Discusssion of passages 243 et. seq. of Wittgenstein's Philosophical lnvestigations tends to concentrate on the argument supporting the thesis that a logically private language is impossible. When the discussion becomes broader, the presumption is generally that this thesis is one premifs of an argument against solipsism. I believe that the passages will support a valid argument that might, at first glance, give comfort to someone in the egocentric predicament, but that this comfort would quickly grow cold on closer examination. I (...) do not mean to suggest that Wittgenstein offers no escape from the predicament, only that the escape will not be a consequence of the pluralism necessary to the existence of language, but rather a byproduct of his discussion of the logic of mental discourse. In this paper, I state an alternative to the contra-solipsist reading of the passages, taking Wittgenstein there to be reflecting a three part dispute, the other participants of which are a skeptic and a philosopher I'll call ‘the Realist'. (shrink)

Do we still have a Cartesian mind-body problem? Folk wisdom has it that Descartes is responsible for there being a mind-body problem. Nonetheless, the same folk wisdom has it that the mind-body problem is still with us. Discovering the culprit and his modus operandi has not apparently enabled us to neutralize his mischief. How can that be? Perhaps it is because the mind-body problem we have now is not the infamous one of Cartesian origins.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation is a technique that may aid researchers in their attempts to elucidate the underlying brain functions involved in consciousness. By employing TMS along with other neuroimaging methods and case studies, researchers may be aided in addressing their various hypotheses. Employing the ‘brain as mobile’ analogy, it may be possible to determine the individual contributions of single elements of the brain without upsetting the overall balance.

Kripke (1977) views Donnellan's (1966) misdescription cases as cases where semantic reference and speaker's reference come apart. Such cases, however, are also cases where semantic reference conflicts with a distinct species of reference I call "public reference", i.e. the object that the cues publicly available at the time of utterance indicate is the speaker's referent of the utterance. This raises the question: do the misdescription cases trade on the distinction between semantic reference and speaker's reference, or the distinction between semantic (...) reference and public reference? I argue that Kripke's own construal in terms of semantic reference and speaker's reference is at best incomplete, and probably wrong. I also explain the general importance of the notion of 'public reference'. (shrink)

The uneasiness caused by deberent loqui is reflected in the variant readings and the emendations put forward. Is there in fact a personal subject? To understand iuvenes is possible but clumsy, but if the tragic poets themselves are intended, then these great writers are strangely selfish. Petronius surely is talking about the proper language for good oratory , which depends on a healthy literary language in general. This rules outWilamowitz's too particular and Fuchs's uglier supplements: easier than deceret would be (...) deberet, paralleled almost exactly in Petronius’ contemporary, Seneca . Deberent and deberemus were doubtless due to a desire to provide a personal subject for the misunderstood impersonal verb. (shrink)

The Indiana Court of Appeals, in JKB, Sr. v. Armour Pharmaceutical Co. ), held that the state's Blood Shield Act does not protect pharmaceutical companies that produce blood-derived products from product liability suits based on injuries attributable to tainted blood supplies. Blood shield statutes help to guarantee adequate blood supplies by limiting the liability of blood banks. This holding limits the defenses available to pharmaceutical companies sued under product liability theory.The defendant, Armour Pharmaceutical, produces and sells clotting factor agents, which (...) are derived through plasmapheresis. Plasmapheresis is a costly and complex donation process through which the plasma and red blood cells of a donor's blood are separated. After separation, the process returns the red blood cells to the donor but retains the plasma. (shrink)

In this paper a new property of theories, called effective retractability is introduced and used to obtain a characterization for the degrees of subtheories of arithmetic and set theory. By theory we understand theory in standard formalization as defined by Tarski [10]. The word degree refers to the Kleene-Post notion of degree of recursive unsolvability [2]. By the degree of a theory we mean, of course, the degree associated with its decision problem via Gödel numbering.