to the degree that it conceals a self-referring ideological affirmation of truth and values that hides and justifies the exercise of power of human beings over and against each other. At the heart of this Destruktion, there is an experience of thought disposed to attentively hear a being whose essential power consists in letting-be, without claiming knowledge as a power to impose itself on what is given. In this space of ex-static opening, constituting the abyss of all self-centered thought together with the risks that it involves, the possibility of a new anthropological and ethical understanding is in the offing. (shrink)

In this book Bruno Latour brings together these different approaches to provide a lively and challenging analysis of science, demonstrating how social context..

In his work, Jules Coleman has held that the rule of recognition, if conceived of as a shared cooperative activity, should be the gateway through which to incorporate moral constraints on the content of law. This analysis, however, leaves unanswered two important questions. For one thing, we do not know when or even why morality becomes a criterion of legality. And, for another thing, we still do not know what conception of morality it is that we are dealing with. In (...) this article, we will attempt to clarify in greater depth what relations there are between the social practice of law and morality. We will thus see how the cooperative nature of social practices imbues law with a moral force, and how this makes it possible to establish a "weak" connection between law and morality: To see this, we will need to single out some basic features of cooperative social practices, thus setting out a suitable framework for the view just mentioned. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage montre la portée universelle de Maître Eckhart en étudiant l'influence de son oeuvre dans la phénoménologie d'Husserl et la dialectique d'Hegel, et les rapports entre la pensée de Maître Eckhart et la mystique chinoise de Laozi.

1. La trasformazione dei principi di legittimazione degli ordinamenti giuridici contemporanei -- 2. I mutamenti nel sistema giuridico -- 3. Analisi del linguaggio giuridico, legistica e legimatica -- 4. I diritti difficili nel sistema giuridico.

The dialogue focuses on the major issues of the contemporary theoretical debate on judicial review and the Supreme Court's role in American constitutional democracy. The discussion begins with the US Supreme Court's case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, successfully argued by Prof. Katyal last year, and covers important issues such as the separation and balance of powers after 9/11, the legitimacy of the laws of terror, the relation between US constitutional law and foreign law, the counter‐majoritarian difficulties posed by the exercise of (...) judicial review, and the legal academy's influence on legal practice. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss the relations between psychology and politics that guide the action of the different political positions. The starting point will be an analysis of the proposal of the political scientist Mark Lilla to consider the "reactionary spirit" as a position structurally linked to an anti-progressivism, which allows also, by contrast, to discuss the progressive positions. This analysis is anchored in the articulation between politics and temporality, understood here as one of the elements that (...) outline a psychology of conservatism. It helps to redescribe significant features of contemporary political dilemmas, offering, for example, a distinction between the reactionary and the conservative position, as well as defining features of the worldview of the reactionary and, consequently, clues to understanding the rise of the extreme right. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss the presence of psychoanalysis in Adorno’s ’Philosophy of the new music’. He draws on the Benjaminian scheme of understanding Baudelaire’s poetry (understood as an elaboration of the shock experiences in life in post-industrial Revolution capitalism), but uses it in music criticism. The works of Schönberg and Stravinsky, the mostimportant composers of two schools of the so-called “new or modern music”, deals with different compositional subjects and their ways of dealing with the shocks (...) of modern life. Both Benjamin and Adorno draw on Freudian theory for the understanding of this notion of shock, in particular his theory of anxiety and trauma. The works of these composers, understood as models of trauma elaboration, offer different ways of reacting to trauma: the identification with the aggressor and resistance. Therein lie elements that help to defend the hypothesis of the centrality of the notion of suffering in Adorno’swork. (shrink)

The paper aims to sketch Kant’s response to the mind-body problem in his first work, Thoughts on the true estimation of living forces (1747). This is accomplished by first examining the origins of the problem in Descartes, then exploring the traditional responses to the problem, occasionalism, pre-established harmony, and physical influx. Finally, the paper positions Kant as a proponent of physical influx and highlights the unique features and challenges of his perspective.

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the concept of legal personality and discuss whether personality may be conferred on artificial intelligence systems (AIs). Legal personality will be presented as a doctrinal category that holds together bundles of rights and obligations; as a result, we first frame it as a node of inferential links between factual preconditions and legal effects. However, this inferentialist reading does not account for the ‘background reasons’ of legal personality, i.e., it does not explain why (...) we cluster different situations under this doctrinal category and how extra-legal information is integrated into it. We argue that one way to account for this background is to adopt a neoinstitutional perspective and to update the ontology of legal concepts with a further layer, the meta-institutional one. We finally argue that meta-institutional concepts can also support us in finding an equilibrium around the legal-policy choices that are involved in including (or not including) AIs among legal persons. (shrink)

General-elimination harmony articulates Gentzen’s idea that the elimination-rules are justified if they infer from an assertion no more than can already be inferred from the grounds for making it. Dummett described the rules as not only harmonious but stable if the E-rules allow one to infer no more and no less than the I-rules justify. Pfenning and Davies call the rules locally complete if the E-rules are strong enough to allow one to infer the original judgement. A method is given (...) of generating harmonious general-elimination rules from a collection of I-rules. We show that the general-elimination rules satisfy Pfenning and Davies’ test for local completeness, but question whether that is enough to show that they are stable. Alternative conditions for stability are considered, including equivalence between the introduction- and elimination-meanings of a connective, and recovery of the grounds for assertion, finally generalizing the notion of local completeness to capture Dummett’s notion of stability satisfactorily. We show that the general-elimination rules meet the last of these conditions, and so are indeed not only harmonious but also stable. (shrink)

German classicist's monumental study of the origins of European thought in Greek literature and philosophy. Brilliant, widely influential. Includes "Homer's View of Man," "The Olympian Gods," "The Rise of the Individual in the Early Greek Lyric," "Pindar's Hymn to Zeus," "Myth and Reality in Greek Tragedy," and "Aristophanes and Aesthetic Criticism.".

In a series of papers, 137–158; 1994, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23, 61–74, 1999) Fine develops his hylomorphic theory of embodiments. In this article, we supply a formal semantics for this theory that is adequate to the principles laid down for it in. In Section 1, we lay out the theory of embodiments as Fine presents it. In Section 2, we argue on Cantorian grounds that the theory needs to be stabilized, and sketch some ways forward, discussing various choice points (...) in modeling the view. In Section 3, we develop a formal semantics for the theory of embodiments by constructing embodiments in stages and restricting the domain of the second-order quantifiers. In Section 4 we give a few illustrative examples to show how the models deliver Finean hylomorphic consequences. In Section 5, we prove that Fine’s principles are sound with respect to this semantics. In Section 6 we present some inexpressibility results concerning Fine’s various notions of parthood and show that in our formal semantics these notions are all expressible using a single mereological primitive. In Section 7, we prove several mereological results stemming from the model theory, showing that the mereology is surprisingly robust. In Section 8, we draw some philosophical lessons from the formal semantics, and in particular respond to Koslicki’s main objection to Fine’s theory. In the appendix we present proofs of the inexpressibility results of Section 6. (shrink)

The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of Nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of Nature have been continuously developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, (...) since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of Nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at Nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name "Gaia" for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on "natural religion", Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of Nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime. (shrink)

Serious actualism is the prima facie plausible thesis that things couldn’t have been related while being nothing. The thesis plays an important role in a number of arguments in metaphysics, e.g., in Plantinga’s argument for the claim that propositions do not ontologically depend on the things that they are about and in Williamson’s argument for the claim that he, Williamson, is necessarily something. Salmon has put forward that which is, arguably, the most pressing challenge to serious actualists. Salmon’s objection is (...) based on a scenario intended to elicit the judgment that merely possible entities may nonetheless be actually referred to, and so may actually have properties. It is shown that predicativism, the thesis that names are true of their bearers, provides the resources for replying to Salmon’s objection. In addition, an argument for serious actualism based on Stephanou, 219–250 2007) is offered. Finally, it is shown that once serious actualism is conjoined with some minimal assumptions, it implies property necessitism, the thesis that necessarily all properties are necessarily something, as well as a strong comprehension principle for higher-order modal logic according to which for every condition there necessarily is the property of being a thing satisfying that condition. (shrink)

Are there ‘self-referential’ propositions? That is, propositions that say of themselves that they have a certain property, such as that of being false. There can seem reason to doubt that there are. At the same time, there are a number of reasons why it matters. For suppose that there are indeed no such propositions. One might then hope that while paradoxes such as the Liar show that many plausible principles about sentences must be given up, no such fate will befall (...) principles about propositions. But the existence of self-referential propositions would dash such hopes. Further, the existence of such propositions would also seem to challenge the widespread claim that Liar sentences fail to express propositions. The aim of this paper is thus to settle the question–at least given an assumption. In particular, I argue that if propositions are structured, then self-referential propositions exist. (shrink)

The topic of liberty in Foucault becomes controversial when related to the objections, predicted by the author, for the subjects to be located outside the power networks. However, Foucault also points out potential for resistance and a notion of freedom involved by historical circumstances, which suggests original normative questions. In order to analyze the tension between domination and freedom in his work, and what is normatively reflected, two main directions are noted: the idea of freedom as something inherent in power (...) relations and as the foundation of the critical exercise of knowledge. It is argued that Foucault`s estimation of dimensions of freedom generates singular implications of evaluation of social conditions based on a normative temperance. (shrink)

Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different ways to exist. It is a position with deep roots in the history of philosophy, and in which there has been a recent resurgence of interest. In contemporary presentations, it is stated in terms of fundamental languages: as the view that such languages contain more than one quantifier. For example, one ranging over abstract objects, and another over concrete ones. A natural worry, however, is that the languages proposed by the pluralist (...) are mere notational variants of those proposed by the monist, in which case the debate between the two positions would not seem to be substantive. Jason Turner has given an ingenious response to this worry, in terms of a principle that he calls ‘logical realism’. This paper offers a counter-response on behalf of the ‘notationalist’. I argue that, properly applied, the principle of logical realism is no threat to the claim that the languages in question are notational variants. Indeed, there seems to be every reason to think that they are. (shrink)

Are there different sizes of infinity? That is, are there infinite sets of different sizes? This is one of the most natural questions that one can ask about the infinite. But it is of course generally taken to be settled by mathematical results, such as Cantor’s theorem, to the effect that there are infinite sets without bijections between them. These results settle the question, given an almost universally accepted principle relating size to the existence of functions. The principle is: for (...) any sets A and B, if A is the same size as B, then there is a bijection from A to B. The aim of the paper, however, is to argue that this question is in fact wide open: to argue that we are not in a position to know the answer, because we are not in one to know the principle. The aim, that is, is to argue that for all we know there is only one size of infinity. (shrink)

This paper discusses three generic types or ways of understanding the common good found in the literature, and then describes the implications of the integral common good for seven key practices of humanistic management. In particular, compared to conventional management, an approach to humanistic management based on the integral common good tends to: 1) have institutional mission and vision statements that are developed by multiple stakeholders that emphasize social and ecological well-being ahead of financial well-being; 2) have a strategic orientation (...) that emphasizes collaboration, “minimizer” and “transformer” generic strategies, a Radical Resource Based View, and uses Porter’s five forces as a way to foster collaboration; 3) structure organizations based on experimentation, sensitization, dignification, and participation ; 4) develop control systems based on value loops that seek to enhance the flourishing of multiple stakeholders; 5) emphasize multi-directional multi-stakeholder communication; 6) invite all stakeholders to participate in making decisions, including developing and choosing alternatives; 7) foster leadership based on socialized power, a focus on SMART 2.0 goals, a desire to ensure everyone is treated fairly, and an emphasis on relationships that nurture community and the integral common good. Implications for research and teaching are discussed. (shrink)

I argue that dialetheists have a problem with the concept of logical consequence. The upshot of this problem is that dialetheists must appeal to a hierarchy of concepts of logical consequence. Since this hierarchy is akin to those invoked by more orthodox resolutions of the semantic paradoxes, its emergence would appear to seriously undermine the dialetheic treatments of these paradoxes. And since these are central to the case for dialetheism, this would represent a significant blow to the position itself.