Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 2 Seiten: 343-346.

This is an investigation into the fundamental connections between the referential use of language and our rich human experience. All types of experience — perceptual, practical, scientific, literary, esthetic, ludic,... — are tightly unified into one total experience by the structure of reference to real or possible items. Singular reference is essential for locating ourselves in our own corner of the world. General reference, by means of quantifiers, is our main tool in ascertaining the accessible patterns of the world. Both (...) are primitive and mutually irreducible. (Often this has been denied.) The unity of total experience is constructed through the biographical unity of a person, and the sociological unity of the communications across a community. This unity of experience is wrought out by an underlying unitary system of reference. We need, therefore, a comprehensive theory of individuation, existence, predication, and truth. One such a theory is Guise Theory. (shrink)

This is an investigation into the fundamental connections between the referential use of language and our rich human experience. All types of experience — perceptual, practical, scientific, literary, esthetic, ludic,... — are tightly unified into one total experience by the structure of reference to real or possible items. Singular reference is essential for locating ourselves in our own corner of the world. General reference, by means of quantifiers, is our main tool in ascertaining the accessible patterns of the world. Both (...) are primitive and mutually irreducible. (Often this has been denied.) The unity of total experience is constructed through the biographical unity of a person, and the sociological unity of the communications across a community. This unity of experience is wrought out by an underlying unitary system of reference. We need, therefore, a comprehensive theory of individuation, existence, predication, and truth. One such a theory is Guise Theory. (shrink)

This is an investigation into the fundamental connections between the referential use of language and our rich human experience. All types of experience — perceptual, practical, scientific, literary, esthetic, ludic,... — are tightly unified into one total experience by the structure of reference to real or possible items. Singular reference is essential for locating ourselves in our own corner of the world. General reference, by means of quantifiers, is our main tool in ascertaining the accessible patterns of the world. Both (...) are primitive and mutually irreducible. (Often this has been denied.) The unity of total experience is constructed through the biographical unity of a person, and the sociological unity of the communications across a community. This unity of experience is wrought out by an underlying unitary system of reference. We need, therefore, a comprehensive theory of individuation, existence, predication, and truth. One such a theory is Guise Theory. (shrink)

Gordon P. Barnes has recently argued that presence by power is inadequate as an explanation of the way elements are present in complex bodies, and that it would be better to explain the elements’ presence by claiming that simpler substances—carbon atoms, for example—are actually and substantially present in living things. In order to address his arguments, this paper begins by briefly presenting St. Thomas’s understanding of presence by power, and then argues that Barnes’s proposal—that there is a multiplicity of substantial (...) forms in one matter—is unsatisfactory. First, the paper explains why the scientific facts do not require a plurality of substantial forms. Second, it shows how Barnes’s theory does not adequately explain living things. Third, it argues against Barnes’s claim that St. Thomas’s explanation is insufficient because it denies "the universal causality of nature.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Astrology, Computers, and the VolksgeistDenis DuttonCarroll Righter is not a name you will recognize, unless, perhaps, you’re old enough and you grew up reading the Los Angeles Times. Righter was the Times’s astrologer, and encountering his name recently brought back a couple of memories from the early 1950s. I remember finding it strange that a man (he was pictured alongside his column) was called Carroll, though he didn’t spell (...) it like the girl who lived across the street. But especially I recall the fun we had when my father would read the horoscopes out loud and we’d compare them with the day’s events. Ours was a tough family for an astrologer to please, with rather different things happening to too many Aquarians, and a robust skepticism about anything of the sort later to be called “New Age.”How could I know that while we laughed and debated, somewhere else out there in the urban sprawl, Righter’s prognostications were being subjected to subtle and portentous analysis by that kingpin of the Frankfurt School, Theodor W. Adorno? Mirabile dictu, Adorno was living in L.A. at the time, and we now have his examination of Righter in The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, edited with an excellent introduction by Stephen Crook (Routledge, $16.95). The result seems, now in the fullness of time, of mixed value and relevance. Adorno has produced an admirably accessible rhetoric of astrology, what he terms “content analysis.” In this, he is finding out for himself about the so-called cold-reading techniques of psychic consultation, practices long known to magicians and astrologers and only really understood by psychologists since Bertram Forer’s work in the 1940s. But beyond that, Adorno uses astrology to support and exemplify his theory of authoritarian irrationalism. As you might expect, this is more questionable. [End Page 424]To be sure, there are many intriguing observations throughout this mostly readable essay. In a passage perhaps even more true today than when it was written, Adorno says that a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology.” He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.” In other words, quantum mechanics is pretty tough, but astrology offers sophisticated understanding of all reality in a few easy steps. Besides, astronomy is about those remote stars and planets out there—rather cold and impersonal. In Adorno’s apt title phrase, astrology brings it all down to earth, because it’s about the single most important thing in the universe: me. In an analogy that isn’t too far-fetched, he says that to the semi-erudite individual “astrology, just as other irrational creeds like racism, provides a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula and offering at the same time the pleasant gratification that he who feels excluded from educational privileges nevertheless belongs to the minority of those who are ‘in the know.’” Someone once remarked that Scientology boosts self-esteem largely by giving semi-educated, degreeless persons impressive certificates to hang on their walls, and Adorno is right that there’s a similar syndrome at work with most New Age esoterica, including astrology. (In literary theory, there are no certificates, of course—you just have to learn the jargon.)Much to his credit, Adorno independently identifies many of the features of cold reading described by Forer and later writers, such as the persistent tendency of the client to personalize the general message. Of Righter’s “Follow up that intuition of yours,” or “Display that keen mind of yours,” Adorno says, “People who have any affinity at all to occultism are usually prepared to react to the information they are craving in such a way... (shrink)

What is Life? This is the question asked by Denis Noble in this very personal and at times deeply lyrical book. Noble is a renowned physiologist and systems biologist, and he argues that the genome is not life itself: to understand what life is, we must view it at a variety of different levels, all interacting with each other in a complex web. It is that emergent web, full of feedback between levels, from the gene to the wider environment, (...) that is life. (shrink)

"The main conclusion of this essay is that it is plausible to conclude that corporations are capable of exhibiting intentionality, and as a result that they may be properly understood as moral agents" (p. 281).

ABSTRACT:In a series of reports the United Nations Special Representative on the issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations has emphasized a tripartite framework regarding business and human rights that includes the state “duty to protect,” the TNC “responsibility to respect,” and “appropriate remedies” for human rights violations. This article examines the recent history of UN initiatives regarding business and human rights and places the tripartite framework in historical context. Three approaches to human rights are distinguished: moral, political, and legal. (...) It is argued that the tripartite framework’s grounding of the responsibility of TNCs to respect human rights is properly understood as moral and not merely as a political or legal duty. A moral account of the duty of TNCs to respect basic human rights is defended and contrasted with a merely strategic approach. The main conclusion of the article is that only a moral account of the basic human rights duties of TNCs provides a sufficiently deep justification of “the corporate responsibility to respect human rights” feature of the tripartite framework. (shrink)

In evolutionary biology changes in population structure are explained by citing trait fitness distribution. I distinguish three interpretations of fitness explanations—the Two‐Factor Model, the Single‐Factor Model, and the Statistical Interpretation—and argue for the last of these. These interpretations differ in their degrees of causal commitment. The first two hold that trait fitness distribution causes population change. Trait fitness explanations, according to these interpretations, are causal explanations. The last maintains that trait fitness distribution correlates with population change but does not cause (...) it. My defense of the Statistical Interpretation relies on a distinctive feature of causation. Causes conform to the Sure Thing Principle. Trait fitness distributions, I argue, do not. *Received July 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy/Institute for the History, Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7, Canada; e‐mail: denis[email protected]. (shrink)

This paper examines a doctrine which David Lewis has called 'Humean Supervenience' (hereafter 'HS'), and a problem which certain imaginary cases seem to generate for HS. They include rotating perfect spheres or discs, and flowing rivers, imagined as composed of matter which is perfectly homogeneous right down to the individual points. Before considering these examples, I shall introduce the doctrine they seem to challenge.

This article represents comments arising from The Compatibility of Evolution and Design by Rope Kojonen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) concerning the role of chance and randomness in evolution (citations from this book are shown as page numbers in brackets). The various meanings of chance and randomness as used in descriptions of biological evolution are discussed and contrasted with their meanings in mathematics and metaphysics. The discussion relates to the role of contingency in evolution and to ideological and rhetorical extrapolations from biology (...) into philosophical world views. Overall it is concluded that evolution is not a chance process, except in the epistemic sense of “chance.” Theologically, this has implications for the idea that God creates through “a free evolutionary process” and may also influence our perspectives on divine action and intentionality in evolutionary history. (shrink)

The standard relation of logical consequence allows for non-standard interpretations of logical constants, as was shown early on by Carnap. But then how can we learn the interpretations of logical constants, if not from the rules which govern their use? Answers in the literature have mostly consisted in devising clever rule formats going beyond the familiar what follows from what. A more conservative answer is possible. We may be able to learn the correct interpretations from the standard rules, because the (...) space of possible interpretations is a priori restricted by universal semantic principles. We show that this is indeed the case. The principles are familiar from modern formal semantics: compositionality, supplemented, for quantifiers, with topic-neutrality. (shrink)

Libertarian theories of the normative core of the corporation hold in common the view that is the responsibility of publicity held corporations to return profits to shareholders within the bounds of certain moral side-constraints. Side-constraints may be either weak (grounded in the rules of the game) or strong (grounded in rights). This essay considers libertarian arguments regarding the normative core of the corporation in the context of global capitalism and in the light of actual corporate behavior. First, it is argued (...) the weak side-constraints view is conceptually incoherent when applied in a global context. Second, it is argued that proponents of the libertarian strong side-constraints view lack an adequate theory of rights. Third, both the weak side-constraints view and the strong side-constraints view are shown to be unsatisfactory insofar as they fail to adequately address the coercive power of corporations. The main conclusion of this essay is that a viable libertarian theory of the corporation has yet to be articulated. (shrink)

Locke distingue : la connaissance intuitive, la connaissance rationnelle et la connaissance sensitive. C'est par celle-ci que nous accédons à la connaissance des « autres choses ». Or on peut se demander comment le sens peut être à la fois juge et témoin. En fait, pour Locke, notre connaissance des choses hors de nous a une « fiabilité effective », mais ce n'en est pas une connaissance parfaite, laquelle nous est inaccessible. Locke distinguishes : intuitive knowledge, rational knowledge, and sensitive (...) knowledge. It is through the latter that we reach the knowledge of « other things ». Now, one may wonder how can sense be both at the same time judge and witness. In fact, according to Locke, our knowledge of things outside ourselves bears some « effective reliability » but it is not necessarily a true knowledge, which is indeed unattainable. (shrink)

According to a prominent view of evolutionary theory, natural selection and the processes of development compete for explanatory relevance. Natural selection theory explains the evolution of biological form insofar as it is adaptive. Development is relevant to the explanation of form only insofar as it constrains the adaptation-promoting effects of selection. I argue that this view of evolutionary theory is erroneous. I outline an alternative, according to which natural selection explains adaptive evolution by appeal to the statistical structure of populations, (...) and development explains the causes of adaptive evolution at the level of individuals. Only together can a statistical theory of selection and a mechanical theory of development explain why populations of organisms comprise individuals that are adapted to their conditions of existence. (shrink)

The concept of the environment appears to be indispensably involved in adaptive explanation. Quite what its role is, however, is a matter of some dispute. The environment is customarily viewed as the dual of the organism; a wholly external, discrete, autonomous cause of evolution. On this view, the external environment is the principal cause of the adaptedness of form, and the determinant of what it is to be an adaptation. I argue that this conception of the environment neither adequately explains (...) nor individuates evolutionary adaptations. Instead, adaptation, properly construed, is an evolutionary response to affordances. The environment, traditionally construed, underdetermines an organism’s affordances. Instead, I argue that the environment takes its place in evolutionary models not as a discrete causal entity, but as an abstraction. (shrink)

In 1484, humanist philosopher and theologian Marsilio Ficino published the first complete Latin translation of Plato's extant works. Students of Plato now had access to the entire range of the dialogues, which revealed to Renaissance audiences the rich ancient landscape of myths, allegories, philosophical arguments, etymologies, fragments of poetry, other works of philosophy, aspects of ancient pagan religious practices, concepts of mathematics and natural philosophy, and the dialogic nature of the Platonic corpus's interlocutors. By and large, Renaissance readers in the (...) Latin West encountered Plato's text through Ficino's translations and interpretation. -/- In Plato's Persona, Denis J.-J. Robichaud provides the first synthetic study of Ficino's interpretation of the Platonic corpus. Robichaud analyzes Plato's works in their original Greek and in Ficino's Latin translations, as well as Ficino's non-Platonic writings and correspondence, in the process uncovering new aspects of Ficino's intellectual work habits. In his letters and works, Ficino self-consciously imitated a Platonic style of prose, in effect devising a persona for himself as a Platonic philosopher. Plato's dialogues are populated with a wealth of literary characters with whom Plato interacts and against whom Plato refines his own philosophies. Reading through Ficino's translations, Robichaud finds that the Renaissance philosopher seeks an understanding of Plato's persona(e) among all the dialogues' interlocutors. In effect, Ficino assumed the role of Plato's Latin spokesperson in the Renaissance. -/- Plato's Persona is grounded in an extensive study of scholarship in Renaissance humanism, classics, philosophy, and intellectual history, and contextualizes Ficino's intellectual achievements within the contemporary Christian orthodox view of Platonism. Ficino was an influential figure in the early Italian Renaissance: the key intermediary between Greek and Latin, and between manuscript and print, giving voice to Plato and access to the ancient frameworks needed to interpret his dialogues. (shrink)

The logical theories of Stanislaw Leśniewski differ profoundly form classical formal systems. Unlike the latter, they do not have an entirely predetermined vocabulary. Nor do they have a determined list of functors of syntactical-semantical categories. Due to formalized directives for definitions, the logics of Leśniewski are constructed progressively, making new theses and consequently functors of new syntactical-semantical categories accesible. In this article we present the genetic aspect associated with these theses-definitions. We also show that the property of creativity makes it (...) possible to bridge some of the fundamental gaps in contemporary classical logics. (shrink)

Le trait caractéristique de la philosophie des sciences telle qu'on la pratique en France depuis une vingtaine d'années, sous le nom générique d'épistémologie, est de réunir un ensemble extrêmement divers d'études et de recherches sur les disciplines particulières qu'on envisage volontiers séparément: le travail est toujours détaillé et très approfondi, ce qui entraîne naturellement la limitation, sauf exception, des confrontations et des synthèses. En ce qui concerne les thèmes privilégiés, on distinguera dans ce bref rapport l'épistémologie des mathématiques, celle de (...) la physique et de la cosmologie, celle de la biologie et, plus spécialement, celle des sciences humaines: c'est peut-être dans ce domainelà que s'annonce un effort plus large de comparaison entre les sciences. Dans cette évolution, la logique mathématique, après des débuts difficiles, tend de plus en plus à jouer un rôle prépondérant. (shrink)

Good explanations are not only true or probably true, but are also relevant to a causal question. Current models of causal explanation either only address the question of the truth of an explanation, or do not distinguish the probability of an explanation from its relevance. The tasks of scenario construction and conversational explanation are distinguished, which in turn shows how scenarios can interact with conversational principles to determine the truth and relevance of explanations. The proposed model distinguishes causal discounting from (...) causal backgrounding , and makes predictions concerning the differential effects of contextual information about alternative explanations on: (a) the kind of mental models constructed; (b) belief revision about probable cause; and (c) the perceived quality of a focal explanation. Four experiments are reported that test these predictions. The significance of the notion of explanatory relevance for research on causal explanation is then discussed. (shrink)

We show that there is a minimal pair in the nonuniform generic degrees, and hence also in the uniform generic degrees. This fact contrasts with Igusa’s result that there are no minimal pairs for relative generic computability and answers a basic structural question mentioned in several papers in the area.

Author considers cognitive assumptions of practical consciousness: some preconditions on which an interaction with the social and natural objects is based. Author follows the “constructivist" program in social theory in its classic version which is represented by social phenomenology and phenomenological sociology of knowledge (A. Schutz, P. Berger, T. Luckmann). Author analyzes some latent axioms and presuppositions, “idealizations" and mechanisms of everyday consciousness which constitute individual social experience at the level of micro-interactions with the objects and the “others". This analysis (...) also refers to the intellectual heritage of classical theory of knowledge (epistemological ideas of I. Kant, E. Husserl). Author considers the status of the Other in the elementary systems of social interaction; discusses the necessity to assume the relative constancy and uniformity of the objective world elements including the existence of an integral self-identical “I" (actor's personality). The organized process of social experience uninterruptedly operated by cognitive schemes of practical consciousness is considered as one of the main conditions of reproduction of coordinated routines which support social order and institutional structures of the society. (shrink)

This paper aims to suggest that Brentano’s theory of intentionality, at least in its later formulation, is not only about mind and also belongs to a tradition of deconstructing language that includes prominent figures of Austrian and German philosophy such as Mach, Vaihinger, and Wittgenstein. In order to establish this, the author explores some differences and similarities between this theory and Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language. He argues that the very starting point of both is one and the same fact: (...) the failure of existential generalization. (shrink)

Una exposición de las particularidades de la propuesta hermenéutica del autor vascoaragonés Andrés Ortiz-Osés. En ella se trata de poner de relieve los aspectos de mayor relevancia para una lectura política de esta temática. Se maneja una selección de obras del autor y bibliografía secundaria realizada con ánimo interpretativo más que taxonómico. Las conclusiones alientan a profundizar en esta lectura, que resulta novedosa con respecto a los enfoques exclusivamente hermenéuticos o antropológico-culturales.

Providing a principled characterization of the distinction between logical and non-logical expressions is a longstanding issue in the philosophy of logic. In the Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap proposes a syntactic solution to this problem, which aims at grounding the claim that logic and mathematics are analytic. Roughly speaking, his idea is that logic and mathematics correspond to the largest part of science for which it is possible to completely specify by "syntactic" means which sentences are valid and which are (...) not. Despite a renewed interest in the philosophical benefits of analyticity, both inside and outside of Carnap scholarship, Carnap's definition of logical expressions seems to have drawn too little attention. I shall argue that it is worth a second look. More precisely, my aim will be to defend this idea against some technical problems faced by Carnap's way of implementing it and against Quinean attacks on syntax-based conventionalism. Section 1 presents Carnap's definition in the context of Logical Syntax of Language, that is, how exactly the definition works, and why Carnap needs it. In section 2, I review three challenges that have been raised in the literature, and I propose to revise the definition accordingly. I argue that its modified version is immune to the previous challenges, and, to some extent, immune to new challenges as well. In the last section, I suggest that the definition has a philosophical interest of its own, because standard Quinean objections are not as conclusive as one might think when attention is paid to the fact that Carnap requires complete syntactic specification of validities. (shrink)

[Denis Vernant: Introduction a la logique standard].