This article argues that Tolstoy’s What Is Art? had a direct influence on David Foster Wallace’s conception of literature, and most specifically that Wallace appropriated Tolstoy’s discourse (down to most of its most specific details) to found his literary project. The article seeks to prove this by exhibiting the striking extent of Wallace’s alignment with Tolstoy’s beliefs, by retracing the multiple direct references to Tolstoy in Wallace’s work, and by uncovering Wallace’s annotations on his own copy of What Is Art? (...) as further confirmation of what a careful comparative analysis of the works of the two authors makes manifest. (shrink)

This article argues that Sartre’s “What Is Literature?” had a profound and direct influence on David Foster Wallace’s conception of literature. At the very least, a number of factors oblige scholars to take this interpretation seriously. We know that Sartre’s existentialism pervades Wallace’s fiction, that Wallace repeatedly mentioned the Existentialists throughout his work, that he’d learned French to read them in the original, and that Sartre was one of his favorites, as testified by Zadie Smith. Most importantly, a comparative analysis (...) of Sartre’s text and Wallace’s nonfiction shows not only striking parallels but also almost exact repetitions in the writers’ fundamental ideals. In this sense, Sartre’s direct influence on Wallace appears so major as to invest multiple specific details of Wallace’s conception of literature both in its content and in the logical structuring of that content. In this article, we explore the extent of this influence through a structured investigation of its multiple features, showing that many of Wallace’s tenets – the rejection of Realism, the affirmation of meaning-as-use and of literature as a means to human communion and individual and social engagement, and many many more – follow from Sartre’s discourse. (shrink)

What were the earliest reactions to Gödel's incompleteness theorems? After a brief summary of previous work in this area I analyse, by means of unpublished archival material, the first reactions in Vienna and Berlin to Gödel's groundbreaking results. In particular, I look at how Carnap, Hempel, von Neumann, Kaufmann, and Chwistek, among others, dealt with the new results.

In this paper we study |$\mathcal{M}\mathcal{V}^{+}$|⁠, i.e. the positive fragment of Łukasiewicz infinite-valued Logic |$\mathcal{M}\mathcal{V}$|⁠. Using mainly algebraic techniques we characterize all the finitary extensions of |$\mathcal{M}\mathcal{V}^{+}$| that are structurally complete and those that are hereditarily structurally complete.

Suppose you’re certain that a claim—say, ‘Frida is tall’—does not have a determinate truth value. What attitude should you take towards it? This is the question of the cognitive role of indeterminacy. This paper presents a puzzle for theories of cognitive role. Many of these theories vindicate a seemingly plausible principle: if you are fully certain that A, you are rationally required to be fully certain that A is determinate. Call this principle ‘Certainty’. We show that Certainty, in combination with (...) some minimal side premises, entails a very implausible claim: whenever you’re certain that it’s indeterminate whether A, it is rationally required that you reject A. This is a surprising result, which requires abandoning at least some intuitive views about indeterminacy and cognitive role. (shrink)

On a traditional view, the semantics of natural language makes essential use of a context parameter, i.e. a set of coordinates that represents the situation of speech. In classical semantic frameworks, this parameter plays two key roles: first, context contributes to determining the content of utterance; second, it is crucial for defining logical consequence. I point out that recent empirical proposals about context shift in natural language (in particular, context-shifting semantics in the style of Anand and Nevins 2004) are incompatible (...) with the traditional view of context. At the same time, there is increasing cross-linguistic support for this brand of context shift. Hence I suggest that context has no place in semantic theory proper. We should revert back to so-called multiple-indexing frameworks that were developed by Montague and others, and relegate context to the postsemantic stage. (shrink)

According to the quantificational Quinean model in meta-ontology, the question of ontology boils down to the question of whether a sortal property is exemplified. I address some complications that arise when we try to build a philosophical reconstruction of the link between individuals and kinds displayed in the exemplification relation from the point of view of conceptualism about kinds and having in mind this stand in ontology. I distinguish two notions of resemblance, object-to- object and object-to- kind, and show the (...) problems with both of them. Finally, I argue for a better awareness of the implicit "bias" involved in the very notion of "resemblance," without indulging in Quine's veto toward this notion. (shrink)

Forms of contemporary life attest to the dissolution of the concept of the ‘people’ and the renewed importance of the idea of the ‘multitude’. Though they took center stage in the seventeenth century debate that spawned much of our ethico-political lexicon, these two notions are polar opposites. The ‘people’ is by its very nature centripetal. Converging towards a general will, it acts as an interface between citizens and the State. The ‘multitude’ is plural. Fleeing all political unity, it shuns negotiations (...) with the sovereign and refuses to delegate its rights to that power; it is a recalcitrant and disobedient entity with a taste for certain forms of non-representative democracy. For example, Hobbes claims that citizens in rebellion against the State represent “the multitude against the people.” But while Hobbes spotted the greatest hindrance to the workings of the State within this multitude, Spinoza found in it the roots of liberty. The political existence of ‘multiples’ as such has been stricken from the horizon of modernity: not only by Absolute State theorists, but also by Rousseau, the liberal tradition, and the socialist movement itself. (shrink)

This article puts forward the thesis that the contemporary global movement against capitalism, and the post-Fordist regime it is responding to, is best understood in terms of the emergence of ‘human nature’ as the crux of political struggle. According to Virno, the biological invariant has become the raw material of social praxis because the capitalist relation of production mobilizes to its advantage, in a historically unprecedented way, the species-specific prerogatives of Homo sapiens. Through the concept of ‘natural-historical diagrams’, the article (...) explores the significance of socio-political states of affairs which directly display key aspects of anthropogenesis, and, making use of Ernesto De Martino’s concept of ‘cultural apocalypses’, considers the different relations that a biological ‘background’ and a socio-political ‘foreground’ entertain in traditional and contemporary societies. The attempt to develop a ‘natural history’ of such diagrams leads Virno to reflecting on the importance of the language faculty, neoteny, non-specialization and the absence of a predetermined natural environment for political action. This reflection on the contemporary importance of political anthropology leads Virno to a set of concluding remarks on the role of ethics and the idea of the ‘good life’ in the practice of the ‘new global’ movement. (shrink)

Hippogriffs and unicorns have a fixed role in philosophical reflection: they serve as interchangeable examples of fictional objects. The purpose of this article is to show that there are many different forms of imaginary objects and that drawing a taxonomy of these objects actually means rethinking the relation that binds imaginative products to our world – a relation that is far from being univocal.

This book aims to explain the decline of the later Wittgensteinian tradition in analytic philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s, Oxford was the center of analytic philosophy and Wittgenstein – the later Wittgenstein – the most influential contemporary thinker within that philosophical tradition. Wittgenstein's methods and ideas were widely accepted, with everything seeming to point to the Wittgensteinian paradigm having a similar impact on the philosophical scenes of all English speaking countries. However, this was (...) not to be the case. By the 1980s, albeit still important, Wittgenstein was considered as a somewhat marginal thinker. What occurred within the history of analytic philosophy to produce such a decline? -/- This book expertly traces the early reception of Wittgenstein in the United States, the shift in the humanities to a tradition rooted in the natural sciences, and the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, to revealthe factors that contributed to the eventual hostility towards the later Wittgensteinian tradition. (shrink)