In the last century there were philosophers who argued that nothing exists but ideas. In our century there are people who write as if there were nothing but texts. These people, whom I shall call “textualists,” include for example, the so-called Yale school of literary criticism centering around Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul De Man, “post-structuralist” French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, historians like Hayden White, and social scientists like Paul Rabinow. Some of these people (...) take their point of departure from Heidegger, but usually the influence of philosophers is relatively remote. The center of gravity of the intellectual movement in which these people figure is not philosophy, but literary criticism. In this paper I want to discuss some similarities and differences between this movement and nineteenth-century idealism. (shrink)

The Aristotelian syllogistic cannot account for the validity of certain inferences involving relational facts. In this paper, we investigate the prospects for providing a relational syllogistic. We identify several fragments based on (a) whether negation is permitted on all nouns, including those in the subject of a sentence; and (b) whether the subject noun phrase may contain a relative clause. The logics we present are extensions of the classical syllogistic, and we pay special attention to the question of whether reductio (...) ad absurdum is needed. Thus our main goal is to derive results on the existence (or nonexistence) of syllogistic proof systems for relational fragments. We also determine the computational complexity of all our fragments. (shrink)

This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more. >.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Des Proklus Diadochus philosophische Anfangsgründe der Mathematik" verfügbar.

This paper undertakes a re-examination of Sir William Hamilton’s doctrine of the quantification of the predicate . Hamilton’s doctrine comprises two theses. First, the predicates of traditional syllogistic sentence-forms contain implicit existential quantifiers, so that, for example, All p is q is to be understood as All p is some q . Second, these implicit quantifiers can be meaningfully dualized to yield novel sentence-forms, such as, for example, All p is all q . Hamilton attempted to provide a deductive system (...) for his language, along the lines of the classical syllogisms. We show, using techniques unavailable to Hamilton, that such a system does exist, though with qualifications that distinguish it from its classical counterpart. (shrink)

THIS PAPER is not a piece of "research"; it simply offers a series of reflections on the transcendental method. It is occasioned by the realization that, while this method is interesting and important in the opinion of some, it can count on little familiarity in the United States. And where philosophers and students of philosophy make the effort, they have great difficulty appreciating transcendental philosophy or understanding its proposals. This difficulty is, as I say, largely circumstantial and due to a (...) lack of familiarity with the relevant works, but, viewed less superficially, it is motivated by a positive affiliation to another philosophical tradition. In fact, the positions of this other tradition are, if largely in a modern guise, the very ones against which transcendental philosophy reacted. This historical relationship has also systematic relevance. In many ways, pre-transcendental positions seem to have priority: we need only think of formal logic, certain basic stances in empiricist epistemology, common sense. Accordingly, the subjective difficulty of philosophers and students of such persuasions can be treated "objectively," as the difficulty of ever establishing arguments for the transcendental turn or for what Kant calls the "Copernican revolution." Transcendental philosophy must provide arguments, so it seems, on the pre-transcendental level to establish the transcendental position. Further, supposing this problem can be overcome, there is the genuine difficulty of understanding what the transcendental theory actually says and in what way it does its job. And lastly, supposing we find that it lives up to its program, there may still be difficulty with certain implications such that philosophers and students take refuge in non-transcendental positions rather than calling for improvements of transcendental philosophy. In this paper we cannot, of course, fully discuss to what extent the transcendental position can take care of its critics. The paper is mainly concerned with the difficulty of access or introductory argument to transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

We extend the language of the classical syllogisms with the sentence-forms “At most 1 p is a q” and “More than 1 p is a q”. We show that the resulting logic does not admit a finite set of syllogism-like rules whose associated derivation relation is sound and complete, even when reductio ad absurdum is allowed.

Der Aufsatz stellt zunächst das konstruktive Abstraktionsverfahren von Paul Lorenzen vor, das eine Bezugnahme auf Mengen vermeidet und daher gestattet, den Terminus ‚Menge‘ selbst als einen Abstraktor einzuführen. Es werden dann weiter häufig übersehene Konsequenzen des Abstraktionsverfahrens für die Rede von abstrakten und konkreten Gegenständen aufgezeigt. Schließlich werden die Inkonsistenzbeweisversuche von Geo Siegwart dargestellt und kritisch diskutiert. Dabei wird gezeigt, dass diese darauf beruhen, dass die besagten Konsequenzen nicht berücksichtigt werden.

How does a predecessor theory relate to its successor? According to Heinz Post's General Correspondence Principle, the successor theory has to account for the empirical success of its predecessor. After a critical discussion of this principle, I outline and discuss various kinds of correspondence relations that hold between successive scientific theories. I then look in some detail at a case study from contemporary physics: the various proposals for a theory of high-temperature superconductivity. The aim of this case study is to (...) understand better the prospects and the place of a methodological principle such as the Generalized Correspondence Principle. Generalizing from the case study, I will then argue that some such principle has to be considered, at best, as one tool that might guide scientists in their theorizing. Finally I present a tentative account of why principles such as the Generalized Correspondence Principle work so often and why there is so much continuity in scientific theorizing. (shrink)

Controlled languages are regimented fragments of natural languagedesigned to make the processing of natural language more efficient andreliable. This paper defines a controlled language, E2V, whose principalgrammatical resources include determiners, relative clauses, reflexivesand pronouns. We provide a formal syntax and semantics for E2V, in whichanaphoric ambiguities are resolved in a linguistically natural way. Weshow that the expressive power of E2V is equal to that of thetwo-variable fragment of first-order logic. It follows that the problemof determining the satisfiability of a set (...) of E2V sentences is NEXPTIMEcomplete. We show that E2V can be extended in various ways withoutcompromising these complexity results; however, relaxing our policy onanaphora resolution renders the satisfiability problem for E2Vundecidable. Finally, we argue that our results have a bearing on thebroader philosophical issue of the relationship between natural andformal languages. (shrink)

We consider two‐variable, first‐order logic in which a single distinguished predicate is required to be interpreted as a transitive relation. We show that the finite satisfiability problem for this logic is decidable in triply exponential non‐deterministic time. Complexity falls to doubly exponential non‐deterministic time if the transitive relation is constrained to be a partial order.

A region-based model of physical space is one in which the primitive spatial entities are regions, rather than points, and in which the primitive spatial relations take regions, rather than points, as their relata. Historically, the most intensively investigated region-based models are those whose primitive relations are topological in character; and the study of the topology of physical space from a region-based perspective has come to be called mereotopology. This paper concentrates on a mereotopological formalism originally introduced by Whitehead, which (...) employs a single primitive binary relation C(x, y) (read: "x is in contact with y"). Thus, in this formalism, all topological facts supervene on facts about contact. Because of its potential application to theories of qualitative spatial reasoning, Whitehead's primitive has recently been the subject of scrutiny from within the Artificial Intelligence community. Various results regarding the mereotopology of the Euclidean plane have been obtained, settling such issues as expressive power, axiomatization and the existence of alternative models. The contribution of the present paper is to extend some of these results to the mereotopology of three-dimensional Euclidean space. Specifically, we show that, in a first-order setting where variables range over tame subsets of ℝ³, Whitehead's primitive is maximally expressive for topological relations; and we deduce a corollary constraining the possible region-based models of the space we inhabit. (shrink)

The fluted fragment is a fragment of first-order logic (without equality) in which, roughly speaking, the order of quantification of variables coincides with the order in which those variables appear as arguments of predicates. It is known that this fragment has the finite model property. We consider extensions of the fluted fragment with various numbers of transitive relations, as well as the equality predicate. In the presence of one transitive relation (together with equality), the finite model property is lost; nevertheless, (...) we show that the satisfiability and finite satisfiability problems for this extension remain decidable. We also show that the corresponding problems in the presence of two transitive relations (with equality) or three transitive relations (without equality) are undecidable, even for the two-variable sub-fragment. (shrink)

"Die fünfte abhandlung war vor drei jahren unter dem titel 'Erläuterungen zur metaphysik des unbewussen' als selbstständige broschüre erschienen. Die mehrzahl der übrigen aufsätze sind als geschlossene essays für journale geschrieben und in solchen zuerst veröffentlicht."--Vorwort.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Der Materialismus in der Philosophie der griechisch-römischen Antike" verfügbar.

1) Die nachfolgenden Betrachtungen entstammen einer Fragestellung, die sich im Rahmen eines größ,eren Problems ergab und eine gesonderte Lösung erforderte. Anläßlich einiger Überlegungen über das Verhältnis von Sprache und Erkenntnis zeigte sich nämlich, daß die Rolle des Namens bzw. des benennenden Bestimmens beim Formulieren von Erkenntnissen so lange nicht adäquat zu erfas·sen ist, wie nicht Struktur und Konstitution der Benennung als solcher untersucht und klargestellt sind. Die Absicht, dies zu tun, ergab die vorliegende selbständige Studie. Sie bewegt sich auf einem (...) Gebiet, das bekanntlich schon einmal von Cas·sirer behandelt worden ist in seiner mei sterhaften Darstellung in der Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Band I; hierzu wird in der vorliegenden Veröffentlichung in einem Schlußabschnitt kurz Stellung genommen. 2) Absichtlich wird im foLgenden. das Wort 'als Name betrachtet, d. h. in seiner Eig·enschaft, charakterisierende Bestimmung zu ermöglichen und mit zuteilen. Es geht damit um dasjenige am Wort oder Sprachmittel allgemein, wodurch ~es für den Menschen ebenso "sinn "voll wie nötig wird; weniger geht es uns hier um seine einen Sinn exponierende Schallgestalt.,Name' meint somit dasjenige, was den Charakter eines Wortes als Nennung aus macht und was für seine Brauchbarkeit als Benennung von etwas verant wortlich ist. Worin schließlich auch das Nennen selbst gipfelt bzw. fundiert werden kann, soll sich im Lauf der Darstellung ergeben. Der Unterschied zur Arbeit E. Leisis Der Wortinhalt, Heidelbel"g 1953, liegt somit darin, daß jene Arbeit auf den Wortinhalt und nicht auf die,Leistung' des Wortes überhaupt ausgeht. (shrink)

Este artigo discute a temática da escrita de vida, a partir de um campo de problematizações em que ela difere de uma ordenação dos signos que aparecem ao pesquisador. Integra a experiência de escrita com vidas de arquivo do projeto de pesquisa "Potência Clínica das Memórias da Loucura", cujo campo é..

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 64 Heft: 3 Seiten: 424-448.