No Future

The difficulties with formalizing the intensional notions necessity, knowability and omniscience, and rational belief are well-known. If these notions are formalized as predicates applying to (codes of) sentences, then from apparently weak and uncontroversial logical principles governing these notions, outright contradictions can be derived. Tense logic is one of the best understood and most extensively developed branches of intensional logic. In tense logic, the temporal notions future and past are formalized as sentential operators rather than as predicates. The question therefore arises whether the notions that are investigated in tense logic can be consistently formalized as predicates. In this paper it is shown that the answer to this question is negative. The logical treatment of the notions of future and past as predicates gives rise to paradoxes due the specific interplay between both notions. For this reason, the tense paradoxes that will be presented are not identical to the paradoxes referred to above.     

What good is moral imagination?

Johnson, Mark. (1993). Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (287 pp.). ISBN 0–226–40168–5.     

Forms of Transformation in the Reflective Space: Clarifying “Mentalization” Theory Through a Clinical Application: Commentary on Paper by Stephen Seligman

In responding to discussions of my paper “Jonah: A Fantasy of Flight” by Fishman, Salberg, and Shulman, I focus on some of my critical assumptions in reading this or any other biblical text. Prominent among these is the need to relinquish the stance of “already knowing” the meaning of the text. This irreducibly enigmatic book demands close, informed, and literary reading. Within the context of a sustained reflection on the methodology and spirit of my enterprise, I discuss the main points of difference or disagreement that arise in the papers of my discussants, as well as celebrating the places of accord and enrichment.