The standard Kratzerian analysis of modal auxiliaries, such as ‘may’ and ‘can’, takes them to be univocal and context-sensitive. Our first aim is to argue for an alternative view, on which such expressions are polysemous. Our second aim is to thereby shed light on the distinction between semantic context-sensitivity and polysemy. To achieve these aims, we examine the mechanisms of polysemy and context-sensitivity and provide criteria with which they can be held apart. We apply the criteria to modal auxiliaries and (...) show that the default hypothesis should be that they are polysemous, and not merely context-sensitive. We then respond to arguments against modal ambiguity. Finally, we show why modal polysemy has significant philosophical implications. (shrink)

Dispositionalists try to provide an account of modality—possibility, necessity, and the counterfactual conditional—in terms of dispositions. But there may be a tension between dispositionalist accounts of possibility on the one hand, and of counterfactuals on the other. Dispositionalists about possibility must hold that there are no impossible dispositions, i.e., dispositions with metaphysically impossible stimulus and/or manifestation conditions; dispositionalist accounts of counterfactuals, if they allow for non-vacuous counterpossibles, require that there are such impossible dispositions. I argue, first, that there are in (...) fact no impossible dispositions; and second, that the dispositionalist can nevertheless acknowledge the non-vacuity of some counterpossibles. The strategy in the second part is one of ‘divide and conquer’ that is not confined to the dispositionalist: it consists in arguing that counterpossibles, when non-vacuous, are read epistemically and are therefore outside the purview of a dispositional account. (shrink)

This paper, which is based on an extensive analysis of the literature, gives a brief overview of the main ways in which solidarity has been employed in bioethical writings in the last two decades. As the vagueness of the term has been one of the main targets of critique, we propose a new approach to defining solidarity, identifying it primarily as a practice enacted at the interpersonal, communal, and contractual/legal levels. Our three-tier model of solidarity can also help to explain (...) the way in which crises of solidarity can occur, notably when formal solidaristic arrangements continue to exist despite ‘lower tiers’ of solidarity practices at inter-personal and communal levels having ‘broken away’. We hope that this contribution to the growing debate on the potential for the value of solidarity to help tackle issues in bioethics and beyond, will stimulate further discussion involving both conceptual and empirically informed perspectives. (shrink)

Inspired both by our ordinary understanding of the world and by reflection on science, anti-Humeanism is a growing trend in metaphysics. Anti-Humeans reject the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience that the world is “just one little thing and then another”, and argue instead that dispositions, powers, or capacities provide connection and activity in nature. But how exactly are we to understand the shared commitment of this anti-Humean movement? I argue that this kind of anti-Humeanism, at its most general level, is (...) to be understood neither as a view about ontology nor about fundamentality, but rather as a specific claim about what explains what. (shrink)

Are today's young adults gender rebels or returning to tradition? In Where the Millennials Will Take Us, Barbara J. Risman reveals the diverse strategies youth use to negotiate the ongoing gender revolution. Using her theory of gender as a social structure, Risman analyzes life history interviews with a diverse set of Millennials to probe how they understand gender and how they might change it. Some are true believers that men and women are essentially different and should be so. Others (...) are innovators, defying stereotypes and rejecting sexist ideologies and organizational practices. Perhaps new to this generation are gender rebels who reject sex categories, often refusing to present their bodies within them and sometimes claiming genderqueer identities. And finally, many youths today are simply confused by all the changes swirling around them. As a new generation contends with unsettled gender norms and expectations, Risman reminds us that gender is much more than an identity; it also shapes expectations in everyday life, and structures the organization of workplaces, politics, and, ideology. To pursue change only in individual lives, Risman argues, risks the opportunity to eradicate both gender inequality and gender as a primary category that organizes social life. (shrink)

Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye? In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali (...) offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people's senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live-and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today's most urgent critical tasks. (shrink)

Plurals had a slow start in the history of formal semantics; a significant explosion of innovations didn’t come until the 1980s. In this paper, I offer a picture of developments by noting not only important achievements but also reflecting on the state of thinking about plurals at various periods—what issues or phenomena were not even noticed, what puzzles had started to get attention, and what innovations made the biggest changes in how people thought about plurals. I divide the epochs roughly (...) into decades: before formal semantics ; the first decade of formal semantics—the 1970s, with early work by Montague and Bennett and landmark work on bare plurals by Carlson; the 1980s, when work by Link, Scha, Krifka, Landman, Roberts, and others significantly changed the landscape; and the 1990s, where I mention some key work by Lasersohn and Schwarzschild and stop there, although there was much more work in the 1990s. I don’t discuss the twenty-first century at all because it’s not very historical yet. (shrink)

Socialism and Feminism in the 19th century.

Some presuppositions seem to be weaker than others in the sense that they can be more easily neutralized in some contexts. For example some factive verbs, most notably epistemic factives like know, be aware, and discover, are known to shed their factivity fairly easily in contexts such as are found in (1). (1) a. …if anyone discovers that the method is also wombat-proof, I’d really like to know! b. Mrs. London is not aware that there have ever been signs erected (...) to stop use of the route… c. Perhaps God knows that we will never reach the stars…. (The examples in (1) are all naturally occurring ones, discovered by David Beaver with the aid of Google; cf. Beaver 2002, exx. 32, 43, and 51, respectively.) On the other hand some other factives, e.g. regret, matter, and be surprised, do not exhibit the same type of behavior: (2) a. If any of the students regrets behaving badly, they’ll let us know. b. It doesn’t matter that the chimpanzees escaped. c. Was Bill surprised that spinach was included? Unlike the examples in (1), those in (2) could not be used appropriately in contexts where the speaker was not assuming that the complement clause was true. Our main concern will be trying to find the cause of this difference. However, before we get to that, we will look more closely at the concept “presupposition” itself, as well as its close neighbor in the linguistic literature, “conventional implicature” (section 2), and also at various ways of getting rid of presuppositions (section 3). In section 4 we will investigate two possible explanations for differences in presupposition triggering – the “lexical alternative” approach of Abusch (2002, 2005), and a suggestion of Ladusaw’s involving detachability of presuppositions. The final section contains concluding remarks. (shrink)

In a pioneering study Georges Duby showed how the system of justice that had prevailed in the Carolingian era ceased to function in the Mâconnais of the tenth century. His observations about the breakdown of public institutions opened up a new field of research, for they suggested the development in the tenth century of a unique set of judicial institutions and practices, different in kind from the traditional public order of the Roman and Roman-influenced Carolingian worlds. This was an important (...) change, and a number of scholars turned their attention to the developments described by Duby. (shrink)

A consideration of efforts to explain religion naturalistically, including a range of recent cognitive-evolutionary approaches. The book also examines recent efforts to reconcile natural-scientific accounts of the world with traditional religious teachings.

According to Hume, experience in observing art is one of the prerequisites for being an ideal art critic. But although Hume extols the value of observing art for the art critic, he says little about the value, for the art critic, of executing art. That is, he does not discuss whether ideal aesthetic judges should have practiced creating the form of art they are judging. In this paper, I address this issue. Contrary to some contemporary philosophers who claim that experience (...) in creating art is irrelevant to one’s ability to judge that art form, as well as to some dance critics who see dance training as possibly even detrimental to one’s aesthetic judgment, I suggest that having practiced dancing makes one a better observer of certain aesthetic qualities of dance. Dance training, I argue, can facilitate a kinesthetic experience upon watching dance without which some aesthetic aspects of a dance performance—such as grace, power, and precision, as perceived kinesthetically—may go unnoticed. (shrink)

Populizmus dnes predstavuje často skloňovaný pojem tak na akademickej pôde, ako i na samotnej politickej scéne, v médiách a medzi laickou verejnosťou. Skutočnosťou je, že hoci v našej spoločnosti tento pojem používa takmer každý, len málokto vie, čo vlastne znamená. V tomto článku sa preto budeme zaoberať otázkou, ktorá sa stala predmetom analýz mnohých teoretikov, otázkou, čo je to populizmus. Jedným z tých teoretikov je Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014), ktorý populizmus nechápe ako ideológiu, ale ako istú stratégiu resp. spôsob komunikácie. V (...) prvej časti nášho článku vymedzíme pojem „populizmus“, pričom upozorníme na jeho viaceré rozličné interpretácie ako aj na to, aké je jeho spoločné základné analytické jad­ro. V nasledujúcich častiach článku sa už zameriame na analýzu populizmu podľa Ernesta Laclaua. Cieľom nášho článku je teda analýza teórie populizmu podľa E. Laclaua v kontexte súčas­nej situácie na domácej i svetovej, nielen politickej scéne. (shrink)

May 1, 2004 is a joyful day for the Polish society. Poland became a member of the European-Union! The Austrians did not enjoy the admission of the 10 countries of Central and Eastern Europe to the EU. At that time only 38% of Austrians were satisfied with EU membership. Before the enlargement of the Union Austria suggested a seven-year grace period for citizens from new member states who wish to work in the area of the EU and the protection period (...) for the four main industries. Members of the Austrian Government and the Commissioner, Franz Fischler expresses a hope that Austrian entrepreneurs would expand to the east. Sixty seven percent of entrepreneurs of small Austrian companies felt, however, that EU enlargement will not bring the country any benefits. They pressured the government to protect its own labor market, agriculture and border regions. (shrink)

Pretende-se reconstruir e analisar a introdução de O sentido da nova lógica de Quine para, à luz de suas justificativas históricas para o corolário sistema lógico moderno, procurar defender a neutralidade ontológica que seu aspecto formal possibilita. A distinção entre nomear e significar, na nova lógica de Quine, ressalta o fato de que não é necessário “admitir um reino de entidades chamadas significados”, e que, portanto, a formalidade dos enunciados ontológicos não assume compromisso ontológico.

Against the background of recent developments in neuroscience, the paper shows how, for Hegel, the theoretical, practical and evaluative functions of the mind are grounded in something like a natural normativity, based on the interaction of the body's inner world with the outer world. These forms of organic homeostasis are the basis for further kinds and levels of norms, and deviations from these norms, which result in mental pathologies, provide insights into the complexity of spirit.

Populist-nationalist ideologies pose a threat to women’s rights. This article examines to what extent national institutionalisation of international frameworks promoting women’s rights can weather the misogynistic political climate accompanying the global rise of populist nationalism. The post-2016 situation in the Philippines offers a testing ground for this problem due to the co-existence of President Duterte’s hypermasculinist national leadership with a strong history of institutionalisation of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Drawing from an analysis of WPS policy and (...) institutions in the Philippines between 2009 and 2019 and from field research and interviews with government agencies, local civil society organisations and international partners, this article argues that the WPS agenda will likely survive in the hostile environment. But it also finds that institutionalisation alone does not guarantee successful implementation. While the WPS agenda may ostensibly remain a national priority under populist-nationalist regimes, its progression has been halted. (shrink)

Bioethics education now takes place outside universities as well as within them. How should clinicians, ethics committee members, and policymakers be taught the ethics they need, and how may their progress best be evaluated?

Pace Dummett, the issue between molecularism and holism does not turn on whether a meaning theory is compositional, but on how successful communication is conceived. Given a notion of partial understanding, molecularism escapes the two most prevalent objections against holism (learnability and communication). Holism, too, can escape these objections, provided we also grant the holist a notion of partial understanding and suitably amend our conception of successful communication.

En este artículo discuto las conexiones entre el poeta, los personajes y los lectores. Mi enfoque se funda en lo siguiente: ¿Cómo se imaginan los lectores al autor, cómo imagina el autor a los personajes y de qué modo los lectores son inspirados por los personajes? He seleccionado ejemplos de la tradición homérica y, más específicamente, de algunas estrategias de interpretación en la exégesis antigua, particularmente lo que se ha dado en denominar “soluciones desde el personaje”, para proponer vinculaciones con (...) la interpretación literaria y la crítica textual moderna. In this article I discuss the connections between poet, characters and readers. My focus is based on the following question: How is the author imagined by readers, how are the characters imagined by the author and how the characters inspire readers? I have taken my examples from the Homeric tradition and, more specifically, from some manoeuvres of interpretation in ancient exegesis, particularly the so-called ‘solutions from character’, suggesting a connection with modern textual criticism and literary interpretation. (shrink)

We are within nature and culture, conditioned simultaneously by genes and meanings. This form of our self-understanding is the result of fundamental modifications that happened in modern philosophical anthropology and of the impact of the natural Science. In modern philosophy three types of approaches to the human situation were constituted at different times: the idealist, the naturalist, and the culturalist, and the problem of whether humanity is natural (biological) or cultural has begun to take precedence over the issue of human (...) supernatural roots. Both approaches are presented, their presuppositions discussed, and arguments in favor of a version of the culturalist approach. Only the culturalist approach allows us to understand our own self-constitution and, in particular, our self-reflectivity, as well as the naturalist attempts to ignore them and immerse ourselves in nature. (shrink)