Transcendental empiricism: Deleuze''s response to Hegel

Funding for the research leading to this article was generously provided by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Fellowship. I would like to thank Andrew Irvine and Steve Savitt for criticisms of an earlier version of this paper, as well as the anonymousMan and World referee.     

Why the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is not contingently true either

Faced with strong arguments to the effect that Leibniz'sPrinciple of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) is not a necessary truth, many supporters of the Principle have staged a strategic retreat to the claim that it is contingently true in this, the actual, world. The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of the various forms of PII in both classical and quantum physics, and it is concluded that this latter view is at best doubtful, at worst, simply wrong.I would like to thank Michael Redhead and an anonymous referee for several useful suggestions and criticisms relating to the earlier version of this paper. I must also acknowledge the support given by the Centre of Logic, Epistemology and History of Science of the University of Campinas and the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development in the later stages of the preparation of this work.     

Divine foreknowledge and the libertarian conception of human freedom

As always, this paper benefitted from discussions I have had with David Werther. I would also like to thank an anonymous referee for this journal who offered many insightful criticisms and suggestions.     

Kripke & the existential complaint

I would like to thank W. R. Carter, Charles Chihara, Karel J. Lambert, Kirk Ludwig, Stephen Neale, Herman Cappelan, and an anonymous referee for this Journal, for helpful discussion on this topic, as well as for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. A version of the paper was read at the 1993 Pacific Division meeting of the APA in San Francisco. I wish to thank especially David Cowles and Mark Richard for their thoughtful contributions in that session.     

Action sentences

I would like to thank Eddy Zemach, Jonathan Stavi, Julius Moravcsik and Dov Gabbay for some very good discussions on the logical form of action sentences. Also, I am indebted to an anonymous referee of Erkenntnis for some very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

The miraculous conception of counterfactuals

I wish to thank Jonathan Bennett, Wayne Davis, Paul Horwich, Donald Nute, John Pollock and anonymous referees for helpful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this paper.     

What's in a function?

In this paper we argue that Revision Rules, introduced by Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap as a tool for the analysis of the concept of truth, also provide a useful tool for defining computable functions. This also makes good on Gupta's and Belnap's claim that Revision Rules provide a general theory of definition, a claim for which they supply only the example of truth. In particular we show how Revision Rules arise naturally from relaxing and generalizing a classical construction due to Kleene, and indicate how they can be employed to reconstruct the class of the general recursive functions. We also point at how Revision Rules can be employed to access non-minimal fixed points of partially defined computing procedures.I thank Nuel Belnap, Rich Thomason, Ken Manders, and Jamie Tappenden for much helpful advice given while I was trying to get clear on the ideas presented here. I also thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this paper.     

Vacuous truth

Special thanks go to Paul Humphreys for his criticisms and helpful comments. Also Richard Gale, Gerald Massey, Nicholas Rescher, David Blumenfeld, James Humber, Richard Ketchum, and Wolfgang Dietel made helpful comments on an earlier version. Each found something in need of repair. Finally, I would like to thank the Hambidge Center and the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh for providing in 1988 the setting and the resources that made this paper possible.     

Vague objects for those who want them

The authors would like to express their thanks to an anonymous reader for Philosophical Studies, who supplied extremely thorough and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We also would like to thank our colleague Thomas Blackson for helpful criticism of the penultimate draft of the paper.     

Phenomenology,possible worlds and negation

I would like to thank Charles W. Harvey from the University of Central Arkansas and Leon Gumaski from the University of Toru in Poland for a number of useful criticisms of an earlier version of this paper.     

A note on the deontic system DL of Jones and Pörn

I would like to thank Ingmar Pörn for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Deconstructing the declaration: A case study in pragrammatology

I would like to thank Jonathan Lee, Terry Pinkard, Steven S. Schwarzschild, Jill Petzall, Bob Gibbs, Bill Hamrick and Jim Bohman for their very helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.     

The context principle and Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's theory of types

In this paper, I try to uncover the role played by Wittgenstein's context principle in his criticism of Russell's theory of types. There is evidence in Wittgenstein's writings that a syntactical version of the context principle in connection with the theory of symbolism functions as a good reason for his dispensing with the theory of types.I would like to thank Michael Wrigley (UNICAMP) and Gottfried Gabriel (Universität Konstanz) as well as an anonymous journal referee for their valuable comments on a previous version of this paper.     

Hierarchical causes in the cosmological argument

I would like to thank Linda Zagzebski for her very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Towards an epistemology of religious traditions

Summary Starting from the acceptance of the Egalitarian Principle I exhibited a version which I considered too lax (BEP) and one I considered too strict (NEP), arriving at a version (MEP) which allows that there can be tolerance-limiting reasons for adhering to traditions but only if they are based on unreasoned knowledge claims. In fact, I hold that the situation most of us find ourselves in restricts such claims on religious topics to very general ones. Hence the choice between NEP and MEP is not significant. It follows that we should take up one of two positions concerning religious traditions: either we argue from the shared assumptions of a variety of traditions without genuine participation in any of them; or we justify participation in one of them by noting various marks of reliability, such as serendipitous understanding. A version of this paper was read at the Faith and Reason Conference held at the Catholic Institute in Strathfield, October 5 and 6, 1996. I would like to thank all who participated in the discussion of my paper on that occasion. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for Sophia for their helpful comments.     

Proxy “Actualism” *

Bernard Linsky and Edward Zalta have recently proposed a new form of actualism. I characterize the general form of their view and the motivations behind it. I argue that it is not quite new – it bears interesting similarities to Alvin Plantinga’s view – and that it definitely isn’t actualist. * I would like to thank Rae Langton, Jim Pryor, Robert Stalnaker, Ed Zalta, and, especially, an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for very helpful comments. Thanks also to Andrew Cortens, Michael Jubien, and an audience at the ANU for helpful discussion of an early version of this paper.     

Gender sceptics and feminist politics

Some feminist gender sceptics hold that the conditions for satisfying the concept woman cannot be discerned. This has been taken to suggest that (i) the efforts to fix feminism’s scope are undermined because of confusion about the extension of the term ‘woman’, and (ii) this confusion suggests that feminism cannot be organised around women because it is unclear who satisfies woman. Further, this supposedly threatens the effectiveness of feminist politics: feminist goals are said to become unachievable, if feminist politics lacks a clear subject matter. In this paper, I argue that such serious consequences do not follow from the gender sceptic position. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the ‘Stirling Political Philosophy Group’ meeting and am grateful to those present for their constructive criticisms. I am also grateful to Alan Millar, the anonymous referees for this journal and Jenny Saul (who has read more than one version of this paper!) for their detailed and extremely helpful comments and suggestions.     

Intuition and the socratic method: Two opposed ways of knowing?

Socratic method and intuition are two ways of knowing commonly thought as opposed. The author shows how both ways of knowing can be linked in an education that has philosophy as its armature.An earlier version of this paper was presented at theWays of Knowing conference at Appalachian State University, and published in the proceedings of that conference. Lee S. Shulman's helpful comments at that time led to this revised version. I would like to thank Jim Garrison for comments and conversation on this topic. Any errors remain my own.