From 1929 through 1944, Wittgenstein endeavors to clarify mathematical meaningfulness by showing how (algorithmically decidable) mathematical propositions, which lack contingent "sense," have mathematical sense in contrast to all infinitistic "mathematical" expressions. In the middle period (1929-34), Wittgenstein adopts strong formalism and argues that mathematical calculi are formal inventions in which meaningfulness and "truth" are entirely intrasystemic and epistemological affairs. In his later period (1937-44), Wittgenstein resolves the conflict between his intermediate strong formalism and his criticism of set theory by requiring (...) that a mathematical calculus (vs. a "sign-game") must have an extrasystemic, real world application, thereby returning to the weak formalism of the Tractatus. (shrink)

The long‐standing issue of Wittgenstein's controversial remarks on Gödel's Theorem has recently heated up in a number of different and interesting directions [,, ]. In their, Juliet Floyd and Hilary Putnam purport to argue that Wittgenstein's‘notorious’ “Contains a philosophical claim of great interest,” namely, “if one assumed. that →P is provable in Russell's system one should… give up the “translation” of P by the English sentence ‘P is not provable’,” because if ωP is provable in PM, PM is ω ‐inconsistent, (...) and if PM is ω‐inconsistent, we cannot translate ‘P’as ’P is not provable in PM’because the predicate‘NaturalNo.’in ‘P’“cannot be…interpreted” as “x is a natural number.” Though Floyd and Putnam do not clearly distinguish the two tasks, they also argue for “The Floyd‐Putnam Thesis,” namely, that in the 1930's Wittgenstein had a particular understanding of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem. In this paper, I endeavour to show, first, that the most natural and most defensible interpretation of Wittgenstein's and the rest of is incompatible with the Floyd‐Putnam attribution and, second, that evidence from Wittgenstein's Nachla strongly indicates that the Floyd‐ Putnam attribution and the Floyd‐Putnam Thesis are false. By way of this examination, we shall see that despite a failure to properly understand Gödel's proof—perhaps because, as Kreisel says, Wittgenstein did not read Gödel's 1931 paper prior to 1942‐Wittgenstein's 1937–38, 1941 and 1944 remarks indicate that Gödel's result makes no sense from Wittgenstein's own perspective. (shrink)

Most philosophers of science maintain Confirmationism's central tenet, namely, that scientific theories are probabilistically confirmed by experimental successes. Against this dominant conception of experimental science, Popper's well-known, anti-inductivistic Falsificationism has stood, virtually alone, since 1934. Indeed, it is Popper who tells us that it was he who killed Logical Positivism. It is also pretty well-known that Popper blames Wittgenstein for much that is wrong with Logical Positivism, just as he despises Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophers for abdicating philosophy's true mission. What (...) is not well-known, however, especially because Popper neglected to tell us in 1934, is that Wittgenstein is very much an ally. It was Wittgenstein who rejected induction in the strongest possible terms as early as 1922, and it was Wittgenstein who similarly rejected Confirmationism approximately four years prior to Popper. The aims of this paper are to illuminate the substantial agreements between Popper and Wittgenstein and, by doing so, to clarify their important disagreement regarding the status of “strictly universal,” scientific theories. (shrink)

The long‐standing issue of Wittgenstein's controversial remarks on Gödel's Theorem has recently heated up in a number of different and interesting directions [, , ]. In their , Juliet Floyd and Hilary Putnam purport to argue that Wittgenstein's‘notorious’ “Contains a philosophical claim of great interest,” namely, “if one assumed. that →P is provable in Russell's system one should… give up the “translation” of P by the English sentence ‘P is not provable’,” because if ωP is provable in PM, PM is (...) ω ‐inconsistent, and if PM is ω‐inconsistent, we cannot translate ‘P’as ’P is not provable in PM’because the predicate‘NaturalNo.’in ‘P’“cannot be…interpreted” as “x is a natural number.” Though Floyd and Putnam do not clearly distinguish the two tasks, they also argue for “The Floyd‐Putnam Thesis,” namely, that in the 1930's Wittgenstein had a particular understanding of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem. In this paper, I endeavour to show, first, that the most natural and most defensible interpretation of Wittgenstein's and the rest of is incompatible with the Floyd‐Putnam attribution and, second, that evidence from Wittgenstein's Nachla strongly indicates that the Floyd‐ Putnam attribution and the Floyd‐Putnam Thesis are false. By way of this examination, we shall see that despite a failure to properly understand Gödel's proof—perhaps because, as Kreisel says, Wittgenstein did not read Gödel's 1931 paper prior to 1942‐Wittgenstein's 1937–38, 1941 and 1944 remarks indicate that Gödel's result makes no sense from Wittgenstein's own perspective. (shrink)

Strong Al presupposes (1) that Super-Searle (henceforth ‘Searle’) comes to know that the symbols he manipulates are meaningful , and (2) that there cannot be two or more semantical interpretations for the system of symbols that Searle manipulates such that the set of rules constitutes a language comprehension program for each interpretation. In this paper, I show that Strong Al is false and that presupposition #1 is false, on the assumption that presupposition #2 is true. The main argument of the (...) paper constructs a second program, isomorphic to Searle’s, to show that if someone, say Dan, runs this isomorphic program, he cannot possibly come to know what its mentioned symbols mean because they do not mean anything to anybody. Since Dan and Searle do exactly the same thing, except that the symbols they manipulate are different, neither Dan nor Searle can possibly know whether the symbols they manipulate are meaningful (let alone what they mean, if they are meaningful). The remainder of the paper responds to an anticipated Strong Al rejoinder, which, I believe, is a necessary extension of Strong Al. (shrink)

For more than six decades, and for thousands of students, Introduction to Logic has been the gold standard in introductory logic texts. In this 15th Edition, Carl Cohen and Victor Rodych update Irving M. Copi's classic text, improving on its many strengths and introducing new and helpful material that will greatly assist both students and instructors.

In this article we define a logical system called Hybrid Partial Type Theory ( $\mathcal {HPTT}$ ). The system is obtained by combining William Farmer’s partial type theory with a strong form of hybrid logic. William Farmer’s system is a version of Church’s theory of types which allows terms to be non-denoting; hybrid logic is a version of modal logic in which it is possible to name worlds and evaluate expressions with respect to particular worlds. We motivate this combination of (...) ideas in the introduction, and devote the rest of the article to defining, axiomatising, and proving a completeness result for $\mathcal {HPTT}$. (shrink)

Constrained instrumentalist theories of punishment – those that seek to justify punishment by its good effects, but limit its scope – are an attractive alternative to pure retributivism or utilitarianism. One way in which we may be able to limit the scope of instrumental punishment is by justifying punishment through the concept of duty. This strategy is most clearly pursued in Victor Tadros’ influential ‘Duty View’ of punishment. In this paper, I show that the Duty View as it stands (...) cannot find any moral distinction between the permissible punishment of the guilty and the permissible punishment of the innocent in extreme circumstances, therefore undermining one the key pillars of its intuitive appeal. I canvass several ways to respond to this problem, arguing that a rights forfeiture theory which employs the distinction between rights forfeiture and rights infringement is the best solution. (shrink)

Le manuscrit decouvert a la Bibliotheque de la Sorbonne est la seule source en francais du cours d'esthetique de Hegel. Le cahier ne mentionne aucun nom, mais les traces de l'ecriture de Victor Cousin atteste que celui-ci en etait le possesseur et le destinataire. La comparaison avec les autres sources manuscrites montre que se texte se rapporte au cours donne a Berlin pendant le semestre d'ete 1823, prenant la forme d'un abrege. L'accent est mis sur la structuration du discours (...) et la dimension systematique, distinguant cette version condensee de l'edition traditionnelle de l'Esthetique. Le texte constitue egalement l'exemple exceptionnel d'une traduction hegelienne realisee du vivant du philosophe. L'enseignement de Hegel, inedit en son temps, se trouve ainsi restitue pour la premiere fois au public francophone sous sa forme originale. (shrink)

Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a whole; an understanding of thought as (...) a process that operates between rather than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake, God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody, singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social hierarchies. (shrink)

Parsa-Parsi et al systematically discuss and elucidate contentious and non-controversial ethical issues that emerged during the ICoME (International Code of Medical Ethics) revision process and the consensus they achieved. The ethical issues discussed include the physician’s duty to act in the best interests of patients and to ensure they are protected from the unjustifiable risk of harm, respect for patient autonomy and the duties of physicians during emergencies, among others. This paper examines paragraph 26, which requires doctors to provide only (...) medically justified remote treatment, ensure patients offer informed consent and adequately protect their confidentiality.1 At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries in Europe and America implemented remote-by-default healthcare policies. At that time, the policy aimed to ensure that patients enjoyed continued access to care while protecting healthcare professionals’ health and well-being. After the COVID-19 pandemic, this policy remained in place. Regardless of the nature of their ailment, patients have consistently preferred in-person care out of concern that their health issues might not be accurately diagnosed and that they may not receive quality care …. (shrink)

A widespread view in moral, legal, and political philosophy, as well as in public discourse, is that responsibility makes a difference to the fair allocation or distribution of things that are valuable or disvaluable independently of responsibility. For example, the fairness of punishing a person for wrongdoing varies with her responsibility for wrongdoing; the fairness of requiring a person to pay compensation varies with her responsibility for the harm that she caused; the fairness of one person being worse off than (...) another varies with her responsibility for being worse off; the fairness of inflicting defensive harm on a person to avert a threat varies with her responsibility for causing or posing the threat; and so on. (shrink)

Various philosophers have wanted to move from a (P.F.) “Strawsonian” understanding of the “practices of moral responsibility” to a non-skeptical result. I focus on a strategy moving from a “response-dependent” theory of responsibility. I aim to show that a key analogy associated with this strategy fails to support a compatibilist result. It seems clear that nothing could show that nothing we have been laughing at has really been funny. If “the funny” is similar to “the blameworthy”, then perhaps it would (...) follow that nothing could show that no one we have ever blamed has really been blameworthy. The comparison is interesting, but inconclusive: even if we grant that these properties are normatively similar, the latter has substantive empirical presuppositions, whereas the former does not. One important upshot: even if the standards operative in our practices cannot be mistaken, it could nevertheless be that no one has ever met these standards Ruling out this possibility seemingly requires re-engaging in all of the so-called "metaphysical" debates Strawsonians are keen to avoid. (shrink)

Moral latitude is only ever a matter of coincidence on the most popular decision procedure in the literature on moral uncertainty. In all possible choice situations other than those in which two or more options happen to be tied for maximal expected choiceworthiness, Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness implies that only one possible option is uniquely appropriate. A better theory of appropriateness would be more sensitive to the decision maker’s credence in theories that endorse agent-centred prerogatives. In this paper, we will develop (...) and defend a modified version of this view that allows for agent-centred prerogatives and supererogation as part of its verdicts about appropriateness. (shrink)

We present an argument in support of the legal prohibition of infant male circumcision (IMC) in developed Western countries. We submit that all IMC, irrespective of whether the motivation behind it be secular or religious, violates children’s rights to self-determination (autonomy) and bodily integrity and is therefore morally illegitimate. And while IMC’s being morally wrong does not entail that it ought to be criminalised, we contend that it should be legally proscribed so as to protect children against harm and to (...) uphold their rights. We consider and reject an argument that an exemption from the legal ban should be granted to religious parents who perceive themselves to be under a moral obligation to subject their male infants to IMC. We argue that since IMC sets back children’s basic interests and violates their rights, there is no room, and no case, for the conferring of a religious exemption. (shrink)

Everyone, even when asserting unchallengeable authority from God or Science, thinks in language, in words and phrases, in expressions of moral, social and political impact, fighting words and words with and over which we fight. However, debates among the educated can be irrelevant elsewhere, ineffective against the highly motivated whose dogma instructs and guides them, their voting and their arming. The degeneration of “democracy” to “tyranny” such as Plato’s Republic postulated threatens in some lands “of the free,” while in others (...) it seems inexorably in progress. Today “democracy,” republic,” “liberty/freedom,” “justice,” “law and order” are adduced by their actual enemies to complement “nationalism,” “patriotism,” and frightening “empire.” Extremists on both sides decry “Tyranny!” each in fact seeking authoritarian power. All of which have instructive ancient precedents: in the History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides offers horrific accounts of ancient nation-states “long ago and far away,” more or less democratic, that abandoned common sense, moral sense, and with them regard for value words and truth itself. In the early 2020s CE many persons and governments have done little better during the still lingering pandemic. A second horror is prompted by Thucydides’ report of civil war on Corcyra, telling how faction spawned riots, coups d’état, and outright civil war. The twenty-first-century media are uniquely potent, yet mechanics of seduction are timeless. Likewise techniques for winning true believers and votes, as illustrated by passages in Mein Kampf on the language of propaganda, its production and reception. Our hope is therefore Education for a New Era to help students to discover pitfalls of media(ted) “information,” to achieve independent critical thinking at levels of basic language use and foundations of argument. Besides recognizing mis- and disinformation as harmful, they must learn themselves to judge thoughtless use, cynical abuse, or, worse yet, brazen disdain of vocabulary indicating moral/ethical value. Scientists have key roles in this drama; humanists larger ones yet. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas has argued that the passion of hope is the movement of the sensitive appetite and the first of the irascible passion. The first part of the article aims to explore the cause and the mechanism of the passion of hope, and tries to clarify the relationship between the passion of hope and the perception. In human beings, it is possible that the passion of hope is caused by false judgement of the perception, which will lead to the result (...) of false hope. In Aquinas’s argument, the problem of false hope could be solved through the moral virtue and the prudence. In the second part of this article, the aim is to analyse how the virtue of magnanimity, humility and the prudence work impact on the passion of hope and perfect it.Contribution: This research concentrates on the topic of the passion of hope of Thomas Aquinas, and provides a new perspective on the understanding of the relationship between the passion and the virtue. (shrink)

The individualist nature of much contemporary just war theory means that we often discuss cases with single attackers. But even if war is best understood in this individualist way, in war combatants often have to make decisions about how to distribute harms among a plurality of aggressors: they must decide whom and how many to harm, and how much to harm them. In this paper, I look at simultaneous multiple aggressor cases in which more than one distribution of harm among (...) aggressors is available. I show how such cases pose deep questions concerning the nature, role, and scope of the necessity principle, and its relationship to both liability and narrow proportionality. I argue that a hitherto unrecognised measure – ‘narrow proportionality shortfall’ – and its distribution is relevant in choosing how to distribute harms across aggressors. I then extend this analysis to show how this may help us with a puzzle concerning sequential attacks. (shrink)

_"One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, ___American Conservative__ Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it _is _an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its (...) legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure. (shrink)

This chapter explores some of the major developments in the philosophical understanding of suicide in 19th Century Western thought. Two developments in particular are considered. The first is a widespread shift towards thinking about suicide in medical terms rather than moral terms. Deploying methods initiated by a number of French and German thinkers in the preceding century who worked at the then emerging interface between the social and biological sciences, a number of 19th century thinkers ejected what they took to (...) be old metaphysical superstitions about ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and replaced them with (allegedly) hard-nosed scientific diagnoses of ‘health’ and ‘sickness’. Dismissing traditional moral arguments against the permissibility of suicide, the phenomenon came to be viewed as a symptom of decline or degeneration. How variations of this view, in biological and social contexts, reorientated practical responses to suicide in terms of treatment rather than moral condemnation is explored. The second 19th century development in philosophical thought with respect to suicide the chapter considers concerns its place in one of the most significant controversies in Germany from 1860 to the turn of the century: the Pessimismusstreit or ‘pessimism dispute’. While philosophical pessimism might be thought to vindicate or even entail suicide, many of the most prominent pessimists—including Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann—denied that this was the case, and perhaps surprisingly took suicide to involve a special kind of moral and/or epistemic failing. The chapter aims to elucidate the different arguments which pessimists appealed to in order to ground this position. (shrink)

In the literature on free will, fatalism, and determinism, a distinction is commonly made between temporally intrinsic (‘hard’) and temporally relational (‘soft’) facts at times; determinism, for instance, is the thesis that the temporally intrinsic state of the world at some given past time, together with the laws, entails a unique future (relative to that time). Further, it is commonly supposed by incompatibilists that only the ‘hard facts’ about the past are fixed and beyond our control, whereas the ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past needn’t be. A substantial literature arose in connection with this distinction, though no consensus emerged as to the proper way to analyze it. It is time, I believe, to revisit these issues. The central claim of this paper is that the attempts to analyze the hard/soft fact distinction got off on fundamentally the wrong track. The crucial feature of soft facts is that they (in some sense) depend on the future. Following recent work on the notion of dependence, however, I argue that the literature on the soft/hard distinction has failed to capture the sense of dependence at stake. This is because such attempts have tried to capture softness in terms of purely modal notions like entailment and necessitation. As I hope to show, however, such notions cannot capture the sort of asymmetrical dependence relevant to soft facthood. Arguing for this claim is the first goal of this paper. My second goal is to gesture towards what an adequate account of soft facthood will really look like. (shrink)

Think of the last thing someone did to you to seriously harm or offend you. And now imagine, so far as you can, becoming fully aware of the fact that his or her action was the causally inevitable result of a plan set into motion before he or she was ever even born, a plan that had no chance of failing. Should you continue to regard him or her as being morally responsible—blameworthy, in this case—for what he or she did? (...) Many have thought that, intuitively, you should not. Recently, Alfred Mele has employed this line of thought to mount what many have taken to be a powerful argument for incompatibilism: the “Zygote Argument”. However, in interesting new papers, John Martin Fischer and Stephen Kearns have each independently argued that the Zygote Argument fails. As I see it, the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns reveal some important questions about how the argument is meant to be—or how it would best be—understood. Once we make a slight (but important) modification to the argument, however, I think we will be able to see that the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns do not detract from its substantial force. (shrink)

A prominent recent strategy for advancing the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism has been to argue that agents who meet compatibilist conditions for responsibility could nevertheless be subject to certain sorts of deterministic manipulation, so that an agent could meet the compatibilist’s conditions for responsibility, but also be living a life the precise details of which someone else determined that she should live. According to the incompatibilist, however, once we became aware that agents had been manipulated (...) or ‘set up’ in the relevant way, we should no longer judge that they are responsible for their behavior, nor should we hold them responsible for it by blaming them, in case what they did was wrong. In this paper, I aim to shift the debate to different terrain. The focus so far has been simply on what we may or may not permissibly say or do concerning manipulated agents. But I believe a powerful new incompatibilist argument can be mounted from considering whether the manipulators themselves can justifiably blame the agents they manipulate in compatibilist-friendly ways. It seems strikingly counterintuitive to suppose that they may do so. The argument of this paper, however, is that, given the right story, incompatibilism provides the best explanation for why this is so. In short, the compatibilist must say that, while such manipulated agents are still responsible, the manipulators lack the moral standing to blame them. But I argue that, on compatibilist assumptions, this explanation ultimately fails. (shrink)

The plane was going to crash, but it didn't. Johnny was going to bleed to death, but he didn't. Geach sees here a changing future. In this paper, I develop Geach's primary argument for the (almost universally rejected) thesis that the future is mutable (an argument from the nature of prevention), respond to the most serious objections such a view faces, and consider how Geach's view bears on traditional debates concerning divine foreknowledge and human freedom. As I hope to show, (...) Geach's view constitutes a radically new view on the logic of future contingents, and deserves the status of a theoretical contender in these debates. (shrink)

Many philosophers endorse the Transparency Thesis, the claim that by introspection one cannot become aware of one's experience. Recently, some authors have suggested that the Transparency Thesis is challenged by introspective states reached under mindfulness. We label this the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis. The present paper develops the hypothesis in important new ways. First, we motivate the hypothesis by drawing on recent clinical psychology and cognitive science of mindfulness. Secondly, we develop the hypothesis by describing the implied shift in experiential perspective, (...) the scope of introspectable qualities, and the level of skill. Thirdly, we defend the hypothesis against various philosophical arguments. We conclude that the Mindfulness Opacity Hypothesis is empirically and theoretically well motivated and supported. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Albert Camus's notion of the absurd in order to elucidate his critique of historical teleology. In his life and work, Camus endeavoured to develop a fallibilist historical sensibility suitable for a cosmos shorn of meaning, which led him to reject ideas of progress and their traces of messianism when elaborating his treatment of rebellion. By making use of Camus's ideas about the absurd and rebellion, I suggest that these two themes productively unsettle contemporary cosmopolitanism as a teleological (...) orthodoxy of human progress and fruitfully, if paradoxically, lie at the heart of a concept of cosmopolitanism “without hope.”. (shrink)