【Philosophy】African philosophy cannot be a thing
This essay unpacks several arguments about the metaphilosophic nature of African philosophy and charts a way through the problems these arguments enco... [more]
【Philosophy】Fusion Philosophy and Epistemic Injustice
I use the concept of epistemic injustice to think through the practice and methodology of comparative, or fusion, philosophy. I make two related claim... [more]
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Barbour's fourfold way-problems with his taxonomy of science-religion relationships
In this paper several problems are raised concerning Ian Barbour's four ways of interrelating science and religion-Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, and Integration-as put forward in such publications as his highly influential Religion in an Age of Scien
The languid child and the eighteenth-century man-midwife
This article addresses the methods used to preserve the life of a sickly neonate-that is, a child described as languid in the immediate period after birth. By looking at the work of some seventeenth-century midwifery authors, we can see how a fragile baby
Towards a critical theory of transnational justice
This paper argues for a conception of transnational justice that provides an alternative to globalist and statist views. In light of an analysis of the transnational context of justice, a critical theory is suggested that addresses the multiple relations
Defeasible reasoning with variable degrees of justification
The question addressed in this paper is how the degree of justification of a belief is determined. A conclusion may be supported by several different arguments, the arguments typically being defeasible, and there may also be arguments of varying strengths
The bicoherence theory of situational irony
Situational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and commonplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scie
Axiomatic quantum theory
The basis of a rigorous formal axiomatization of quantum mechanics is constructed, built upon Dirac's bra-ket notation. The system is three-sorted, with separate variables for scalars, vectors and operators. First-order quantification over all three type
Do regulators of animal welfare need to develop a theory of psychological well-being?
The quest for a theory of nonhuman minds'' to assess claims about the moral status of animals is misguided. Misframed questions about animal minds facilitate the appropriation of animal welfare by the animal user industry. When misframed, these question
On cloning: Advocating history of biology in the public interest
Cloning - the process of creating a cell, tissue line or even a complete organism from a single cell - or the strands that led to the cloning of a mammal, Dolly, are not new. Yet the media coverage of Dolly's inception raised a range of reactions from fe
Comments on some completeness theorems of Urquhart and Mendez and Salto
Urquhart and Mendez and Salto claim to establish completeness theorems for the system C and two of its negation extensions. In this note, we do that following three things: (1) provide a counterexample to all of these alleged completeness theorems, (2) at
What's wrong with infinite regresses?
It is almost universally believed that some infinite regresses are vicious, and also almost universally believed that some are benign. In this paper I argue that regresses can be vicious for several different sorts of reasons. Furthermore, I claim that so
The logical structure of linguistic commitment, part 3, Brandomian scorekeeping and incompatibility
Curiously, though he provides in Making It Explicit (MIE) elaborate accounts of various representational idioms, of anaphora and deixis, and of quantification, Robert Brandom nowhere attempts to lay out how his understanding of content and his view of the
On the nature of continuous physical quantities in classical and quantum mechanics
Within the traditional Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics, it is not possible to describe a particle as possessing, simultaneously, a sharp position value and a sharp momentum value. Is it possible, thought, to describe a particle as possessing
On discourse markers: Evidence from modern Greek
The aim of this paper is to describe and account for the function of four Modem creek expressions, namely delta ila deltai ('that is to say'), m ala loja ('in other words'), theta elo na po ('I wish to say'), i malon ('or rather'). After a brief t
Proclus and the Neoplatonic syllogistic
AN investigation of Proclus' logic of the syllogistic and of negations in the Elements of Theology, On the Parmenides, and Platonic Theology. It is shown that Proclus employs interpretations over a linear semantic structure with operators for scalar nega
Truth as translation, part A (Convention T, Liar paradox)
According to Tarski's Convention T, the adequacy of a truth definition is (implicitly) defined relatively to a translation mapping from the object language to the metalanguage; the translation mapping itself is left unspecified. This paper restates Conve