Cook argues that impure sets are not located. But ‘location’ is an ambiguous word and when we resolve those ambiguities it turns out that on no resolution is Cook's argument compelling.

In this study we offer a new way of applying Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe to musical experiences in terms of psychologically inhibited games of make-believe, which Walton attributes chiefly to ornamental representations. Reading Walton’s theory somewhat against the grain, and supplementing our discussion with a set of instructive examples, we argue that there is clear theoretical gain in explaining certain important aspects of composition and performance in terms of psychologically inhibited games of make-believe consisting of two interlaced game-worlds. Such (...) complex games can accommodate a continuous rich spectrum of congruent modes of listening, which broaches both the formalist-type and the narrativist-type. We conclude that this sort of oblique reading of Walton’s original theory actually complements and completes Walton’s recent theoretic angle concerning thoughtwriting in music by way of affording it with a suitable conception for a mechanism of appropriation for music. (shrink)

Episodic memory has a distinctive phenomenology: it involves “mentally reliving” a past event. It has been suggested that characterising episodic memory in terms of this phenomenology makes it impossible to test for in animals, because “purely phenomenological features” cannot be detected in animal behaviour. Against this, I argue that episodic memory's phenomenological features are impure, having both subjective and objective aspects, and so can be behaviourally detected. Insisting on a phenomenological characterisation of episodic memory consequently does nothing to damage the (...) prospects for detecting it in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

I consider but reject one broad strategy for answering the threshold problem for fallibilist accounts of knowledge, namely what fixes the degree of probability required for one to know? According to the impurist strategy to be considered, the required degree of probability is fixed by one's practical reasoning situation. I distinguish two different ways to implement the suggested impurist strategy. According to the Relevance Approach, the threshold for a subject to know a proposition at a time is determined by the (...) practical reasoning situations she is then in to which that particular proposition is relevant. According to the Unity Approach, the threshold for a subject to know any proposition whatsoever at a time is determined by a privileged practical reasoning situation she then faces, most plausibly the highest stakes practical reasoning situation she is then in. I argue that neither way of implementing the impurist strategy succeeds and so impurism does not offer a satisfactory response to the threshold problem. (shrink)

A notorious objection to robust virtue epistemology—the view that an agent knows a proposition if and only if her cognitive success is because of her intellectual virtues—is that it fails to eliminate knowledge-undermining luck. Modest virtue epistemologists agree with robust virtue epistemologists that if someone knows, then her cognitive success must be because of her intellectual virtues, but they think that more is needed for knowledge. More specifically, they introduce independently motivated modal anti-luck principles in their accounts to amend the (...) problem of eliminating luck—this makes their views instances of impure virtue epistemology. The aim of the paper is to argue, firstly, that such a move lacks adequate motivation; secondly, that the resulting impure accounts equally fail to handle knowledge-undermining luck. On a more positive note, these results bolster a more orthodox virtue-theoretic approach to knowledge that assigns a fundamental explanatory role to the notion of ability. In this sense, the paper also sketches an account of ability and a corresponding account of knowledge that explains how success from ability is incompatible with success from luck. (shrink)

This paper provides a new solution to the concept horse paradox. Frege argued no name co-refers with a predicate because no name can be inter-substituted with a predicate. This led Frege to embrace the paradox of the concept horse. But Frege got it wrong because predicates are impurely referring expressions and we shouldn’t expect impurely referring expressions to be intersubstitutable even if they co-refer, because the contexts in which they occur are sensitive to the extra information they carry about their (...) referents. (shrink)

I consider but reject one broad strategy for answering the threshold problem for fallibilist accounts of knowledge, namely what fixes the degree of probability required for one to know? According to the impurist strategy to be considered, the required degree of probability is fixed by one's practical reasoning situation. I distinguish two different ways to implement the suggested impurist strategy. According to the Relevance Approach, the threshold for a subject to know a proposition at a time is determined by the (...) practical reasoning situations she is then in to which that particular proposition is relevant. According to the Unity Approach, the threshold for a subject to know any proposition whatsoever at a time is determined by a privileged practical reasoning situation she then faces, most plausibly the highest stakes practical reasoning situation she is then in. I argue that neither way of implementing the impurist strategy succeeds and so impurism does not offer a satisfactory response to the threshold problem. (shrink)

Informed by María Lugones’s understanding of the “logic of purity,” this essay analyzes the race for critical phenomenology. It suggests how Lugones’s analysis of such a logic may guide us in developing phenomenological analyses of complex social identities such as race. It also shows how traces of the logic of purity remain even in critical phenomenological analyses of race. Specifically, the essay analyzes the methodological call for a reduction of quasi-transcendental structures. Ultimately an attitude and practice of critical criticality and (...) a mode of critical impurity are suggested so as to avoid problematic traces of the logic of purity. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how Latina feminist theorizing stands to enhance critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Feminist critiques of intention challenge some aspects of traditional just war reasoning, including the criteria of right intention and discrimination. I take note of these challenges and propose some directions just war reasoners might take in response. First, right intention can be evaluated more accurately by judging what actors in war actually do than by attempting to uncover inward dispositions. Assessing whether agents in war have taken due care to minimize foreseeable collateral damage, avoided intentional targeting of noncombatants, corrected previous (...) mistakes in their later actions, and taken responsibility to repair unintended damage they cause are examples of ways in which just war reasoners can evaluate intention by looking at actions. (shrink)

Semiotic objections to markets urge us not to place a good on the market because of the message that doing so would send. Brennan and Jaworski reject them on the grounds that either the contingent semiotics of a market can be changed or the weakness of semiotic reasons allows them to be ignored. The scope of their argument neglects the impure semiotic objections that claim that the message a market sends causes, constitutes, or involves a nonsemiotic wrong. These are the (...) most compelling class of semiotic objections and are the kind actually advanced in the literature. Rather than focusing on the necessity or contingency of a market's semiotics, we should instead attend to a semiotic objection's most important feature: its purity or impurity. (shrink)

The Argument from Principles, the primary motivation for impurism or pragmatic encroachment theories in epistemology, is often presented as an argument for everyone—an argument that proceeds from harmless premises about the nature of rationally permissible action to the surprising conclusion that one’s knowledge is partly determined by one’s practical situation. This paper argues that the Argument from Principles is far from neutral, as it presupposes the falsity of one of impurism’s main competitors: epistemic contextualism. As a consequence, hybrid positions combining (...) impurism and contextualism—positions that impurists have sometimes hinted at in the literature—are, while logically consistent, ill-motivated. Once the impurist embraces contextualism, the Argument from Principles can no longer get off the ground. The paper concludes that those who make use of the Argument from Principles are committed to an invariantist impurism and their case in support of impurism can only ever be as strong as their case against contextualism. Given recent contextualist work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, this is likely to turn out problematic for the impurists. (shrink)

This essay provides a novel argument for impurism, the view that certain non-truth-relevant factors can make a difference to a belief's epistemic standing. I argue that purists, unlike impurists, are forced to claim that certain ‘high-stakes’ cases rationally require agents to be akratic. Akrasia is one of the paradigmatic forms of irrationality. So purists, in virtue of calling akrasia rationally mandatory in a range of cases with no obvious precedent, take on a serious theoretical cost. By focusing on akrasia, and (...) on the nature of the normative judgments involved therein, impurists gain a powerful new way to frame a core challenge for purism. They also gain insight about the way in which impurism is true: my argument motivates the claim that there is moral encroachment in epistemology. (shrink)

I give a semantic characterisation of a system for the logic of grounding similar to the system introduced by Kit Fine in his “Guide to Ground”, as well as a semantic characterisation of a variant of that system which excludes the possibility of what Fine calls ‘zero-grounding’.

Some properties such as having a beard and being a philosopher are intuitively qualitative, while other properties such as being identical to Plato and being a student of Socrates are intuitively non-qualitative. It is often assumed that, necessarily, a property is qualitative if and only if it can be designated descriptively without the aid of directly referential devices. I argue that this linguistic thesis fails in both directions: there might be non-qualitative properties that can be designated descriptively, and there appear (...) to be qualitative properties that can only be designated directly. I conclude that while the linguistic thesis is ultimately untenable as stated, it can be plausibly recast as a thesis about our concepts rather than the properties they designate. (shrink)

Climate change governance is extremely challenging because of both the intrinsic difficulty of the issues at stake and the plurality of values and worldviews. For these reasons, the ethical concerns that characterise climate change should also be meaningfully addressed through a specific version of procedural justice. Accordingly, in this article we adopt an impure notion of procedural justice. On this theoretical basis, we define relevant fairness criteria and contextualise them for climate governance systems. Then, we empirically justify fairness criteria against (...) a critical and divisive element for the future governance of the Green Climate Fund, i.e., the no-objection procedure. The article concludes with some considerations prompted by the analysis. (shrink)

It is sometimes suggested that impure sets are spatially co-located with their members (and hence are located in space). Sets, however, are in important respects like numbers. In particular, sets are connected to concepts in much the same manner as numbers are connected to concepts—in both cases, they are fundamentally abstracts of (or corresponding to) concepts. This parallel between the structure of sets and the structure of numbers suggests that the metaphysics of sets and the metaphysics of numbers should parallel (...) each other in relevant ways. This entails, in turn, that impure sets are not co-located with their members (nor are they located in space). (shrink)

This paper aims to outline the essential structural traits that a procedural theory of justice for the management of conflicts about values should display in order to combine open-endedness and cogency. To this purpose, it offers an investigation into the characteristics of procedural justice through a critical assessment of John Rawls‟s taxonomy of proceduralism, in terms of perfect, imperfect and pure procedural justice. Given the concessions the two former kinds of proceduralism make to substantive theories, and the potentially misleading characterisation (...) Rawls gave of pure procedural theories of justice, it reformulates the latter category in terms of impure proceduralism. In this case, the theory is required not to pose substantive constraints on the qualities of just outcomes, but is, rather, expected to provide a trans-contextually applicable account of the qualities of just procedures on the basis of an independent criterion of justice. (shrink)

If politics is understood as a foundational and open-ended activity, a general problem that arises from such a framing concerns the question of how to sustain the possibility of continuous openings without converting action into permanence and closure. In this article, we approach this problematic by treating Hannah Arendt as an exemplary figure in the current of political thought that emphasizes the indeterminate nature of action. We focus more specifically on how Arendt addressed the question of sustaining action by exploring (...) the role of forgiveness, promises, divided power, and principles of action in her thought. While we show that the task of sustaining the indeterminacy of action partly remains an unresolvable paradox for Arendt, a general force underpinning the thought of Giorgio Agamben sheds new light on this paradox. Rather than affirming radical openness and pure _praxis_ as such, Agamben’s work helps accentuate the need of a certain contamination of _praxis_ by its own limit or apparent opposite. Importantly, this allows us to interpret Arendt and the paradoxical task of bestowing some degree of permanence to the open horizon of political action in a decidedly positive light: that _praxis_ implies a moment of impurity is the very force that sustains it without sacrificing its indeterminate nature. (shrink)

Recent philosophy of mind has seen an increase of interest in theories of intentionality in offering a functional account of mental states. The standard intentionalist view holds that mental states can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of their representational contents. An alternative view proposed by Tim Crane, called impure intentionalism, specifies mental states in terms of intentional content, mode, and object. This view is also suggested to hold for states of sensory awareness. This paper primarily develops an alternative to (...) the impure intentionalist account of states of sensory awareness. On the basis of Husserl’s phenomenological work, I argue that a focus on intentionality at the level of sensory awareness is phenomenologically implausible. The final part offers an alternative functional account of sensory awareness based on what Husserl called ‘immanent association’. (shrink)

This paper aims to outline the essential structural traits that a procedural theory of justice for the management of conflicts about values should display in order to combine open-endedness and cogency. To this purpose, it offers an investigation into the characteristics of procedural justice through a critical assessment of John Rawl’s taxonomy of prodeduralism, in terms of perfect, imperfect and pure procedural justice. Given the concessions the two former kinds of proceduralism make to substantive theories, and the potentially misleading characterisation (...) Rawls gave of pure procedural theories of justice, it reformulates the latter category in terms of impure proceduralism. In this case, the theory is required not to pose substantive constraints on the qualities of just outcomes, but is, rather, expected to provide a transcontextually applicable account of the qualities of just procedures on the basis of an independent criterion of justice. (shrink)

Recent philosophy of mind has seen an increase of interest in theories of intentionality in offering a functional account of mental states. The standard intentionalist view holds that mental states can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of their representational contents. An alternative view proposed by Tim Crane, called impure intentionalism, specifies mental states in terms of intentional content, mode, and object. This view is also suggested to hold for states of sensory awareness. This paper primarily develops an alternative to (...) the impure intentionalist account of states of sensory awareness. On the basis of Husserl’s phenomenological work, I argue that a focus on intentionality at the level of sensory awareness is phenomenologically implausible. The final part offers an alternative functional account of sensory awareness based on what Husserl called ‘immanent association’. (shrink)

Impure systems contain Objects and Subjects: Subjects are human beings. We can distinguish a person as an observer (subjectively outside the system) and that by definition is the Subject himself, and part of the system. In this case he acquires the category of object. Objects (relative beings) are significances, which are the consequence of perceptual beliefs on the part of the Subject about material or energetic objects (absolute beings) with certain characteristics.The IS (Impure System) approach is as follows: Objects are (...) perceptual significances (relative beings) of material or energetic objects (absolute beings). The set of these objects will form an impure set of the first order. The existing relations between these relative objects will be of two classes: transactions of matter and/or energy and inferential relations. Transactions can have alethic modality: necessity, possibility, impossibility and contingency. Ontic existence of possibility entails that inferential relations have Deontic modality: obligation, permission, prohibition, faculty and analogy. We distinguished between theorems (natural laws) and norms (ethical, legislative and customary rules of conduct). (shrink)

Kant’s metaphilosophy has three main parts: (1) an essentialist project (“What is philosophy?”); (2) a methodological project (“How do we do philosophy?”); and (3) a taxonomic project (“What are the different parts of philosophy, and how are they related?”). This paper focuses on the third project. In particular, it explores one of the most intriguing yet puzzling aspects of Kant’s philosophy, viz. the relationship between what Kant calls ‘pure’ philosophy vs. ‘applied’, ‘empirical’ or what we can broadly refer to as (...) ‘impure’ philosophy. (As we shall see, in order to be able to address this third project, we shall also need to examine the other two projects in detail.) My plan is as follows. First, I discuss four main areas of pure vs. impure philosophy: (i) ‘pure logic’ vs. ‘applied logic’; (ii) ‘rational psychology’ vs. ‘empirical psychology’; (iii) ‘pure metaphysics of nature’ vs. ‘physics’ and (iv) ‘pure morality’ or a ‘metaphysics of morals’ vs. ‘moral anthropology’, ‘practical anthropology’ or ‘applied moral philosophy’. Based on this, I identify four key differences between pure and impure philosophy. Second, I critically examine four different readings of Kant’s views about the status of ‘impure’ philosophy: (a) that it is not genuine philosophy; (b) that it is bad or inferior philosophy; (c) that it is instrumentally valuable; and (d) that it constitutes an indispensable part of Kant’s philosophy, both in a theoretical and practical sense. I argue that Kant is best interpreted as endorsing readings (c) and (d). Third, I offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)

Laurence BonJour has defended the view that we have an a priori intellectual capacity to understand the nature of proper reason. This view is critically examined in detail and a naturalistic alternative is proposed and defended according to which our understanding of proper reasoning requires a posteriori support.

Within the class of indexicals, a distinction is often made between “pure” or “automatic” indexicals on one hand, and demonstratives or “discretionary” indexicals on the other. The idea is supposed to be that certain indexicals refer automatically and invariably to a particular feature of the utterance context: ‘I’ refers to the speaker, ‘now’ to the time of utterance, ‘here’ to the place of utterance, etc. Against this view, I present cases where reference shifts from the speaker, time, or place of (...) utterance to some other object, time, or place. I consider and reject the claim that these counterexamples to the automatic indexical theory all involve non-literal uses of indexicals and argue that they cannot be explained away on the grounds that they involve conversational implicature or pretense. (shrink)

Laurence BonJour has defended the view that we have an a priori intellectual capacity to understand the nature of proper reason. This view is critically examined in detail and a naturalistic alternative is proposed and defended according to which our understanding of proper reasoning requires a posteriori support.

Responding to critiques of Dilthey’s interpretive psychology, I revisit its relation with epistemology and the human sciences. Rather than reducing knowledge to psychology and psychology to subjective understanding, Dilthey articulated the epistemic worth of a psychology involving (1) an impure phenomenology of embodied, historically-situated, and worldly consciousness as individually lived yet complicit with its naturally and socially constituted contexts, (2) experience- and communication-oriented processes of interpreting others, (3) the use of third-person structural-functional analysis and causal explanation, and (4) a recognition (...) of the ungroundability, facticity, and conflict inherent in knowledge and life. (shrink)

Some of Derek Parfit’s most significant work concerns the non-identity problem. Briefly put, this is the problem of how, morally speaking, we should understand cases in which we can act in one way, and produce persons with sub-optimal lives, or act in another way, and produce different persons with better lives. Discussions of the non-identity problem tend to assume that it is a single problem, raising a single set of moral issues. This chapter seeks to complicate this picture. It introduces (...) ‘Impure Non-Identity Cases’. These are cases in which a policy, or group of acts, is a non-identity case, and so nobody is harmed, or made worse off, by the policy, or group of acts, but some (and maybe even all) of the individual acts within the policy or group are not non-identity cases, and are harmful. The chapter investigates the moral implications of such cases, and the problems and questions they raise, aside from those raised by ‘Pure Non-Identity Cases’. (shrink)

Although race mixing is often treated as a marginal matter or a transgression against dominant racial logic, this article argues that mixed-race bodies and interracial sexuality are central to the invention of whiteness and the origin of the white settler state in several ways. Race mixing is at the foundation of the modern conception of race; at the material and political origin of the white settler state; and serves as the grounding against which cultural and legal categories of race are (...) articulated. The conceptual history of race looks to mixed-race bodies as the means to define race and delimit races. The colonization and economic success of the white settler state in the United States depended on mixed-race individuals who served as emissaries and interpreters, while interracial sexuality was central to the economy of slavery. Dominant conceptions of whiteness, and of the identity of the white settler state, rely on the scrutiny of mixed bodies as a means of racial demarcation. Mixed race histories and subjects are of central interest to studies of the invention of whiteness and processes of racialization. (shrink)

This paper establishes a sound and complete semantics for the impure logic of ground. Fine (Review of Symbolic Logic, 5(1), 1–25, 2012a) sets out a system for the pure logic of ground, one in which the formulas between which ground-theoretic claims hold have no internal logical complexity; and it provides a sound and complete semantics for the system. Fine (2012b) [§§6-8] sets out a system for an impure logic of ground, one that extends the rules of the original pure system (...) with rules for the truth-functional connectives, the first-order quantifiers, and λ-abstraction. However, no semantics has yet been provided for this system. The present paper partly fills this lacuna by providing a sound and complete semantics for a system GG containing the truth-functional operators that is closely related to the truth-functional part of the system of Fine (2012b). (shrink)

sBuilding models as a practical aspect of ecological theory has as a principal purpose the determination of relations in formal language. In this paper, the authors provide a formalization of ecological models based on impure systems theory. Impure systems contain objects and subjects: subjects are human beings. We can distinguish a person as an observer that by definition is the subject himself and part of the system. In this case he acquires the category of object. Objects are significances, which are (...) the consequence of perceptual beliefs on the part of the subject about material or energetic objects with certain characteristics. The impure system approach is as follows: objects are perceptual significances of material or energetic objects. The set of these objects will form an impure set of the first order. The existing relations between these relative objects will be of two classes: transactions of matter and/or energy and inferential relations. Transactions can have alethic modality: necessity, possibility, impossibility and contingency. In this work we define measures which let us choose the more suitable variables to relate both the model with the ecosystem and with different models. In this way we define different comparison indexes. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study in any language to examine in detail and critically assess the second part of Kant's ethics- -an empirical, impure part, which determines how best to apply pure principles to the human situation. Drawing attention to Kant's under-explored impure ethics, this revealing investigation refutes the common and long-standing misperception that Kants ethics advocates empty formalism. Making detailed use of a variety of Kantian texts never before translated into English, author Robert B. Louden reassesses the strengths (...) and weaknesses of Kantian ethics as a whole, once the second part is re-admitted to its rightful place within Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

Lucius Outlaw and Shannon Sullivan have argued for the preservation of racial distinctiveness and the necessity of racial separatism. This paper articulates and challenges this push for racial separatism and the particular conception of race evoked therein. The author points out that the multiplicity, the multiculturalism, the intersectionality within these communities of resistance is typically belittled, fragmented, or erased. Recognizing the practical use of racial coalitions to combat racism, the author articulates an alternative conception of coalitional agency, one that allows (...) for multiplicitous identities, opening avenues to intercultural communication and impure coalitions of resistance. (shrink)

Purity has been recognized as an ideal of proof. In this paper, I consider whether purity continues to have value in contemporary mathematics. The topics (e.g., algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, category theory) and methods of contemporary mathematics often favor unification and generality, values that are more often associated with impurity rather than purity. I will demonstrate this by discussing several examples of methods and proofs that highlight the epistemic significance of unification and generality. First, I discuss the examples of (...) algebraic invariants and of considering a mathematical object from several different perspectives to illustrate that the methods used in contemporary mathematics favor impurity. Then I consider an example from category theory which demonstrates how unification and generality are related to impurity and that impure solutions can be explanatory. In light of this discussion, we see that purity only has marginal value within contemporary mathematics which instead prioritizes the epistemic values associated with impurity. (shrink)

Impurism says that practical factors encroach on knowledge. An important version of impurism is called ‘Threshold-Impurism,’ which says that practical factors encroach on the threshold that rational credence must pass in order for one to have knowledge. A prominent kind of argument for Threshold-Impurism is the so-called ‘principle-based argument,’ which relies on a principle of fallibilism and a knowledge-action principle. This paper offers a new challenge against Threshold-Impur- ism. I attempt to show that the two principles Threshold-Impurists are committed to—KJ (...) and Fallibilism—are jointly in tension with a widely-held principle of credence that’s called ‘Truth-Directedness,’ in the sense that the former two principles cannot both apply to those who know the third. This tension constitutes a serious challenge to Threshold-Impurists, because it leaves them two options, both of which are undesirable: denying Truth-Directedness, or accepting Truth-Directedness and accepting that whether KJ and Fallibilism apply to a person depends on whether she knows Truth-Directedness. (shrink)

Mythologies generally devote much attention to the birth of heroes and gods whose coming into the world is described as particular. Our first examples come from Greek mythology.The Furies, goddesses of vengeance, were born of the blood of Uranus who had been castrated by his son Cronos. Athena sprang, completely armed, from the head of Zeus which Prometheus had struck with an axe, an act sometimes attributed to Hephaistos. The Centaurs came from a union of Ixion with a cloud to (...) which Zeus had given the appearance of Hera with whom he was in love. Adonis came into the world from a myrrh tree (Smyrna in Greek ) which opened magically to give him birth. Ten years earlier a woman named Smyrna (myrrh) had committed incest with her father, Theios, without his realizing it; when he discovered the fact, he changed her into the tree known by that name. Bacchus was drawn out, a six months old fetus, from the body of his mother by Zeus. The body was lying in coals lit by the lightning and thunder accompanying the god's chariot as he came to visit Semele. Terrified at the sound of nature's fury, she had died of shock. Zeus sewed the fetus in his thigh and, when the time came, gave birth to Dionysius. (shrink)

Hegel, Heidegger, Postmodernity reconsidered after 20 years.

The ArgumentIn this contribution, I argue for epistemological impurity as the key to the historical reconstruction of the proto-biological sciences of the eighteenth century.The traditional approaches to the more or less complex and more or less stratified past of science either focus on the ideal content of that which has in the meantime been recognized as standard biological knowledge or otherwise try to uncover the implicit cognitive principles at work in order to reveal their shortcomings.A closer look at the (...) breakdown of the classical models of mechanistic explanation and the detailed analysis of the new empirico-experimental research in the neurophysiology of the eighteenth century shows, however, that eclectic procedures of various kinds have dominated the field. This eclecticism supported, and was in turn supported by, what has recently become known as “thinking with one's hand.” The paper illustrates this specific kind of thinking with reference to the case of Nicolas Le Cat's microphysics of nervous activity. (shrink)

This paper refers to a subjective approach to Ecosystems, referred to as Impure Systems to capture a set of fundamental properties. There are four main phenomenological components: directionality, intensity, connection energy and volume. A fundamental question in this approach to Impure Systems is the intensity or forces of a relation. Concepts as the system volume, and propose a system thermodynamic theory based in the Law of Zipf and the temperature of information are introduced. It hints at the possibility of adapting (...) the fractal theory by introducing the fractal dimension of the system. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to investigate what Hegel means by “reason” and “rationality.” The paper identifies and interprets some of Hegel’s most significant claims concerning the content of these terms, paying particular attention to his claims regarding the relation of the rational and the irrational. The resulting understanding of Hegel’s account of reason is then used to develop an improved interpretation of Hegel’s assertion of the equivalence of the rational and the actual.