There is relatively little comprehensive treatment of Heidegger’s theory of essences despite his ubiquitous use of essences. It is commonplace in contemporary analytic philosophy to view essences as the ground for true de re modal claims. I argue that Heidegger offers an account of essences that can best be understood as a type of relative essentialism. Relative essentialism is the view that more than one being can occupy the same space at the same time and those beings have distinct sets (...) of de re modal truths about them. Heidegger’s account of essences allows for true de re modal claims about a wide variety of things including scientific and cultural entities. At the same time, Heidegger rejects absolute essentialism: the view that there is one privilege collection of beings whose natures determine the truth values of de re modal claims about them. Relative essentialism is distinguished from contextual essentialism. (shrink)

There has been a long debate on whether demonstratives are directly referential as Kaplan originally argued, or indirectly referential like a definite description. I propose a new analysis of demonstratives that combines intuitions from both direct and indirect approaches. The demonstrative is analyzed as an indirectly referential expression with a binary maximality operator that takes two arguments, where the second argument can be a deictic pointing, an anaphoric index, or a relative clause. Direct reference is encoded not in the meaning (...) of the demonstrative but in the meaning contributed by the pointing gesture, thus capturing both direct and indirect uses. I further propose that some pronouns in English function as demonstratives, realizing the binary structure and competing with the demonstrative. The main advantages of this proposal include (a) deriving the distribution of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives systematically; (b) capturing the unique interaction that demonstratives have with a pointing gesture; and (c) locating English demonstratives against a larger, cross-linguistic picture. (shrink)

Davidson, truth, and triangulation -- Davidson applied -- Half truths -- Heidegger's analytic of Dasein -- Dasein and truth -- Truthful intersections -- Primitive disclosive alethism.

The contemporary debate about truth is polarized between deflationists and those who offer robust accounts of truth. I present a theory of truth called ‘Primitive Disclosive Alethism’ that occupies the middle ground between these two extremes. Contrary to deflationist claims, truth has a nature beyond its merely linguistic, expressive function. Truth is objective and non-epistemic, yet cannot be characterized in terms of correspondence. Primitive Disclosive Alethism offers a metaphysically satisfying explanation of our correspondence intuitions, while explaining why the concept of (...) truth is an undefined primitive. The theory also explains why the T-schema offers the clearest expression of what makes a sentence true. I distinguish this theory from the Identity Theory of Truth which equates true propositions with facts. (shrink)

"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

Relative essentialism is the novel metaphysical theory that there can be multiple objects occupying the same space at the same time each with its own de re modal truths. Relative essentialism is motivated by Davidson’s semantics and his denial that nature itself is divided into a privileged domain of objects. Relative essentialism was first presented by Samuel C. Wheeler. I argue that Wheeler’s approach to the Davidsonian program needs to be elaborated in terms of various types of preconceptual intentional relations. (...) This elaboration is already largely implicit in Davidson’s own later work and in Wheeler’s relaunching of Davidsonian metaphysics. More specifically, I argue that relative essentialism is ultimately founded not on predication narrowly construed but on intentionality broadly construed. Following Wheeler’s suggestion, comparisons are made between relative essentialism and work within the phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

In his article on radical innovation, Shinn (2005) examined the role of scientific instruments in innovation. This paper continues to investigate this theme, but the main focus is on how scientists or engineers from one discipline may learn from another and produce new knowledge and new technology. The paper looks at the role that tools and instruments developed by one discipline, in one environment, can play in the development of knowledge in a new environment. The theoretical basis for this study (...) is Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of tool-mediated activity. The proposed conceptualisation views instruments as dynamic and suggests types of tool-mediated activities which may contribute to knowledge creation. The collaborative process of experimentation is examined and opportunities for knowledge creation are discussed in relation to the instruments used. Methods used are interviews and observations. The case study is a small multidisciplinary laboratory developing a new process for producing nanoreactors, with potential applications in pharmaceuticals and energy. (shrink)

But what is thus presented is something additional to a study in the history of ideas. The author courageously undertakes not simply to recount but to interpret the story and, indeed, to point out the lesson to be learned from it. This lesson is not that we have gone astray and that our business is to discover where we took the wrong turning and who is chiefly responsible for this misdirection. On the contrary, the slow and difficult development of a (...) value-free mode of scientific thought is accounted a positive gain. But though this is so, we have no grounds for complacency. Indeed our present situation is described as one of crisis and predicament. This is because scientific success in the independent treatment of fact has not been matched by a comparable success in the independent treatment of value. The latter is our most pressing intellectual task and we are warned that it will be exceedingly difficult, requiring, indeed, the development of nothing less than a whole new logic and methodology. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza (1634–1677) is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of (the) multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is (...) found in the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature. (shrink)

It has often been said that the Zhuangzi 莊子 advocates political abstention, and that its putative skepticism prevents it from contributing in any meaningful way to political thinking: at best the Zhuangzi espouses a sort of anarchism, at worst it is “the night in which all cows are black,” a stance that one scholar has charged is ultimately immoral. This article tracks possible political allusions within the text, and, by reading these against details of social, political, and historical context, sheds (...) light on another strand of the Zhuangzi—one that questions prevailing normative values because it is fiercely critical of scholarly complicity with violent imperial territorial consolidation. (shrink)

Donald Davidson assigns truth a central role in his theory of meaning but he also makes truth a guiding methodological principle in metaphysics. Truth is inexorably connected to belief and meaning, and no one of these concepts has theoretical priority over the others. I argue that there is a methodological circularity in Davidson’s account of how the world contributes to the truth of our beliefs and utterances. The difficulty for Davidson is in providing an account of how speakers share a (...) common world while denying an ontologically privileged domain of entities and further claiming that being supervenes on truth. I suggest that the Heideggerian notion of disclosedness offers one solution. (shrink)

This paper examines some French feminist uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I focus on two Lacanian influenced accounts of psychological oppression, the first by Luce Irigaray and the second by Julia Kristeva, and I argue that these accounts fail to meet criteria for an adequate political psychology.

The human body is becoming hot property, a resource to be “mined,” “harvested,” patented, and traded commercially for profit as well as scientific and therapeutic advances. Under the new entrepreneurial approach to the body old tensions take on new dimensions—about consent, the fair distribution of tissues and products developed from them, the individual and cultural values represented by the body, and public policy governing the use of organs and tissues.

Recent literature comparing the works of Heidegger and Davidson suggests that one of the main differences between these two thinkers is that the latter lacks any notion of non-linguistic interpretation and understanding; the only way of making sense of a domain of entities for Davidson is theory. I argue against this common perspective and show that Davidson is committed to a primitive, pre-conceptual form of understanding that is socially mediated. This primitive form of understanding is essential to the functioning of (...) what Davidson calls 'primitive triangulation'. Properly understood, primitive triangulation shares many structural features with Dasein's comportment. (shrink)

A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter is written for all psychotherapists, counsellors, and psychologists who practise under the broad banner of psychoanalytic thinking. It is also for anyone who loves beauty and wants to think more about its place in the mind.

This paper attempts to motivate skepticism about the reality of mathematical objects. The aim of the paper is not to provide a general critique of mathematical realism, but to demonstrate the insufficiency of the arguments advanced by Michael Resnik. I argue that Resnik's use of the concept of immanent truth is inconsistent with the treatment of mathematical objects as ontologically and epistemically continuous with the objects posited by the natural sciences. In addition, Resnik's structuralist program, and his denial of relational (...) properties, is incompatible with a realist metaphysics about mathematical objects. (shrink)

The dissertation examines Davidson and Heidegger's rejections of correspondence truth, as well as their claims that truth is theoretically primitive. Truth is primitive in the sense that it cannot be reduced to, nor defined in terms of, some other more theoretically basic concepts, such as those offered in correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic accounts of truth. The fact that truth cannot be defined in terms of more basic concepts does not mean that there are not important and meaningful things to say (...) about truth; Davidson and Heidegger's agreement that there is more to say about truth distinguishes them from minimalist approaches to truth. Davidson and Heidegger make explicit truth's conceptual relationship to other important areas of inquiry such as language, subjectivity, and ontology. The dissertation claims that the two philosophers agree, despite radically different background texts and methodologies, on the fundamental relationship between self, other, and world. The dissertation moves beyond mere comparison by showing that Davidson's own position commits him to a Heideggerian treatment of truth, or something like it. I argue that understanding the similarities and supplemental arguments offered by each philosopher leads to a better overall account of truth than that offered by each philosopher individually. Moreover, I argue that although Heidegger and Davidson offer primarily transcendental arguments, their theories can accommodate naturalistic theories of language and concept acquisition. (shrink)

This book traces the career development and influence on American intellectual life of the first twenty women to earn a PhD in philosophy in the United States. Rogers explores the factors that led these women to pursue careers in academic philosophy, examines the ideas they developed, and evaluates the impact they had on the academic and social worlds they inhabited. This volume investigates not only the success stories of such women as Eliza Ritchie, Julia Gulliver, and Christine Ladd-Franklin, to name (...) a few, but also the policies and practices that made it difficult or impossible for others to succeed. (shrink)

This is essay is a critical response to Zhang Longxi's argument that Taoist philosophy is susceptible to Derrida's arguments against logocentrism. I present two main arguments. First, I argue that Zhang fails to provide sufficient evidence that would show Taoism is logocentric. Moreover, even if Zhang could provide support for such a claim there cannot be a general deconstructive argument against logocentrism. Derrida's arguments against logocentrism work from within a specific text. The second argument offers reasons for believing Taoism is (...) decidedly not logocentric because it lacks, among other things, the phonocentrism Derrida was intent on criticising. The 'presence' mentioned in Taoist literature is antithetical to the Platonic notion of Forms; it is not the presence of unchanging ideas in a rational mind. Zhuangzi and Plato do not share the similarities attributed to them by Zhang. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates the arguments advanced by Hubert Dreyfus in his debate with John McDowell regarding the nature of skilled coping. The paper argues that there are significant methodological shortcomings in Dreyfus’ position. The paper examines these methodological limitations and attempts to clarify the problems by re-framing the issues in terms of intentionality, and the specific intentional structures that may or may not be present in skilled coping. The paper attempts to show that the difficulties facing Dreyfus arise from (...) his implicit adherence to a final myth of the mental. The last myth of the mental is the belief thatmental coping is fundamentally different than embodied coping because the former is characterized by mindedness while the latter is not. Dreyfus characterizes the mental as constituted by a kind of interiority while everyday expertise or embodied coping is characterized by exteriority to the exclusion of any type of interiority. I undermine this Cartesian assumption in Dreyfus’ position by showing that the criteria and phenomenological descriptions he uses to characterize embodied coping apply equally to mental coping. (shrink)

In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth predicate and asserts that (...) “it is true” is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the “nature of truth” as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. (shrink)

Moral and social arguments weigh heavily against performing medical procedures solely for purposes of sex selection. The medical profession has a responsibility to abandon its posture of ethical neutrality and take a firm stand now against sex selection.