THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS A THEORY OF REFERENCE AS AN INTENTIONAL ACT, INDEPENDENT OF THE METAPHYSICAL ASSUMPTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF A REAL (AND COMMON) WORLD. ACCORDING TO THE THEORY, SPEAKERS REFER TO ENTITIES IN THEIR COGNITIVE SPACES. DIFFERENT SPEAKERS HAVE DIFFERENT SPACES, WHICH AT ANY GIVEN TIME MIRROR THEIR BELIEF-SYSTEMS AT THAT TIME. OBJECTS IN COGNITIVE SPACES ARE DISTINGUISHED FROM IDEAS, "SINNE", AND MEINONGIAN NON-EXISTENTS, AND SEVERAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY ARE DISCUSSED: AMONG THEM, HOW TO HANDLE COMMUNICATION AND TRUTH.

This clear, accessible account of Hegelian logic makes a case for its enormous seductiveness, its surprising presence in the collective consciousness, and the dangers associated therewith. Offering comprehensive coverage of Hegel's important works, Bencivenga avoids getting bogged down in short-lived scholarly debates to provide a work of permanent significance and usefulness.

Logic is often seen as the bedrock of intellectual life. It aims to be straight-forward, true, clear. But in this provocative book of postmodern philosophy, Ermanno Bencivenga presents an extended reflection on the subversive nature of logic--logic that is not stable and certain, but deceptive and tortuous. The author uses Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the eleventh century, as his case study to show how human reason can be devious. In Anselm's famous texts, his beliefs are (...) not at stake, he is sure of them--he only seeks to under-stand his faith, not to prove it. But by looking at Anselm's writings as a whole, Bencivenga argues that they undermine Anselm's own interpretation. Not only can reason be more effective than force in fighting the unorthodox, but it can also be a subtle way of undermining orthodoxy. Bencivenga demonstrates how reason plays different roles at the different levels of Anselm's project. For its authoritarian subject, reason imposes a limit on its rebellious character. For its subversive subject, reason opens up an infinite arena for experimentation whose end will never be reached. Ultimately, Logic and Other Nonsense asks hard questions about the nature of philosophy in Anselm's world, as well as our own. (shrink)

In his most recent book, Ermanno Bencivenga offers a stylistically and conceptually exciting investigation of the nature of language, mind, and personhood and the many ways the three connect. Bencivenga, one of the most iconoclastic voices to emerge in contemporary American philosophy, contests the basic assumptions of analytic (and also, to an extent, postmodern) approaches to these topics. His exploration leads through fascinating discussions of education, courage, pain, time and history, selfhood, subjectivity and objectivity, reality, facts, the empirical, power and (...) transgression, silence, privacy and publicity, and play—all themes that are shown to be integral to our thinking about language. Relentessly bending the rules, Bencivenga frustrates our expectations of a "proper" theory of language. He invokes the transgressions of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein even as he appropriates the aphoristic style of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Written in a philosophically playful and experimental mode, A Theory of Language and Mind draws the reader into a sense of continual surprise, therapeutic discomfort, and discovery. (shrink)

This is a highly original, wide-ranging, and unorthodox discourse on the idea of philosophy contained in Kant's major work, the Critique of Pure Reason. Bencivenga proposes a novel explanation of the Critique's celebrated "obscurity." This great obstacle to reading Kant, Bencivenga argues, has nothing to do with Kant's being a bad writer or with his having anything very complicated to say; rather, it is the natural result of the kind of operation Kant was performing: a universal conceptual revolution. Bencivenga contends (...) that in rejecting the traditional way of doing philosophy, Kant was proposing a paradigm shift comparable in magnitude to Copernicus's overthrow of the Ptolemaic view of the cosmos. Kant, however, was not successful in establishing his idea of philosophy as the new paradigm, and the old view persists in many contemporary versions. Bencivenga argues in favor of Kant's position, which he sees as entailing the view that the role of philosophy is to offer a plausible story about how objectivity might be grounded in certain principles of coherence of our mental states. This book is the story of Kant's revolutionary turnabout, what motivated it, and where it took him; it reveals Kant not only as a figure of historical importance, but as a source of ideas of great contemporary interest. (shrink)

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a magnificent work; as any such work, it can be read in a variety of ways and be found to teach us important lessons at a number of independent levels. Here I want to look at it as an extended meditation on historical causality---and, by implication, on causality, period. So I will not be taking it for granted that it is a novel; I will be treating it as if it were an outcome of the (...) conceptual reflection philosophers engage in---though, when all is said and done, I will be able to shed light on some of its structural features as a novel. (shrink)

A classic experiment by Henri Tajfel provides evidence for the conclusion that the division of a group into subgroups is enough to trigger discriminatory behavior, even if there is no reason for such behavior in terms of the individual’s own interest. I don’t challenge that conclusion; but I question an implicit assumption which is suggested by the experimental setup and by the language used by Tajfel in describing the experiment. The assumption is that an initially coherent group will typically experience (...) division as a result of outside influence. A totally different picture of the situation and totally different social policy recommendations will follow if we believe instead that groups are evolving structures, and specifically structures that constantly and autonomously come into conflict with themselves. (shrink)

The correspondence theory of truth provides standard semantics with a simple scheme for evaluating sentences. This scheme however depends on the existence of basic correspondences between singular terms and objects, And thus breaks down in the case of non-Denoting singular terms. An alternative to the correspondence theory is thus called for in dealing with such terms. The author criticizes various positions discussed in the literature in this regard, And then presents a solution of his own.

I may feel guilty for situations and events in which I seemed to play no causal role, which (it would seem) would have been exactly the same had I never existed. What is the reason for this guilt? The paper argues that it is to be found in a sense of universal connectedness: I take myself to always make a difference, no matter how distant I appear to be from anything that happens.

A logic is a doctrine of the logos, that is, of meaningful discourse; hence the first thing we expect from it is an account of what makes the logos meaningful — of what a meaning is. There is no single such doctrine or account: it is part of the immense richness of meaningful discourse that we can shift back and forth between several logics — several organized ways of reasoning, of providing reasons or grounds for our claims. Building on previous (...) work on Hegel's dialectical logic, the author here identifies three distinct logics simultaneously in play in our conversations. Analytic logic structures its organization of discourse around negation, contraries, and hence arguments forcing a conclusion to follow (under threat of inconsistency) from some premises. Dialectical logic's main tool is the construction of narratives, hence the attempted incorporation of interlocutors within one's own story. The third option, here labeled gradual logic, sees sorites (which are recalcitrant anomalies for the analytic approach) as ideal cases, since the bleeding of a predicate into an alleged contrary points the way to reaching an agreement among initially conflicting parties: to them eventually coming to regard themselves as stressing different aspects of one and the same thing. (shrink)

A system of modal logic with the operator is proposed, and proved complete. In contrast with a previous one by Stalnaker and Thomason, this system does not require two categories of singular terms.

The famous passage from Descartes' Sixth Meditation (54), proving that I am distinct from my body, is analysed in a way that it presupposes the following argument: (1) God can make X and Y distinct. (2) I f God can make X and Y distinct, then X and Y are distinct. (3) Therefore, X and Y are distinct. (2) is shown up as the crucial premise, several objections to it and possible ways out are discussed with the result that Descartes (...) needs to avoid references to God within the argument for the real distinctness of mind and body. (shrink)

The famous passage from Descartes' Sixth Meditation (54), proving that I am distinct from my body, is analysed in a way that it presupposes the following argument: (1) God can make X and Y distinct. (2) I f God can make X and Y distinct, then X and Y are distinct. (3) Therefore, X and Y are distinct. (2) is shown up as the crucial premise, several objections to it and possible ways out are discussed with the result that Descartes (...) needs to avoid references to God within the argument for the real distinctness of mind and body. (shrink)

In her book "descartes", Margaret wilson proposes a new interpretation of the dreaming argument. According to this interpretation, Descartes does not reach his conclusion via a subconclusion that I cannot be certain that I am not dreaming (as was claimed by more traditional authors such as moore, Malcolm, Frankfurt, And walsh), But rather directly, By pointing out that I cannot be certain that waking experience is veridical. The present article examines the arguments supporting wilson's interpretation, And finds them to be (...) faulty. Thus the article's conclusions clearly favor the traditional interpretations mentioned above. (shrink)

Dieses Buch bietet eine elementare, in sich geschlossene Einführung in die analytische Sprachphilosophie anhand einer systematischen und chronologischen Behandlung der Referenzproblematik: Welche Rollen spielen die singulären Terme (vor allem Eigennamen und Kennzeichnungen) in natürlichen Sprachen? Es werden die Lösungsversuche Meinongs, Freges, Russells, Carnaps, Strawsons, Donnellans und Kripkes rekonstruiert und miteinander verglichen. Jeder der Beiträge dieser bedeutenden analytischen Philosophen wird unter drei Gesichtspunkten betrachtet. Erstens: Was leistet er zur Lösung des Problems der leeren Referenz? (Was z.B. bedeutet ein singulärer Term wie (...) «Pegasus», der nichts zu bezeichnen scheint?) Zweitens: Was leistet er zur Lösung des Problems des ausgeschlossenen Dritten? (Ist z.B. ein Satz wie «Pegasus ist weiss oder Pegasus ist nicht weiss», der gemäss dem Gesetz vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten logisch wahr sein müsste, in Wirklichkeit falsch?) Drittens: Was leistet er zur Lösung des Problems der indirekten Kontexte? (Wie kommt es z.B., dass «Peter glaubt, dass der Abendstern ein Fixstern ist» wahr und «Peter glaubt, dass der Morgenstern ein Fixstern ist» falsch sein kann?). (shrink)

In Dancing Souls Bencivenga addresses the crucial question of how the subject can be one and multiple at the same time. He finds that this phenomenon is like the disciplined movement of the dancer through space. Bencivenga explores the structure of this ontological betweenness in its various levels of complexity from the most intimately personal to the communal and the political.

In an attempt at fleshing out the thesis that religious (and other similar) experiences cannot be attributed to an individual on the basis of outer behaviour alone, the hypothesis is entertained of somebody who decides, at a certain point in his life, to fool everybody into beUeving that he is a reUgious beUever. This person, it is claimed, lacks the inner conviction that is crucial to religious experiences. Does this claim fall prey to Wittgenstein-like objections to the possibility of a (...) private language? It is argued that it does not, by distinguishing between what counts empirically, and what conceptually, as a private language. (shrink)

In an attempt at fleshing out the thesis that religious (and other similar) experiences cannot be attributed to an individual on the basis of outer behaviour alone, the hypothesis is entertained of somebody who decides, at a certain point in his life, to fool everybody into beUeving that he is a reUgious beUever. This person, it is claimed, lacks the inner conviction that is crucial to religious experiences. Does this claim fall prey to Wittgenstein-like objections to the possibility of a (...) private language? It is argued that it does not, by distinguishing between what counts empirically, and what conceptually, as a private language. (shrink)

Can we regard ourselves as having free will? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral injunctions, and why should we care about them? Unless we provide satisfactory answers to these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be subsumed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory. According to Ermanno Bencivenga, this outcome is both common and regrettable. Bencivenga points to Immanuel Kant for the solution. Kant's philosophy is (...) a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need. Ethics Vindicated is a clear and thorough account of this effort that builds on Bencivenga's previous interpretation of transcendental philosophy (as articulated in his Kant's Copernican Revolution) and draws on the entire Kantian corpus. (shrink)

Translated by Bencivenga from the original Italian of his philosophical best-seller, this dialogue provides a comprehensive statement on the role of freedom in the realms of morality, psychology, metaphysics, and aesthetics. Taking as his motto Galileo's claim in Dialogues in the Great World Systems that "every small connection should be worth introducing with almost as much liberty as if we were telling stories," Bencivenga lets his four characters embrace a wide range of topics in their eclectic discussion. A guide, a (...) libertarian, a determinist, and an open-minded intellectual (who seeks only to understand the strengths of various positions) offer thoughtful considerations of quantum physics and deconstruction, the Gothic novel and detective stories, the structure of desire and the mathematics of infinity, penetrating comments on Freud, Raymond Chandler, and Wertverlaufe, and a reasonable explanation of why Kant's first Critique is longer than either the second or third. What results is less a systematic account than a composite picture for the student of philosophy to piece together. (shrink)