The aim of this paper is to provide some acquaintance with the exegetical history of ἐξαίφνης inside the Platonic Tradition, from Plato to Marsilio Ficino, by way of Middle Platonism and Greek Neoplatonism. (Since this is only a draft, several modifications should be made later, notably in order to improve the English.) Some part has been presented in Los Angeles: “Damascius’ Theodicy: Psychic Input of Disorder and Evil into the World”, 16th Annual ISNS (International Society for Neoplatonic Studies) Conference, Loyola (...) Marymount University, 14th June 2018. (shrink)

Many languages have past-and-counterfactuality markers such as English simple past. There have been various attempts to find a common definition for both uses, but I will argue in this paper that they all have problems with ruling out unacceptable interpretations, or accounting for the contrary-to-fact implicature of counterfactual conditionals, or predicting the observed cross-linguistic variation, or a combination thereof. By combining insights from two basic lines of reasoning, I will propose a simple and transparent approach that solves all the observed (...) problems and offers a new understanding of the concept of counterfactuality. (shrink)

Is Orthodox Judaism committed to the existence of a Torah that pre-existed the world? This paper argues that Orthodoxy is so committed unless it can find compelling philosophical or theological reasons to reject the possibility of such an entity, and then to re-interpret allegorically all of the texts that speak of such a Torah. Providing an ontology of primordial texts, I argue that no compelling reason can be found to deny the existence of the primordial Torah.

There are numerous occasions on which we need to reason about a finite number of events. And we often need to consider only those events which are given or which we perceive. These give rise to the Criteria of Finiteness and Closedness. Allen's logic provides a way of reasoning about events. In this paper I examine Allen and Hayes' axiomatisation of this logic, and develop two other axiomatisations based on the work by Russell and Thomason. I shall show that these (...) three axiomatisations are weakly equivalent, and that only the last two meet the Criteria of Finiteness and Closedness (to different degrees). I shall then examine two ways of constructing instants of time in a finite and closed world, i.e. the Russell construction and the Thomason construction. I shall prove that these two constructions are equivalent under certain conditions. (shrink)

Logics of discrete time are, in Arthur Prior’s words, “applicable in limited fields of discourse in which we are concerned with what happens in a sequence of discrete states,” independent of “any serious metaphysical assumption that time is discrete.” This insight is applied to natural language semantics, a widespread assumption in which is that time is, as is the real line, dense. “Limited fields of discourse” are construed as finite sets of temporal propositions, inducing bounded notions of temporal granularity that (...) can be refined to expand the discourse. The construal is developed in line with Prior’s view of what is “metaphysically fundamental”. (shrink)

One of the principal objections to a tensed or dynamic theory of time is the ancient puzzle about the extent of the present. Three alternative conceptions of the extent of the present are considered: an instantaneous present, an atomic present, and a non-metrical present. The first conception is difficult to reconcile with the objectivity of temporal becoming posited by a dynamic theory of time. The second conception solves that problem, but only at the expense of making change discontinuous. The third (...) conception is the most plausible: that "the present" is a non-metrical notion which must be completed by the mention of some event or interval in order to have a measure, in which case what is present varies with one's context. (shrink)

A set of axioms implicitly defining the standard, though not instant-based but interval-based, time topology is used as a basis to build a temporal modal logic of events. The whole apparatus contains neither past, present, and future operators nor indexicals, but only B-series relations and modal operators interpreted in the standard way. Determinism and indeterminism are then introduced into the logic of events via corresponding axioms. It is shown that, if determinism and indeterminism are understood in accordance with their core (...) meaning, the way in which they are formally introduced here represents the only right way to do this, given that we restrict ourselves to one real world and make no use of the many real worlds assumption. But then the result is that the very truth conditions for sentences about indeterministic events imply the existence of tensed truths, in spite of the fact that these conditions are formulated (in the indeterministic axiom) in terms of tenseless language. The tenseless theory of time implies determinism, while indeterminism requires the flow of time assumption. (shrink)

Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.

We think of a boundary whenever we think of an entity demarcated from its surroundings. There is a boundary (a line) separating Maryland and Pennsylvania. There is a boundary (a circle) isolating the interior of a disc from its exterior. There is a boundary (a surface) enclosing the bulk of this apple. Sometimes the exact location of a boundary is unclear or otherwise controversial (as when you try to trace out the margins of Mount Everest, or even the boundary of (...) your own body). Sometimes the boundary lies skew to any physical discontinuity or qualitative differentiation (as with the border of Wyoming, or the boundary between the upper and lower halves of a homogeneous sphere). But whether sharp or blurry, natural or artificial, for every object there appears to be a boundary that marks it off from the rest of the world. Events, too, have boundaries — at least temporal boundaries. Our lives are bounded by our births and by our deaths; the soccer game began at 3pm sharp and ended with the referee's final whistle at 4:45pm. It is sometimes suggested that even abstract entities, such as concepts or sets, have boundaries of their own, and Wittgenstein could emphatically proclaim that the boundaries of our language are the boundaries of our world. Whether all this boundary talk is coherent, however, and whether it reflects the structure of the world or simply the organizing activity of our mind, are matters of deep philosophical controversy. (shrink)

The present PhD dissertation aims to examine the relation between modality and change in Aristotle’s metaphysics. -/- On the one hand, Aristotle supports his modal realism (i.e., worldly objects have modal properties - potentialities and essences - that ground the ascriptions of possibility and necessity) by arguing that the rejection of modal realism makes change inexplicable, or, worse, banishes it from the realm of reality. On the other hand, the Stagirite analyses processes by means of modal notions (‘change is the (...) actuality of what is virtual insofar as it is virtual’). In other words: to grasp what change is, one has to resort to the modal idiom of potentialities, while the fact that there is change is indicative of the fact that nature is full of modal properties. -/- Aristotle’s modal and kinetic realism finds a negative in the figure of the Megaric Diodorus Kronus. The polemical situation of Greek philosophy has indeed the dialectical advantage of not opposing the Aristotelian position to a sui generis straw man. Both in its reduction of modal judgements to temporal quantifications and in its dissolution of the reality of the state-of-being-in-motion in favour of a cinematographic view of processes, the philosophical figure of reductionist antirealism embodied by Diodorus constitutes an alternative that takes the opposite view of Aristotle’s realism. -/- The present study is structured as a discussion between these two positions. In the face of Diodorus’ antirealist challenges, Aristotle articulates modal and kinetic considerations: the answers he gives to Diodorus’ puzzles thus provide valuable insight into his metaphysics. Moreover, the examination of Aristotle’s and Diodorus’ metaphysics, because of their insight and originality, will not fail to interest the philosopher concerned with the metaphysical foundations of modern physics, insofar as the entanglement between modalities and processes is nowadays at the core of mechanics (phase spaces, path integrals, etc.). (shrink)

Many theists reject the notion that God’s eternity consists in his timelessness — i.e., in his lacking temporal extension and failing to possess properties at any times. Some of these “divine temporalists” hold that, for philosophical reasons, it is impossible to accept both the timelessness of God and the view that God knows what happens at different times and brings about events in time. 1 Many reject divine timelessness as a dubious import from Platonism with no biblical or theological warrant.2 (...) And some question the very intelligibility of the doctrine. (shrink)