Deictic (or pointing) gestures are traditionally known to have a simple function: to supply something as the referent of a demonstrative linguistic expression. I argue that deixis can have a more complex function. A deictic gesture can be used to _say something_ in conversation and can thereby become a full discourse move in its own right. To capture this phenomenon, which I call _rich demonstration_, I present an update semantics on which deictic gestures can indicate situations from a conversation’s context (...) and those situations coherently connect to prior discourse to generate information. (shrink)

Comment les tendances lourdes de l’évolution du droit canonique depuis une cinquantaine d’années peuvent–elles contribuer à une analyse pluridisciplinaire des mutations de l’Église catholique elle-même? Peut-on discerner certains liens ou certains indices de connexité entre évolution du droit canonique et mutation de l’Église catholique dans les sociétés sécularisées de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest, voire entre les dysfonctionnements du premier et l’affaissement de la seconde? Le texte voudrait montrer comment une triple crise de légitimité, d’effectivité et de légalité du droit canonique met (...) en lumière l’évolution de l’Église catholique et les enjeux d’une nouvelle relation entre responsabilité et authenticité. (shrink)

De nos jours, les religions sont souvent invitées à prendre part à la promotion des droits de l'homme dans le monde. Dans ce nouveau cadre, les religions se voient progressivement demander d'établir leur crédibilité et leur loyauté envers une doctrine des droits de l'homme relativement homogène. Quoi qu'il en soit, il serait biaisé d'entamer une analyse de ces nouvelles responsabilités religieuses sans préalablement examiner les modes de conceptualisation du «religieux» présupposés par les doctrines des droits de l'homme elles-mêmes. Cette approche (...) juridique n'est pas seulement utile au titre d'une analyse interne au monde du droit, mais aussi comme une contribution juridique à une compréhension élargie de l'interdisciplinarité des sciences des religions. (shrink)

Clásicos y modernos -- Convenciones y mixturas -- Cine independiente -- El nuevo canon -- Cine latinoamericano -- Cine ecuatoriano -- Temas.

This paper presents an analysis of face emoji (disc-shaped pictograms with stylized facial expressions) that accompany written text. We propose that there is a use of face emoji in which they comment on a target proposition expressed by the accompanying text, as opposed to making an independent contribution to discourse. Focusing on positively valenced and negatively valenced emoji (which we gloss as _happy_ and _unhappy_, respectively), we argue that the emoji comment on how the target proposition bears on a contextually (...) provided discourse value endorsed by the author. Discourse values embody what an author desires, aspires to, wishes for, or hopes for. Our analysis derives a range of non-trivial generalizations, including (i) ordering restrictions with regards to the placement of emoji and text, (ii) cases of apparent mixed emotions, and (iii) cases where the lexical content of the accompanying text influences the acceptability of a face emoji. (shrink)

Debates about the theological implications of recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion have tended to focus on the question of theism. The question of whether there is any disagreement about the conceptualization of the individual human being has been largely overlooked. In this article, I argue that evolutionary and cognitive accounts of religion typically depend upon a view of cognition that conceptually isolates the mind from its particular social and physical environmental contexts. By embracing this view (...) of the mind, these accounts also unwittingly embrace an abstract individualist view of individual personhood that Christian theologians have explicitly battled against. Taken as a whole, the field leaves sufficient room for supplementary theories that are compatible with theological accounts of the relational individual, but in practice, no effort has been made to engage, or even to accommodate, any other view of individual personhood. (shrink)

Leone's Dialogues consists of three conversations - 'On Love and Desire,' 'On the Universality of Love,' and 'On the Origin of Love' - that take place over a period of three subsequent days.They are organized in a dialogic format, much like a theatrical representation, of a conversation between a man, Philo, who plays the role of the lover and teacher, and a woman, Sophia, the beloved and pupil. The discussion covers a wide range of topics that have as their common (...) denominator the idea of Love. Through the dialogue, the author explores many different points of view and complex philosophical ideas. Grounded in a distinctly Jewish tradition, and drawing on Neoplatonic philosophical structures and Arabic sources, the work offers a useful compendium of classical and contemporary thought, yet was not incompatible with Christian doctrine. (shrink)

Celebrated as the equal to the great philosophers of old, namely Plato and Aristotle, whom – as Cassiodorus put it – he taught to speak Latin better than they spoke Greek, Boethius aspired to fully emancipate Roman culture from its Greek models through translations and exegesis so faithful they would leave nothing more to be desired from the original. The essay focuses on Boethius philhellenism, without complexes insofar as it had little to do either with the mixed feelings of his (...) Roman predecessors or with the plundering agenda of his Christian contemporaries. Special attention is paid to the close relationship Boethius established between word for word translations and multi-layered commentaries which he thought of and – albeit partially – carried out as part of the same scholarly endeavour. Devoid of literary pretentions as well as free from aspirations to autonomy, Boethius literal rendering and scrupulous interpretation were meant to be completely self-sufficient. Together they stand out as both the most innovative and the most conservative features of his ambitious cultural project. -/- Célébré comme l’égal des grands philosophes du passé, auxquels il aurait appris à parler Latin mieux qu’ils ne parlaient Grec, Boèce a caressé le rêve d’une émancipation radicale de la culture romaine vis-à-vis des modèles grecs qu’il se proposait de traduire et interpréter assez fidèlement pour que la comparaison avec les sources ne soit plus nécessaire. De son effort de livrer un Aristote et un Platon latins à la hauteur des originaux grecs, nous étudions l’étroite solidarité qui relie la traduction mot-à-mot des textes grecs et la restitution scrupuleuse de leur sens. Cette double tâche, que Boèce a conçue et menée d’un seul tenant, nous est dès lors apparue comme le reflet d’un philhellénisme sans complexes, tout aussi éloigné des sentiments ambivalents que nourrissaient vis-à-vis des hellènes ses devanciers romains que des efforts visant à domestiquer l’héritage classique auxquels se livraient certains de ses contemporains de même confession que lui. Affranchis de tout rêve d’autonomie, les traductions et les commentaires de Boèce se conçoivent comme parfaitement autosuffisants. Ensemble ils constituent ce qu’il y a à la fois de franchement novateur et de profondément conservateur dans son projet de faire parler Latin les sources grecques. (shrink)

In a recent paper T. D. J. Chappell advances the thesis that orthodox Christianity is incompatible with consequentialism. 1 His thesis is grounded on a number of premises; I shall, however, confine my criticism to only one of them, i.e. a consequentialist God could not possibly have created a world. Here is his argument.

Just as the pleasant experience differs from the non-pleasant or unpleasant, and the aesthetic from the non-aesthetic, internally or qualitatively, and not merely in degree, or externally or relationally, so, it is natural to expect, a moment of moral living differs from a moral or immoral moment. Indeed, from many quarters, and most emphatically from the Stoic and Christian, we have been wont to hear that if we but leave our sinful or indifferent lives and put on righteousness or (...) goodness, we shall become new men or men reborn, even creatures of a different species. But according to many analyses of morality these promises of transfiguration or translation are nonsensical lies: for the moral experience, as exhibited in these analyses, differs from the non-moral or immoral only in respect of external relations, or at the most in degree. Whether the truth resides in the promises or in the analyses is, obviously, a question of no mean import. It is also a vast one, while the time and space that can be given up to an article are brief; hence the following will be barely more than a raising of the question, or a provocation, by means of rough statements, some dogmatic, others hypothetical. (shrink)

Originally published in 1948. Moses Maimonides was one of the most powerful philosophers of the Middle Ages. The philosophical basis which he elaborated for Judaism had a profound influence on mediaeval Christian thinkers. This volume describes the full background of Maimonides’s thinking in its twelfth-century historical and religious context.

In this article, we offer a rebuttal to a key thesis in Chapter 5 of Engelhardt’s After God: namely, that there exists an “unbridgeable gap” between the dominant secular culture and traditional religious believers. Contra Engelhardt, we argue that it is possible to bridge the gap by employing a strategy that includes, but is not limited to, methods for cultivating understanding and respect and a sense of solidarity. Our argument proceeds in three steps. First, we elucidate Engelhardt’s thesis in light (...) of some of the key concepts he discusses elsewhere in After God. Second, in the hope of developing understanding and respect, we elucidate the history and teachings that form the consciences of traditional Christian medical professionals concerning abortion, euthanasia, and disfiguring surgeries. Third, in the hope of developing a sense of solidarity, we explain the broad scope of the dominant secular culture’s attempt to limit people’s freedom of conscience rights, showing that it includes not only traditional Christians but also members of other traditional religions, members of mainline religious groups, people with alternative conceptions of secularity, and even faithful members of the dominant secular culture. (shrink)

Nature can remove us from an obsessive humanism. It can return us to a state of thinking about the world rather than about ourselves. Yet, what is the world “without us?” In this question there seems to be a metaphysical issue at stake: What is the world, really, whether humans or not? Is it possible that hiking (especially in remote environments) may divulge this question’s answer?

The way in which people change and represent their spiritual evolution is often determined by recurrent language structures. Through the analysis of ancient and modern stories and their words and images, this book describes the nature of conversion through explorations of the encounter with the religious message, the discomfort of spiritual uncertainty, the loss of personal and social identity, the anxiety of destabilization, the reconstitution of the self and the discovery of a new language of the soul.

This essay aims to summarize and explore two issues that, in the exegetical and representational traditions of the biblical text, have triggered a myriad of semiotic intelligences. First, the nature of Cain’s face at the moment of the sacrifice refused him by the Lord, a face variously interpreted as angry, sad, dejected, depressed, dark. Second, the nature of the sign imposed by God on Cain following Abel’s fratricide. After exploring Jewish and Christian exegesis, ancient and modern, with some reference (...) to contemporary narrative versions (and especially to Saramago’s _Cain_), the reflection will turn to the question of whether this kind of exegetical questioning can be part of the objects of a discipline like semiotics, the modern science of signs. (shrink)

Even if somebody considers inappropriate any geographic adjective for Bioethics, nevertheless we think that there are some specific features of “Mediterranean” Bioethics that could distinguish it from a “Northern-European and Northern-American” one. First of all we must consider that medical ethics was born and grew in Mediterranean area. First by the thought of great Greek philosophers as Aristotle (that analyse what ethics is), then by Hippocrates, the “father” of medical ethics. The ethical pattern of Aristotle was based on “virtues” and (...) their practice. In this perspective we can already note a strong difference with actual North-European or American principialist ethics. But a second consideration concerns the role that great Mediterranean religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) had in the construction of the ethical thought especially on the matter of life and its respect. So, in our pluralistic and multicultural society is absolutely necessary to rescue an approach that considers both “lungs” of ethical thought (Mediterranean and Northern one) and highlights the role that Mediterranean Ethics still has in this way. (shrink)

El artículo tiene como objetivo fundamental presentar el concepto de repetición bajo tres aspectos. El primero es su ubicación en el contexto de la existencia individual; el segundo, su carácter de exigencia de búsqueda de la libertad; y, finalmente, la consideración de la repetición como acontecimiento de la existencia. El recorrido del artículo revela así el tránsito que se emprende desde la importancia de la figura del lector en su profunda soledad; lector de la vida, de la prueba, de la (...) circunstancia, de lo ineludible; hasta la revelación de la existencia revestida en un acto mimético. Este recorrido aparece evidenciado porque se pone de relieve la preocupación humana no sólo por la existencia, sino por el sentido que ella adquiere frente a la posibilidad del mal desde lo particular, desde lo individual. En este orden de ideas, tras un seguimiento del concepto de repetición se pretende hacer evidente un interés que puede llamarse interés existencial y por ello filosófico: volver la cara hacia el individuo. (shrink)

In this article the author provides new external evidence demonstrating that the correspondence between the philosopher Seneca and the apostle Paul is a forgery. The author compares archaeological data offered by inscriptions, graffiti and regionarii with information conveyed by the apocryphal letters. The setting of the epistles, as well as information about the duration and damages of the Neronian fire, contrast with the archaeological data, indicating that the text should be considered a forgery. The contribution shows that the forger worked (...) rather in a literary mode. Conversely, the only archaeological date that scholars have brought to support authenticity is probably not a Christian inscription and does not prove anything regarding a meeting between Seneca and Paul or Seneca’s conversion. The origin of the correspondence should instead be traced to the cult of the apostles Paul and Peter during the 3rd and 4th centuries. (shrink)

In recent years, the veracity of the tradition of the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul has been disputed; recently, Brent Donald Shaw denied the historicity of the persecution of Christians. In this article, the author analyzes the texts of Tacitus and Suetonius as well as other texts omitted by Shaw and demonstrates the inconsistency of the hypotheses put forward by negationist scholars from a theoretical and historical point of view.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics, Theory and the NovelLeon SuretteEthics, Theory and the Novel, by David Parker; x & 218 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, $54.95.David Parker’s stated purpose in Ethics, Theory and the Novel is to ground the value of “canonical works” of literature in the “ethical interest,” which each of them embodies in the meditation and exploration of “the clashes of moral value” (p. 38). He is self-consciously responding (...) to the strictures of neo-Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction which allegedly see “the canon simply as the repository of conservative values” and therefore reject it (p. 51). In order to demonstrate this capacity of imaginative literature Parker provides ethical analyses of scenes in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The book divides into two projects, since Parker also argues for the pertinence of ethics itself quite apart from the value of imaginative literature as a repository of serious ethical thought. Part one makes the theoretical case, and part two applies the theory.For the theory he takes as his champions Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, the late Australian critic, S. L. Golberg, and the Canadian political scientist, Charles Taylor. From Nussbaum he derives the claim that “literature can be moral philosophy” (p. 34). From Taylor he takes a triadic schema of Western [End Page 247] culture: Judeo-Christian-Kantian, Liberal-Enlightenment-rational, and Romantic-irrational-egoistic (p. 20) as the sources of our ethical thinking. Murdoch and Goldberg are deployed as predecessors in his own practice of ethical analysis of literary works. Parker’s claim is that imaginative literature exhibits the dynamic tensions of these conflicting ethical discourses.Parker’s discussion is intelligent and well-informed. His position is, in my view, perfectly defensible—indeed traditional. That said, this book seems to be as much a symptom of the malaise afflicting literary criticism as a cure. To this reader the theoretical portion is not faithful to any of his champions, but is a dog’s breakfast of “theoretical” postures gathered from Derrida, Cavell, de Man, Rorty, Foucault, and Frederic Jameson—as well as from those named above. The problem is not that Parker misunderstands or misrepresents their thought, but rather that he treats theoretical discourse as a flea market from which he can assemble pre-owned furniture for his own residence.The practice of literary criticism encourages such rummaging among other people’s belongings. It is appropriate for commentators on a literary work of art to select from previous commentary those observations and insights they regard as sound, and to reject or ignore those viewed as unsound. Nonetheless it is difficult to understand how a discourse which finds one leg in Marxist discourse, a second in Freudian, a third in phenomenological, and a fourth in Heideggerean or Derridean discourse can be expected to stand four square.Ethics, Theory and the Novel can be defended as an exercise in bricolage—and quite an impressive one in its own way. Like the handyman, Parker has cobbled together an ethicist criticism out of what is available or ready-at-hand in other discourses. But—as with many a home project—one can still see its flea market provenance. In his critical analysis of the novels, Parker shows himself to be a careful and perceptive reader. But I must confess that his ethical analyses seemed very like old-fashioned moral analysis of character motivation. I would not disagree with his claim that “an ethical vocabulary... is essential to the full understanding of the created fictional situation” (p. 191). However, his argument for a dialogic plurivocity in the ethical discourse of Western fiction is one that has been previously put by Mikhail Bakhtin from within Marxism. It is, I think, a serious oversight that Bakhtin is never mentioned—even though Parker’s position is distinguishable from Bakhtin’s in that his dialogue is between perennial ethical schemata and Bakhtin’s is between hegemonic and subversive discourses.Leon SuretteUniversity of Western OntarioCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 105-107 [Access article in PDF] Richard H. Popkin. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiv + 415. Cloth, $74.00. Paper, $24.95. Richard Popkin tells the story that once a long time ago when he asked a question at a conference that made reference to late-eighteenth-century skeptics like Maimon (...) and Platner, Myles Burnyeat turned to the audience and asked, "Does anyone else read these people that Popkin reads?" The answer, by the time we get to this, the fourth edition of a book that first appeared in 1960, is that lots of people are reading the people that Popkin reads. Now [End Page 105] Myles Burnyeat is quoted on the cover of this volume for graciously saying "I regard it as one of the seminal books in the history of ideas." In one of the three Festschriften that have been published in Popkin's honor, David Katz even reports that some of those who work in areas Popkin pioneered refer to themselves as "Popkinites" (James E. Force and David S. Katz, eds., Everything Connects [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1999], ix).Popkin was also founding editor of this journal, and his name has been footnoted in numerous articles over the years, so it will not be unknown to many. But readers will want to know what is new in this latest version of the classic work. For openers, it is roughly fifty percent longer, now 18 chapters instead of the 12 chapters of the last version. The original book was subtitled "From Erasmus to Descartes" and the later California edition subtitle became "From Erasmus to Spinoza." This edition pushes the envelope in both directions: back to Savonarola and forward to Pierre Bayle.The Savonarola connection comes from the unlikely discovery that the famous monk collected manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus and was planning to have them translated as tools for use against pagan philosophy and in favor of revealed religion. This brings out one of Popkin's favorite points: that what we think of as philosophical skepticism was part and parcel of religious debate early on. Among other new findings in this edition, Popkin finds clues that Leone Ebreo (Judah Abravanel) may have helped Gianfrancesco Pico read anti-Aristotelian Hebrew texts. Jews could use this sort of skepticism against the dogmatic Christians who tried to refute them.The religious connection is fundamental throughout the text. In his new introduction, Popkin admits that "I am more in sympathy with those who used the sceptical and fideist views of the nouveaux pyrrhoniens for religious rather than secular purposes" (p. xxiii). He has developed this sympathy into research on millenarianism in volumes such as Popkin and David S. Katz, Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998) and Popkin, et al., eds., Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, 4 vols. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001).Other new materials follow the discussion of Descartes with a chapter on Henry More, Pascal, and the Quietists and another one on Hobbes's political and practical answer to skepticism. There are new chapters on Wilkins, Boyle, and Glanvill of the Royal Society, and on late seventeenth-century metaphysics. New material on Simon Foucher and Pierre-Daniel Huet is followed by the concluding chapter on Pierre Bayle as a "super sceptic."The book has never been uncontroversial. Although they could follow the skeptical undercutting of the Bible in Spinoza, many scholars could not see how the master of the geometrical method in ethics could be anything but a dogmatist in the final analysis. (Popkin has an answer.) The same doubt will now apply to the treatment of Pierre Bayle in this version. To Popkin, as we have seen, Bayle is a "super sceptic" who "carried scepticism to its ultimate extreme" (300); to Gianluca Mori (Bayle philosophe, Paris: Champion, 1999) and others, he is a dogmatic philosophical atheist as well as moral rigorist. To his credit... (shrink)

Este texto aborda la última parte de la producción teórica de León Rozitchner, en donde se tematiza el mito estructurante de nuestra cultura: el cristianismo. Mediante una interpretación freudiana de las Confesiones de San Agustín, Rozitchner retoma con originalidad la idea marxista que considera a la crítica de la religión como el presupuesto de toda crítica. Se ponen de relieve los núcleos religiosos encubiertos en la secularización moderna que el capitalismo obstaculiza y se arriba a una idea de cuerpo que (...) permite revisar críticamente antiguas dicotomías transidas de religión, para abrir espacio a nuevos modos de contar la Historia. Desde la perspectiva del materialismo histórico, se intenta aquí dar cuenta del pasaje de la crítica de la ideología a la crítica de la mitología. Esta última propicia la reflexión sobre los fundamentos simbólicos que podrían dar lugar a procesos emancipatorios. Finalmente, se muestra que la voluntad de construir una teoría del sujeto y una crítica cultural es, en la obra de Rozitchner, el correlato de una permanente reflexión sobre la propia identidad. This text focuses on the last part of the theoretical production of León Rozitchner, in which he assesses the structuring myth of our culture: Christianism. By means of a Freudian interpretation of Saint Augustin’s “Confessions”, Rozitchner retakes in an original way the Marxist idea of criticism of religion as the presumption of every criticism. The religious core hidden by modern secularization, hindered by capitalism, is revealed, and the notion of a corpus emerges, which allows critical revision of ancient dichotomies beset by religion, in order to open paths towards new ways of telling History. From the perspective of historical materialism, we try to put forward the passage from criticism of ideology to criticism of mythology. The latter promotes a reflection on the symbolic foundations that may give way to emancipatory processes. Finally, we show that in Rozitchner´s work, the will to construct a theory of the subject and the criticism of culture is the result of a perennial reflection on identity in itself. (shrink)

European autobiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was fed particularly by the religious exploration of the self and the desire to tell about and place oneself within the web of one's family. Jewish autobiography has behind it these same impulses, though it is more likely to be an expansion of ethical teachings appended to a will than an elaboration from an account book. It also differs from Christian autobiography in lacking a definitive conversion. Rather the life is imbued (...) with a cyclical sense of sin, of God's power and punishment, and of the unpredictable: the individual's life is a recapitulation of the history of the Jewish people. Leon Modena's Life of Judah is a combination of confession, lament, and self-celebration. It bears comparison to Girolamo Cardano's Book of My Life, for both men express pride in their fame and many books, despair about their sons, and admit to the vice of gambling. Cardano's glory and complaints delimited a secular sphere within the Christian universe of meaning, while Modena's were still closely tied to God's tangled relations with His chosen people. Further, the realm of the "secret" was defined differently by Christian and Jew. Christian writers usually assumed the inside/outside contrast to apply especially to the individual and that secrecy was bad but inevitable in a society of preferment. For Jewish writers the inside went beyond the individual and his or her family to the wider Jewish community. In that protected space and in the safe language of Hebrew, a range of situations and feelings could be explored with considerable frankness, the inner/outer contrast leading to surprising self-discovery. (shrink)

Everyone's favorite houseguest who never left, Leon Black (played by award-winning comedian JB Smoove on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm) drops his wisdom and good-bad advice for the masses. Learn the secrets Larry David has gleaned from the Falstaff of television."--Amazon.

The Hungry Soul is a fascinating exploration of the natural and cultural act of eating. Kass brilliantly reveals how the various aspects of this phenomenon, and the customs, rituals, and taboos surrounding it, relate to universal and profound truths about the human animal and its deepest yearnings. "Kass is a distinguished and graceful writer. . . . It is astonishing to discover how different is our world from that of the animals, even in that which most evidently betrays that we (...) too are animals--our need and desire for food."--Roger Scruton, Times Literary Supplement "Yum."--Miss Manners. (shrink)

It’s constitutive of classical theism that there is a necessarily existent personal god who is also the creator of the universe, where the latter claim includes at least the following three theses: (i) God is wholly distinct from the natural world; (ii) God is the originating or sustaining cause of the natural world; and (iii) God created the natural world ex nihilo, i.e., without the use of pre-existing materials. Call this tripartite component of classical theism the classical view of creation. (...) In this paper, I offer a new argument against classical theism. In particular, I argue that creation ex nihilo is prima facie impossible, and that since the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is constitutive of classical theism, classical theism is false. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that defenders of Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities do not need to construct a metaphysically possible scenario in which an agent is morally responsible despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. Rather, there is a weaker (but equally legitimate) sense in which Frankfurt-style counterexamples can succeed. All that's needed is the claim that the ability to do otherwise is no part of what grounds moral responsibility, when the agent is indeed morally responsible.

Building on the seminal work of Kit Fine in the 1980s, Leon Horsten here develops a new theory of arbitrary entities. He connects this theory to issues and debates in metaphysics, logic, and contemporary philosophy of mathematics, investigating the relation between specific and arbitrary objects and between specific and arbitrary systems of objects. His book shows how this innovative theory is highly applicable to problems in the philosophy of arithmetic, and explores in particular how arbitrary objects can engage with the (...) nineteenth-century concept of variable mathematical quantities, how they are relevant for debates around mathematical structuralism, and how they can help our understanding of the concept of random variables in statistics. This fully worked through theory will open up new avenues within philosophy of mathematics, bringing in the work of other philosophers such as Saul Kripke, and providing new insights into the development of the foundations of mathematics from the eighteenth century to the present day. (shrink)

In this article ideas from Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects are applied to questions regarding mathematical structuralism. I discuss how sui generis mathematical structures can be viewed as generic systems of mathematical objects, where mathematical objects are conceived of as arbitrary objects in Fine’s sense.

We are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new ...