Critical discussion of Alan Code's paper "Aristotle's Investigation of a Basic Logical Principle: Which Science Investigates the Principle of Non-Contradiction?".

"--David Ruelle, author of "Chance and Chaos" "This is an important book, one that should cause an epoch-making change in the way we think about mathematics.

Nietzsche s work was heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy. Meyer shows how Nietzsche attempted to revive the Heraclitean-Protagorean position that is critically analyzed by both Plato and Aristotle in the Theaetetus and Metaphysics IV, and establishes Nietzsche as a naturalist who believes that there are objective facts.The book not only highlights the foundations of his thought, but also restores order to Nietzsche s work.".

The Brave New World–style utilitarian dystopia is a familiar feature of the cultural landscape; Kantian dystopias are harder to come by, perhaps because, until Rawls, Kantian morality presented itself as a primarily personal rather than political program. This asymmetry is peculiar for formal reasons, because one phase of the deliberative process on which Kant insists is to ask what the world at large would be like if everyone did whatever it is one is thinking of doing. I do not propose (...) to write a Kantian Brave New World myself, but I am going to ask, of what these days is called “the CI-procedure,” what would happen if everybody followed it. I will argue that if the CI-procedure works as advertised, it exposes a practical incoherence in the commitment to having it govern one’s actions: in the Kantian vocabulary that goes with the territory, that the Categorical Imperative gives rise to a contradiction in the will. (shrink)

James Anderson and Greg Welty have resurrected an argument for God’s existence, which we will call the argument from logic. We present three lines of response against the argument, involving the notion of necessity involved, the notion of intentionality involved, and then we pose a dilemma for divine conceptualism. We conclude that the argument faces substantial problems.

This article argues that people have legitimate interests in privacy that deserve legal protection on democratic principles. It describes the right to privacy as a bundle of rights of personal choice, association and expression and shows that, so described, people have legitimate political interests in privacy. These interests reflect the ways that privacy rights can supplement the protection for people's freedom and equality provided by rights of political choice, association and expression, and can help to make sure that these are, (...) genuinely, democratic. Feminists have often been ambivalent about legal protection for privacy, because privacy rights have, so often, protected the coercion and exploitation of women, and made it difficult to politicise personal forms of injustice. However, attention to the differences between democratic and undemocratic forms of politics can enable us to meet these concerns, and to distinguish a democratic justification of privacy rights from the alternatives. (shrink)

In Contradiction advocates and defends the view that there are true contradictions (dialetheism), a view that flies in the face of orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle. The book has been at the center of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever since its first publication in1987. This second edition of the book substantially expands upon the original in various ways, and also contains the author's reflections on developments over the last two decades. Further aspects of dialetheism are discussed in the (...) companion volume, Doubt Truth to be a Liar, also published byOxford University Press in 2006. (shrink)

On the ground of Kant’s reformulation of the principle of con- tradiction, a non-classical logic KC and its extension KC+ are constructed. In KC and KC+, \neg(\phi \wedge \neg\phi),  \phi \rightarrow (\neg\phi \rightarrow \phi), and  \phi \vee \neg\phi are not valid due to specific changes in the meaning of connectives and quantifiers, although there is the explosion of derivable consequences from {\phi, ¬\phi} (the deduc- tion theorem lacking). KC and KC+ are interpreted as fragments of an S5-based first-order (...) modal logic M. The quantification in M is combined with a “subject abstraction” device, which excepts predicate letters from the scope of modal operators. Derivability is defined by an appropriate labelled tableau system rules. Informally, KC is mainly ontologically motivated (in contrast, for example, to Jaśkowski’s discussive logic), relativizing state of affairs with respect to conditions such as time. (shrink)

You 遊 is a crucial term for understanding the Zhuangzi . Translated as “play,” “free play,” and “wandering,” it is usually defined as an ideal, playful Zhuangzian way of being. There are two problems with this definition. The first is logical: the Zhuangzi cannot consistently recommend playfulness as an ideal, since doing so vitiates the essence of you —it becomes an ethical imperative instead of an activity freely undertaken for its own sake. The second problem is performative: arguments for playful (...) Zhuangzi as exemplar resemble those of the logicians and philosophers who appear to come in for Zhuangzian criticism. This essay addresses these tensions by demonstrating how the Zhuangzi ambiguates the nature and value of you . Apparent endorsements of you are not freestanding, instead occurring in grudging replies of teachers to overly zealous students. In light of this recontextualization, a new version of you is offered that accommodates “non-playful” ways of being. (shrink)

Nineteen eleven was a tumultuous year for Bertrand Russell, both personally and academically. The intense scholarly activity of 1911 that resulted in an impressive set of diverse academic publications and manuscripts was accompanied by a number of personal entanglements that were equally intense for Russell. Two of these relationships would prove to be especially strained. Late Wednesday afternoon, 18 October 1911, Russell met Ludwig Wittgenstein for the first time. As we know from the numerous accounts available on their relationship, the (...) exchanges between Russell and Wittgenstein were emotionally charged and not always cordial. However, in 1911 a second relationship flourished that would prove equally significant for Russell. The aristocratic English philosopher fell in love with Lady Ottoline Morrell. This relationship would eventually generate a correspondence in excess of 3,400 letters, telegrams and postcards. My paper is an assessment of the impact of Morrell on Russell's thought at the time he completed his classic Problems of Philosophy. In particular, I shall attempt to accomplish two tasks in this paper: -/- (a) In the first place, I shall show that Russell's 1911 view of philosophy appears to be contradictory, especially in regard to his conception of the Self. -/- (b) In the second place, I shall consider the nature and extent of Morrell's influence on Russell's 1911 view of philosophy and suggest that Lady Ottoline has more than a benign influence on Russell's 1911 understanding of the Self. -/- . (shrink)

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, liberal autonomy concomitant to political (...) power, and autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how – in this case – these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students’ self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation. (shrink)

Dayton's account of lewis' pragmatic contradiction seriously misconstrues this key concept by analyzing it in terms of logical contradiction. this order of analysis is explicitly rejected by lewis as the reverse of the proper order in which the pragmatic concept is foundational to logic and epistemology. i outline a correct account of pragmatic contradiction. then lewis' application of the idea to moral skepticism and the liar paradox is reconsidered, and is seen to vindicate his claim that both (...) skeptic and liar are defeated by a non-fallacious "ad hominem" consisting of a demonstration that each is in pragmatic contradiction. (shrink)

In 2004, the Department for Education and Skills in England published its Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners (DfES, 2004). It was preceded by Excellence and Enjoyment: a strategy for primary schools (DfES, 2003). 'Excellence and enjoyment' seems to constitute an ambiguity, even a contradiction. The government's view is otherwise. It states that enjoyment (for pupils) is a consequence of excellent teaching. In turn, excellent teaching is said to be more assured if it is personalised and creative. This (...) official logic is questionable. A different interpretation is offered. Global capitalism is placing fiscal pressures on the public expenditure of the nation-state, and new accommodations and justifications have to be made by government as it continues to re-focus the education system towards an economic purpose. In this endeavour it must gain public and professional assent. Informed by critical theorists, it is argued here that 'excellence' associates with a producer ethic; 'enjoyment' with a consumer ethic. The former enables the capital accumulation process within a social-democratic welfare state; the latter justifies the policies of accumulation. (shrink)

In what follows I will say little if anything about the animadversions vis-à-vis Irwin and Lukasiewicz and Owen, because there is so much of such greater interest in what Code has told us about Aristotle, the great preponderance of which, in my opinion, is true. I will review some of this truth, specify one place where I have trouble reconciling his account with the evidence, and then try to give a better account that I think is entirely compatible with the (...) rest of what he has given us. (shrink)

Certain Buddhist texts contain statements that are prima facie contradictions. The scholarly consensus has been that such statements are meant to serve a rhetorical function that depends on the apparent contradictions being resolvable. But recently it has been claimed that such statements are meant to be taken literally: their authors assert as true statements that are of the form ‘p and not p’. This claim has ramifications for our understanding of the role played by the principle of non-contradiction in (...) Buddhist argumentation. I argue that these make the claim less plausible. (shrink)

Contradictions of the Welfare State is the first collection of Offe's essays to appear in a single volume in English, and it contains a selection of his most important recent work on the breakdown of the post-war settlement.

This dissertation concerns dynamic semantics and the broader normative and epistemic consequences of theorizing with dynamic contents. Dynamic semantics deviates significantly from canonical approaches to meaning in that it treats the meanings of sentences as well as the contents of attitudes as context-change-potentials rather than propositions. While some of the consequences of this deviation have been recognized, several crucial consequences remain, heretofore, unexplained. In particular, I argue that dynamic theories not only differ from more traditional static theories with respect to (...) their preferred representational objects, but also with respect to how they must treat the normative statuses of these representational objects, their idealizing assumptions, and how content interfaces with choice and decision. In each case, I demonstrate how and why dynamic accounts differ and explore the consequences. In certain cases, I argue why these consequences ought to be embraced. In others, I provide solutions to the problems they pose. (shrink)

In Philosophical Logic, the Liar Paradox has been used to motivate the introduction of both truth value gaps and truth value gluts. Moreover, in the light of “revenge Liar” arguments, also higher-order combinations of generalized truth values have been suggested to account for so-called hyper-contradictions. In the present paper, Graham Priest's treatment of generalized truth values is scrutinized and compared with another strategy of generalizing the set of classical truth values and defining an entailment relation on the resulting sets of (...) higher-order values. This method is based on the concept of a multilattice. If the method is applied to the set of truth values of Belnap's “useful four-valued logic”, one obtains a trilattice, and, more generally, structures here called Belnap-trilattices. As in Priest's case, it is shown that the generalized truth values motivated by hyper-contradictions have no effect on the logic. Whereas Priest's construction in terms of designated truth values always results in his Logic of Paradox, the present construction in terms of truth and falsity orderings always results in First Degree Entailment. However, it is observed that applying the multilattice-approach to Priest's initial set of truth values leads to an interesting algebraic structure of a “bi-and-a-half” lattice which determines seven-valued logics different from Priest's Logic of Paradox. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the divide that separates Heidegger and Sartre from Husserl. At issue is what Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence.” From Heidegger onward this has been characterized as an interpretation of both being and knowing in terms of presence. To exist is to be now, and to know is to make present the evidence for something’s existence. Husserl’s account of constitution assumes this interpretation. By contrast, Heidegger and Sartre see constitution in terms of our pragmatic engagements (...) with the world, engagements that they trace to the essential nothingness at our core. Who is correct: Husserl or those who give his phenomenology a negative basis? At issue is the nature of transcendence. Do we transcend ourselves toward the world by constituting both our own and the world’s presence or do we do so by virtue of an inner nothingness that allows us to assume various identities as a consequence of our pragmatic engagements? Husserl claims that to argue against presence is to argue... (shrink)

Discussion of sexuality in African cultures has a long history, but since the 1990s ethical reflections on homosexuality on the continent have often degenerated into furors and provoked a spate of anti-gay legislation in several countries. Refutations of homophobic dispositions encounter as barrier a pervasive belief in African cultures, that childbearing for community replenishment is a cherished moral duty. Several philosophers consider these to be exaggerated inhibitions that unjustifiably impede social acceptance of homosexuality, and have proposed as a solution what (...) they consider to be self-justifying political-moral principles, that terminate in value-pluralistic ideas such as the acceptance of the equality of sexual orientations and vindication of the right to the freedom to choose and satisfy sexual desire. I question the adequacy of such self-justificatory normative principles and consider the solutions they proffer as depreciating the moral point of the African pro-natalist position. Consequently, I develop a moral argument grounded in the ontology of Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarian theory of personhood as the most persuasive justification for homosexuality. (shrink)

The contemporaries of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) openly acknowledged his towering importance. Both Fichte and Hegel praised him in the same breath with Kant as having launched the philosophical revolution they sought to complete. Yet for more than a century, misrepresentations of Jacobi's thought have stood in the way of a proper appreciation of his insights. In her study of this long-neglected German philosopher, internationally-renowned Jacobi expert Birgit Sandkaulen interprets his philosophical writings in their intellectual context. Originally published in German (...) and translated into English for the first time, this is a major contribution to reading the life, work, and legacy of Jacobi. The biographical chapter on Jacobi's life as a public intellectual was written specifically for this English edition. Offering new perspectives on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, Sandkaulen focuses on Jacobi's specific conception of practical realism. This conception, the source of Jacobi's famous defense of faith and human freedom, matches his critique of the German Idealists: the post-Kantian systems of German Idealism were bound to fail. Sandkaulen shows us that long before 20th-century philosophers took up this line of thought, indeed at the very origin of the epoch-making developments of classical German philosophy, Jacobi articulated a practical, ethical, personal realism that is as philosophically appealing and relevant today as it was in its time"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

In this analysis of one of the most difficult and neglected topics in Hegelian studies, Songsuk Susan Hahn tackles the status of contradiction in Hegel's ...

For some years, Matthew Meyer has labored at a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s oeuvre that understands his philosophical and literary output as a revival of a particularly Greek mode of thought. This volume represents the culmination of much, but not all, of this previous work, and it serves also as a promise of future work in the same vein. The title, Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients, is therefore a trifle misleading: Meyer is not reading all of Nietzsche through all the (...) ancients, but only some of Nietzsche through some of them. That is all for the good, so far as I am concerned, since I am usually suspicious of ambitions to resolve Nietzsche’s debt to antiquity in a single... (shrink)