Medieval theology had an important influence on later philosophy which is visible in the empiricisms of Russell, Carnap, and Quine. Other thinkers, including McDowell, Kripke, and Dennett, show how we can overcome the distorting effects of that theological ecosystem on our accounts of the nature of reality and our relationship to it. In a different philosophical tradition, Hegel uses a secularized version of Christianity to argue for a kind of human knowledge that overcomes the influences of late-medieval voluntarism, and some (...) twentieth-century thinkers, including Benjamin and Derrida, instead defend a Jewish-influenced notion of the religious sublime. Frank B. Farrell analyzes and connects philosophers of different eras and traditions to show that modern philosophy has developed its practices on a terrain marked out by earlier theological and religious ideas, and considers how different philosophers have both embraced, and tried to escape from, those deep-seated patterns of thought. (shrink)

Interessanter Artikel. Ebersole fordert ein extensionales Kriterium für die Unterscheidung, erklärt die Suche aber für aussichtslos. Er betont, dass nur Aussagen analytisch sind, nicht Sätze. Er betont, dass empirische Allsätze weder prinzipiell analytisch noch synthetisch sind, ihr Wahrheitswert ist unbestimmt. Erst, wenn wir alle Gegenstände kennen, die unter den allquantifizierten Begriff fallen, können wir dies sagen. (Hier habe ich Probleme, da ich Allquantifikation über undefinierten Begriffen unzulässig finde.).

This unusually accessible account of recent Anglo-American philosophy focuses on how that philosophy has challenged deeply held notions of subjectivity, mind, and language. The book is designed on a broad canvas in which recent arguments are placed in a historical context. The author then explores such topics as mental content, moral realism, realism and antirealism, and the character of subjectivity. Much of the book is devoted to an investigation of Donald Davidson's philosophy, and there is also a sustained critique of (...) the position of Richard Rorty. A final chapter defends the realist position against objections from postmodern thought. As a rigorous and historically sensitive account of recent philosophy, this book should enjoy a wide readership among philosophers of many different persuasions, literary theorists, and social scientists who have been influenced by postmodern thought. (shrink)

Resurrection has been used as the conceptual basis for attempted solutions to two problems that occur in the context of western theism, the problem of cognitive meaning and the problem of theodicy. Because John Hick has proposed resurrection as a solution to both problems so extensively, and because Antony Flew and Terence Penelhum have examined those solutions so strenuously, I will use their writings to lay out the problem. My aim is to improve upon Hick by overcoming a weakness in (...) his defence of resurrection. My narrower focus will be on resurrection and the ‘replica objection’, rather than the wider use of resurrection to solve problems of evil or the meaningfulness of theistic discourse, but some brief remarks on the wider problems will be necessary to set the stage. (shrink)

Frank Wilderson: I introduce a semiotic configuration. The point is, at important levels of abstraction, people who are positioned as Black—which is very different from saying people who think of themselves as Black. One of the basic premises of Afropessimism, which makes it resonate with psychoanalysis or Marxism, is that where one is positioned in a paradigm might not be where one thinks one is or where one desires to be. When I teach undergraduates, I say: “Look, I used (...) to study neorealism. In these neorealist films, we have these people who are bona fide fascists, and then you have those people in the Communist Party, so they could not agree on much. They don’t see themselves as having much of a connection. But in a Gramscian sense, they are both positioned as the host of capitalist parasites. Both groups rely on the wage. So, they are both workers.” One of the big points with respect to the narratological question is that I, as a Black person, trained at Columbia University in creative writing, trained at UC Berkeley in critical theory, love narrative, but narrative does not love me. In other words, it is impossible for me to be “emplotted” as a speaking subject. I can only be “emplotted” as an object of narrative. But I am always struggling to attain that love of humanity; and if I were to attain it, the Human would not have a foil against which to know itself. So, what I am saying is that in a book like Red, White & Black, I am just being very categorically clear about the divisions. In Afropessimism, I am actually talking about the desire of a sentient being who cannot be allowed into an arena where people are recognized and incorporated, in Lacanian terms, as “contemporaries” of human beings. So, there is all this back and forth. I don’t think this speaking subject in Afropessimism ever achieves anything in particular. It is always struggling toward being a subject that can actually travel on a narrative arc and yet ultimately is an object that can never travel from dispossession to redemptive recovery. (shrink)

It has been known for some time that there is a primitive recursive permutation of the nonnegative integers whose inverse is recursive but not primitive recursive. For example one has this result apparently for the first time in Kuznecov [1] and implicitly in Kent [2] or J. Robinson [3], who shows that every singularly recursive function ƒ is representable aswhere A, B, C are primitive recursive and B is a permutation.

"[Reading Ebersole] requires and often succeeds in producing a radical reorientation of one´s thinking . . . " from a book review Things We Know is a collection of fifteen essays that focus on perennial philosophical problems about knowledge. The essays let you participate in Frank Ebersole´s unique struggles to come to terms with such questions as: Can we know the world? . . . the past? . . . the future? . . . of God´s existence? . . (...) . whether our actions are free? . . . the foundations of logic and language? This is not just another philosophy book about problems of knowledge. In Things We Know, Ebersole, by carefully using examples, exposes the problems to be the products of philosophical pictures. The examples also make the pictures less compelling. Thus, by reading this philosophy book readers can join the author in working to free themselves from some perplexing philosophical concerns. How the Second Edition differs from the First Edition This edition differs from the First Edition (University of Oregon Books, 1967) in three ways. An essay is added. "Everyman´s Ontological Argument" has been inserted as Essay 14, following two other essays about the ontological argument. "Everyman´s Ontological Argument" was published in the Fall 1978 issue of Philosophical Investigations. (The original Chapter 14, "Where the Action Is," is now Chapter 15.) An essay is replaced. The original Essay 3, "How Philosophers See Stars," has been replaced by a modified version that was printed in Philosophy Today (no. 2, 1969). The replacement includes some further improvements. The text is improved. Throughout the book, the author has made corrections, stylistic improvements, and changed the wording as needed to make clearer his line of thought. Summary Each of the fifteen essays takes up a philosophical problem. In most of the essays, Ebersole first clarifies the problem and reviews common attempts to resolve the problem. Then he focuses on the central ideas and terms used to state the problem and creates examples of people using the terms under consideration. The examples are unique because of their focus on the context and point of what we say. If his investigations fail to find a use of the terms that supports the philosophical problem, he is led to conclude that the problem does not really derive from a philosophical insight but rather arises from a philosophical picture or model. Preface The essays in Things We Know address some of the perennial philosophical problems of knowledge. The essays are unified by being similar in method and philosophic aim. Ebersole exposes a picture behind each problem. In the essays he works through some of the ways that pictures control our thinking and tries to make the pictures less compelling. Chapters 1 6: Perception and Language Chapter 1: "Seeing Red in Red Things" Philosophical problem: Must words for simple visual properties (e.g., "red") refer to things because the things share some property (e.g., redness)? Can we see this property? Topics investigated: Family resemblances, properties of colors, when we regard things as the same, when we regard colors as the same, when we regard things as having common properties, language-world philosophical pictures. Philosophers discussed: A. J. Ayer, J. Herder, J. S. Mill. Chapter 2: "Seeing Things" Philosophical problem: Do hallucinations and afterimage. (shrink)

It was a bad day. First I presented my idea about a Central America protest to the faculty committee, but the committee played ping-pong with the idea until it was crushed. Then I met Robinson, who has somehow been able to present his theory of action in a serious journal. But the theory is a house of cards, and once his critics rattle the table a bit, the theory will come crashing down. And his book on the history of philosophy, (...) just published, is a cheap TV dinner. He does not understand how to study the history of thought. It is necessary to dig into hidden layers of thought, to uncover earlier strata, to map the subterranean patterns, and then to explain why upheavals take place when they do.The above paragraph contains a number of metaphorical sentences. Now all of the following are, I believe, facts about, or relevant to, those sentences. They can be true or false, and our behavior towards them shows that we take them as candidates for truth. I will be expected to offer evidence in support of their truth, and Robinson's supporters on the faculty, if they hear me state the sentences about him, will accuse me of having made false claims. It is generally clear, in regard to the metaphorical sentences under consideration, what would count as evidence for them and against them. (shrink)

Examines why parapsychology has been held in disdain by scientists, philosophers, and theologians, explores the evidence for ESP, psychokinesis, and life after death, and suggests that these phenomena provide support for a meaningful postmodern spirituality.

This unusually accessible account of recent Anglo-American philosophy focuses on how that philosophy has challenged deeply held notions of subjectivity, mind, and language. The book is designed on a broad canvas in which recent arguments are placed in a historical context (in particular they are related to medieval philosophy and German idealism). The author then explores such topics as mental content, moral realism, realism and antirealism, and the character of subjectivity. Much of the book is devoted to an investigation of (...) Donald Davidson's philosophy, and there is also a sustained critique of the position of Richard Rorty. A final chapter defends the realist position against objections from postmodern thought. As a rigorous and historically sensitive account of recent philosophy, this book should enjoy a wide readership among philosophers of many different persuasions, literary theorists, and social scientists who have been influenced by postmodern thought. (shrink)

Flew's attack on the free-Will defense (fwd) is well known, As are the defenses of the fwd based on the claims that the fwd (now at least) employs an indeterminist sense of free, Free (i), Rather than the compatibilists sense of free, Free (c), That flew used. This paper tries to (1) modify the flew attack so that it does apply to free (i) versions of the fwd, (2) show that even the modified flew attack fails to defeat the fwd, (...) And, In passing, (3) make some comment on coherence of standard (thomistic) doctrine of foreknowledge of future free (i) acts. (shrink)

Of late there has been a resurgence of interest in the proofs of God’s existence. Both the ontological argument and Thomistic forms of the cosmological argument have been analyzed repeatedly and well. Very little attention, however, has been given to the rather unique cosmological argument presented by Descartes in his Third Meditation. An additional reason for airing this argument is that a recent presentation of D’s cosmological argument has misconstrued its basic structure.

“We raised the power of reason, the power of manipulating words, above all other faculties. The written word became our god. We forgot that before words there were actions … that there have always been things beyond words. We forgot that spoken words preceded the written one. We forgot that written form of our letters came from ideographic pictures … that standing behind every letter is an image like an ancient ghost. The image stands for natural movements of the body (...) and other living things.” Frank Herbert. (shrink)

Recently Steven E. Boër gave another turn to the discussion of the free will defence by claiming that the free will defence is irrelevant to the justification of moral evil. Conceding that free will may be of real value, Boër claims that free will could have been allowed creatures without that leading to any moral evil at all. What I shall hereafter refer to as the ‘Boër reform’ is the suggestion that God could have allowed creatures to exercise free choices (...) but have intervened with ‘coincidence miracles’ to prevent all the intended evil from actually occurring. What is important to the free will defence, according to Boër, is the ability to choose freely and not the ability to succeed in effecting what we have intended to accomplish. It is no intrusion on the freedom of our wills for God to prevent us from accomplishing what we tried to do with our free wills as long as we were free to try. (shrink)