© The Authors [2018]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...In his Moby Dick, Herman Melville writes that “to produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme”. Marc Lange’s Because Without Cause is definitely an impressive book that deals with a mighty theme, that of non-causal explanations in the empirical sciences and in mathematics. Blending a (...) variety of insights originating within the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics, the book has an ambitious goal: capturing what features, in the many examples of putative explanations offered by mathematicians and scientists, make them genuinely explanatory.The architecture of Because Without Cause reflects its mighty character. The book is divided into four parts and eleven chapters, preceded by... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that explanations just ARE those sorts of things that, under the right circumstances and in the right sort of way, bring about understanding. This raises the question of why such a seemingly simple account of explanation, if correct, would not have been identified and agreed upon decades ago. The answer is that only recently has it been made possible to analyze explanation in terms of understanding without the risk of collapsing both to merely phenomenological states. (...) For the most part, theories of explanation were for 50 years held hostage to the historical accident that they far outstripped in sophistication corresponding accounts of understanding. (shrink)

In recent years, substructural approaches to paradoxes have become quite popular. But whatever restrictions on structural rules we may want to enforce, it is highly desirable that such restrictions be accompanied by independent philosophical motivation, not directly related to paradoxes. Indeed, while these recent developments have shed new light on a number of issues pertaining to paradoxes, it seems that we now have even more open questions than before, in particular two very pressing ones: what (independent) motivations do we have (...) (if any) for restrictions on structural rules, and what to make of the plurality of new logics emerging from these restrictions, i.e. how to ‘choose’ among the different options. In this paper, we address these two questions from the perspective of a dialogical conception of logic that we've been advocating in recent years. We will argue that dialogical interpretations of structural rules, that is, as rules determining specific properties of the dialogues in question, provide a conveniently neutral framework to adjudicate between the different substructural proposals that have been made in the literature on paradoxes. (shrink)