Phenomenology,Realism and Logic

One never gets beyond time. Husserl, says only that there are many ways of living time. On the one hand, there is the passive way, in which one is inside time and submits to it—being in time [Innerzeitigkeit], On the other hand, one can take over this time and live it through for oneself. But in either case one is temporal and never gets beyond time.¹     

Religion,Identity and Freedom of Expression

This article examines the issues raised by religious adherents’ wish to express their beliefs in the public domain through, for example, their modes of dress, their performance of public roles, and their response to homosexuality. It considers on what grounds religion might merit special treatment and how special that treatment should be. A common approach to these issues is through the notion of religious identity, but both the idea of religious identity and its use to ground claims against others prove deeply problematic. An alternative and more productive approach is through the notion of harm. People should enjoy the freedom to express their religious convictions subject to the harm principle, but harm should include the undermining of people’s status as free and equal citizens. The article concludes by considering the grounds upon which this alternative approach might recognize religion as special and might justify giving an overriding status to civic equality.     

Actual Existence, Identity and Ontological Priority

The paper first distinguishes ontological priority from epistemological priority and unilateral ontic dependence. Then explications of ontological priority are offered in terms of the reducibility of the actual existence or identity of entities in one ontological category to the actual existence or identity of entities in another. These explications lead to incompatible orders of ontological priority for individuals, properties of individuals and states of affairs. Common to those orders is, however, that the primacy of the category of individuals is abandoned. This primacy is challenged in the paper also by epistemological arguments, and an onto-anthropological explanation is offered for the very common but false idea that individuals are ontological prior to all other kinds of entities. Finally ontological priority is discussed with respect to a fully specified system of ontological categories. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Ontic Structural Realism and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles

Recently, there has been a debate as to whether or not the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (the PII) is compatible with quantum physics. It is also sometimes argued that the answer to this question has implications for the debate over the tenability of ontic structural realism (OSR). The central aim of this paper is to establish what relationship there is (if any) between the PII and OSR. It is argued that one common interpretation of OSR is undermined if the PII turns out to be false, since it is committed to a version of the bundle theory of objects, which implies the PII. However, if OSR is understood as the physical analogue of (sophisticated) mathematical structuralism then OSR does not imply the PII. It is further noted that it is (arguably) a virtue of OSR that it is compatible with a version of the PII for possible worlds.     

Leibnizian Identity and Paraconsistent Logic

The standard Leibnizian view of identity allows for substitutivity of identicals and validates transitivity of identity within classical semantics. However, in a series of works, Graham Priest argues that Leibnizian identity invalidates both principles when formalized in paraconsistent semantics. This paper aims to show the Leibnizian view of identity validates substitutivity of identicals and transitivity of identity whether the logic is classical or paraconsistent. After presenting Priest's semantics of identity, I show what a semantic expression of Leibnizian identity does amount to. Then, I argue that Priest's semantic definition of identity is not Leibnizian. Finally, I offer a semantics characterization of identity in paraconsistent logic that is truly Leibnizian. I demonstrate that the correct formalization of Leibnizian identity in paraconsistent logic also validates substitutivity of identicals and transitivity of identity.     

Logic and Existence: Timothy Williams

The paper defends the intelligibility of unrestricted quantification. For any natural number n , 'There are at least n individuals' is logically true, when the quantifier is unrestricted. In response to the objection that such sentences should not count as logically true because existence is contingent, it is argued by consideration of cross-world counting principles that in the relevant sense of 'exist' existence is not contingent. A tentative extension of the upward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem to proper classes is used to argue that a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic of unrestricted universal quantification results from adding all sentences of the form 'There are at least n individuals' as axioms to a standard axiomatization of the first-order predicate calculus.
Of the many questions on which logic is neutral, one is usually supposed to be this: 'How many individuals are there?' On the alternative view defended below, truths about the number of individuals are logically true. They are not contingent logical truths, for it is not contingent what individuals there are.     

Abstractionist and processing accounts of implicit learning

Five experiments evaluated the contributions of rule, exemplar, fragment, and episodic knowledge in artificial grammar learning using memorization versus hypothesis-testing training tasks. Strings of letters were generated from a biconditional grammar that allows different sources of responding to be unconfounded. There was no evidence that memorization led to passive abstraction of rules or encoding of whole training exemplars. Memorizers instead used explicit fragment knowledge to identify the grammatical status of test items, although this led to chance performance. Successful hypothesis-testers classified at near-perfect levels by processing training and test stimuli according to their rule structure. The results support the episodic-processing account of implicit and explicit learning.     

On Putnam's Critique of Metaphysical Realism: Mind-Body Identity and Supervenience

As part of his ongoing critique of metaphysical realism, Hilary Putnam has recently argued that current materialist theories of mind that locate mental phenomena in the brain can make no sense of the proposed identifications of mental states with physical (or physical cum computational) states, or of the supervenience of mental properties with physical properties. The aim of this paper is to undermine Putnam's objections and reassert the intelligibility – and perhaps the plausibility – of some form of mind-body identity and supervenience.     

证候存在的逻辑回答

认为存在的就是客观的,包含了自然客观、思维客观和理性客观;把疾病现象和疾病本质划等号,在症状层面规范证候标准,抛弃中医辨证思维,就等于否定中医。物质不能等于客观,不能取代存在。证候属于理性客观,发生于中医学,是中医“阴阳神气”观念临床实在化(还原)的必然。     

Logic And Existence: Ian Rumfitt

Frege's logicism in the philosophy of arithmetic consisted, au fond , in the claim that in justifying basic arithmetical axioms a thinker need appeal only to methods and principles which he already needs to appeal in order to justify paradigmatically logical truths and paradigmatically logical forms of inference. Using ideas of Gentzen to spell out what these methods and principles might include, I sketch a strategy for vindicating this logicist claim for the special case of the arithmetic of the finite cardinals.     

Model Existence in Non-Compact Modal Logic

Predicate modal logics based on Kwith non-compact extra axioms are discussed and a sufficient condition for the model existence theorem is presented. We deal with various axioms in a general way by an algebraic method, instead of discussing concrete non-compact axioms one by one.     

Mind-World Identity Theory and Semantic Realism: Haldane and Boulter on Aquinas

Stephen Boulter, in The Philosophical Quarterly , 48 (1998), pp. 504–13, attacks John Haldane's proposed account of the relationship between mind and world based on Aquinas' theory of cognition. Boulter argues against Haldane's attempt to square metaphysical realism with semantic anti-realism. I argue that even if metaphysical realism and a full-bodied semantic anti-realism may be incompatible, from the stance of the mind-world identity theory, one may nevertheless maintain metaphysical realism together with the negation of semantic realism. I suggest that this is what Haldane actually claimed, and moreover that Aquinas would have accepted it. Aquinas' analogy-based semantics enlarges the recognitional capacities of speakers, and one's capacity to recognize a fact empirically is different from one's capacity to form thoughts about a fact.