Search results for "060302 philosophy"
showing 10 items of 113 documents
Essays on Gödel's Reception of Leibniz, Husserl, and Brouwer
2015
Evil lords, benign historians: strongman politics in medieval India and Renaissance Florence
2019
Recent developments in Europe and the United States (US) attest to an increasing fascination with and nostalgia for the strong leaders of the past – especially those that emerged in the aftermath o...
Models, information and meaning
2018
Abstract There has recently been an explosion of formal models of signaling, which have been developed in order to learn about different aspects of meaning. This paper discusses whether that success can also be used to provide an original naturalistic theory of meaning in terms of information or some related notion. In particular, it argues that, although these models can teach us a lot about different aspects of content, at the moment they fail to support the idea that meaning just is some kind of information. As an alternative, I suggest a more modest approach to the relationship between the informational notions used in models and semantic properties in the natural world.
Quentin Skinner's rhetoric of conceptual change
1997
Hume’s Fork and Mixed Mathematics
2017
Abstract:Given the sharp distinction that follows from Hume’s Fork, the proper epistemic status of propositions of mixed mathematics seems to be a mystery. On the one hand, mathematical propositions concern the relation of ideas. They are intuitive and demonstratively certain. On the other hand, propositions of mixed mathematics, such as in Hume’s own example, the law of conservation of momentum, are also matter of fact propositions. They concern causal relations between species of objects, and, in this sense, they are not intuitive or demonstratively certain, but probable or provable. In this article, I argue that the epistemic status of propositions of mixed mathematics is that of matters…
Logical Sentential Calculi Inspired by the Chrysippean Sentential Calculus
2021
The aim of the present paper is to consider an approach, different from that presented by J. Łukasiewicz, concerning the interpretation of the so-called stoic undemonstrables, which were given by Chrysippus. Stoic undemonstrables have been interpreted in two different ways: using the notion of “negation of a sentence” (Łukasiewicz) and using the notion of “a sentence inconsistent with a given one” (Mates). According to the Stoics, two sentences are inconsistent if one of them is negation of the other. The Mates’ interpretation generates five different inference rules. Based on one of these rules we can consider (with other undemonstrables) four different stoic propositional calculi. Taking …
The Linguistics of Lying
2018
This review deals with the communicative act of lying from a linguistic point of view, linguistics comprising both grammar and pragmatics. Integrating findings from the philosophy of language and from psychology, I show that the potential for lying is rooted in the language system. The tasks of providing an adequate definition of lying and of distinguishing lying from other concepts of deception (such as bald-faced lying and bullshitting) can be solved when interfaces between grammar and pragmatics are taken into account and when experimental results are used to narrow down theoretical approaches. Assuming a broadly neo-Gricean background, this review focuses on four theoretical topics: the…
Singular Terms in Fiction. Fictional and “Real” Names (III Blasco Disputatio)
2019
Abstract In this introduction, I consider different problems posed by the use of singular terms in fiction (section 1), paying especial attention to proper names and, in particular, to names of real people, places, etc. As we will see (section 2), descriptivist and Millian theories of reference face different kinds of problems in explaining the use of fictional names in fiction-related contexts. Moreover, the task of advancing a uniform account of names in these contexts—an account which deals not only with fictional names but also with “real” names—will prove to be very hard no matter whether we favour realist or antirealist intuitions about fictional discourse (section 3). Section 4 offer…
You Cannot Steal Something that Doesn't Exist: Against Fictionalism about Fiction
2018
Free will and open alternatives
2017
Abstract In her recent book Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio develops a distinctive version of an actual-sequence account of free will, according to which, when agents choose and act freely, their freedom is exclusively grounded in, and supervenes on, the actual causal history of such choices or actions. Against this proposal, I argue for an alternative- possibilities account, according to which agents’ freedom is partly grounded in their ability to choose or act otherwise. Actual-sequence accounts of freedom (and moral responsibility) are motivated by a reflection on so-called Frankfurt cases. Instead, other cases, such as two pairs of examples originally designed by van Inwagen,…