Understanding Wisdom Literature: Conflict and Dissonance in the Hebrew Text. By David Penchansky. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012. Pp. xii + 120. $20.
A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism. Edited by Matthias Henze. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012. Pp. xv + 568. $50.
With The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times, Charles Mathewes has given us a timely book that, I imagine, will be so for many times to come. His purpose throughout is to "offer a primer in the Augustinian-Christian vernacular, a language of religious, moral, and political deliberation" (2). This language and way of understanding reality, Mathewes argues, can provide us with ways of thinking about our own lives in the world as political and social creatures. The "dark times" (...) to which he refers in the subtitle have to do with life after 9/11 as citizens in a country that dominates as an economic and military powerhouse and greatly under the influence of what he calls "millennial capitalism" .. (shrink)
Making Sense of Sex: Attitudes towards Sexuality in Early Jewish and Christian Literature. By William Loader. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013. Pp. vii + 168. $24.
Making Sense of Sex: Attitudes towards Sexuality in Early Jewish and Christian Literature. By William Loader. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013. Pp. vii + 168. $24.
Imperative sentences like Dance! do not seem to represent the world. Recent modal analyses challenge this idea, but its intuitive and historical appeal remain strong. This paper presents three new challenges for a non-representational analysis, showing that the obstacles facing it are even steeper than previously appreciated. I will argue that the only way for the non-representationalist to meet these three challenges is to adopt a dynamic semantics. Such a dynamic semantics is proposed here: imperatives introduce preferences between alternatives. This (...) characterization of meaning focuses on what function a sentence serves in discourse, rather than what that sentence refers to (e.g., a state of the world). By representing the meaning of imperatives, connectives and declaratives in a common dynamic format, the challenges posed for non-representationalism are met. (shrink)
A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker, Philosophia, 5, 269–286 (1975)) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study (...) of conditionals, broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here. This new analysis exploits a dynamic conception of meaning where the meaning of a symbol is its potential to change an agent’s mental state (or the state of a conversation) rather than being the symbol’s content (e.g. the proposition it expresses). The analysis of conditionals is also built on the idea that the contrast between subjunctive and indicative conditionals parallels a contrast between revising and consistently extending some body of information. (shrink)
This paper proposes a semantics for free choice permission that explains both the non-classical behavior of modals and disjunction in sentences used to grant permission, and their classical behavior under negation. It also explains why permissions can expire when new information comes in and why free choice arises even when modals scope under disjunction. On the proposed approach, deontic modals update preference orderings, and connectives operate on these updates rather than propositions. The success of this approach stems from its capacity (...) to capture the difference between expressing the preferences that give rise to permissions and conveying propositions about those preferences. (shrink)
No existing conditional semantics captures the dual role of 'if' in embedded interrogatives — 'X wonders if p' — and conditionals. This paper presses the importance and extent of this challenge, linking it to cross-linguistic patterns and other phenomena involving conditionals. Among these other phenomena are conditionals with multiple 'if'-clauses in the antecedent — 'if p and if q, then r' — and relevance conditionals — 'if you are hungry, there is food in the cupboard'. Both phenomena are shown to (...) be problematic for existing analyses. Surprisingly, the decomposition of conditionals needed to capture the link with interrogatives provides a new analysis that captures all three phenomena. The model-theoretic semantics offered here relies on a dynamic conception of meaning and compositionality, a feature discussed throughout. (shrink)
