This study applied a body of knowledge derived from the common core thesis of mysticism to investigate the hypothesis that similarities in belief significantly contribute to the appearance of overlap between mystical and positive dimension schizotypal phenomena. Data from 211 university students who completed Hood's Mysticism Scale and Eckblad and Chapman's Magical Ideation Scale were submitted to correlational analyses. Contrary to the hypothesis, results indicated that positive schizotypy correlates more strongly with the experiential dimensions of mysticism than with the (...) interpretive dimension of mysticism. These correlation differences suggest criteria for distinguishing mystical and schizotypal experiences and identify specific points of overlap. Suggestions for future research into this relationship, and implications for schizotypy research, are noted. (shrink)

We respond to Stephen T. Davis’ criticism of our earlier essay, “Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis.” We argue that the Standard Model of physics is relevant and decisive in establishing the implausibility and low explanatory power of the Resurrection hypothesis. We also argue that the laws of physics have entailments regarding God and the supernatural and, against Alvin Plantinga, that these same laws lack the proviso “no agent supernaturally interferes.” Finally, we offer Bayesian arguments for the Legend hypothesis and against the (...) Resurrection hypothesis. (shrink)

In this paper I urge friends of truth-value gaps and truth-value gluts – proponents of paracomplete and paraconsistent logics – to consider theories not merely as sets of sentences, but as pairs of sets of sentences, or what I call ‘bitheories,’ which keep track not only of what holds according to the theory, but also what fails to hold according to the theory. I explain the connection between bitheories, sequents, and the speech acts of assertion and denial. I illustrate the (...) usefulness of bitheories by showing how they make available a technique for characterising different theories while abstracting away from logical vocabulary such as connectives or quanti- fiers, thereby making theoretical commitments independent of the choice of this or that particular non-classical logic. (shrink)

The two-dimensional modal logic of Davies and Humberstone [3] is an important aid to our understanding the relationship between actuality, necessity and a priori knowability. I show how a cut-free hypersequent calculus for 2D modal logic not only captures the logic precisely, but may be used to address issues in the epistemology and metaphysics of our modal concepts. I will explain how the use of our concepts motivates the inference rules of the sequent calculus, and then show that the completeness (...) of the calculus for Davies–Humberstone models explains why those concepts have the structure described by those models. The result is yet another application of the completeness theorem. (shrink)

Implication barrier theses deny that one can derive sentences of one type from sentences of another. Hume’s Law is an implication barrier thesis; it denies that one can derive an ‘ought’ (a normative sentence) from an ‘is’ (a descriptive sentence). Though Hume’s Law is controversial, some barrier theses are philosophical platitudes; in his Lectures on Logical Atomism, Bertrand Russell claims: You can never arrive at a general proposition by inference particular propositions alone. You will always have to have at least (...) one general proposition in your premises. (Russell, 1918, p. 206) We will refer to this claim—that one cannot derive general sentences from particular sentences—as Russell’s Law.1 A third barrier thesis claims that one cannot derive sentences about the future from sentences about the past or present. Hume’s endorsement of this barrier thesis is well-known: all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past . . . if there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any argument from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. (Hume, EHU 4.21/37) We will refer to this barrier thesis as Hume’s Second Law. A fourth barrier thesis says that one cannot derive a necessary sentence from one about the actual world and we will refer to this last thesis Kant’s Law. Such implication barrier theses present a problem. (shrink)

Paul Grice (1913-1988) is best known for his psychological account of meaning, and for his theory of conversational implicature. This is the first book to consider Grice's work as a whole. Drawing on the range of his published writing, and also on unpublished manuscripts, lectures and notes, Siobhan Chapman discusses the development of his ideas and relates his work to the major events of his intellectual and professional life.

In this short paper, I compare and contrast the kind of symmetric treatment of negation favoured in different ways by Huw Price (in “Why ‘Not’?”) and by me (in “Multiple Conclusions”) with Robert Brandom’s analysis of scorekeeping in terms of commitment, entitlement and incompatibility. Both kinds of account are what Brandom calls a normative pragmatics. They are both semantic anti-realist accounts of meaning in the significance of vocabulary is explained in terms of our rule-governed (normative) practice (pragmatics). These accounts differ (...) from intuitionist semantic anti-realism by providing a way to distinguish the inferential significance of “A” and “A is warranted.” Although proof plays a central role, in neither accont is verification the primary bearer of meaning. Our accounts make these distinctions in terms of a subtle analysis of our practices. On the one hand according to Price and me, we assert as well as deny; on the other, Brandom distingushes downstream commitments from upstream entitlements and the notion of incompatibility definable in terms of these. In this paper I will examine a number connections between these different approaches, and end with a discussion of the kind of account of proof that might emerge from these considerations. (shrink)

The paradoxes of self-reference are genuinely paradoxical. The liar paradox, Russell’s paradox and their cousins pose enormous difficulties to anyone who seeks to give a comprehensive theory of semantics, or of sets, or of any other domain which allows a modicum of self-reference and a modest number of logical principles. One approach to the paradoxes of self-reference takes these paradoxes as motivating a non-classical theory of logical consequence. Similar logical principles are used in each of the paradoxical inferences. If one (...) or other of these problematic inferences are rejected, we may arrive at a consistent (or at least, a coherent) theory. In this paper I will show that such approaches come at a serious cost. The general approach of using the paradoxes to restrict the class of allowable inferences places severe constraints on the domain of possible propositional logics, and on the kind of metatheory that is appropriate in the study of logic itself. Proof-theoretic and model-theoretic analyses of logical consequence make provide different ways for non-classical responses to the paradoxes to be defeated by revenge problems: the redefinition of logical connectives thought to be ruled out on logical grounds. Non-classical solutions are not the “easy way out” of the paradoxes. (shrink)

Combining non-classical (or sub-classical) logics is not easy, but it is very interesting. In this paper, we combine nonclassical logics of negation and possibility (in the presence of conjunction and disjunction), and then we combine the resulting systems with intuitionistic logic. We will find that Kracht's results on the undecidability of classical modal logics generalise to a non-classical setting. We will also see conditions under which intuitionistic logic can be combined with a non-intuitionistic negation without corrupting the intuitionistic fragment of (...) the logic. (shrink)

Among the far-reaching impacts of COVID-19 is its impact on care systems, the social and other systems that we rely in to maintain and provide care for those with “illness.” This paper will examine these impacts through a description of the influence on palliative care systems that have arisen within this pandemic. It will explore the impact on the meaning of care, how care is performed and identified, and the responses of palliative care systems to these challenges. It will also (...) highlight the current and potential future implications of these dynamics within the unfolding crisis of this pandemic. (shrink)

Self-advocacy organisations support people in a wide range of political activities, alongside providing key social networks. The emergence of formalised self-advocacy for intellectually disabled people marked an important cultural shift. These groups soon became associated with the pursuit of social change and the attainment of rights. The role of the self-advocacy support worker, working together with self-advocates, has been pivotal. However, studies have shown there has been concern over the relationship between self-advocates and those who advise or support them. Both (...) parties are aware of the potential tensions of supporters teaching people skills to take control, to manage their workers, whilst, perhaps inadvertently, assuming a powerful position in the relationship. This interesting paradox hints at ethical complexities inherent in the role. A key challenge facing these support workers is how they can support their employers to run successful organisations, without ?taking over?. Using material from both Chapman and Tilley's research of self-advocacy organisations in the UK, this article problematises some key ethical issues within the role. (shrink)

I sketch an application of a semantically anti-realist understanding of the classical sequent calculus to the topic of mathematics. The result is a semantically anti-realist defence of a kind of mathematical realism. In the paper, I begin the development of the view and compare it to orthodox positions in the philosophy of mathematics.

He notes that parallel to this phenomenon have been developments in the common law of malpractice that give patients a better chance than ever of winning compensation. While these developments benefit patients, Dr. Chapman describes how they have also pointed out a major flaw in malpractice law: the enormous amounts of time and money it takes to bring such cases to court. To overcome these difficulties, Dr. Chapman maintains, the medical profession needs to reconsider the basic concepts on (...) which its ethics rest. No less important is a revision of malpractice law so that it finally begins to serve, fairly and equitably, the purposes for which it originally came into being. Literate, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, Physicians, Law, and Ethics is an important contribution to today's medical care debate. (shrink)

Warren Goldfarb, Deductive Logic, Hackett Publishing Company, 2003.    : 0872206602. Deductive Logic is an introductory textbook in formal logic. The book is divided into four parts covering truth-functional logic, monadic quantifi- cation, polyadic quantification and names and identity, and there are exercises for all these topics at the end of the book. In the truth-functional logic part, the reader learns to produce paraphrases of English statements and arguments in logical notation, then about the semantic properties of such (...) paraphrased statements and arguments, such as satisfiability, implication and equivalence and finally there is an axiomatic proof method and some important extras such as disjunctive normal form and expressive adequacy. Parts two and three mirror this analysis/assessment/reflection structure for monadic and polyadic quantification, though this time the proof system is a natural deduction one, and part three contains a completeness proof for that system. The fourth part of the book introduces names, the identity predicate and descriptions and examines the additional expressive power which these provide. I do not think there should be any doubt that this is an excellent book; it presents the essential topics of a first logic course with accuracy, clarity and attention to detail, and it makes material that can be confusing the first time round—say, the translation of conditionals—transparent and easy to understand. But there are a lot of good introductory logic textbooks out there, so I will say something about how it resembles and differs from some other books, and then discuss one minor irritation with this one. (shrink)

Perhaps such a proposition is not expressible in any language that you or I speak, but – so a familiar story goes – it is decided by each world, so it plays just the role that other propositions do, so it counts as a proposition in the same way. In fact, we can see just how it counts as a proposition: given all the worlds in S, our proposition p says that the world is one of the worlds in S. (...) It describes a way the world is, even if we have no means of picking out the set S, so it is a proposition.1.. (shrink)

interesting. In this paper, we combine nonclassical logics of negation and possibility in the presence of conjunction and disjunction, and then we combine the resulting systems with intuitionistic logic. We will nd that Kracht's results on the undecidability of classical modal logics generalise to a non-classical setting. We will also see conditions under which intuitionistic logic can be combined with a non-intuitionistic negation without corrupting the intuitionistic fragment of the logic.

Gustav Bergmann was, arguably, the greatest ontologist of the twentieth century in pursuing the fundamental questions of first philosophy as deeply as any philosopher of any time. In 2006 and 2007, international conferences devoted solely to Bergmann's work were held at the University of Iowa in the USA, Université de Provence in France, and Università degli Studi Roma Tre in Italy. The papers in this volume were presented at the first of these conferences, in Iowa City, where Bergmann taught for (...) nearly four decades after escaping from Europe, following the dissolution of the Vienna Circle of which he had been the youngest member. There are nine philosophical papers, reminiscences of three of his students, and a complete bibliography of his published writings. (shrink)

The paradoxes of self-reference are genuinely paradoxical. The liar paradox, Russell’s paradox and their cousins pose enormous difficulties to anyone who seeks to give a comprehensive theory of semantics, or of sets, or of any other domain which allows a modicum of self-reference and a modest number of logical principles. One approach to the paradoxes of self-reference takes these paradoxes as motivating a non-classical theory of logical consequence. Similar logical principles are used in each of the paradoxical inferences. If one (...) or other of these problematic inferences are rejected, we may arrive at a consistent (or at least, a coherent) theory. In this paper I will show that such approaches come at a serious cost. The general approach of using the paradoxes to restrict the class of allowable inferences places severe constraints on the domain of possible propositional logics, and on the kind of metatheory that is appropriate in the study of logic itself. Proof-theoretic and model-theoretic analyses of logical consequence make provide different ways for non-classical responses to the paradoxes to be defeated by revenge problems: the redefinition of logical connectives thought to be ruled out on logical grounds. Non-classical solutions are not the “easy way out” of the paradoxes. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 49-50.

A brief survey of events and movements from the first century to the present day provides the background for understanding the complexity of questions relating to the presence of Christians in the Middle East at the present time. Some of these issues affect all Christians, while others are specific to particular countries in the region. Given the steep decline in the numbers of Christians for a variety of reasons over the centuries, is it possible to have any optimism about their (...) future in the region? (shrink)

The capture of Mosul in Iraq by ISIS in June 2014 focused the world’s attention on Islamism, or political Islam. In addition to all the political issues faced by the rest of the world, Christians are faced with some special challenges and have not always responded with a single voice. If we are to think in a distinctively Christian way about Islamism and violence carried out in the name of Islam, what are the key questions that we need to be (...) asking? (shrink)

This paper explores one of the major issues before transitional societies, the balance among truth, justice, and/or reconciliation. It focusses on the role of truth commissions, with an emphasis on the experience of South Africa. A central thesis of the paper is that establishing a shared truth that documents the causes, nature, and extent of severe and gross human rights abuses and/or collective violence under antecedent regimes is a prerequisite for achieving accountability, meaningful reconciliation, and a foundation for a common (...) future. It develops and applies an approach to reconciliation based on and extending Donald Shriver's concept of "political forgiveness.". (shrink)

This article explores archival accounts of the experimental community, Kingsley Hall, established by R. D. Laing, the radical Scottish psychiatrist. The paper contributes to renewed interest in Kingsley Hall, R. D. Laing's radical psychiatry and UK counterculture. Archival sources enable not only the further exploration of already known figures but also let us hear previously unheard voices. Following a discussion of archival materials, the Hall is analyzed thematically and historically as an inner spaceship; an embattled middle-class countercultural plantation; a site (...) of spiritual renewal and development; a single-building arts colony; and a countercultural experiment. Finally, it is argued that with re-evaluation of 1960s and 1970s counterculture now underway on the Left, the Hall’s experiment in Laingian countercultural psychiatry—as we may fittingly call it—may yet inform future radical projects. (shrink)

A progressive and uncompromising work that merges fiction and theory to create an intense yet gloriously deviant look at the world through the eyes of controversial Brit-artist, Jake Chapman (of the Chapman Brothers). With protagonists who -- like his mutated Nike-wearing child mannequins -- exhibit similar aberrations, Chapman engages with Freudian theory, genetic engineering and consumerism, to create a highly original and intellectually stimulating work that is as challenging and confrontational as any of his acclaimed works of (...) art. (shrink)

Philosophy for Linguists provides students with a clear, concise introduction to the main topics in the philosophy of language. Focusing on what linguists need to know and how philosophy relates to modern linguistics, the book is structured around key branches of linguistics: semantics, pragmatics, and language acquisition. Assuming no prior knowledge of philosophy, Siobhan Chapman traces the history and development of ideas in the philosophy of language and outlines the contributions of specific philosophers. The book is highly accessible and (...) includes: a general introduction and introductions to each chapter; numerous examples and quotations; comprehensive suggestions for further reading and an extensive glossary of linguistic terms. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 46-48.

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising--on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into (...) American childhood and education: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths--and the resulting culture of safetyism--interferes with young people's social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America's rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique by Nathan BrownGreg EllermannBrown, Nathan. Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique. Fordham University Press, 2021. 318pp.Nathan Brown's Rationalist Empiricism is, above all, a book about philosophical method. It is also a highly significant study of the conceptual architecture of Marxism, developed by way of a critical return to the lesson of Althusser. Drawing on a range of disparate materials–from the (...) works of Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Meillassoux to contemporary experiments in digital photography and metrology–Brown demonstrates the necessity of "a mutual interruption of reason and experience" (31) for any theoretical or political practice that would avoid falling into ideological complacency.The book opens with an appraisal of "the speculative turn" (1) in 21st-century thought, a turn Brown characterizes as an intellectual dead-end. He remarks that the various new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies of the last decades were united by an inattention to method. Unconcerned to establish the necessity of their claims or with the relation between reasoning and reality, these philosophies made assertions instead of arguments; they mistook dogmatism for speculation.For Brown, it is the dialectic–specifically, the dialectic of reason and experience–that promises to renew the possibility of speculative thinking. Such renewal will entail refusing "the severance of speculation from critique" (2). It also requires thinking through a more basic problem: the relation between rationalism and empiricism. While rationalism "explore[s] what has to be thought according to the internal order and consistency of ideas," empiricism, as Brown has it, "claim[s] the genesis of ideas in experience" (3). Since Kant's first Critique, this binary and the effort to overcome it have set the terms of philosophical debate. Brown's striking contention is that the search for a synthesis or a hidden ground uniting these two positions (as, for instance, in Deleuze or Michel Henry) invariably leads us back to the transcendental–an improvement on the dogmatism of contemporary theory but a reduction of knowledge to "conditions of experience" [End Page 128] nonetheless (47). Brown therefore proposes another path: "a relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism" animated by "the critical power of the tension between [them] to check one another's claims and to propel those claims further" (3). In other words, he develops a methodological dialectic whose two poles-the rationalist and the empiricist-alternately take on speculative and critical functions. There is no static alignment of the key categories in Brown's book. "Speculation and critique cannot be parceled out," he writes, "according to the division of reason and experience. Metaphysics, science, politics: each of these fields relies integrally upon the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience, their 'epistemological polarity'" (250). In Bachelard's terms, pivotal for the overall argument, reason and experience must be allowed to "transmute," "propel," and "say 'no' to one another" (8). It is their ungrounded dialectical relation that sustains true speculative thought.This methodological position has profound ontological implications. Looking to Althusser, Brown finds the beginnings of a theory of rationalist empiricism in the structural Marxist notion of the "concrete-in-thought" (15-16): the self-critical and experimentally verified knowledge of a science. Crucially, for Althusser there can be no concrete-in-thought without a "concrete-real," external to theory itself (15). Developing to the fullest this underappreciated point, Brown shows that rationalist empiricism must be a realism. Thus, the book's second, third, and fourth chapters elaborate a continuous argument concerning "the primacy of being over thought" (59), and the relationship between speculative and scientific knowledge. The central question is how speculation might extend or "extrapolate from the exteriorizing force of science, without being reducible to its forms of experience" (261). Refracting Hegel's Logic through the thought of Heidegger and Meillassoux, Brown ultimately offers a new account of the ontological difference–between being and beings, between speculative truth and "ontic," scientific knowledge–that privileges neither side and insists on their coordination. Once again, he declines to seek a synthesis, arguing that "true critique" (as Hegel characterized his speculative method) depends on "the ontological primacy of becoming" (91), on an absolute time bound up with... (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

We present a new frame semantics for positive relevant and substructural propositional logics. This frame semantics is both a generalisation of Routley–Meyer ternary frames and a simplification of them. The key innovation of this semantics is the use of a single accessibility relation to relate collections of points to points. Different logics are modeled by varying the kinds of collections used: they can be sets, multisets, lists or trees. We show that collection frames on trees are sound and complete for (...) the basic positive distributive substructural logic $\mathsf {B}^+$, that collection frames on multisets are sound and complete for $\mathsf {RW}^+$ (the relevant logic $\mathsf {R}^+$, without contraction, or equivalently, positive multiplicative and additive linear logic with distribution for the additive connectives), and that collection frames on sets are sound for the positive relevant logic $\mathsf {R}^+$. The completeness of set frames for $\mathsf {R}^+$ is, currently, an open question. (shrink)

This paper provides a method for characterizing space events using the framework of conceptual spaces. We focus specifically on estimating and ranking the likelihood of collisions between space objects. The objective is to design an approach for anticipatory decision support for space operators who can take preventive actions on the basis of assessments of relative risk. To make this possible our approach draws on the fusion of both hard and soft data within a single decision support framework. Contextual data is (...) also taken into account, for example data about space weather effects, by drawing on the Space Domain Ontologies, a large system of ontologies designed to support all aspects of space situational awareness. The framework is coupled with a mathematical programming scheme that frames a mathematically optimal approach for decision support, providing a quantitative basis for ranking potential for collision across multiple satellite pairs. The goal is to provide the broadest possible information foundation for critical assessments of collision likelihood. (shrink)

The literature on values in science struggles with questions about how to describe and manage the role of values in scientific research. We argue that progress can be made by shifting this literature’s current emphasis. Rather than arguing about how non-epistemic values can or should figure into scientific assessment, we suggest analyzing how scientific assessment can accommodate non-epistemic values. For scientific assessment to do so, it arguably needs to incorporate goals that have been traditionally characterized as non-epistemic. Building on this (...) insight, we show how the adequacy-for-purpose framework recently developed for assessing scientific models can provide a general framework for describing scientific assessment so that it goes beyond purely epistemic considerations. Adopting this framework has significant advantages and opens the possibility of effecting a partial rapprochement between critics and proponents of the value-free ideal. (shrink)

Typically, although it’s notoriously hard to define, autism has been represented as a biologically-based mental disorder that can be usefully investigated by biomedical science. In recent years, ho...

The poetry and journalistic essays of Katherine Tillman often appeared in publications sponsored by the American Methodist church. Collected together for the first time, her works speak to the struggles and triumphs of African-American women.

Philosophy has a language problem. A recent study by Schwitzgebel, Huang, Higgins and Gonzalez-Cabrera (2018) found that, in a sample of papers published in elite journals, 97% of citations were to work originally written in English. 73% of this same sample didn’t cite any paper that had been originally written in a language other than English. Finally, a staggering 96% of elite journal editorial boards are primarily affiliated with an Anglophone university. This is consistent with earlier data suggesting that journal (...) submissions from countries that are outside the Anglophone world and Europe have disturbingly low chances of being accepted. The route forward is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that this structural disadvantage deserves closer philosophical and empirical attention. We owe this to current and future members of our philosophical community who speak English non-natively. We also need this if we want to make sure philosophy is enriched by a diverse group of thinkers who have a grasp of different languages, and of the cultures strongly associated with them. (shrink)