California Unnatural: On Fine's Natural Ontological Attitude

Abela accepts Fine's account of realism and instrumentalism, but thinks that we can reject the Natural Ontological Attitude by distinguishing the theoretical attempt to make sense of scientific practice from choosing the attitude we bring to the debate, or to science itself. But Abela's attitudes are vulnerable to Fine's criticisms of the philosophical positions. However, if we take attitude as contrastive and as full-blooded enough to lead to different behaviour we can see a gap in Fine's position. He cannot tell us why it is science that he trusts. When we look more widely, the philosophical positions might be seen as ways of justifying that trust.     

Natural Dualities Through Product Representations: Bilattices and Beyond

This paper focuses on natural dualities for varieties of bilattice-based algebras. Such varieties have been widely studied as semantic models in situations where information is incomplete or inconsistent. The most popular tool for studying bilattices-based algebras is product representation. The authors recently set up a widely applicable algebraic framework which enabled product representations over a base variety to be derived in a uniform and categorical manner. By combining this methodology with that of natural duality theory, we demonstrate how to build a natural duality for any bilattice-based variety which has a suitable product representation over a dualisable base variety. This procedure allows us systematically to present economical natural dualities for many bilattice-based varieties, for most of which no dual representation has previously been given. Among our results we highlight that for bilattices with a generalised conflation operation (not assumed to be an involution or commute with negation). Here both the associated product representation and the duality are new. Finally we outline analogous procedures for pre-bilattice-based algebras (so negation is absent).     

Soviet Spinoza: introduction

Studies in East European Thought -     

Vygotsky and Spinoza

Studies in East European Thought - The article analyzes Lev Vygotsky’s attempts to utilize Spinoza’s philosophical ideas in solving the methodological crisis of psychology in the 1920s...     

Spinoza: une lecture d'Aristote

Does (affirmative) judgement have a logical dual, negative judgement? Whether there is such a logical dualism was hotly debated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Frege argued in ‘Negation’ (1918/9) that logic can dispense with negative judgement. Frege's arguments shaped the views of later generations of analytic philosophers, but they will not have convinced such opponents as Brentano or Windelband. These philosophers believed in negative judgement for psychological, not logical, reasons. Reinach's ‘On the Theory of Negative Judgement’ (1911) spoke to the concerns of these philosophers. While Frege took the distinction between affirmative and negative judgement to be logically redundant, Reinach argued that it is the result of confusing judgement with a different mental act. In this article, I present Reinach's arguments against the ‘old logical dualism’ in context, analyse them and discuss Reinach's innovative use of the notion of focus in the theory of judgement. Recently, there has been a revival of the view that sentential negation is grounded in a prior mental act of rejection. In the final section, I argue that Reinach's analysis of rejection poses a challenge for the revivalists.     

斯宾诺莎与预定论

“预定论”是新教神学中的基本教义,也是新教神学家解决恩典、救赎等问题的根本途径。作为一个与新教颇具渊源的哲学家,斯宾诺莎构建了一种与预定论多有相似之处的决定论理论。以这些相似性为契机,有研究者认为斯宾诺莎是在新教预定论的基础上提出了他的决定论思想,有人甚至把他视为一个新教哲学家。然而,通过对这两种理论进行对比,我们发现,无论在精神气质、思想前提,还是在具体内涵等方面,二者均有深刻差异。斯宾诺莎所坚持的并非预定论思路上的决定论,也不以新教的预定论作为其直接的理论渊源。