An appropriately unprejudiced logical investigation of causation as a type of implication relation is undertaken. The implication delineated is bounded syntactically. The developing argument then leads to a very natural process analysis, which demonstrably captures the established syntactical features. Next relevantly-based semantics for the resulting logical theory are adduced, and requisite adequacy results delivered. At the end of the tour, further improvements are pointed out, and the attractive terrain beyond present developments is glimpsed.

The ordinary attribution of intentionality to (nonhuman) animals raises serious problems for fashionable linguistic accounts of belief and of intentionality generally; and many of the alleged problems arise from such linguistic theories of mind. Another deeper source of alleged problems is the apartness thesis, that there is a significant difference in kind, with substantial moral import, between humans and other animals; for the last lines of defence of this erroneous thesis consist in making out that there are significant intentional differences. (...) A wide range of recent arguments against assigning intentionality (in the full sense) to animals are criticized in detail: those of Stich and Williams, in terms of animals lacking effective or specifiable concepts (concepts now replacing souls); those of Stich and Davidson based on the requirement for beliefs of an isomorphic belief network; those based on the usual opacity of intentionality; those of Descartes and Davidson and others based on the requirement of, or arguments to the essentiality of, language use for attributions of intentionality; arguments based on the requirement of capacity for pretence or awareness of error; and arguments used by Vendler and Malcolm. Several different arguments for assigning intentionality to animals are then advanced, arguments from cerebral organization, exteriorization arguments, and interiorization arguments from the semantical analysis of intentionality. The main arguments advanced are not analogical; they are not anthropocentric, or the result of personifying languageless animals; and the attributions of intentionality they lead to are not impoverished or of reduced status. (shrink)

This paper criticises necessitarianism, the thesis that there is at least one necessary truth; and defends possibilism, the thesis that all propositions are contingent, or that anything is possible. The second section maintains that no good conventionalist account of necessity is available, while the third section criticises model theoretic necessitarianism. The fourth section sketches some recent technical work on nonclassical logic, with the aim of weakening necessitarian intuitions and strengthening possibilist intuitions. The fifth section considers several a prioristic attempts at (...) demonstrating that there is at least one necessary proposition and finds them inadequate. The final section emphasises the epistemic aspect of possibilism. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)