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Stalnaker on Sleeping Beauty Brian Weatherson
Stalnaker on Sleeping Beauty Brian Weatherson The Sleeping Beauty puzzle provides a nice illustration of the approach to self-lo- cating belief defended by Robert Stalnaker in Our Knowledge of the Internal World (Stalnaker, 2008), as well as a test of the utility of that method. The setup of the Sleeping Beauty puzzle is by now fairly familiar. On Sunday Sleeping Beauty is told the rules of the game, and a (known to be) fair coin is flipped. On Monday, Sleeping Beauty is woken, and then put back to sleep. If, and only if, the coin landed tails, she is woken again on Tuesday after having her memory of the Monday awakening erased.1 On Wednesday she is woken again and the game ends. There are a few ques- tions we can ask about Beauty’s attitudes as the game progresses. We’d like to know what her credence that the coin landed heads should be (a) Before she goes to sleep Sunday; (b) When she wakes on Monday; (c) When she wakes on Tuesday; and (d) When she wakes on Wednesday? Standard treatments of the Sleeping Beauty puzzle ignore (d), run together (b) and (c) into one (somewhat ill-formed) question, and then divide theorists into ‘halfers’ or ‘thirders’ depending on how they answer it. Following Stalnaker, I’m going to focus on (b) here, though I’ll have a little to say about (c) and (d) as well. I’ll be following 1 orthodoxy in taking 2 to be the clear answer to (a), and in taking the correct answers to (b) and (c) to be independent of how the coin lands, though I’ll briefly question that assumption at the end. -
Semantical Paradox* Tyler Burge
4 Semantical Paradox* Tyler Burge Frege remarked that the goal of all sciences is truth, but that it falls to logic to discern the laws of truth. Perceiving that the task of determining these laws went beyond Frege’s conception of it, Tarski enlarged the jurisdiction of logic, establishing semantics as truth’s lawyer.1 At the core of Tarski’s theory of truth and validity was a diagnosis of the Liar paradox according to which natural language was hopelessly infected with contradiction. Tarski construed himself as treating the disease by replacing ordinary discourse with a sanitized, artificial construction. But those interested in natural language have been dissatisfied with this medication. The best ground for dis satisfaction is that the notion of a natural language’s harboring contradictions is based on an illegitimate assimilation of natural language to a semantical system. According to that assimilation, part of the nature of a “language” is a set of postulates that purport to be true by virtue of their meaning or are at least partially constitutive of that “language”. Tarski thought that he had identified just such postulates in natural language as spawning inconsistency. But postulates are contained in theories that are promoted by people. Natural languages per se do not postulate or Tyler Burge, “Semantical Paradox", reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), 169-98. Copyright © 1979 The Journal of Philosophy. Reprinted by permission of the Editor of The Journal of Philosophy and the author. * I am grateful to Robert L. Martin for several helpful discussions; to Herbert Enderton for proving the consistency (relative to that of arithmetic) of an extension of Construction C3; to Charles Parsons for stimulating exchanges back in 1973 and 1974; and to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for its support. -
Two Views of the De Re E) Scope Paradoxes: (5) John Thinks at Least Two Men in the Room Are Spies
two views of the de re e) scope paradoxes: (5) John thinks at least two men in the room are spies. (John is not thinking of them as the men in the room) PLUK, Leeds, 2014 Daniel Rothschild ([email protected]) 2 neo-Fregean orthodoxy 1 de re in attitudes Kaplan [1986], building on Quine [1956] sets the standard for accounts of the de re. Basic assumption: semantic values in attitude reports present certain problems not present for other intensional contexts (such as metaphysi- cal modals). (6) (x believes α is a drunk and α denotes y) iff (9 guise g (satisfying some conditions that could make reference to x), the g = y and x A reasonable subset of the data to be captured, for the use of a term α in believes the g is drunk.) an attitude context. Covers a), b) be modified to handle c), d) and e) a) attitude about α does not require the attitude holder to think of α under the predicative content expressed by α. So substitution of co- a) we do not require that x think about y as α. extensive terms: b) we can make the with two different guises x can think y is drunk and is not drunk. (1) John thinks the mayor/the man in the corner is tall. Kaplan puts no contextual restrictions on what guises (his `names') can be, he just quantifies over them and requires them to be vivid, be an b) double vision. at least across different conversation contexts, but per- acquaintance relation for the attitude holder of the referent. -
Mind and Language Seminar: Theories of Content
Mind and Language Seminar: Theories of Content Ned Block and David Chalmers Meetings • Main meeting: Tuesdays 4-7pm over Zoom [4-6pm in weeks without a visitor] • Student meeting: Mondays 5-6pm hybrid • Starting Feb 22 [only weeks with a visitor] • Enrolled students and NYU philosophy graduate students only. • Feb 2: Background: Theories of Content • Feb 9: Background: Causal/Teleological Theories • Feb 16: Background: Interpretivism • Feb 23: Nick Shea • March 2: Robbie Williams • March 9: Frances Egan • March 16: Adam Pautz • March 23: Veronica Gómez Sánchez • March 30: Background: Phenomenal Intentionality • April 6: Imogen Dickie • April 13: Angela Mendelovici • April 20: Background: Conceptual-Role Semantics • April 27: Christopher Peacocke • May 4: David Chalmers Assessment • Draft paper due April 19 • Term paper due May 17 Attendance Policy • Monday meetings: Enrolled students and NYU philosophy graduate students only. • Tuesday meetings: NYU and NYC Consortium students and faculty only • Very limited exceptions • Email us to sign up on email list if you haven’t already. Introductions Short History of the 20th Century • 1900-1970: Reduce philosophical questions to issues about language and meaning. • 1970s: Theories of meaning (philosophy of language as first philosophy) • 1980s: Theories of mental content (philosophy of mind as first philosophy). • 1990s: Brick wall. Theories of Content • What is content? • What is a theory of content? Content • Content (in the broadest sense?) is intentionality or aboutness • Something has content when it is about something. Contents • Content = truth-conditions • Content = satisfaction-conditions • Content = propositions • Content = objects of intentional states • Content = … What Has Content? • What sort of thing has content? What Has Content? • What sort of thing has content? • language (esp. -
Curriculum Vitae Samuel R
CURRICULUM VITAE SAMUEL R. FREEMAN (October 2020) Avalon Chair in the Humanities Professor of Philosophy and of Law University of Pennsylvania Philosophy Department, 433 Claudia Cohen Hall Phone: 215-898-9052 (office) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-6304 215-898-8563 (Philosophy Dept) sfreeman(at)sas.upenn.edu EDUCATION_____________________________________________________ Harvard University, Department of Philosophy, 1979-1985; Ph.D. awarded 1985. Thesis: "Contractarianism and Fundamental Rights," Dissertation Supervisor: John Rawls University of North Carolina, School of Law, J.D., 1977 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, A.B. with highest honors, 1973 Göttingen University, West Germany, 1971-1972 AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION____________________________________________ Political and Social Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Philosophy of Law, History of Ethics HONORS, GRANTS, AND AWARDS________________________________________ 2017 Election to American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2008-present Avalon Chair in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania 2005-2006 Fellow at Kadish Center, School of Law, University of California-Berkeley 2001-2008 Steven F. Goldstone Term Chair Professor, University of Pennsylvania 1995 Research Fellowship, University of Pennsylvania 1993 American Philosophical Association Fred Berger Memorial Prize, for the Best Essay in Philosophy of Law published in 1990 and 1991. 1992-93 Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow, The Center for Human Values, Princeton University 1993 Pew Foundation, Course Development Grant -
The Case of Zhang Yiwu
ASIA 2016; 70(3): 921–941 Giorgio Strafella* Postmodernism as a Nationalist Conservatism? The Case of Zhang Yiwu DOI 10.1515/asia-2015-1014 Abstract: The adoption of postmodernist and postcolonial theories by China’s intellectuals dates back to the early 1990s and its history is intertwined with that of two contemporaneous trends in the intellectual sphere, i. e. the rise of con- servatism and an effort to re-define the function of the Humanities in the country. This article examines how these trends merge in the political stance of a key figure in that process, Peking University literary scholar Zhang Yiwu, through a critical discourse analysis of his writings from the early and mid- 1990s. Pointing at his strategic use of postmodernist discourse, it argues that Zhang Yiwu employed a legitimate critique of the concept of modernity and West-centrism to advocate a historical narrative and a definition of cultural criticism that combine Sino-centrism and depoliticisation. The article examines programmatic articles in which the scholar articulated a theory of the end of China’s “modernity”. It also takes into consideration other parallel interventions that shed light on Zhang Yiwu’s political stance towards modern China, globalisation and post-1992 economic reforms, including a discussion between Zhang Yiwu and some of his most prominent detractors. The article finally reflects on the implications of Zhang Yiwu’s writings for the field of Chinese Studies, in particular on the need to look critically and contextually at the adoption of “foreign” theoretical discourse for national political agendas. Keywords: China, intellectuals, postmodernism, Zhang Yiwu, conservatism, nationalism 1 Introduction This article looks at the early history and politics of the appropriation of post- modernist discourse in the Chinese intellectual sphere, thus addressing the plurality of postmodernity via the plurality of postmodernism. -
China Perspectives, 55 | September - October 2004 the Debate Between Liberalism and Neo-Leftism at the Turn of the Century 2
China Perspectives 55 | september - october 2004 Varia The Debate Between Liberalism and Neo-Leftism at the Turn of the Century Chen Lichuan Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/417 DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.417 ISSN: 1996-4617 Publisher Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine Printed version Date of publication: 1 October 2004 ISSN: 2070-3449 Electronic reference Chen Lichuan, « The Debate Between Liberalism and Neo-Leftism at the Turn of the Century », China Perspectives [Online], 55 | september - october 2004, Online since 29 December 2008, connection on 28 October 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/417 ; DOI : 10.4000/ chinaperspectives.417 This text was automatically generated on 28 October 2019. © All rights reserved The Debate Between Liberalism and Neo-Leftism at the Turn of the Century 1 The Debate Between Liberalism and Neo-Leftism at the Turn of the Century Chen Lichuan EDITOR'S NOTE Translated from the French original by Nick Oates 1 From the beginning of the 1980s to the middle of the 1990s, three movements took centre stage on the Chinese intellectual scene: radicalism, conservatism and liberalism. This article sets out to retrace the debate between liberalism and neo-leftism by relying exclusively on the polemical texts of the Chinese writers1. How can we present an intellectual debate that is a process of questioning and clarification and that does not arrive at a consensual conclusion? How can we render intelligible the concepts debated in extracts from the original texts? How can we evaluate the impact that this debate has had on a society undergoing a profound transformation? These are just some of the difficulties with which we were confronted. -
1 the Problem of Intentionality: a Cardinal Difficulty for Physicalism Or What Happens to the World When a Mind Shows Up? Joel S
The Problem of Intentionality: A Cardinal Difficulty for Physicalism Or What Happens to the World When a Mind Shows Up? Joel Steinmetz I. What is the Socratic Club? • Content: Issues related to the truth or falsity of the Christian faith • Method: In the Socratic spirit to follow the argument wherever it leads • Motivation: “In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus. The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and differences of opinion are embittered by group hostility. Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say. In the Socratic all this was changed. Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-God weeklies. At the very least we helped civilize one another…. Everyone found how little he had known about everyone else.”1 II. What is the problem of intentionality (a brief historical intro)? • The way in which intentionality is understood, or the aspect of intentionality that is emphasized, focuses the way in which intentionality is problematic. Analytic vs. Continental divide: • Phenomenology: explain the essential structures of intentionality; how does objectivity arise from subjectivity? • Analytic: intentionality is mark of mental; how can we explain, or incorporate, intentional mental states into a physicalist account of the world? • Why a physicalist account of the world? “These days we’re all materialists for much the reason that Churchill gave for being a democrat: the alternatives seem even worse. -
Qt11c0x4n5.Pdf
UC Berkeley Working Papers Title Figure and Ground in Logical Space Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11c0x4n5 Author Yalcin, Seth Publication Date 2015-12-02 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Figure and Ground in Logical Space⇤ Seth Yalcin [email protected] April 22, 2011 1Introduction The idea that states of belief are, in a certain sense, sensitive to questions, or to subject matters, or more generally to ways of resolving logical space,helpsin some simple ways with aspects of the classical problem of logical omniscience. So I argue here. Focusing on belief, I begin by reviewing a version of a familiar story about belief and belief content, what I will call the map picture of belief. I will suggest that the picture is incomplete in ways that lead to the problems of logical omniscience, and that the addition of the aforementioned kind of sensitivity helps to fill in the picture in ways that start to address the problems. My larger aim is to explore the extent to which the idea of belief as question- sensitive state can be motivated by considerations in the philosophy of content, considered largely in abstraction from issues in descriptive semantics per se (e.g., in abstraction from the detailed compositional semantics of belief ascription). By the end, we will not have fully resolved the problems of logical omniscience, but we will have made some headway. 2Themappicture The motto of the map picture is: belief is the map by which we steer.1 You will have heard some version this story before, but we need a single version of it for operating on. -
What Are Centered Worlds?*
What Are Centered Worlds?* Shen-yi Liao e Philosophical Quarterly (2012)† Abstract David Lewis argues that centered worlds give us a way to capture de se, or self- locating, contents in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In recent years, centered worlds have also gained other uses in areas ranging widely from metaphysics to ethics. In this paper, I raise a problem for centered worlds and discuss the costs and benets of different solutions. My investigation into the nature of centered worlds brings out potentially problematic implicit commit- ments of the theories that employ them. In addition, my investigation shows that the conception of centered worlds widely attributed to David Lewis is not only problematic, but in fact not his. is paper raises a problem for centered worlds and discusses the costs and benets of different solutions. In recent years, centered worlds have gained uses in a variety of philosophical sub-disciplines, from metaphysics to ethics. Given the diverse applica- tions and theoretical usefulness of centered worlds, the problem and solutions raised in this paper have wide ramications. Examining the nature of centered worlds brings out implicit commitments of the theories that employ them. §1 motivates the present investigation into what centered worlds are by reviewing their applications. e original motivation for positing centered worlds is to have a way of adequately capturing the self-locating contents of attitudes such as belief. Since then, philosophers have given centered worlds new uses in the metaphysics of prop- erties, foundations of two-dimensional semantics, and relativist theories in aesthetics, epistemology, metaethics, and philosophy of language. -
Philosophy 267 Fall, 2010 Professor Richard Arneson Introductory Handout Revised 11/09 Class Meets Tuesdays 1-4 in the Department Seminar Room
1 Philosophy 267 Fall, 2010 Professor Richard Arneson Introductory Handout revised 11/09 Class meets Tuesdays 1-4 in the Department seminar room. My email: [email protected] This course considers some philosophical arguments concerning the justification of the claim that under modern conditions, the political order of a society ought to be democratic. Next question: how democratic ought the political order to be, and what determines the normatively appropriate degree of democracy in particular circumstances. Following David Estlund, let us say a state is legitimate if it issues commands (laws, public policies) and enforces them and does so permissibly, and a state has authority if it has the moral power to issue commands (laws, public policies) to its subjects and thereby to bring it about that those commanded have some moral obligation to comply. Under modern conditions, must a state be democratic in order to rule legitimately and with authority? Texts: Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals; David Estlund, Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. J. S. Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government is available on line at www.utilitarianism.net/jsmill/ Jason Brennan’s forthcoming book the Ethics of Voting will be made available by email attachment. Some other readings will be made available by email attachment or in printed copies to be placed in the Philosophy Department Library or both. Note that the reading for weeks 1 and 2 includes Rousseau’s The Social Contract, which is neither a book placed on the shelves of the bookstore for this class nor specially made available in the Department Library. -
Copp Cv 2015
CURRICULUM VITAE DAVID COPP Department of Philosophy telephone: 530-554-1386 University of California, Davis fax: 530-752-8964 Davis, CA 95616 [email protected] http://philosophy.ucdavis.edu/people/dcopp Education Ph.D. in Philosophy: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1976. Dissertation, “Individuals, Collectives and Moral Agency.” M.A.: Cornell University, 1973. Honours B.A. in Philosophy and Sociology: Glendon College, York University, Toronto, l970. Faculty Positions Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, 1974 - 1976. Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, 1976 - 1980 Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, 1980 - 1988. (On leave, 1984 - 1987.) Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1984 - 1987. Professor, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, 1988 - 1989. Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, 1989 - 1999. (On leave, 1998 - 1999.) Professor, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, 1998 - 2003. Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida, 2003 - 2009. Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, 2009 - 2013. Distinguished Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, 2013 - . Other Academic Positions Teaching Assistant to R. Stalnaker and N. Sturgeon, Cornell University, 1971 - 1972. Josephus Daniels Fellow of the Research Triangle Foundation, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 1988-89. Visiting Professor, Stanford University, Fall 1992. Fellow of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, August - December, 1996. Fellow of the Centre for Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia, Jan.- June, 1997. Research Fellow, Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University, June and July, 1998.Senior Research Fellow, Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, 1998 - 2003.