This paper presents an original semantic theory of proper names that aims to cover both non-empty and empty proper names. According to the theory, proper names have simple assignable hyperintensions as their content. This content provides the referent (if there is one) for which the proper name stands. The paper further describes the role of the proposed content of (empty) proper names within the compositional semantics of problematic sentences. I stress the difference between the content of a sentence (...) (i.e. its hyperintension) and the proposition (i.e. a mapping from possible worlds to truth values) denoted by that sentence. (shrink)

Ordinary use of empty names encompasses a variety of different phenomena, including issues in semantics, mental content, fiction, pretense, and linguistic practice. In this paper I offer a novel account of empty names, the cognitive theory, and show how it offers a satisfactory account of the phenomena. The virtues of this theory are based on its strength and parsimony. It allows for a fully homogeneous semantic treatment of names coped with ontological frugality and empirical and psychological adequacy.

This paper examines to what extent Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics can give an adequate account for empty names in natural languages. It argues that the prospect is dim because of a tension between metaphysical austerity, non-vacuousness of theorems and empirical adequacy. Sainsbury (2005) proposed a Davidsonian account of empty names called ‘Reference Without Referents’ (RWR), which explicates reference in terms of reference-condition rather than referent, thus avoiding the issue of existence. This is an inspiring account. However, it meets several difficulties. First, (...) there is no non-vacuous, interpretive truth-condition available for any T-sentence containing an empty name, because by stipulation there is no way to compose a true atomic sentence using an empty name in RWR. The absence of an interpretive truth-condition implies the absence of an interpretive reference-condition. It also entails empirical inadequacy to support an interpretation because the related propositional attitude can never be truly satisfied. These considerations cast doubt on whether truth is the proper vehicle to articulate meaning. This paper suggests that we can alleviating the problem by employing truth-conditions varying across contexts of utterance, rather than just contexts of evaluation. The result is a two-dimensional model-theoretic approach to empty names. It involves a new function coined counterfactual reference and the account is compatible with both descriptivism and Millianism. (shrink)

This paper examines the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy of nonintuitive intentions. The analysis has two stages. First, I expose a mistake in Husserl’s account of non-intuitive acts from his 1901 Logical Investigations. I demonstrate that Husserl employs the term “signitive” too broadly, as he concludes that all non-intuitive acts are signitive. He states that not only meaning acts, but also the contiguity intentions of perception are signitive acts. Second, I show how Husserl, in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Logical (...) Investigation, amends his 1901 theory of non-intuitive acts, which he now calls “empty” intentions. He there accurately distinguishes empty meaning acts from the empty intentions of perception. In the conclusion, I reveal how Husserl’s alterations to his theory of non-intuitive intentions can inform our understanding of a larger shift in his philosophy. (shrink)

Deleuze argued that a fundamental mutation in the concept of time occurred in Kant. In antiquity, the concept of time was subordinated to the concept of movement: time was a ‘measure’ of movement. In Kant, this relation is inverted: time is no longer subordinated to movement but assumes an autonomy of its own: time becomes "the pure and empty form" of everything that moves and changes. What is essential in the theory of time is not the distinction between objective (...) ‘clock time’ (or physical time) and the subjective experience of ‘time consciousness,’ since both of them measure movements, whether the movement of extensive objects or intensive states. What is fundamental is rather the relation between time and movement, since time can only assume its own concept when it ceases to be subordinate to movement, whether that movement is objective or subjective. This article examines how Kant inverted the relation between time and movement, and how Deleuze’s own theory of time builds on Kant’s revolution and extends it further. (shrink)

According to higher order theories of consciousness, a mental state is conscious when there is a HO state about it. However, some HO states do not seem to be about other existing mental states. It is possible to resolve this problem since targetless HO states resemble HO states that misrepresent but the assumption that HO states always target other existing mental states is at odds with the theory since HO states are not only necessary but also sufficient for phenomenal (...) consciousness according to the theory. Given the sufficiency of the HO states for consciousness, there is a need to understand the emergence of HO states as a non-random phenomenon to avoid the difficulties caused by targetless HO states. I suggest it is possible to develop such an understanding by thinking of HO states as predictive states in accordance with the predictive processing theory of the mind. (shrink)

The living world is expanding thanks to the rapid and massive expansion of new technological capabilities. At the same time, paradoxically, it has been narrowed as thinking itself has become narrower and impoverished. Thinking has been pushed away by knowledge in almost all areas of the living world. Instead of thinking, modern man is becoming more and more curious. The acquisition of massively produced knowledge has become a form of consumption or even of entertainment. New theories that appear every day (...) and reveal the failures of the previous ones only emphasize the limitations and fragmentation of the attitude itself. Although such knowledge is useful in solving practical local tasks, its universal validity is unfounded. What is needed is a more open consciousness which is able to reconcile different modes of experience. The rejection of ancient spiritual contemplating traditions and desacralization have impoverished the ability to express reality. This paper presents—as an attempt to recreate contemplative thinking—the conceptions of Martin Heidegger and Shinichi Hisamatsu, two thinkers living in different cultures. The paper pays a special attention to the way of being. The articulation of the state and the posture of the thinker and his/her attitudes uses concepts, that are often ambiguous, multidimensional, but already capable of articulating phenomena that could not otherwise be named. Such a stance paves the way for creative thinking capable of extending and overstepping the limits of the strict causal Western way of thinking. (shrink)

Watsuji Tetsurô’s Ethics is one of the most important works in Japanese ethical thought. But scholarly research in English has largely focused on the first of three volumes of Ethics, leaving the latter two oft-neglected. In order to balance out the views of Watsuji’s ethics, this paper focuses on the contributions of the second and third volumes of Ethics. These volumes are essential for any concrete understanding of Watsuji’s ‘ethics of emptiness’. The second volume develops the ideas of the (...) first, particularly how the dual-structure is concretely realized through the various stages of ethical organization. The third volume develops the notions of space and time from the first volume into a theory of climate and history. By analyzing these, we can understand Watsuji’s system as a whole and clarify Watsuji’s unique contribution to ethical theory. (shrink)

Is there a vacuum in nature? This is a question which preoccupied natural philosophers for millennia. Great thinkers including Democritus and Newton maintained the existence of a vacuum, while Aristotle, Descartes and Leibniz argued strongly that there was not, and perhaps could not be, any such thing. A casual glance at the literature of contemporary physics may leave the impression that scientific progress has produced a definitive positive answer, so that the philosophers' debates are now of only historical interest. Not (...) only is the attainment of high vacua a multimillion dollar industry, but almost every text and research paper in theoretical high energy or condensed matter physics or cosmology includes multiple references to the vacuum and its often surprising properties. And yet we have it on the authority of no less a scientist than Einstein himself that his general theory of relativity vindicates Descartes' conclusion that there could be no vacuum since the idea of space without matter is unintelligible! Does this mean that there is after all no scientific consensus on this issue, and that the ancient philosophical debate should simply be resumed with renewed vigor? I shall argue that it does not. The progress of physics has given rise to such a proliferation of different uses of the word 'vacuum' as to irretrievably alter the terms of that debate. Rather than asking whether there is a vacuum in nature, one should ask how well what counts as the vacuum in some physical theory represents reality. This in turn splits up into a semantic question and an empirical question I shall focus mainly on the prior, semantic question here. (shrink)

The de Broglie–Bohm interpretation is a no-collapse interpretation, which implies that we are in principle surrounded by empty waves generated by all particles of the universe, empty waves that will never collapse. It is common to establish an analogy between these pilot-waves and 3D radio-waves, which are nearly devoided of energy but carry nevertheless information to which we may have access after an amplification process. Here we show that this analogy is limited: if we consider empty waves in configuration space, (...) an effective collapse occurs when a detector clicks and the 3ND empty wave associated to a particle may not influence another particle (even if these two particles are identical, e.g. bosons as in the example considered here). (shrink)

Watsuji Tetsurô is famous for having constructed a systematic socio-political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought, in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a (...) balanced theory of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine-tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non-duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities. (shrink)

In this paper, we will examine the role that intuitions and responses to thought experiments play in confirming or disconfirming theories of reference, using insights from both debates as our starting point. Our view is that experimental evidence of the type elicited by MMNS does play a central role in the construction of theories of reference. This, however, is not because such theory construction is accurately characterized by "the method of cases." First, experimental philosophy does not directly collect data (...) about intuitions, but rather about peoples responses to thought experiments, which may reflect their intuitions but may well not. Second, unusually in the case of the theory of reference, experimental prompts involve elicitation of the phenomenon under investigation—that is, referring—and it is the reference facts rather than the intuitions that a theory of reference should capture. Finally, "best fit" models like the method of cases are inconsistent with the actual practice of semantic theorists, who appeal to general principles of theory construction as well as considerations native to the theory of reference, often in the service of rejecting intuitions. Indeed, Kripke himself viewed several claims of his theory as unintuitive, but felt no pressure to alter them on that account. These facts, we'll argue, suggest that the relevance of experimental methods in the theory of reference cannot be straightforwardly extended to other fields: an experimental prompt containing Newtons two rocks tied together in empty space may elicit referring, and may also elicit intuitions, but it doesn't also elicit the phenomenon under investigation. Furthermore, the considerations native to the theory of reference are not part of physics, which has its own distinct set of principles and considerations. This suggests that an evaluation of the centrality of intuitions/ responses to thought experiments in philosophical methodology must proceed in a piecemeal fashion. We conclude that the potential contributions of experimental philosophy will take different forms in different sub-fields of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Geach points out that some pairs of beliefs have a common focus despite there being, apparently, no object at that focus. For example, two or more beliefs can be directed at Vulcan even though there is no such planet. Geach introduced the label ‘intentional identity’ to pick out the relation that holds between attitudes in these cases; Geach says that ’[w]e have intentional identity when a number of people, or one person on different occasions, have attitudes with a common focus, (...) whether or not there actually is something at that focus’. In this paper, I propose a novel theory of intentional identity, the triangulation theory, and argue that it has considerable advantages over its principal rivals. My approach centers on agents’ metarepresentational beliefs about what it takes for intentional attitudes to be about particular objects. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony interprets in a peculiar way two central concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the signifier and the real. Laclau maintains that signifiers are per se tendentially empty and that there is some constituting impossibility in every social system, that is, some real in the Lacanian sense. This paper levels two criticisms at this interpretation. Firstly, Lacan never employs the concept “empty signifier”: His definition of the signifier as that which represents a subject—and his enjoyment—for another signifier (...) contradicts this emptiness. Secondly, in the place of the impossible, Lacan puts enjoyment. The main political consequence of these two considerations is that the theory of hegemony is mistaken when focusing on the rhetorical debate and forgets that individual political inclinations are based mainly on their enjoyment. (shrink)

Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names. I will defend this theory against the problem of meaningfulness, and show that the theory is in general well motivated. My solution to the problem of meaningfulness is that speakers’ judgements about meaningfulness are tracking grammaticality, and not propositional content.

Nothingness addresses one of the most puzzling problems of physics and philosophy: Does empty space have an existence independent of the matter within it? Is "empty space" really empty, or is it an ocean seething with the creation and destruction of virtual matter? With crystal-clear prose and more than 100 cleverly rendered illustrations, physicist Henning Genz takes the reader from the metaphysical speculations of the ancient Greek philosophers, through the theories of Newton and the early experiments of his contemporaries, right (...) up to the current theories of quantum physics and cosmology to give us the story of one of the most fundamental and puzzling areas of modern physics and philosophy. (shrink)

In Search of Excellence was the book that launched a thousand popular management books. In this concise book, David and Jack Collins demonstrate the emptiness of business excellence and in so doing reveal the flawed foundations of popular management theory. Focusing upon the conduct of those organizations vaunted as 'exemplars of excellence' the authors build upon insightful case reports to demonstrate wholesale misconduct at the very heart of the excellence project. Indeed, The Emptiness of Business Excellence demonstrates (...) that the exemplars of excellence indulged bribery, corruption, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism...and more besides! Furthermore, the book demonstrates that, despite their claims to knowledge, Peters and Waterman often knew little about the financial performance of their excellent organizations and were either unaware of or had chosen to overlook reports which highlighted deeply problematic conduct within those formations, which they offered as beacons for change and renewal. This book will be of interest to researchers, scholars and students with an interest in business and management, especially those focusing on the realities of managerial practice. (shrink)

We consider weak theories of concatenation, that is, theories for strings or texts. We prove that the theory of concatenation WTC-ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{WTC}^{-\varepsilon}}$$\end{document}, which is a weak subtheory of Grzegorczyk’s theory TC-ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{TC}^{-\varepsilon}}$$\end{document}, is a minimal essentially undecidable theory, that is, the theory WTC-ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{WTC}^{-\varepsilon}}$$\end{document} is essentially undecidable and if one omits an axiom (...) scheme from WTC-ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{WTC}^{-\varepsilon}}$$\end{document}, then the resulting theory is no longer essentially undecidable. Moreover, we give a positive answer to Grzegorczyk and Zdanowski’s conjecture that ‘The theory TC-ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{TC}^{-\varepsilon}}$$\end{document} is a minimal essentially undecidable theory’. For the alternative theories WTC\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{WTC}}$$\end{document} and TC\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{TC}}$$\end{document} which have the empty string, we also prove that the each theory without the neutrality of ε\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varepsilon}$$\end{document} is to be such a theory too. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the encounter of the Mādhva philosopher Vyāsatīrtha with the works of the Navya-Naiyāyika Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya. The article is based on original translations of passages from Vyāsatīrtha’s Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava. Philosophically, the article focuses on the issue of empty-terms/nonexistent entities, particularly in the context of the theory of inference. I begin by outlining the origin of the Mādhva and Nyāya positions about these issues in their respective analyses of perceptual illusion. I then contrast the role (...) of Gaṅgeśa’s thought in the Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava and show how Vyāsatīrtha responds to Gaṅgeśa’s ideas in different ways in those texts. I conclude with a discussion of how Vyāsatīrtha defends the Mādhva theory of “substrate-free” qualities against Gaṅgeśa in order to show that we can think and make valid inferences about nonexistent things. (shrink)

In his article ‘The Structure of Emptiness’, 467–80. doi: 10.1353/pew.0.0069[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]) Graham Priest examines the concept of emptiness in the Mādhyamaka school of Nāgārjuna and his commentators Candrakīırti and Tsongkhapa from a mathematical point of view. The approach attempted in this article does not involve any commitment to Priest's more controversial dialethic Mādhyamaka interpretation. The purpose of the present paper is to explain Priest's sketchy but very insightful interpretation of objects as non-well-founded sets (...) in greater detail. Some problems concerning his idea to model the Mādhyamaka claim of the emptiness of emptiness by means of this kind of framework will be noted. Moreover, we will also discuss the possibility to represent the Mādhyamika's denial of the existence of irreducible constituents of empirical reality within a well-founded system of set theory. Finally, some slight mistakes in Priest's mathematical construction need to be pointed out. (shrink)

This paper articulates the structure of a two species of weakly aggregative necessity in a common idiom, neighbourhood semantics, using the notion of a k-filter of propositions. A k-filter on a non-empty set I is a collection of subsets of I which contains I, is closed under supersets on I, and contains ∪{Xi ≤ Xj : 0 ≤ i < j ≤ k} whenever it contains the subsets X0,…, Xk. The mathematical content of the proof that weakly aggregative modal logic (...) is complete relative to k-ary frame theory, the standard semantic idiom for weakly aggregative modal logic is presented in language-independent terms as a representation theorem for k-filters: every non-trivial k-filter is included in the union of ≤ k non-trivial filters. The elementary theory of k-filters is developed and then applied in the form of an ultrafilter extension result for k-ary frame theory. (shrink)

본 연구의 목적은 노자와 장자의 철학적 관점에서 상처와 치유의 문제를 논의하는 것이 다. 인간과 사회의 상처를 치유하는 철학적 원리가 마음 비움의 위도론(爲道論)에 담겨 있 다고 해석하였다. 노장철학의 관점에 따르면, ‘이것’과 ‘저것’을 자의적으로 분별하는 행위 는 분별지와 선입견을 쌓이게 한다. 이는 존재의 왜곡으로 이어지며, 더 나아가 인간과 사 회에 상처를 남기게 된다. 이에 노자와 장자는 본래적 마음을 회복하는 철학적 해법을 제 시하였다. 그것은 마음 비움을 통하여 분별지를 해체하는 것이다. 마음 비움을 통하여 분 별지를 해체한 이상적 인간은 덕(德)을 회복한 인간으로 간주될 수 (...) 있음을 논하였다. 노장 철학의 이상적 인간은 부조리한 세상 속에서 인간과 사회의 치유를 이루어 가기 위해 실존 적 고뇌에 직면하면서도 타자에게 다가가고 소통하는 존재로 이해된다. (shrink)

The Demonstrative Theory holds that quoted matter is logically external to the quoting sentence, that quotation marks are (demonstratively) referential, and that quotation marks are grammatically required for autonomous mentioning. In contrast, the Identity Theory holds that quoted matter is integral to its quoting sentence, that quotation marks serve merely as disambiguating punctuation, and that mentionings need not be quotation-marked. I support the Identity Theory by pointing out fallacies in the arguments for demonstrative theories and by considering (...) empty quotation, ordinary language as found in casual use and in novels and plays, and historical and developmental facts about quotation. (shrink)

Is there a connection between power struggles and urban context? How the urban space used for the symbolic manifestation of power and social control? How urban space becomes the site of conflict and resistance? How urban nodes like squares became political apparatus in social demonstrations and revolutions? How do specific squares become symbols of revolutions? This thesis investigated these questions by viewing the city as a place formed by politics, which built upon the central concept of Meydan (Public Square), as (...) the "political order in the ideogram of the city". Focusing on public squares, it traces their sociopolitical transformations as well as their role in instigating social transformations through examples that span from the pre-modern times to the present. As the embodiment of the square in the image of the city, the historical, social and theological concept of Meydan- a term, which has mostly applied, for Iranian public squares has been studied. The Empty Locus of Power rereads squares as peculiar urban forms and representations of political ideas, when the squares of the city has become the stage for the process of politicizing, de-politicizing or neutralizing space. This thesis tries to analyze the square beyond an architectural element in the city, but weaves this blank slate, with its contemporary socio political atmosphere as a new paradigm. This interpretation, suggested the idea of Meydan as the core of the projects on the city, which historically exposed in formalization of theological ideologies. Regarding this issue, urban space of traditional Iranian cities introduced as the medium through which theological ideologies and political sovereignty took place. In pursuing such analyses, this research engages with issues ranging from details of political histories of the case studies in public squares to the master plan of the city of VIII Tehran. During the recent century, various political events and social demonstrations have been staged in Tehran as Middle Eastern Capital, which emphasize the further discussions for analyzing the relationship between socio-political dimensions of city and its urban projects that ultimately led to occupy the city and reclaim the public spaces in Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. In this sense, analyzing the major political events in modern Tehran as a city loaded with politics will lead to trace the processes of its spatial transformation. In this regard, the thesis examines the relationship between affordances of public spaces, their histories, and the emergence of social events and movements. Building on this theoretical framework, this thesis stresses on the transformative dynamism of autocratic modernization, which motivate or shape a creative tension in the form of the city. The emergence of representative pseudo political public space for demonstration of power and national identity during the First Pahlavi Era (1925-41), reoccupation of public spaces by social movements and political parties during the nationalization of Iranian oil movement till 1953 Iranian coup d'etat will be the second part and socio- political arrangement of capital as ‘Metropolis of Tomorrow' and its urban transformation during the second Pahlavi Era (1941-79) till Islamic Revolution have been examined. Analysis suggests that spatial transformations and modernization politics have led to or facilitated (directly or indirectly and, or inadvertently) political changes. Building on the foundation of knowledge established in this research, the final part of research focuses on the centrality of squares in recent social protests. Using Middle East sociologist, Asef Bayat's theory of ‘Spatialities of discontent', the final chapter explores the spatial dimension of political spaces of the city and aims to theorize the necessity of urban social movements to approach democratic space in a global context. (shrink)

The article revisits the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and shows how a normative injunction, which according to Laclau is not compatible with the hegemonic logic, is not only possible but a necessary condition for hegemony to function. The article claims that the path to demonstrate this involves rethinking the relationship between the theory of hegemony and Derridean deconstruction. Following criticisms that the theory of hegemony overlooks the aporetic nature of Derridean undecidability that (...) it nevertheless relies upon, the hegemonic logic is submitted to a deconstructive reading, which reveals an internal aporia in it. It is further argued that the unaccounted aporia in the logic of hegemony explains the theory’s inability to satisfactorily account for its essential theoretical underpinning, the radical exclusion. However, the article also demonstrates that the aporia does not destroy hegemonic logic but, instead, supplements it by a normative dimension, by a demand of opening to the other as other. (shrink)

What I shall do in this paper is to propose an analysis of ‘Agent P tries to A’ in terms of a subjunctive conditional, that avoids some of the problems that beset most alternative accounts of trying, which I call ‘referential views’. They are so-named because on these alternative accounts, ‘P tries to A’ entails that there is a trying to A by P, and therefore the expression ‘P’s trying to A’ can occur in the subject of a sentence and (...) be used to refer to a particular, namely an act or event of trying. A conditional account such as mine avoids having to answer questions about those alleged particulars, for example their location and their causal relation to physical actions, or alternatively their identity to physical actions. In brief, the analysis I propose eschews any need to quantify over any sort of trying particulars. I both clarify the proposal and deal with five possible objections to it: metaphysically impossible actions: cases of finking and reverse-cycle finking; the empirical emptiness of preventers and blockers; proximate intentions and trying; and alleged explanatory loss. (shrink)

Oakeshott’s theory of poetry was a pure theory. But it was so pure a theory it emptied out most of what we would normally mean by poetry, it ignored the history of poetry in extracting a meaning out of it, and it left to one side most of the questions about poetry which are of interest to poets, critics or indeed anyone. This chapter places Oakeshott’s theory of poetry in the context of theories of poetry from (...) Aristotle through Johnson, Wordsworth and Shelley through to figures as varied as Wittgenstein, Leavis, Eliot and Auden in order to suggest that Oakeshott theory was, as a theory of poetry, a provocation, and, as a theory of something undoubtedly worth thinking about, not a theory of poetry at all. (shrink)

Signals to the brain from the flows of energy around the body, varied primarily by declining amounts of food energy in the stomach, can explain the pattern of meals in the laboratory rat, the differences between dark and light phases, and the development of obesity ion the rat wioth VMH lesions but normal sating.

Through an historical investigation of the concept of the zero from Gauthiot to Deleuze, this paper examines a peculiar object, the signifying nothing. Saussure founds his science of linguistics on the claim that the opposition between something and nothing provides the minimal condition for the existence of language. What is this nothing and how can it be recognized? What can account for the zero—as structuralist linguists call a marked nothing—in language? The essay first considers linguists’ responses to these problems, before (...) turning to later redeployments of the zero as the index for the fundamental questions raised by the structuralist project as such. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to provide a formalism to deal with the special theory of relativity (STR, in short) as riewed by Reichenbach, according to which STR involves an ineradicableconventionality of simultaneity. One of the two postulates of STR asserts that, in empty space, the one-way speed of light relative to inertial frames is constant. Experimental evidence, however, is related to the constancy of the round-trip speed of light and has no bearing on one-way speeds. Following Reichenbach's (...) viewpoint, we relax the second postulate of STR, abandoning the constancy of the one-way speed of light to the more realistic one asserting the constancy of the round-trip speed of light. This, in turn, results in a formalism to deal with Reichenbach's special theory of relativity (RSTR, in short) in which the two one-way speeds of light in empty space, C±, in the two senses of a round-trip are arbitrarily selected in such a way that their harmonic mean is the measurable round-trip speed of light, c. Experimentally, RSTR and STR are indistinguishable and, hence, represent the same physical theory. It is only the formalism that we use to deal with STR which is extended in RSTR to accommodate the immeasurability of one-way velocities. The usefulness of the proposed formalism to study special relativity is demonstrated. (shrink)

Welcome to the world of cutting-edge math, physics, and neuroscience, where the search for the ultimate vacuum, the point of nothingness, ground zero of theory, has rendered the universe deep, rich, and juicy. "Modern physics has animated the void," says K. C. Cole in her entrancing journey into the heart of Nothing. Every time scientists and mathematicians think they have reached the ultimate void, new stuff appears: a black hole, an undulating string, an additional dimension of space or time, (...) repulsive anti-gravity, universes that breed like bunnies. Cole's exploration at the edge of everything is as animated and exciting as the void itself. Take Cole's hand on this adventure into the unknown, and you'll come back informed, amused, and excited. (shrink)

A Dedekind Algebra is an ordered pair (B,h) where B is a non-empty set and h is an injective unary function on B. Each Dedekind algebra can be decomposed into a family of disjoint, countable subalgebras called configurations of the Dedekind algebra. There are N0 isomorphism types of configurations. Each Dedekind algebra is associated with a cardinal-valued function on omega called its configuration signature. The configuration signature of a Dedekind algebra counts the number of configurations in the decomposition of the (...) algebra in each isomorphism type.The configuration signature of a Dedekind algebra encodes the structure of that algebra in the sense that two Dedekind algebras are isomorphic iff their configuration signatures are identical. Configuration signatures are used to establish various results in the first-order model theory of Dedekind algebras. These include categoricity results for the first-order theories of Dedekind algebras and existence and uniqueness results for homogeneous, universal and saturated Dedekind algebras. Fundamental to these results is a condition on configuration signatures that is necessary and sufficient for elementary equivalence. (shrink)

I consider an underappreciated problem for proponents of the Humean theory of motivation. Namely, it is unclear whether is it to be understood as a largely psychological or largely metaphysical theory. I show that the psychological interpretation of HTM will need to be modified in order to be a tenable view and, as it will turn out, the modifications required render it virtually philosophically empty. I then argue that the largely metaphysical interpretation is the only a plausible interpretation (...) of HTM's central claim that desires are necessary conditions for motivation. This interpretation also fits better with the important roles that HTM plays in both moral psychological and metaethical debates. (shrink)

Nagarjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside from the Buddha himself, concludes his masterpiece, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, with these baffling verses: -/- For the abandonment of all views He taught the true teaching By means of compassion I salute him, Gautama -/- But how could anyone possibly abandon all views? In Buddhism between Religion and Philosophy, Rafal K. Stepien shows not only (...) how Nagarjuna's radical teaching of no-view or “abelief” makes sense within his Buddhist philosophy, but also how it stands at the summit of his religious mission to care for all living beings. Rather than treating any one aspect of Nagarjuna's ideas in isolation, here his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics emerge as a single coherent and convincing philosophical-religious system of thought and practice. -/- Grounded in meticulous study of original texts from classical India and China but innovating on the theories and methods underpinning contemporary scholarship East and West, this study shows how profoundly important voices from the diverse religious and philosophical traditions of the world have until now been diminished, distorted, and silenced. In opening up truly global horizons of existing and co-existing in the world, this work challenges the very ways in which we think about religion and philosophy. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1843) thought that proper names denote individuals and do not connote attributes. Contemporary Millians agree, in spirit. We hold that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its referent. We also think that the semantic content of a declarative sentence is a Russellian structured proposition whose constituents are the semantic contents of the sentence’s constituents. This proposition is what the sentence semantically expresses. Therefore, we think that sentences containing proper names semantically express singular propositions, which (...) are propositions having individuals as constituents. For instance, the sentence ‘George W. Bush is human’ semantically expresses a proposition that has Bush himself as a constituent. Call this theory Millianism. Many philosophers initially find Millianism quite appealing, but find it much less so after considering its many apparent problems. Among these problems are those raised by non-referring names, which are sometimes (tendentiously) called empty names. Plausible examples of empty names include certain names from fiction, such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’, which I shall call fictional names, and certain names from myth and false scientific theory, such as ‘Pegasus’ and ‘Vulcan’, which I shall call mythical names. I have defended Millianism from objections concerning empty names in previous work (Braun 1993). In this paper, I shall re-present those objections, along with some new ones. I shall then describe my previous Millian theory of empty names, and my previous replies to the objections, and consider whether the theory or replies need revision. I shall next consider whether fictional and mythical names are really empty. I shall argue that at least some utterances of mythical names are. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of empty names that is consistent with direct-reference theory and Millianism.

Humans seem to readily track their conspecifics’ mental states, such as their goals and beliefs from early infancy. However, the underlying cognitive architecture that enables such powerful abilities remains unclear. Here I will propose that a basic representational structure, the belief file, could provide the foundation for efficiently encoding, and updating information about, others’ beliefs in online social interactions. I will discuss the representational possibilities offered by the belief file and the ways in which the repertoire of mental state reasoning (...) is shaped by the characteristics of its constituents. A series of questions will be outlined concerning the representational skeleton of the belief file, sketching a possible structure that supports the rapid encoding and re-identification of belief related information. After analyzing the possible limitations of the belief attribution system, I will examine some of its characteristics that might enable a flexibility that is often neglected. I will suggest that operations involving belief files are not impeded by the absence of precise first-person information regarding their contents. In fact, the system permits manipulations with “empty” belief files, allowing humans to ascribe beliefs to conspecifics based on little or no direct information regarding the content of the mental state. Such an analysis aims to advance our understanding of how spontaneous belief attribution may be performed, and to provide an insight into the possible mechanisms that allow humans to successfully navigate the social world. (shrink)

This dissertation contextualizes the emergence of the Church of Light by Tadao Ando within the Japanese religio-philosophical tradition of nothingness. The idea of nothingness was revived during the first half of the twentieth-century by Kitaro Nishida with two cultural ramifications in the post-war period: a series of dialogues on the points of convergence and divergence between nothingness and the God of Christianity, and an architectural art movement called Monoha, or l'Ecole de Choses. Under the concept of "structuring emptiness," Monoha (...) attempted to restore perceptual depth where dichotomous semiotic representation is overcome through shintaisei, the co-originating corporeal fabric between the subject and object. This two-fold mapping, theological and architectural, not only illuminates the post-war cultural milieu from which Ando's church of spatial emptiness emerged, but also locates the church within the legacy of Nishida's nothingness. ;Nishida's philosophy of nothingness offers a perceptual theory of the "dialectic of self-negation" enacted by shintai, "the actively knowing body." Shintai is the agent of emptying selfhood by functioning as 'the sensational capacity to be filled by' the world. Shintai concretizes the perceptual matrix of co-emergence between the interiority of selfhood and the outside world. When its sensational capacity overflows, shintai enters into the realm of creative action to accommodate the surplus. The figure thus created is not a sign embodying subjective intentions, but constitutes the corporelly-inscribed, pre-reflective experiential datum of the world. Nishida called such a figure "the pure body of the artist," implying its apprehension not as the other in unknowable confrontation, but as the extended self. ;The dissertation examines how this notion of self-renunciatory perception through shintai opens a new hermeneutic horizon for the Church of Light. The church presents an unprecedented conjunction between emptiness, based on the reductive removal of signs, and the cross of light. This seemingly contradictory integration confronts the modern degradation of the cross into an atrophied sign of Christianity and seeks to retrieve its fully efficacious symbolic power. The emptiness contributes to the revival of a deeper communicative mode as shintai by negating the habituated perception pivoted upon the dichotomy between the deciphering subject and the semiotic elements. The perception of light, a natural thing rather than a sign, which infiltrates the cross, is a preliminary ritual to save the perception from the paradigm of the semiotic representation. Shintai, the self-emptying corporeality, resonates with and becomes penetrated by, rather than subjectivizes, the light. On this restored perceptual depth, the cross is perceived not as a sign, but as a part of the pre-reflective, ontological datum constructed and apprehended by shintai. This perceptual experience endorses the associational similarity between the pre-Christian datum predicated upon shintai as the agent of the self-renunciatory subjectivity and Christianity with its theology of the self-transcending love of kenosis. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce’s first rule of logic (EP 2.48, 1898) identifies the inception point of human inquiry. Taking a closer look at this principle, we find at its core a necessary relationship between emptiness and desire that underlies all genuine instances of human learning and adaptation. This composite relationship plays a critical role in the function or failure of learning but has received scant attention in the literature. As a result, the complexities of the first rule of logic are (...) not well understood, often being mistakenly conflated with the rule’s famous corollary, ‘do not block the way of inquiry’, or passed over with cursory definitions, including ‘wonder’, ‘doubt’ and ‘the will to learn’. Following a background discussion highlighting the nature of reflexive inquiry and fallibilism that situate human consciousness both within and beyond animal being, I draw on multiple layers of evidence from a range of disciplines to better reveal the complex dynamics intrinsic to the first rule of logic. These layers include a closer reading and exegesis of the original passage and surrounding text; a semiotic reanalysis of this reading in light of recent advances in the semiotic theory of learning; a resituation of these distinctions within broader contemporary discussions of emptiness ontology to which I contribute in part via an original semantic/rhetorical analysis of a linguistic construction in Laozi; the introduction of a closely related pedagogical tool under development in the context of my own university-level teaching in ethnography and research methods; and the dialogic situation of this diagram within discourses of psychotherapy, philosophy and literature. Building on these principles and distinctions, the paper closes with a perspective shift on obstacles and desire in human learning and an expanded reformulation of the first rule of logic. (shrink)

Our research concerns a formal representation of Bolzano’s original concepts of Substanz and Adhärenz. The formalized intensional theory enables to articulate a question about the consistency of a part of Bolzano’s metaphysics and to suggest an answer to it in terms of contemporary model theory. The formalism is built as an extension of Zalta’s theory of abstract objects, describing two types of predication, viz. attribution and representation. Bolzano was aware about this distinction. We focus on the consistency (...) of this formalism and the description of its semantics. Firstly, we explore the possibility to reconstruct a Russellian antinomy based on the concept of the Bolzano’s Inbegriff of all adherences. Our aim is to show limitations of his theory that prevent a contradiction when the Inbegriff consists of non-self-referential adherences. Next, we discuss two competing semantics for the proposed theory: Scott’s and Aczel’s semantics. The first one yields a problematic result, that there are no models for the considered theory, containing a non-empty collection of all adherences. This is due to the fact that Scott’s structures verify the formula on reloading abstracts in extensional contexts. We show that Aczel’s semantics does not contain this difficulty. There are described Aczel’s models with a non-empty set of all adherences. The self-referentiality of such a collection becomes irrelevant here. Finally, we show that there are Aczel’s structures verifying the formula on reloading abstracts and we exclude them from the class of models intended for our theory. (shrink)

The strongly innovative theory of whole-parts relations outlined by Husserl in his Third logical Investigation—to which he attributed a basic value for his entire phenomenology—has recently attracted a renewed interest. Although many important issues have been clarified (especially by Kit Fine) the subject seems still worth being revisited. To this aim Husserlian universes are introduced. These are lower bounded distributive lattices endowed with a unary operation of defect and a binary relation of isogeneity. Husserl's contents are identified with nonzero (...) elements of a Husserlian universe and the dependence relations among contents are defined and studied starting from the idea that the defect of xis what x needs in order to ‘exist’ i.e., in order to be ‘closed’ with respect to the closure operation defined as the sup of x and its defect. It turns out that there are (at least) eight dependence relations which are worth to be considered. Many other questions concerning the world of contents (among them the proofs of the famous Husserl's Sätze) may now be discussed and clarified. Then the theory of species and genera is developed. Ultimate species (for short: species) are identified with equivalence classes of contents modulo isogeneity, and species in general (for short: genera) are identified with arbitrary unions of species. On the basis of the relation obtaining among two contents when they are isogeneous to two contents the first of which is a part of the second it becomes possible to develop a rather satisfying interpretation of Husserl's theory of the dependencies among species and genera and of the material a priori laws. By strengthening the notion of Husserlian universe into the notion of rigid Husserlian universe, the theory of species and genera obtains a stronger version. Three models of the theory are exhibited. The first one, suggested by combinatorial-topological considerations, identifies contents with finite non-empty sets of natural numbers; the second one identifies contents with non-empty sets of formulas of a formal language; the third one (not totally ‘rigid’) identifies contents with positive integers. (shrink)

Abstract: There are two traditionally rival views about the nature of time: substantivalism that takes time to be a substance that exists independently of events located in it, and relationism that takes time to be constructed out of events. In this paper, first, I want to make some progress with respect to the debate between these two views, and I do this mainly by examining the strategies they use to face the possibilities of ‘empty time’ and ‘time without change’. As (...) we shall see, the two allegedly very different rival views are much less different than has been thought: their structure is extremely similar, their strategies are extremely similar, and they can both face the possibilities of ‘empty time’ and ‘time without change’ in the same way. Thus, I argue in favour of a certain kind of equivalence between the two views; I discuss a Strong and a Weak version of this claim; and I provide reasons for endorsing the former. I also discuss the parallel between this pair of views about the nature of time and another analogous pair of views: the bundle theory and the substratum theory about the nature of material objects, with respect to the problem with Identity of Indiscernibles. (shrink)

Jizang (549–623) is regarded as a prominent figure in Sanlun Buddhism (三論宗) and a revitalizer of Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka tradition in China. In this essay, I argue that Jizang’s concept of non-empty Buddha-nature is compatible with the idea of universal emptiness. My argument unfolds in three steps. First, I argue that, for Jizang, Buddha-nature is the Middle Way (zhongdao 中道), which signifies a spiritual state that avoids the extremes of both emptiness and non-emptiness. Next, I explore how and (...) why Jizang believes that Buddha-nature is eternal. I examine Jizang’s notions of intrinsic eternality (dingxing chang 定性常) and conditional eternality (yinyuan chang 因緣常), aiming to demonstrate that his understanding of Buddha-nature as eternal can be framed within the concept of conditional eternality, where Buddha-nature is seen as the objective manifestation of the dharma body. Since this type of eternality aligns with the principle of universal emptiness, Jizang’s assertion that Buddha-nature is eternal is thus compatible with the notion of universal emptiness. Furthermore, I illustrate that Jizang’s theory of eternal Buddha-nature carries practical implications, suggesting that this assertion serves as encouragement rather than being merely an ontological claim. (shrink)

[ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY 2023 ESSAY PRIZE WINNER] I argue that the term ‘naturalism’ is so empty of meaning that it is not suitable for serious theorizing in philosophy. In particular, I argue that the question of whether or not some theory or thesis should count as naturalistic is an empty verbal dispute with no further theoretical significance. I also discuss naturalism construed as a methodological thesis and argue that any plausible version will collapse into triviality. Lastly, I briefly (...) discuss the idea that naturalism is not a thesis at all but rather a ‘stance’ and suggest that this too succumbs to the charge of emptiness. I conclude that we should stop talking about naturalism altogether. (shrink)

Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time is (...) set to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

This essay reviews the possibility of the space of appearance under the authoritarian nationalism that has been ushered in by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. For those working in and around higher education, I propose that the tasks with which we should begin are: decolonizing the curriculum; emptying the museum; and opening theory. Each of these categories has both a history in past resistance and liberation movements and a present-day dynamic that is explored here from the South (...) African Rhodes Must Fall movement via Occupy Wall Street to the Free University and Antiuniversity. (shrink)