How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we (...) can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nature and foundation of duties to oneself in Kant's moral theory. Duties to oneself embody the requirement of the formula of humanity that agents respect rational nature in them-selves as well as in others. So understood, duties to oneself are not subject to the sorts of conceptual objections often raised against duties to oneself; nor do these duties support objections that Kant's moral theory is overly demanding or produces agents who are preoccupied with their own virtue. (...) Duties to oneself emerge as an essential and compelling part of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I explicate Kant’s theory of virtue and situate it within the context of theories of virtue before Kant (such as Aristotle, Hobbes, and Hume) and after Kant (such as Schiller and Schopenhauer). I explore Kant’s notions of virtue as a disposition to do one’s duty out of respect for the moral law, as moral strength in non-holy wills, as the moral disposition in conflict, and as moral self-constraint based on inner freedom. I distinguish between Kant’s notions of (...) virtue and of the good will. I discuss Kant’s duties of virtue (and so particular virtues and vices), the relationships between virtue and happiness and virtue and the emotions, and Kant’s criticisms of his predecessors’ views of virtue. I close with a discussion of Kant and contemporary virtue ethics. Although the paper reflects my own interpretation of Kant, it strives less to argue for a particular thesis about Kant on virtue than to illuminate important aspects of Kant’s theory of virtue. (shrink)

April 15, 2024: This article published in Early View in error. The article will republish shortly.

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)

"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).

Conscious Agency is a major driver of evolution. Artificial Selection (i.e. Conscious Selection by human breeders) was the foil against which Charles Darwin defined Natural Selection. In later work, he extended Artificial Selection to other species. That ability for social (e.g. sexual) selection must have evolved. Jablonka and Ginsburg identify markers of conscious agency, such as Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL), and show that it must have existed at the time of the Cambrian Explosion. To their insights, my commentary argues that (...) the harnessing of stochasticity was also involved in the evolution of the faculty of choice in organisms. (shrink)

writings, however, reveals a profoundly medieval outlook. Smith is preoccupied with the need to preserve order in society. His scientific methodology emphasises reconciliation with the world we live in rather than investigation of it. He invokes a version of natural law in which the universe is a harmonious machine administered by a providential deity. Nobody is uncared for and, in real happiness, we are all substantially equal. No action is without its appropriate reward – in this life or the next. (...) The social desirability of individual self-seeking activity is ensured by the ‘invisible hand’, that is, the hand of a god who has moulded us so to behave, that the quantity of happiness in the world is always maximised. (shrink)

Europeans seeking to understand tribal arts face obvious problems of comprehending the histories, values, and ideas of vastly remote cultures. In this respect the issues faced in understanding tribal art (or folk art, primitive art, traditional art, third or fourth-world art — none of these designations is ideal) are not much different from those encountered in trying to comprehend the distant art of “our own” culture, for instance, the art of medieval Europe. But in the case of tribal or so-called (...) primitive art, there are special complications. First, objects of tribal art are sometimes so strange to us that we cannot tell immediately whether they are intended to be works of art (or some local analogue of what we would call art) at all.1An African head-rest I once came across had an odd, extravagant extrusion which made the whole piece reminiscent of Arp. It seemed to my baffled, ignorant eyes to be much more than a mere head-rest, but I couldn’t tell what more it was supposed to be. Maybe that extension on the side of the object had some purely utilitarian function, acting as a handle, or perhaps it was a natural part of the original block of wood, left there merely because it looked nice to the eye of the carver. Though the head-rest seemed beautiful, I still don’t know if I was admiring as an essentially expressive object some simple item of practical use, or something that combined expression and utility. (shrink)

By means of a consideration of Whitman (1998) the present paper considers the meanings of ‘Panglossianism’ and the relation between group and individual levels in evolution. It establishes the connection between the Panglossian policy prescription of laissez-faire and the mistaken evolutionary theory of group selection. Analysis of the passages in Hayek cited by Whitman shows that, once these passages are taken in context, and once the appropriate meaning of the term ‘Panglossian’ has been clarified, they fail to defend Hayek from (...) this charge, but, on the contrary, confirm that Hayek was, indeed, ‘a Panglossian evolutionary theorist’. (shrink)

A common view about the phenomenology of episodic remembering has it that when we remember a perceptual experience, we can relive or re-experience many of its features, but not its characteristic presence. In this paper, we challenge this common view. We first say that presence in perception divides into temporal and locative presence, with locative having two sides, an objective and a subjective one. While we agree with the common view that temporal and objective locative presence cannot be relived in (...) remembering, we argue that subjective locative presence – the feeling of being immersed in a certain scene – can be so. Our argument for this claim starts by determining independently the underpinning mechanisms of subjective locative presence in quasi-perceptual imagination. These mechanisms are self-projection, imaginative pretence, and attentional focus. We then proceed to establish that they have been found to underpin conscious states of episodic remembering too. We conclude that episodic remembering can bring us to relive the subjective locative presence characteristic of a perceptual experience, and that the common view is mistaken. Our view – ‘mnemonic immersivism’ – has important consequences regarding the relationships between memory and imagination and the phenomenology of episodic remembering. (shrink)

Though Heidegger’s Being and Time is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last hundred years, its Division Two has received relatively little attention. This outstanding collection corrects that, examining some of the central themes of Division Two and their wide-ranging and challenging implications. An international team of leading philosophers explore the crucial notions that articulate Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, including death, anxiety, conscience, guilt, resolution and temporality. In doing so, they clarify the bearing of (...) Division Two’s reflections on our understanding of intentionality, normativity, responsibility, autonomy and selfhood. These discussions raise important questions about how we may need to rethink the morals of Division One of Being and Time , the broader project to which that book was devoted, the shaping influence of figures such as Aristotle and Kierkegaard, as well as Heidegger’s relationship with his contemporaries and successors. Essential reading for students and scholars of Heidegger’s thought, and anyone interested in key debates in phenomenology, ethics, metaphilosophy and philosophy of mind. Contributors: William Blattner, Clare Carlisle, Taylor Carman, Steven Galt Crowell, Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Sophia Dandelet, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Guignon, Jeffrey Haynes, Stephan Käufer, Denis McManus, Stephen Mulhall, George Pattison, Peter Poellner, Katherine Withy, Mark A. Wrathall. (shrink)

Paul Boghossian has pointed out a ’circularity problem’ for dispositionalist theories of meaning: as a result of the holistic character of belief fixation, one cannot identify someone’s meaning such and such with facts of the form S is disposed to utter P under conditions C, without C involving the semantic and intentional notions that such a theory was to explain. Alex Miller has recently suggested an ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’ (modelled on David Lewis’s well known version of functionlism) and has argued that (...) this version of dispositionalism escapes Boghossian’s ’circularity problem’. Miller argues, nonetheless, that another of Boghossian’s criticisms of dispositionalism, ’the infinity problem’ still applies to this ’ultra‐sophisticated dispositionalism’: C will still draw upon a potential infinity of mediating background clusters of belief. The present paper argues that the feature that ’the infinity problem’ presents as problematic is a feature of a host of familiar explanations. Our fundamental difficulty in this area is not our inability to understand how a more general model can be applied to a particular domain (the intentional understood as dispositional) but our failure to understand that general model itself (dispositional explanation). (shrink)

The twelve original studies collected in this volume examine different aspects of Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. They are authored by scholars and specialists internationally recognized for their expertise in the fields of phenomenology, logic, history of philosophy and philosophy of mind. They approach Husserl's groundwork from different angles and perspectives and shed new light on a number of issues such as meaning, intentionality, ontology, logic, etc. They also explore questions such as the place of the Logical Investigations within the whole (...) of Husserl's work, its sources in 19th century philosophy and in particular in the philosophical work of Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, its reception amongst the so-called members of the Munich Circle and its influence on contemporary philosophy. In short, this volume constitutes a "companion" to Husserl's Logical Investigations. (shrink)

What is a logical constant? In which terms should we characterize the meaning of logical words like “and”, “or”, “implies”? An attractive answer is: in terms of their inferential roles, i.e. in terms of the role they play in building inferences. More precisely, we favor an approach, going back to Dosen and Sambin, in which the inferential role of a logical constant is captured by a double line rule which introduces it as reflecting structural links (for example, multiplicative conjunction reflects (...) comma on the right of the turnstyle). Rule-based characterizations of logical constants are subject to the well known objection of Prior’s fake connective, tonk. We show that some double line rules also give rise to such pseudo logical constants. But then, we are able to find a property of a double line rules which guarantee that it defines a genuine logical constant. Thus we provide an alternative answer to Belnap’s requirement of conservatity in terms of a local requirement on double line rules. (shrink)

Pour certains interprètes des Recherches philosophiques , Wittgenstein souscrit à l'idée que l'emploi d'un langage est une institution sociale et que suivre une règle est nécessairement une pratique partagée ; d'autres estiment au contraire — à mon avis avec raison — qu'il admet la possibilité d'un langage parlé par un seul individu et des règles non communes. Je défends l'interprétation selon laquelle la question importante dans les Recherches n'est pas tellement de savoir si un idiolecte est possible que de savoir (...) ce qui découle, pour nos concepts de signification, de compréhension linguistique et de « suivre une règle », du fait que la communication verbale soit — comme c'est normalement le cas — une pratique commune.According to some interpreters of the Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein thinks that language-use is a social institution and that rule following is a shared practice. Others hold the opposite view and rightly so. They argue that Wittgenstein thinks there could be a language which is spoken by only one individual and unshared rules. In this paper I defend the following interpretation: The important question raised in the Investigations is not whether or not an idiolect is possible , it is rather what follows with respect to our concepts of meaning , understanding and rule-following from the fact that verbal communication is indeeed a shared practice. (shrink)

After sketching some aspects of truthmaker doctrines and "truthmaker projects", and canvassing some prima facie objections to the latter, I turn to an issue which might seem to involve confusion about the nature of character of truthmakers if such there be, viz for statements of identity and (specially) distinctness. The real issue here is versions of the Identity of Indiscernibles. I discuss ways of discriminating versions, which are almost certainly true but trivial, which almost certainly substantive but false, and explore (...) an interesting intermediate possibility which might if developed yield a plausibly true yet not-entirely-trivial version of the doctrine: it is equivalent to what I call "the Denial of Bare Distinctness". (shrink)

Annotation. Against the background of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Bradley provides a detailed differentiation between Aristotle's and Aquinas's view on moral principles and the end of man.

Sydney Shoemaker argues that time without change is possible, but begs the question by assuming an, in effect, Newtonian absolute time, that 'flows equably' in a region in which there is no change and in one in which there is. An equally possible, relativist, assumption, consistent, it seems, with relativity theory, is that where nothing changes there is no time flow, though there may be elsewhere, where there is change. Such an assumption would require some revision of uncritical common thought (...) about time. Aristotle argues that there is no time without change but that time is not change. His arguments for the latter can be faulted both internally and again in terms of the same relativist assumption. From the Physics we can derive, though Aristotle himself did not, an argument that time is to change as geometrical space is to body: the thing itself in abstraction. (shrink)

The dual character of invariance under transformations and definability by some operations has been used in classical works by, for example, Galois and Klein. Following Tarski, philosophers of logic have claimed that logical notions themselves could be characterized in terms of invariance. In this article, we generalize a correspondence due to Krasner between invariance under groups of permutations and definability in L∞∞ so as to cover the cases that are of interest in the logicality debates, getting McGee’s theorem about quantifiers (...) invariant under all permutations and definability in pure L∞∞ as a particular case. We also prove some optimality results along the way, regarding the kinds of relations which are needed so that every subgroup of the full permutation group is characterizable as a group of automorphisms. (shrink)

Kant claims that we have a duty to promote our own moral perfection, but not the moral perfection of others. I examine three types of argument for this asymmetry, as well as the implications of these arguments--and their success or failure--for Kantian theory. The arguments I consider say that (first) to promote others’ perfection is impossible; (second) to try to promote others’ perfection is impermissible; and (third) one cannot be obligated to promote both others’ perfection and one’s own. I argue (...) that none of these arguments establishes Kant’s conclusion. Since the formula of humanity grounds a duty to promote our own perfection out of respect for our rational nature, the absence of an argument denying that we must promote others’ perfection suggests that we must do so (out of respect for their rational nature). Even so, Kant’s theory discourages moral paternalism and takes perfection to be a primarily self-regarding project. Thus, I also show that a Kantian duty to promote the moral perfection of others would be unobjectionable, despite the problems such a duty might initially seem to invite. (shrink)

Judgments based on episodic memory are often thought to be immune to errors of misidentification (IEM). Yet there is a certain category of episodic memories, viz. observer memories, that seems to threaten IEM. In the resulting debate, some say that observer memories are a threat to the IEM enjoyed by episodic memory (Michaelian, 2021); others say that they pose no such threat (Fernández, 2021; Lin, 2020). In this paper, we argue for a middle way. First, we frame the debate, claiming (...) that the existing literature lacks a satisfying definition both of observer memories and of the precise issue of errors of identification in such memories. Then, we contribute to the debate by challenging an anti-separatist view about the relation between phenomenal and intentional features of observer memories that looms behind this debate. On this view, if the rememberer's self is a phenomenal feature of the memory, by implication it is also built into the intentional content. We reject this view and offer a moderate separatist account. Distinguishing between empirically-grounded species of observer memories, we say that the phenomenal self sometimes is, and sometimes is not built into the intentional content of the memory, and this results in different implications for IEM. (shrink)

Les pages qui suivent sont consacrées à un certain problème qui est au fondement de l’éthique de Franz Brentano. Je tâcherai de clarifier et de problématiser l’idée brentanienne d’une analogie entre logique et éthique, entre correction logique et justice éthique, entre l’existant et le bien. Après en avoir dégager la signification générale, j’en indiquerai les conséquences les plus importantes sur l’éthique brentanienne dans son ensemble. Une première conséquence, que je commenterai en détail, est l’« objectivisme » éthique de Brentano, dont (...) je montrerai qu’il n’est pas forcément synonyme de réalisme. Ensuite, j’expliquerai en quels termes Brentano s’efforce de transposer analogiquement à l’éthique sa théorie de la vérité-correspondance, y compris sa reformulation en termes d’évidence. Enfin, je donnerai quelques brèves indications sur l’influence marquée qu’a eue l’éthique brentanienne sur Husserl, en me limitant à la question de l’analogie logico-éthique. (shrink)

The project of articulating a theological ethics on the basis of liturgical anthropology is bound to fail if the necessary consequence is that one has to quit the forum of critical modern rationality. The risk of Engelhardt's approach is to limit rationality to a narrow vision of reason. Sin is not to be understood as the negation of human holiness, but as the negation of divine holiness. The only way to renew theological ethics is to understand sin as the anthropological (...) and ethical expression of the biblical message of the justification by faith only. Sin is therefore a secondary category, which can only by interpreted in light of the positive manifestation of liberation, justification, and grace. The central issue of Christian ethics is not ritual purity or morality, but experience, confession and recognition of our own injustice in our dealing with God and men. (shrink)

We show that there are models and such that elementarily embeds into but their ultrafilter extensions and are not elementarily equivalent.

Business Ethics: Best Practices for Designing and Managing Ethical Organizations, Third Edition focuses on how to create organizations of high integrity and superior performance. Author Denis Collins shows how to design organizations that reinforce ethical behavior and reduce ethical risks using his unique Ethical Systems Model that outlines how to hire and train ethical employees, make ethical decisions, and create a trusting, productive work environment. Taking a practical approach, this text is packed with tips, strategies, and real-world case studies (...) that profile a wide variety of businesses, industries, and issues. (shrink)

This paper explores difficulties that resolute readers of the early Wittgenstein face, arising out of what I call the ‘sheer lack’ interpretation of their ‘austere’ conception of nonsense, and the intelligibility of philosophical confusion—there being a sense in which we rightly talk of a ‘grasp’ of philosophical nonsense and indeed of its ‘logic’. Such readers depict philosophical and ‘plain’ nonsense as distinct psychological kinds; but I argue that the ‘intelligibility’ of philosophical confusion remains invisible to the kind of psychology that (...) the ‘sheer lack’ interpretation would make available to Wittgenstein. These concerns relate to well-established worries concerning whether the Tractatus’s ‘ladder’ can be climbed by thinking through arguments—or indeed by thinking full stop—if it is austerely nonsensical. Though I argue that these worries can be met, doing so requires another interpretation of ‘austerity’, which I call the ‘equivocation’ interpretation, and reveals the difference between resolute and non-resolute readings to be less clear cut than has been thought. Key here is the failure of some hard-and-fast distinctions that inform the literature—distinctions shaped by intuitions about mind, meaning, inference, logic, and nonsense—to serve us well. (shrink)

The ‘dehuman’ and the inhuman are not, even partially, exterior to the human, as are the material and the living, the animal and the bestial; they represent rather the extremes, the very limits of the human. The inhuman forms the interior facet of the boundary which makes us human and concerns us as such. In that sense, it is never exterior to us.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Empire Writes Back, With A VengeanceDenis DuttonOne of the more uplifting aspects of the turn toward theory in recent years has been the growth of postcolonial cultural studies. Postcolonial studies are in actuality constituted by counterdiscoursive, decolonizing practices which acknowledge the recognition of minority discourses, deconstructing hegemonic texts and imperialist metanarratives, opposing unduly overprivileging Western canonical paradigms of “literature,” and—well, you know what I mean. As Benita Parry (...) so lucidly explains, “The labor of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism’s dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony.” And what an awesome labor it is. The noted postcolonial theorist Georg M. Gugelberger sums things up by saying (I’m not inventing this) “postcolonialism can be conceptualized as the last bulwark against an encroaching total capitalism.”But what of the struggling masses of oppressed peoples whose interests and cultural sensitivities are so caringly looked after by practitioners of postcolonial studies? How do they feel about the fact that the only thing standing between them and “total capitalism” is resistance being mounted in a comparative literature department in Idaho, or someplace? This is a question seldom asked, let alone answered. Fortunately, new light has been thrown on the matter with the arrival of a booklet at this journal. Indian History from Above and Below, by Rukun Advani, is published by Ram Advani, probably a member of the family, in Lucknow. It is dedicated to “all Bengali intellectuals and those whose dollar salaries rise in proportion with obscurity and jargon.” Advani notes in his preface that although Bengali intellectuals talk torrents in their native tongue, when they [End Page 198] disseminate their thoughts abroad, they translate into a “clogged, colonial, unfluid flow,” with footnotes such as: “Derrida; ibid.; see my recent essay on the modes and moods of Foucault in JPS, III.iii, 3–333; on Lacan, see Lacan, On Lacan; Barthes, how many times a day do you have one in summer; idem., do you really?; differentiated peasantry; undifferentiated peasantry; for a feminist, though partially anthropologized, hermeneutic-critical discourse on the post-colonial subversive dimensions of the undifferentiated middle peasant in Midnapore district in June 1959, see the provocative controversy between Ranajit da and Amiya da in Gayatri di, ed., Gendered, Gendered, O Most Gendered: Epistemology and the Male Menopause in Bengal between June 1959 and July 1959 (Oxford University Press, forty years later).”The first of the booklet’s two essays, “Indian History from Below: a Swiftian Consideration,” discusses a neglected but “important arena of subaltern existence, namely the history of belching, wind-breaking and defecation.” Just to name these three functions posits “a bourgeois hierarchy of disgust with what Marx, in one of his most decisively Derridesque reflections, termed ‘The Asiatic Commode of Production.’” Beginning with the Foucauldian notion of “the peasant’s overdetermined relative autonomy from the olfactory,” Advani describes “the Barthesian notion of the impossibility of critical transcendence by the historian into either the symbiotic acculturation of the pastness, and indeed the presentness, of the present-subject, or indeed the even greater epistemological and hermeneutic problems posed by attempting a recreation of the ontological presuppositions of the peasant.” Much of this is elaborated in the classic essay by Professor Lavatri Lavatory Spewhack, “The Post-Colonial Lavatory and Its Radical Implications for Nomenclaturing Among Gendered and Subalternized Third World Expatriate-Marxist-Feminists in the First and Second Worlds: A Derivative Discourse Decoded.”The debt that Rukun Advani owes to Professor Spewhack is clear from the sheer number of his references to books and articles by her. These include, on the subject of toileting, Master Disgusted, Native Disgusting: a Perspective on Peasants from 250,000 Dollars per Annum, “On the Symbolic Hegemony of Subsection Numbers in a Gendered and Subalternized Post-Colonial Context: A Derivative Discourse Decoded” (in The Phenomenology of Praxis and the Praxis of Phenomenology in a Postmodern Residential Colony), “The Violence of Steam and the Episteme of Violence: Foucault’s Views on Hot Air Balloons” (in Obscurata), and even parts of her autobiography: The Larger than Life of Lavatri Lavatory [End Page 199] Spewhack (chapter titled “My Collected Phonecalls and Faxes”). While some... (shrink)

The concept of equilibrium has long been a focus for dissent between orthodox and heterodox schools of thought in economics. The paper explores the meanings of ‘equilibrium’ and attempts to tease apart salient appropriate and inappropriate modes of deployment of the concept. Under far-from-equilibrium conditions, equilibrium is not even an approximate description of the condition of the system, but an abstraction – a state of affairs which might obtain should a process under consideration run to its conclusion. The order of (...) the system is viewed from this standpoint, not as an equilibrium, but as a temporary and ephemeral balance of forces, destined to be disturbed by the passage of time. A specific instance of the deployment of the concept of equilibrium by a neoclassical writer – Robert Lucas – is examined and the conclusion drawn that the concept has been hypostatised: an aspect of a process has been one-sidedly emphasised and substituted for the whole. The temporary is made permanent, and process subordinated to stasis, with clear apologetic results. The paper concludes by suggesting that this hypostatisation exemplifies the contrast between formal and dialectical modes of thought, and that it is in the application of a dialectical notion of equilibrium that the heterodoxy can make its most telling contribution. (shrink)

In its forty years of existence, Artificial Intelligence has suffered both from the exaggerated claims of those who saw it as the definitive solution of an ancestral dream — that of constructing an intelligent machine-and from its detractors, who described it as the latest fad worthy of quacks. Yet AI is still alive, well and blossoming, and has left a legacy of tools and applications almost unequalled by any other field-probably because, as the heir of Renaissance thought, it represents a (...) possible bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences, philosophy and neurophysiology, psychology and integrated circuits-including systems that today are taken for granted, such as the computer interface with mouse pointer and windows. This writing describes a few results of AI that have modified the scientific world, as well as the way a layman sees computers: thetechnology of programming languages, such asLISP-witness the unique excellence of academic departments that have contributed to them-thecomputing workstations-of which our modern PC is but a vulgarised descendant-theapplications to the educational field-e.g., the realisation of some ideas of genetic epistemology-and tointerdisciplinary philosophy-such as Hofstadter's associations between the arts and mathematics-and the use ofAI techniques in music and musicology. All this has led to a generalisation of AI towards Negrotti's overallTheory of the Artificial, which encompasses further specialisation such asartificial reality, artificial life, and applications ofneural networks among others. (shrink)

Individual humans as well as human communities interact in a great variety of ways and, in essence, Unesco's Silk Roads Major Project endeavors to shed light on the cultural interactions along the trade routes linking various Eurasian civilizations. The term Silk Road or Roads conjures up visions of caravans laden with rare goods, carrying them from the distant, perhaps even the so-called “mysterious”, East towards the Western World. This general impression is partially created by the word “silk”, name of a (...) commodity generally and correctly linked with China where it was first produced. It is good to remember that a “Silk Road” is a historic fiction, invented in the nineteenth century by the German geographer von Richthofen to call attention to the existence of, first and foremost, commercial contacts between China and the Roman Empire. Silk was but one of the many goods circulating all along the many roads criss-crossing the great Eurasian space. This short essay will provide some information on the languages used along the land arteries of communication between East and West. (shrink)

Papers from a seminar held in Paris, Sept. 1995, organized by the International Union of Physiological Sciences and UNESCO.

ABSTRACT: Paul Horwich writes in his recent book, Meaning : "the picture of meaning to be developed here is inspired by Wittgenstein's idea that the meaning of a word is constituted from its use—from the regularities governing our deployment of the sentences in which it appears." Horwich makes no claim to a faithful exegesis of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, but I argue in the present article that the conception of meaning he develops in his book is actually quite close to that (...) of the author of the Investigations. I do this by comparing the views of the two philosophers. I also examine the question of holism, which, as it seems, is inseparable from the notion that use is constitutive of meaning. (shrink)

Dans les Recherches philosophiques, Wittgenstein consacre une série importante de remarques au problème du «langage privé». Un langage privé, d'après la définition qu'il donne dans ces passages, est un langage dont les mots sont censés se référer «à ce dont seul celui qui parle peut avoir connaissance; à ses sensations immédiates et privées […]». Le résultat bien connu de sa discussion est que non seulement il n'y a pas en fait, mais il n'est pas possible qu'il existe un tel langage; (...) pour lui, un langage doit être nécessairement «public», c'est-à-dire parlé par plusieurs locuteurs. De l'avis de tous les commentateurs, ces remarques sur le thème du langage privé occupent une place centrale dans les Recherches, mais les opinions diffèrent sur la façon dont on devrait les interpréter. Dans ce qui suit, je défends l'interprétation d'après laquelle sa discussion doit se comprendre en la replaçant dans le cadre d'une philosophie du langage. De façon plus précise, j'essayerai de montrer quel est le lien entre l'«argument du langage privé», comme le désignent les interprètes, l'argument qu'il avance contre l'idée qu'il pourrait exister un langage comme celui-là, et ses vues sur le langage et la signification. Il y a en réalité, je pense, non pas un mais deux «arguments du langage privé» et les deux arguments, que je vais exposer, visent indirectement à mettre en relief une conception d'ensemble du langage, celle qu'il met de l'avant dans ses Recherches, et non pas seulement, de façon plus étroite, une conception ayant trait au langage des sensations. Comme je le dirai aussi plus loin, cette image du langage qu'offre Wittgenstein dans les Recherches soulève une difficulté, si je l'interprète correctement, mais celle-ci n'enlève rien à l'intérêt philosophique de ses remarques. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: According to Michael Dummett, Wittgenstein rejects in the Philosophical Investigations the “realist” approach of the Tractatus, and replaces it with the idea that meaning is “use”; Wittgenstein, Dummett holds, draws the “metaphysical consequences” of this by subscribing to a form of non-realism. In this paper I defend a version of Dummett’s point that the Tractarian semantics is replaced in the Investigations by the notion that meaning is use, but I criticize his contention that Wittgenstein, as a consequence, subscribes to (...) some variety of metaphysical non-realism. (shrink)