In a pair of very important papers, namely “Space, Time and Individuals” in the Journal of Philosophy for October 1955 and “The Indestructibility and Immutability of Substances” in Philosophical Studies for April 1956, Professor N. L. Wilson began something which badly needed beginning, namely the construction of a logically rigorous “substance-language” in which we talk about enduring and changing individuals as we do in common speech, as opposed to the “space-time” language favoured by very many mathematical logicians, perhaps most notably (...) by Quine. This enterprise of Wilson's is one with which I could hardly sympathize more heartily than I do; and one wishes for this logically rigorous “substance-language” not only when one is reading Quine but also when one is reading many other people. How fantastic it is, for instance, that Kotarbinski1 should call his metaphysics “Reism” when the very last kind of entity it has room for is things —instead of them it just has the world-lines or life-histories of things; “fourdimensional worms”, as Wilson says. Wilson, moreover, has at least one point of superiority to another rebel against space-time talk, P. F. Strawson; namely he does seriously attempt to meet formalism with formalism—to show that logical rigour is not a monopoly of the other side. At another point, however, Strawson seems to me to see further than Wilson; he is aware that substance-talk cannot be carried on without tenses, whereas Wilson tries to do without them. Wilson, in short, has indeed brought us out of Egypt; but as yet has us still wandering about the Sinai Peninsula; the Promised Land is a little further on than he has taken us. (shrink)

WHAT do we mean by saying that a being, God for example, is omniscient? One way of answering this question is to translate ‘God is omniscient’ into some slightly more formalised language than colloquial English, e.g. one with variables of a number of different types, including variables replaceable by statements, and quantifiers binding thes.

Proceedings of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics is a cover-to-cover translation of the Trudy Matematicheskogo Instituta imeni V.A. Steklova of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Each issue ordinarily contains either one book-length article or a collection of articles pertaining to the same topic.

It is frequently said that words like ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘ago’, ‘present’, ‘past’, ‘future’ and the various indications of tense, are ‘egocentric’ or ‘token-reflexive’ in character. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that the apparent egocentricity or token-reflexiveness of this class of expression is deceptive. It is perhaps not easy to see how on a point of this sort deception is possible, but a parallel case may make the position clearer.

Iris Marion Young fue una de las pensadoras feministas más importantes del último cuarto del siglo pasado. Su obra es reconocida internacionalmente como una de las aportaciones más creativas e influyentes de nuestra época. Con el objeto de celebrar su aporte único y su novedad y de mantener vivo su pensamiento, Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán desarrolla un riguroso análisis crítico de su obra desde las cuestiones de justicia social, democracia deliberativa y su relación con la teoría de la opresión, hasta el enfoque (...) metodológico con el que Young aproxima su estudio sobre la experiencia corporal femenina llevando a diálogo las ideas de Simone de Beauvoir y Merleau-Ponty. Se examinan sus herramientas conceptuales articuladas desde la teoría crítica (Habermas y Marcuse), junto con el postestructuralismo psicoanalítico (Kristeva e Irigaray). Asimismo, el libro trata de plasmar las fructíferas controversias teóricas que Iris Young llevó a cabo con autores y autoras de relevancia internacional como lo son Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, John Rawls o el propio Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)