Suicide is Neither Rational nor Irrational

Richard Brandt, following Hume, famously argued that suicide could be rational. In this he was going against a common ‘absolutist’ view that suicide is irrational almost by definition. Arguments to the effect that suicide is morally permissible or prohibited tend to follow from one’s position on this first issue of rationality. I want to argue that the concept of rationality is not appropriately ascribed – or withheld – to the victim or the act or the desire to commit the act. To support this, I explore how the concept is ascribed and withheld in ordinary situations, and show that it is essentially future-oriented. Since the suicide victim has no future, it makes no sense to call his act rational or irrational. The more appropriate reaction to a declared desire for suicide, or to the news of a successful suicide, is horror and pity, and these are absent from Brandt’s account, as is a humble acknowledgement of the profound mystery at the heart of any suicide.

What is a Sophistical Refutation?

From Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations the following classifications are put forward and defended through extensive excerpts from the text. (AR-PFC) All sophistical refutations are exclusively either ‘apparent refutations’ or ‘proofs of false conclusions’. (AR-F) ‘Apparent refutations’ and ‘fallacies’ name the same thing. (ID-ED) All fallacies are exclusively either fallacies in dictione or fallacies extra dictionem. (ID-nAMB) Not all fallacies in dictione are due to ambiguity. (AMB-nID) Not all fallacies due to ambiguity are fallacies in dictione. (AMB&ID-ME) The set of fallacies due to ambiguity and fallacies in dictione together comprise the set of arguments said to be “dependent on mere expression”. Being “dependent on mere expression” and “dependent on language” are not the same (instances of the latter form a proper subset of instances of the former). (nME-FACT) All arguments that are not against the expression are “against the fact.” (FACT-ED) All fallacious arguments against the fact are fallacies extra dictionem (it is unclear whether the converse is true). (MAN-ARG) The solutions of fallacious arguments are exclusively either “against the man” or “against the argument.” (10) (F-ARG) Each (type of) fallacy has a unique solution (namely, the opposite of whatever causes the fallacy), but each fallacious argument does not. However, each fallacious argument does have a unique solution against the argument, called the ‘true solution’ (in other words, what fallacy a fallacious argument commits is determined by how it is solved. However, if the solution is ‘against the man’ then this is not, properly speaking, the fallacy committed in the argument. It is only the ‘true solution’—the solution against the argument, of which there is always only one—that determines the fallacy actually committed).     

On the Mind Dependence of Truth

The claim that truth is mind dependent has some initial plausibility only if truth bearers are taken to be mind dependent entities such as beliefs or statements. Even on that assumption, however, the claim is not uncontroversial. If it is spelled out as the thesis that “in a world devoid of mind nothing would be true”, then everything depends on how the phrase ‘true in world w’ is interpreted. If ‘A is true in w’ is interpreted as ‘A is true of w’ (i.e. ‘w satisfies A’s truth conditions’, the claim need not be true. If on the other hand it is interpreted as ‘A is true of w and exists in w’ then the claim is trivially true, though devoid of any antirealistic efficacy. Philosophers like Heidegger and Rorty, who hold that truth is mind dependent but reality is not, must regard such principles as “A if and only if it is true that A” as only contingently true, which may be a good reason to reject the mind dependence of truth anyway.     

Williamson’s Woes

This is a reply to Timothy Williamson’s paper ‘Tennant’s Troubles’. It defends against Williamson’s objections the anti-realist’s knowability principle based on the author’s ‘local’ restriction strategy involving Cartesian propositions, set out in The Taming of the True. Williamson’s purported Fitchian reductio, involving the unknown number of books on his table, is analyzed in detail and shown to be fallacious. Williamson’s attempt to cause problems for the anti-realist by means of a supposed rigid designator generates a contradiction with arithmetic right away, upon instantiating the obviously relevant theorem that every natural number is provably odd or provably even. The paper also explains and formulates a globally restricted knowability principle, which likewise blocks the attempted reductio.     

The small improvement argument

It is commonly assumed that moral deliberation requires that the alternatives available in a choice situation are evaluatively comparable. This comparability assumption is threatened by claims of incomparability, which is often established by means of the small improvement argument (SIA). In this paper I argue that SIA does not establish incomparability in a stricter sense. The reason is that it fails to distinguish incomparability from a kind of evaluative indeterminacy which may arise due to the vagueness of the evaluative comparatives ‘better than,’ ‘worse than,’ and ‘equally as good as.’     

Liberal pluralism,radical orthodoxy and the right tone of voice

This paper considers two differenttones of voice in philosophy and theology (‘liberal pluralism’ in contrast to ‘radical orthodoxy’) and relates it to a discussion about the theology of religions. ‘Tone of voice’ in this context is intended to denote the affective potency (or not) of a theological perspective as it impacts and influences religious attitudes. In addition, at a related level, ‘tone of voice’ is used when speaking of first-order or second-order perspectives: for example, a first-orderconfessional tone in contrast to a second-ordernotional tone. The paper proceeds to critically engage with John Hick’s pluralism and John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy particularly from the point of view of considering thetone adopted by both perspectives. The conclusion is that both views are inadequate: Hick’s pluralism—as a second-order meta-theory—lacks the first-order power that is needed to affect ‘hearts and minds’, Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy has rhetorical power but is an ‘unfounded’ narrative which lacks the ability to rationally engage with thereal world. In the end, the suggestion is that the ‘right tone of voice’, in a religious context, ought to combine a realistic enquiry concerning the order-of-things with a first-order rhetorical strength.     

Statues and Lumps: A Strange Coincidence?

Puzzles about persistence and change through time, i.e., about identity across time, have foundered on confusion about what it is for ‘two things’ to be have ‘the same thing’ at a time. This is most directly seen in the dispute over whether material objects can occupy exactly the same place at the same time. This paper defends the possibility of such coincidence against several arguments to the contrary. Distinguishing a temporally relative from an absolute sense of ‘the same’, we see that the intuition, ‘this is only one thing’, and the dictum, ‘two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time’, are individuating things at a time rather than absolutely and are therefore compatible with coincidence. Several other objections philosophers have raised ride on this same ambiguity. Burke, originating what has become the most popular objection to coincidence, argues that if coincidence is possible there would be no explanation of how objects that are qualitatively the same at a time could belong to different sorts. But we can explain an object’s sort by appealing to its properties at other times. Burke’s argument to the contrary equivocates on different notions of ‘cross-time identity’ and ‘the statue’. From a largely negative series of arguments emerges a positive picture of what it means to say multiple things coincide and of why an object’s historical properties explain its sort rather than vice versa – in short, of how coincidence is possible.     

Local contexts and local meanings

Stalnaker (1978) made two seminal claims about presuppositions. The most influential one was that presupposition projection is computed by a pragmatic mechanism based on a notion of ‘local context’. Due to conceptual and technical difficulties, however, the latter notion was reinterpreted in purely semantic terms within ‘dynamic semantics’ (Heim 1983). The second claim was that some instances of presupposition generation should also be explained in pragmatic terms. But despite various attempts, the definition of a precise ‘triggering algorithm’ has remained somewhat elusive. We discuss possible extensions of both claims. First, we offer a reconstruction of ‘local contexts’ which circumvents some of the difficulties faced by Stalnaker’s original analysis. We preserve the idea that local contexts are computed by a pragmatic mechanism that aggregates the information that follows from an incomplete sentence given the global context; but we crucially rely on a modified notion of entailment (‘R-entailment’), whose plausibility should be assessed on independent grounds. Second, we speculate that local contexts might prove necessary (though by no means sufficient) to understand how some presuppositions are triggered. In a nutshell, we suggest that a presupposition is triggered when the semantic contribution of an expression to its local context is in some sense ‘heterogeneous’. Without giving an analysis of the latter notion, we note that this architecture implies that presuppositions should be triggered on the basis of the meaning that an expression has relative to its local context (what we call its ‘local meaning’); we sketch some possible consequences of this analysis.     

The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ Argument, and The Prospects for the Theory of Denoting Concepts

Russell’s new theory of denoting phrases introduced in “On Denoting” in Mind 1905 is now a paradigm of analytic philosophy. The main argument for Russell’s new theory is the so-called ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument, which purports to show that the theory of denoting concepts (analogous to Frege’s theory of senses) promoted by Russell in the 1903 Principles of Mathematics is incoherent. The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument rests on the premise that if a denoting concept occurs in a proposition, then the proposition is not about the concept. I argue that the premise is false. The ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument does not exhaust Russell’s ammunition against the theory of denoting concepts. Another reason Russell rejects the theory is, as he says, that it cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts. In the last section of the paper, I argue that even though Russell was right in thinking that the theory of denoting concepts cannot provide an adequate account of non-uniquely denoting concepts, Russell’s new theory does not succeed in eliminating the occurrence of all denoting concepts, as it requires a commitment to the existence of variables that indirectly denote their values. However, the view that variables are denoting concepts is unproblematic once the ‘Gray’s Elegy’ argument is blocked.     

Sensing Aliveness

This study examines whether the categories animate/inanimate might be formed on the basis of information available to the cognitive system. We suggest that the discrimination of percepts according to these categories relies on proprioceptive information, which allows the perceiving subject to know that he is ‘animate’. Since other ‘objects’ in the world exhibit movements, reactions, etc. similar to those that the subject experiences himself, he can ‘project’ his knowledge onto these objects and recognize them as ‘animate’ like himself. On this basis we try to corroborate the empricist position in the debate concerning the organization of knowledge as opposed to the nativist view. Furthermore, we argue that the categorical dichotomy animate/inanimate is more basic than other analogous ones such as living/non-living, biological/non-biological and we sketch a ‘categorical stratification’ following the line ‘humans–animals–plants’ based on the hypothesis that humans detect different degrees of ‘vitality’ according to the degree of similarity they recognise between the considered instance and themselves.     

Intensional Specifications of Truth-Conditions: ‘Because’, ‘In Virtue of’, and ‘Made True By…’

Although a number of truth theorists have claimed that a deflationary theory of ‘is true’ needs nothing more than the uniform implication of instances of the theorem ‘the proposition that p is true if and only if p’, reflection shows that this is inadequate. If deflationists can’t support the instances when replacing the biconditional with ‘because’, then their view is in peril. Deflationists sometimes acknowledge this by addressing, occasionally attempting to deflate, ‘because’ and ‘in virtue of’ formulas and their close relatives. I examine what I take to be the most promising deflationist moves in this direction and argue that they fail.     

Common knowledge of payoff uncertainty in games

Using epistemic logic, we provide a non-probabilistic way to formalise payoff uncertainty, that is, statements such as ‘player i has approximate knowledge about the utility functions of player j.’ We show that on the basis of this formalisation common knowledge of payoff uncertainty and rationality (in the sense of excluding weakly dominated strategies, due to Dekel and Fudenberg (1990)) characterises a new solution concept we have called ‘mixed iterated strict weak dominance.’     

Yet Another Run around the Circle

In a recent article, D. A. Truncellito (2004, ‘Running in Circles about Begging the Question’, Argumentation 18, 325–329) argues that the discussion between Robinson (1971, ‘Begging the Question’, Analysis 31, 113–117), Sorensen (1996, ‘Unbeggable Questions’, Analysis 56, 51–55) and Teng (1997, ‘Sorensen on Begging the Question’, Analysis 57, 220–222) shows that we need to distinguish between logical fallacies, which are mistakes in the form of the argument, and rhetorical fallacies, which are mistakes committed by the arguer. While I basically agree with Truncellito’s line of thinking, I believe this distinction is not tenable and offer a different view. In addition, I will argue that the conclusion to draw from the abovementioned discussion is that validity is not a sufficient criterion of begging the question, and that we should be wary of the containment-metaphor of a deductive argument.     

Buddhist Idealism,Epistemic and Otherwise: Thoughts on the Alternating Perspectives of Dharmakīrti

Some influential interpreters of Dharmakīrti have suggested understanding his thought in terms of a ‘sliding scale of analysis.’ Here it is argued that this emphasis on Dharmakīrti's alternating philosophical perspectives, though helpful in important respects, obscures the close connection between the two views in play (identified by later commentators as ‘Sautrāntika’ and ‘Yogācāra’). Indeed, with respect to these perspectives as Dharmakīrti develops them, the epistemology is the same either way. Insofar as that is right, John Dunne's characterization of Dharmakīrti's Yogācāra as ‘epistemic idealism’ may not, after all, distinguish this perspective from Sautrāntika; indeed, epistemic idealism can be understood as just the view these positions share. Thus, what distinguishes the ‘Yogācāra’ section of Dharmakīrti's texts is simply his making explicit that epistemological commitments the Sautrāntika does (or at least can coherently) hold are already compatible with idealism. Sautrāntika and Yogācāra thus differ only when one turns to the metaphysical arguments that (on the idealist's view) additionally show that only such mental things as sense data could be real.

Human Rights in the Perspective of Traditional Africa: A Cosmotheandric Approach

The notion of human rights is highly controversial and contested in modern scholarship. However, human rights have been defined as ‘the rational basis… for a justified demand.’ What constitutes demand should be understood as that which is different from favor or privilege but one's due, free from racial, religious, gender, political inclinations. But since rights are basic due to the fact that they are necessary for the enjoyment of something else, we are poised to examine it from the pre-figurative, configurative and post-figurative stages of development in Africa. This enterprise anchors on the belief in cosmotheandrisation of human rights in Africa: cosmos ‘earth’, theos ‘God’ and anthropos ‘human’. These three levels of horizontal and vertical relationship guarantee the respect for human rights in traditional Africa. Through this approach, this enterprise shows that the positive approach to human rights is majorly declarative without corresponding pragmatic manifestation.     

Conquering the quarters: Religion and politics in Hinduism

Conclusion Our understanding of South Asian society and history is sometimes muddled by the rigid distinctions we make between ‘religion’ and ‘politics.’ The resurgent appeal of Hindu nationalism, the involvement of Hindu renouncers in contemporary Indian politics, and the continuing relevance of religious issues to political discourse throughout South Asia, show that such a distinction is of limited utility. In this essay, I have examined the notion of digvijaya in some detail, in an attempt to show that this ‘most important Indian concept with regard to sovereignty’ was always both a ‘religious’ and a ‘political’ phenomenon. When it was performed by Hindu kings in the classical period, the ‘political’ dimension of digvijaya was foregrounded, while in the medieval and modern periods, when it was associated primarily with Hindu renouncers, its ‘religious’ aspects were paramount. But neither ‘political’ nor ‘religious’ aspects were ever absent from any of the digvijayas discussed here because religion and politics were mutually entailed in the digvijaya at all times, just as kings and renouncers were—and still are—alter-egos of each other. I am tempted to conclude that the digvijaya melded religious and political domains. Yet perhaps even to speak of ‘melding’ religion and politics is a peculiarly modern kind of discourse. Perhaps we need to rethink our categories and recognize that politics always has a religious element, while religion is always a political force.     

Time for Presence?

It is, I think, possible to generate a variation of McTaggart’s (Mind 17:457–474, 1908) paradox that infects all extant versions of presentism. This is not to say that presentism is doomed to failure. There may be ways to modify presentism and I can’t anticipate all such modifications, here. For the purposes of the paper I’ll understand ‘presentism’ to be the view that for all x, x is present (cf. Crisp (2004: 18)). It seems only right that, at a conference devoted to McTaggart’s work on time, we continue to pursue new ways in which his now infamous arguments remain relevant to us today.     

Internalism and Hyperexternalism About Reasons

Alan Goldman’s Reasons from Within is one of the most thorough recent defenses of what might be called ‘orthodox internalism’ about practical reasons. Goldman’s main target is an opposing view that includes a commitment to the following two theses: (O) that there are such things as objective values, and (E) that these values give rise to external reasons. One version of this view, which we can call ‘orthodox externalism’, also includes a commitment to the thesis (I) that rational people will be motivated by any reason they have of which they are aware. Goldman himself embraces (I), and deploys it frequently in his criticisms of orthodox externalism. But there is logical space for an externalist view that includes a commitment to (O) and (E), but that denies (I). The resulting “hyperexternalist” view holds that some reasons need not motivate us, even if we are rational. In this paper I argue that Goldman’s criticisms of orthodox externalism leave hyperexternalism untouched, and that his specific criticisms of my own version of hyperexternalism do not work. In light of Goldman’s criticisms of orthodox externalism and my own criticisms of Goldman’s view, hyperexternalism emerges as the favored option.     

Hermann Cohen and Bakhtin’s early aesthetics

In this article, Bakhtin’s early aesthetics is reread in the context of Hermann Cohen’s system of philosophy, especially his aesthetics. Bakhtin’s thinking from the early ethical writing Toward a Philosophy of Act to Author and Hero in Artistic Activity and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is followed. In Author and Hero, an individual is in his life conceived as involved in cognitive and ethical action but as remaining without a consummative form; the form, or the ‘soul’, is bestowed upon a person by the creative activity of the artist alone. In his understanding of artistic creativity and the relationship between the ‘hero’ and the author, Bakhtin closely follows Cohen, with the exception that for Cohen the object of artistic form-giving is the universal, idealized man, whereas for Bakhtin it is an individual. In the concept of a ‘polyphonic novel’ as developed in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin, however, considers this view of the activity of the artist (or the novelist) to apply to the “traditional” novel only, while in a Dostoevskyean novel the characters are not subordinated to any defining power of the author. Bakhtin’s theory of the Dostoevskyean novel is thus a return to the emphasis of the cognitive and ethical autonomy of the individual. His understanding of the encounter between persons as a ‘subject’—‘subject’ or an ‘I’—‘thou’ relation has a predecessor, among others, in Cohen.     

Moore’s Paradox is not just another pragmatic paradox

One version of Moore’s Paradox is the challenge to account for the absurdity of beliefs purportedly expressed by someone who asserts sentences of the form ‘p & I do not believe that p’ (‘Moorean sentences’). The absurdity of these beliefs is philosophically puzzling, given that Moorean sentences (i) are contingent and often true; and (ii) express contents that are unproblematic when presented in the third-person. In this paper I critically examine the most popular proposed solution to these two puzzles, according to which Moorean beliefs are absurd because Moorean sentences are instances of pragmatic paradox; that is to say, the propositions they express are necessarily false-when-believed. My conclusion is that while a Moorean belief is a pragmatic paradox, it is not just another pragmatic paradox, because this diagnosis does not explain all the puzzling features of Moorean beliefs. In particularly, while this analysis is plausible in relation to the puzzle posed by characteristic (i) of Moorean sentences, I argue that it fails to account for (ii). I do so in the course of an attempt to formulate the definition of a pragmatic paradox in more precise formal terms, in order to see whether the definition is satisfied by Moorean sentences, but not by their third-person transpositions. For only an account which can do so could address (ii) adequately. After rejecting a number of attempted formalizations, I arrive at a definition which delivers the right results. The problem with this definition, however, is that it has to be couched in first-person terms, making an essential use of ‘I’. Thus the problem of accounting for first-/third-person asymmetry recurs at a higher order, which shows that the Pragmatic Paradox Resolution fails to identify the source of such asymmetry highlighted by Moore’s Paradox.