There was a time when 'logic' just meant classical logic. The climate is slowly changing and non-classical logic cannot be dismissed off-hand. However, a metatheory used to study the properties of non-classical logic is often classical. In this paper, we will argue that this practice of relying on classical metatheories is problematic. In particular, we will show that it is a bad practice because the metatheory that is used to study a non-classical logic often rules out the very logic it (...) is designed to study. (shrink)

Book Information The Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic. Edited by Lou Goble. Blackwell Publishers. Oxford. 2001. Pp. x + 510. Paperback, £16.99.

This paper analyzes the impact of practices of classification, organization, and presentation within U.S. academic libraries on systemic support for diversity in philosophy. It argues that present practices result in the preemptive marginalization of non-traditional perspectives and methods in the discipline of philosophy. The paper has three parts. First, an examination of the historical and philosophical roots of the predominant systems of classification in academic libraries, Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and Subject Headings (LCSH). Second, a consideration of how library (...) classification norms the research and practice of philosophy. Third, a response to potential objections about the impact of library classification on philosophers. (shrink)

This article extends the concept of symmetry to ethics. Using the case of canola in Canada, the authors argue that grades and standards simultaneously subject humans and nonhumans to rites of passage that test their "goodness. " Then, they further develop a tentative typology of standards. The authors argue that these standards allow something resembling the neoclassical market to be established, create the conditions for economic analysis, and allocate power among human actors.

Priest holds anti-exceptionalism about logic. That is, he holds that logic, as a theory, does not have any exceptional status in relation to the theories of empirical sciences. Crucial to Priest’s anti-exceptionalism is the existence of ‘data’ that can force the revision of logical theory. He claims that classical logic is inadequate to the available data and, thus, needs to be revised. But what kind of data can overturn classical logic? Priest claims that the data is our intuitions about the (...) validity of inferences. In order to make sense of this claim, I will appeal to the Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher Candrakīrti. I will then pose a problem for Priest’s anti-exceptionalism. Finally, I will suggest a way out of the problem for Priest. Whether or not he accepts my solution, I will let him decide. (shrink)

Following on from Shaun Gallagher's influential 2005 book How the Body Shapes the Mind, this volume brings together leading experts from the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry in a productive dialogue, exploring key questions and debates about the relationship between body schema and body image.

A recent publication project entitled Asian Business Discourse has brought to the attention of the international readership an original body of research on business discursive practices and organizational communication issues in a variety of Asian cultures. In this Forum, we discuss some of the topics highlighted by the project, which arise from the recent indigenous research in business discourse as a multidisciplinary field.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:201 HUME TO SMITH: AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER* In all probability, a newly-discovered letter by David Hume, written on 17 November 1772 and published here for the first time, was addressed to Adam Smith. Purchased in May 1982 by Kwansei Gakuin University Library, it now forms part of the Adam Smith Collection there. The vendors stated the letter was acquired from a French collector, but there seems to be no (...) other information available about its provenance. The letter itself is a brief one in which Hume urges the addressee to move to an excellent house in the New Town of Edinburgh which will be empty next Whitsuntide, one of the Scottish quarterdays or term-days, fixed for the beginning and end of tenancy and usually falling on 15 May. There is a postscript, in which Hume adds that he is enclosing an account of the importing of money into Spain that was once requested from him. This enclosure has not been traced. There is no doubt about the authenticity of the Hume letter, but there is a technical difficulty about the identity of the addressee. This is made known by a slip pasted on the foot of the letter. A suspicious mind might think of an owner doing this to enhance the value of the letter, but the words 'Adam Smith Esqr Kirkaldy' are probably in Hume's hand, and the slip may well have been cut from the cover of the letter. The contents of the letter, to be sure, point definitely to Adam Smith as the recipient. For one thing, Hume stresses that the house he has in mind for his correspondent 'has a Prospect of... even I believe Kirkaldy,' and Smith was certainly the most prominent of Hume's intimate friends then living in 202 the 'lang toun' visible across the Firth of Forth from many parts of Edinburgh. There were others associated with Kirkcaldy, of course, such as James Oswald of Dunnikier, also Smith's childhood friend and someone with a great interest in political economy, but he had died in 1769. One might think, too, of the brothers Adam, in particular Robert and John, rising architects and later designers of Hume's memorial on Carlton Hill, but the focus of their life was London by this date, and they were unlikely to be asking Hume for an account of the money imported into Spain. In Hume's later years, he delighted in conversing with his friends in his home, and would call on them to pass time with him, even to move to Edinburgh to be near him. For example, he wrote to Smith on 23 November 1772 (corr. 134) that Adam Ferguson 'comes over next week, to a house in this neighbourhood. Pray, come over this winter, and join us.' On other occasions, too, he urged Smith to come to Edinburgh to visit him or to settle there so that they could enjoy each other's company. Thus, the first point suggesting that the new letter must be addressed to Smith arises from awareness of the relationship between Hume and Smith at this period. As is well known, Smith left the service of the Duke of Buccleuch in 1767 and returned from London to Kirkcaldy. There he lived with his mother and immersed himself in writing the Wealth of Nations until he left for London in May 1773 to see to the publication of his great book. As John Rae wrote of the intervening years: 'Hume, who thought the country an unsuitable place for a man of letters, used every endeavour to persuade [Smith] to remove to 2 Edinburgh, but without success.' 203 In a letter from James's Court of the Old Town, dated 20 August 1769 (Corr. 121), Hume asked Smith with all sincerity, ¦ but with a pleasing sense of humour, to spend some time with him: I am glad to have come within sight of you, and to have a View of Kirkaldy from my Windows: But as I wish also to be within speaking terms of you, I wish we coud concert measures for that purpose. I am mortally sick at Sea, and regard with horror, and a kind of... (shrink)

これまで九鬼周造や和辻哲郎、丸山眞男などの日本思想研究で高い評価を得てきた著者が、第一作『善の研究』から晩年の論考にいたるまで、西田のテクストのなかに潜り込み、著作の成立事情や、西洋思想からの影響関係 、独特な用語の使用の変遷などを丁寧に検証して、その思想の全貌を明らかにする。西田幾多郎研究/近代日本哲学研究の必携ガイドにして、従来の西田幾多郎研究を真正面から再統合する西田哲学の決定版!

あはれ・わび・いきなどの美意識や芸術の本質について、和辻哲郎、九鬼周造などの知の巨人から学ぶ。.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Individual in Relation to the Sangha in American Buddhism:An Examination of "Privatized Religion"Kenneth K. TanakaIn his celebrated book Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam noted the increased level in the phenomenon of "privatized religion" within the previous thirty-five years. Many of the Baby Boomer generation left churches in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Some sought out new religious movements and religious therapies, but most simply "dropped out" of (...) organized religion altogether. He cites Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, specialists in American religion, who describe the outcome of this trend in American religious behavior: "[The consequence was a] tendency toward highly individualized religious psychology without the benefits of strong supportive attachments to believing communities. A major impetus in this direction in the post-1960s was the thrust toward greater personal fulfillment and quest for the ideal self.... In this climate of expressive individualism, religion tends to become "privatized," or anchored in the personal realms."1 Putnam observes that although privatized religion may be "morally compelling and psychologically fulfilling," it involves less social capital than environments in which individuals are connected to other individuals in shared faith commitment.Interestingly, American Buddhism may be one of the beneficiaries of this trend, for the recent growth of Buddhism in the United States is partly attributable to the climate of "privatized" religion. Nowhere is this symbolized more than by the so-called Nightstand Buddhists.2The Nightstand Buddhists derive their name from their practice of placing a Buddhist meditation book on the nightstand after reading it before they go to sleep. They get up the next morning and practice to the best of their ability the meditation they had read about the night before. Further, they may frequently attend lectures at the local university and visit a Buddhist center's web-page or participate in an online Buddhist discussion group. And if we were to visit them, we might find their homes decorated with Buddhist artifacts.But these Nightstand Buddhists do not show up in any statistics on the [End Page 115] American Buddhist population because they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. According to Thomas Tweed, who coined the term Nightstand Buddhists, "Sympathizers (= Nightstand Buddhists) are those who have some sympathy for Buddhism but do not embrace it exclusively or fully. When asked, they would not identify themselves as Buddhists. They would say they are Methodists, or Jewish, or unaffiliated."3 However, they have been an important part of the story of Buddhism in America from its beginning and continue to be so today.Among the three million Buddhists currently estimated to be in the United States, I believe there are Buddhists who exhibit many of the same characteristics as the Nightstand Buddhists. And this number is significant, particularly among those converts to Buddhism whose main practice is meditation. This group of convert Buddhists is one segment of the larger Buddhist community in the United States, which I have categorized into four groups.41. New Asian American Buddhists (those who have mostly arrived in the United States since the 1960s: Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Cambodian, Myanmar, Laotian, and Sri Lankan).2. Old-line Asian American Buddhists (those who were established before World War II: Chinese and Japanese).3. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation (predominately Euro-Americans practicing in the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions).4. Convert Buddhists whose main practice is chanting (Sōkagakkai International–USA, a sizable percentage of whom are African and Hispanic Americans).In this paper, I wish to focus on a Jōdo Shinshū temple from the second group (old-line Asian American Buddhists) and on several centers collectively that belong to the Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan traditions from the third group (convert Buddhists whose main practice is meditation), looking at the manner in which individuals relate to their respective institutions and traditions, with special attention given to the phenomenon of "privatized religion."For purposes of this paper, my definition of "privatized religion" is based on the observation of Roof and McKinney, cited above, as "a tendency for individuals (1) to emphasize practicing at home over religious centers, and (2) to value the subjective and the inward." The homebound orientation is connected... (shrink)

What does it mean for the laws of logic to fail? My task in this paper is to answer this question. I use the resources that Routley/Sylvan developed with his collaborators for the semantics of relevant logics to explain a world where the laws of logic fail. I claim that the non-normal worlds that Routley/Sylvan introduced are exactly such worlds. To disambiguate different kinds of impossible worlds, I call such worlds logically impossible worlds. At a logically impossible world, the laws (...) of logic fail. In this paper, I provide a definition of logically impossible worlds. I then show that there is nothing strange about admitting such worlds. (shrink)

Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

The problem of how to accommodate inconsistencies has attracted quite a number of researchers, in particular, in the area of database theory. The problem is also of concern in the study of belief change. For inconsistent beliefs are ubiquitous. However, comparatively little work has been devoted to discussing the problem in the literature of belief change. In this paper, I examine how adequate the AGM theory is as a logical framework for belief change involving inconsistencies. The technique is to apply (...) to Grove’s sphere system, a semantical representation of the AGM theory, logics that do not infer everything from contradictory premises, viz., paraconsistent logics. I use three paraconsistent logics and discuss three sphere systems that are based on them. I then examine the completeness of the postulates of the AGM theory with respect to the systems. At the end, I discuss some philosophical implications of the examination. (shrink)

A logic is said to be paraconsistent if it does not allow everything to follow from contradictory premises. There are several approaches to paraconsistency. This paper is concerned with several philosophical positions on paraconsistency. In particular, it concerns three ‘schools’ of paraconsistency: Australian, Belgian and Brazilian. The Belgian and Brazilian schools have raised some objections to the dialetheism of the Australian school. I argue that the Australian school of paraconsistency need not be closed down on the basis of the Belgian (...) and Brazilian schools’ objections. In the appendix of the paper, I also argue that the Brazilian school’s view of logic is not coherent. (shrink)

In this paper, using Mark Schroeder’s (2008a) expressivist semantic framework for normative language as a case study, I will identify difficulties that even an expressivist semantic theory capable of addressing the Frege-Geach problem will encounter in handling the logical possibility of moral dilemmas. To this end, I will draw on a classical puzzle formulated by McConnell (1978) that the logical possibility of moral dilemmas conflicts with some of the prima facie plausible axioms of the standard deontic logic, which include obligation (...) implies permission. On the tentative assumption that proponents of ethical expressivism should be generally committed to securing the logical possibility of moral dilemmas in their semantic theories, I will explore whether and how expressivists can successfully invalidate obligation implies permission within the framework developed by Schroeder. The case study eventually reveals that this can indeed be a hard task for expressivists. Generalizing from the case study, I will suggest that the source of the difficulty ultimately lies in the mentalist assumption of the expressivist semantic project that the logico-semantic relations exhibited by normative sentences should be modeled in terms of the psychological attitudes that speakers express by uttering them. My final goal will be to show that the difficulty expressivists face in dealing with the logical possibility of moral dilemmas is a reflection of the more general problem that their commitment to the mentalist assumption prevents them from flexibly adopting or dropping axioms in their semantic theories to get the right technical results. (shrink)

Buddhist philosophers have investigated the techniques and methodologies of debate and argumentation which are important aspects of Buddhist intellectual life. This was particularly the case in India, where Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy originated. But these investigations have also engaged philosophers in China, Japan, Korea and Tibet, and many other parts of the world that have been influenced by Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Several elements of the Buddhist tradition of philosophy are thought to be part of this investigation. -/- There are (...) interesting reasoning patterns discernible in the writings of Buddhist philosophers. For instance, the Mādhyamika philosopher Nāgārjuna presents arguments for the emptiness of all things in terms of catuṣkoṭi (four ‘corners’: roughly speaking, truth, false, both, neither). There are also the Indian vāda (debate) literature and Tibetan bsdus grwa (collected topics) that list techniques of debates. -/- The main interest here is the tradition of Buddhist philosophy, sometimes referred to as Pramāṇavāda, whose central figures are Dignāga (approx. 480–540 CE) and Dharmakīrti (6th– 7th CE). This philosophy is understood to be the Buddhist school of logic-epistemology. ‘Pramāṇavāda’ is not a doxographical term traditionally used to refer to a recognised school of Buddhist philosophy. It is a conventional term that is sometimes used in modern literature. Nevertheless, in what follows, we think of it as a tradition within Buddhist philosophy and ‘Buddhist logic’ refers to what is developed in this tradition. -/- Buddhist logicians have systematically analysed the kind of reasoning involved in acquiring knowledge. They hold that there are valid ways to reason that are productive of knowledge. In what follows, some of the main elements of their analyses will be described. Note, however, that, while exegetical studies of Buddhist texts are important, we must step back from them and consider what is involved in taking a Buddhist approach to logic in light of modern formal logic. This analysis will be done against the backdrop of the contemporary literature on logic and related subjects in contemporary philosophy to make sense of the logical studies by Buddhist logicians. (shrink)

Kripke completeness of some infinitary predicate modal logics is presented. More precisely, we prove that if a normal modal logic above is -persistent and universal, the infinitary and predicate extension of with BF and BF is Kripke complete, where BF and BF denote the formulas pi pi and x x, respectively. The results include the completeness of extensions of standard modal logics such as , and its extensions by the schemata T, B, 4, 5, D, and their combinations. The proof (...) is obtained by extending the correspondence between the representation of modal algebras and the completeness of propositional modal logic to infinite. (shrink)