DOCSLIB.ORG

The Nature of Predication

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Nature of Predication THE NATURE OF PREDICATION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by David Liebesman August 2009 c 2009 David Liebesman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE NATURE OF PREDICATION David Liebesman, Ph.D. Cornell University 2009 I articulate and defend a necessary and sufficient condition for an occurrence of a term to function semantically as a predicate. The condition is that the term occurrence stands in the relation of ascription to its denotation, ascription being a fundamental semantic relation that differs from reference. This view on pred- ication has dramatically different semantic consequences from its alternatives. After outlining the alternatives, I draw out these consequences and show how they favor the ascription view. I then develop the ascription view and elicit a number of its virtues. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH David Liebesman received his B.A. in philosophy from Brandeis University in 2002, and his M.A. from University of Colorado in 2005. His primary areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of language and metaphysics. He begins his assistant professorship at Boston University in the fall of 2009. iii To my parents. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The work in this dissertation has benefited from conversations I’ve had with Karen Bennett, Richard Boyd, Brendan Jackson, Theo Korzukhin, Christian Lee, Tom McKay, Colin McLear, Andrew McGonigal, Nathan Salmon, and Robbie Williams. My dissertation committee has been absolutely wonderful. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Harold Hodes, and Brian Weatherson provided con- stant feedback and support. My greatest debt is to my dissertation advisor, Matti Eklund. Matti’s insight permeates every page of this dissertation. He has been an outstanding advisor, colleage, and friend. My parents, Larry and Carol Liebesman, and my partner Karen Bourrier have provided me with love and support. Without them, this dissertation wouldn’t be actual. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch . iii Dedication . iv Acknowledgements . .v Table of Contents . vi 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Preliminaries . .1 1.2 Reference, Ascription, Mapping, and Skepticism . .7 1.2.1 The Entity View . .8 1.2.2 The Ascription View . 11 1.2.3 The Mapping View . 12 1.2.4 The Skeptical View . 15 1.3 The Plan . 17 2 Skepticism 19 2.1 The Sources of Skepticism . 19 2.2 The Skeptic’s Semantics . 20 2.3 Motivation for Skepticism . 23 2.3.1 The Argument from Sameness of Proposition . 24 2.3.2 The Argument from The Incomprehensible Trinity . 27 2.3.3 The Argument from Intimate Connections . 30 2.4 Motivation for Optimism . 33 2.4.1 Negation . 33 2.4.2 Concatenation . 41 2.4.3 Interpretability . 44 2.5 The State of Play . 47 3 Nominalism and Quantification 48 3.1 Nominalism . 48 3.2 Two Arguments for Nominalism . 49 3.2.1 Van Cleve’s argument from Intrinsicality . 50 3.2.2 Regress Arguments . 55 3.3 Quantification . 62 3.3.1 The First Strategy . 64 3.3.2 The Second Strategy . 69 3.3.3 Looking Forward . 73 4 Expressibility Problems 75 4.1 Frege and Beyond . 75 4.2 The Concept Horse in Frege . 77 4.2.1 A Breach of Custom . 77 4.2.2 Expressibility Problems . 82 vi 4.2.3 Misdiagnosis . 86 4.2.4 Diagnosis . 90 4.3 Relevance . 94 4.3.1 Montague-style Type Theory . 95 4.3.2 General Motivation . 97 4.4 Depth . 99 4.4.1 Ineffability . 100 4.4.2 Methods for Rejecting GS . 102 4.4.3 Proxy Objects . 104 4.4.4 Descriptions as Predicates . 106 4.4.5 “What” Phrases as Predicates . 108 4.4.6 A Move to the Formal . 112 4.4.7 The Unsolvable Problem . 114 4.5 Implications . 116 5 Natural Language Motivations for the Ascription View 118 5.1 Natural Language . 118 5.1.1 Nominalization . 119 5.1.2 Dual Occurrences . 122 5.1.3 Predicate Anaphora . 125 5.2 Attempted Solutions for the Entity Theorist . 128 5.3 Attempted Solutions for the Mapping Theorist . 135 5.4 The Ascription View and Relation Swapping . 137 6 The Ascription View 139 6.1 Combating Obscurity . 139 6.1.1 Direction . 140 6.1.2 Incompleteness . 145 6.1.3 Predicates and Predicative Occurrences . 146 6.1.4 Relata . 147 6.1.5 Nominalization . 149 6.1.6 Truth . 150 6.1.7 Unity . 152 6.2 Paradox . 155 6.2.1 The Entity and Mapping Views . 157 6.2.2 Ascription-Compatible Approaches . 158 Bibliography 160 vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Preliminaries Our simplest sentences come in two parts. One part, the subject, picks out the sentence’s topic. The other part, the predicate, characterizes that topic. For example, in “Homer drinks”, “Homer” is the subject and “drinks” is the pred- icate. Dividing simple sentences into these parts is easy, but complexity brings complications. The sentence “Dave cooked dinner and Karen ate it” contains more than two significant parts, and which is picked as the subject could have as much to do with the reader’s hunger as the sentence’s structure. We can still pick out predicates, though: “cooked dinner” is a predicate of “Dave” and “ate it” is a predicate of “Karen”. As quantifiers, adjuncts, relative clauses and other sorts of complexity are introduced, decomposing a sentence into its significant parts becomes steadily harder. We will still likely find predicates, though, as well as an intuitive contrast with their arguments. My aim in this dissertation is to advance a theory of what the meanings of all predicates have in common. This aim is ambitious, though it is not without precedent. On my view, what predicates have in common is a way of denoting. Just as proper names denote by referring:“Dave” refers to Dave, predicates de- note by ascribing: “cooked dinner” ascribes the property of cooking dinner to Dave. This view is certainly not the only possible one: I will soon sketch three others. It also has not been frequently defended, despite some recent notable adherents: Wright (1998) and Burge (2007). 1 More precisely, my aim is to give a necessary and sufficient condition for a term or an occurrence of a term to function semantically as a predicate. This aim should be distinguished from distinct, though related, issues involving predica- tion, e.g. the problem of the unity of the proposition, Bradley’s regress, the con- cept horse problem, and the third man argument. In the Chapters to follow, I will consider several of these issues, sometimes in great detail. For now, though, I’ll stick to considering the conditions that give rise to predication. Since this partic- ular topic is not one with an extensive literature nor one that many contempo- rary philosophers, even philosophers of language, have seriously considered, preliminaries are needed. When I write about predicates I have in mind a category of terms and their occurrences that is familiar to just about every competent speaker. For instance, in sentence (1), “Frege” is the subject while “wise” is the predicate.1 (1) Frege is wise. At least when it comes to simple sentences such as (1), ordinary speakers are competent at distinguishing predicates from non-predicates. There are cer- tainly harder cases, but the uncontroversial examples are plentiful enough to fix a topic. That the category of predicates is familiar does not entail that it is semantically interesting. A skeptic may maintain that there is nothing that semantically distinguishes predicates. I will argue against such skepticism in 1Throughout this dissertation I’ll assume that the copula “is” is semantically vacuous. This assumption is common, though I do not see that it is essential to my discussion. If the predicate in (1) is “is wise” rather than “wise” then most of what I say could easily be adjusted to apply to “is wise” rather than “wise”. Salmon (2005) and Wiggins (1984) give views on which the copula is a predicate-forming operator that takes a referential term, e.g. “wise”, and produces a predicate, e.g. “is wise”. I reject this view for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that general terms such as “wise” have predicative occurrences in the absence of the copula, e.g. “I consider Frege wise”. Nonetheless, the view is consistent with all of the substantial claims in this dissertation. 2 Chapter 2. In (1) “Frege” is distinguished from “wise” in a number of ways. Syntac- tically, the former constitutes a noun phrase while the later is part of a verb phrase. Pragmatically, the former picks out the topic of the sentence while the latter characterizes the topic. Model-theoretically, “Frege” is usually assigned a single entity while “wise” is assigned a function from entities to truth-values. My aim is largely independent of what syntactic, pragmatic, and model- theoretic features we attribute to predicates.2 I will not be concerned with syntax by, for instance, correlating predicates with syntactic categories or fea- tures.3 I will not be concerned with pragmatics by, for instance, explaining the role of predication in communicative intentions and discourse structure.4 I will not be concerned with model theory by, for instance, by providing set-theoretic structures that allow us to make cross-linguistic and compositional predictions.5 Rather, I will be concerned with the semantic properties of predicates. Predi- cates, I claim, form a natural semantic class in virtue of the contribution they make to the semantic structure of sentences. Examples of predicates, especially in atomic sentences such as (1), are easy to come by. According to some se- 2I say “largely independent” because, though I will not be concerned with syntax, pragmat- ics, and model theory, we may expect that satisfaction of my aim will have implications in all three areas.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Participation and Predication in Plato's Middle Dialogues Author(S): R
    Participation and Predication in Plato's Middle Dialogues Author(s): R. E. Allen Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 69, No. 2, (Apr., 1960), pp. 147-164 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2183501 Accessed: 10/08/2008 14:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org PARTICIPATION AND PREDICATION IN PLATO'S MIDDLE DIALOGUES* I PROPOSE in this paper to examine three closely related issues in the interpretation of Plato's middle dialogues: the nature of Forms, of participation, and of predication.
    [Show full text]
  • Overturning the Paradigm of Identity with Gilles Deleuze's Differential
    A Thesis entitled Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy Dr. Ammon Allred, Committee Chair Dr. Benjamin Grazzini, Committee Member Dr. Benjamin Pryor, Committee Member Dr. Patricia R. Komuniecki, Dean College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo May 2014 An Abstract of Difference Over Identity: Overturning the Paradigm of Identity With Gilles Deleuze’s Differential Ontology by Matthew G. Eckel Submitted to the Graduate Faculty as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in Philosophy The University of Toledo May 2014 Taking Gilles Deleuze to be a philosopher who is most concerned with articulating a ‘philosophy of difference’, Deleuze’s thought represents a fundamental shift in the history of philosophy, a shift which asserts ontological difference as independent of any prior ontological identity, even going as far as suggesting that identity is only possible when grounded by difference. Deleuze reconstructs a ‘minor’ history of philosophy, mobilizing thinkers from Spinoza and Nietzsche to Duns Scotus and Bergson, in his attempt to assert that philosophy has always been, underneath its canonical manifestations, a project concerned with ontology, and that ontological difference deserves the kind of philosophical attention, and privilege, which ontological identity has been given since Aristotle.
    [Show full text]
  • Aristotle on Predication
    DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12054 Aristotle on Predication Phil Corkum Abstract: A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Sub- jects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates char- acterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homogeneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true if the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In this paper, I will examine evidence for ascribing to Aristotle the view that subjects and predicates refer. If this is correct, then it seems that Aristotle, like the traditional term logician, problematically conflates predication and identity claims. I will argue that we can ascribe to Aristotle the view that both subjects and predicates refer, while holding that he would deny that a sentence is true just in case the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In particular, I will argue that Aristotle’s core semantic notion is not identity but the weaker relation of consti- tution. For example, the predication ‘All men are mortal’ expresses a true thought, in Aristotle’s view, just in case the mereological sum of humans is a part of the mereological sum of mortals. A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Subjects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates characterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homo- geneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true if the subject and predicate name one and the same thing.
    [Show full text]
  • CHAPTER 1 and Unexemplified Properties, Kinds, and Relations
    UNIVERSALS I: METAPHYSICAL REALISM existing objects; whereas other realists believe that there are both exemplified CHAPTER 1 and unexemplified properties, kinds, and relations. The problem of universals I Realism and nominalism The objects we talk and think about can be classified in all kinds of Metaphysical realism ways. We sort things by color, and we have red things, yellow things, and blue things. We sort them by shape, and we have triangular things, circular things, and square things. We sort them by kind, and 0 Realism and nominalism we have elephants, oak trees, and paramecia. The kind of classification The ontology of metaphysical realism at work in these cases is an essential component in our experience of the Realism and predication world. There is little, if anything, that we can think or say, little, if anything, that counts as experience, that does not involve groupings of Realism and abstract reference these kinds. Although almost everyone will concede that some of our 0 Restrictions on realism - exemplification ways of classifying objects reflect our interests, goals, and values, few 0 Further restrictions - defined and undefined predicates will deny that many of our ways of sorting things are fixed by the 0 Are there any unexemplified attributes? objects themselves.' It is not as if we just arbitrarily choose to call some things triangular, others circular, and still others square; they are tri- angular, circular, and square. Likewise, it is not a mere consequence of Overview human thought or language that there are elephants, oak trees, and paramecia. They come that way, and our language and thought reflect The phenomenon of similarity or attribute agreement gives rise to the debate these antecedently given facts about them.
    [Show full text]
  • Predication and the Problem of Universals Catherine Legg
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Research Commons@Waikato Philosophical Papers Vol. 30, No. 2 (July 2001): 117-143 Predication and the Problem of Universals Catherine Legg Abstract: This paper contrasts the scholastic realists of David Armstrong and Charles Peirce. It is argued that the so-called 'problem of universals' is not a problem in pure ontology (concerning whether universals exist) as Armstrong construes it to be. Rather, it extends to issues concerning which predicates should be applied where, issues which Armstrong sets aside under the label of 'semantics', and which from a Peircean perspective encompass even the fundamentals of scientific methodology. It is argued that Peir ce's scholastic realism not only presents a more nuanced ontology (distinguishing the existent front the real) but also provides more of a sense of why realism should be a position worth fighting for. ... a realist is simply one who knows no more recondite reality than that which is represented in a true representation. C.S. Peirce Like many other philosophical problems, the grandly-named 'Problem of Universals' is difficult to define without begging the question that it raises. Laurence Goldstein, however, provides a helpful hands-off denotation of the problem by noting that it proceeds from what he calls The Trivial Obseruation:2 The observation is the seemingly incontrovertible claim that, 'sometimes some things have something in common'. The 1 Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buehler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 248. 2 Laurence Goldstein, 'Scientific Scotism – The Emperor's New Trousers or Has Armstrong Made Some Real Strides?', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol 61, No.
    [Show full text]
  • The Problem: the Theory of Ideas in Ancient Atomism and Gilles Deleuze
    Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2013 The rP oblem: The Theory of Ideas in Ancient Atomism and Gilles Deleuze Ryan J. Johnson Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Johnson, R. (2013). The rP oblem: The Theory of Ideas in Ancient Atomism and Gilles Deleuze (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/706 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PROBLEM: THE THEORY OF IDEAS IN ANCIENT ATOMISM AND GILLES DELEUZE A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College & Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Ryan J. Johnson May 2014 Copyright by Ryan J. Johnson 2014 ii THE PROBLEM: THE THEORY OF IDEAS IN ANCIENT ATOMISM AND GILLES DELEUZE By Ryan J. Johnson Approved December 6, 2013 _______________________________ ______________________________ Daniel Selcer, Ph.D Kelly Arenson, Ph.D Associate Professor of Philosophy Assistant Professor of Philosophy (Committee Chair) (Committee Member) ______________________________ John Protevi, Ph.D Professor of Philosophy (Committee Member) ______________________________ ______________________________ James Swindal, Ph.D. Ronald Polansky, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College & Graduate Chair, Department of Philosophy School of Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT THE PROBLEM: THE THEORY OF IDEAS IN ANCIENT ATOMISM AND GILLES DELEUZE By Ryan J. Johnson May 2014 Dissertation supervised by Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • 2.2 Glock Et Al
    Journal for the History of Book Symposium: Analytical Philosophy Hans-Johann Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy? Volume 2, Number 2 Introduction Hans-Johann Glock..................... 1 Editor in Chief Mark Textor, King’s College London Commentaries Guest Editor Leila Haaparanta......................... 2 Mirja Hartimo, University of Helsinki Christopher Pincock....................6 Editorial Board Panu Raatikainen........................11 Juliet Floyd, Boston University Graham Stevens.......................... 28 Greg Frost-Arnold, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Ryan Hickerson, University of Western Oregon Replies Henry Jackman, York University Hans-Johann Glock..................... 36 Sandra Lapointe, McMaster University Chris Pincock, Ohio State University Richard Zach, University of Calgary Production Editor Ryan Hickerson Editorial Assistant Daniel Harris, CUNY Graduate Center Design Douglas Patterson and Daniel Harris ©2013 The Authors What is Analytic Philosophy? shall not be able to respond to all of the noteworthy criticisms and questions of my commentators. I have divided my responses ac- Hans-Johann Glock cording to commentator rather than topic, while also indicating some connections between their ideas where appropriate. Let me start by thanking the Journal for the History of Analytical Phi- losophy for offering me this opportunity to discuss my book What is Analytical Philosophy? (Cambridge, 2008). I am also very grateful Hans-Johann Glock for the valuable feedback from the contributors. And I thank both University of Zurich the journal and the contributors for their patience in waiting for [email protected] my replies. I was pleased to discover that all of my commentators express a certain sympathy with the central contention of my book, namely that analytic philosophy is an intellectual movement of the twentieth-century (with roots in the nineteenth and offshoots in the twenty-first), held together by family-resemblances on the one hand, ties of historical influence on the other.
    [Show full text]
  • How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science
    How Analytic Philosophy Has Failed Cognitive Science Robert Brandom I. Introduction We analytic philosophers have signally failed our colleagues in cognitive science. We have done that by not sharing central lessons about the nature of concepts, concept-use, and conceptual content that have been entrusted to our care and feeding for more than a century. I take it that analytic philosophy began with the birth of the new logic that Gottlob Frege introduced in his seminal 1879 Begriffsschrift. The idea, taken up and championed to begin with by Bertrand Russell, was that the fundamental insights and tools Frege made available there, and developed and deployed through the 1890s, could be applied throughout philosophy to advance our understanding of understanding and of thought in general, by advancing our understanding of concepts—including the particular concepts with which the philosophical tradition had wrestled since its inception. For Frege brought about a revolution not just in logic, but in semantics. He made possible for the first time a mathematical characterization of meaning and conceptual content, and so of the structure of sapience itself. Henceforth it was to be the business of the new movement of analytic philosophy to explore and amplify those ideas, to exploit and apply them wherever they could do the most good. Those ideas are the cultural birthright, heritage, and responsibility of analytic philosophers. But we have not done right by them. For we have failed to communicate some of the most basic of those ideas, failed to explain their significance, failed to make them available in forms usable by those working in allied disciplines who are also professionally concerned to understand the nature of thought, minds, and reason.
    [Show full text]
  • Predication and the Problem of Universals Catherine Legg
    Philosophical Papers Vol. 30, No. 2 (July 2001): 117-143 Predication and the Problem of Universals Catherine Legg Abstract: This paper contrasts the scholastic realists of David Armstrong and Charles Peirce. It is argued that the so-called 'problem of universals' is not a problem in pure ontology (concerning whether universals exist) as Armstrong construes it to be. Rather, it extends to issues concerning which predicates should be applied where, issues which Armstrong sets aside under the label of 'semantics', and which from a Peircean perspective encompass even the fundamentals of scientific methodology. It is argued that Peir ce's scholastic realism not only presents a more nuanced ontology (distinguishing the existent front the real) but also provides more of a sense of why realism should be a position worth fighting for. ... a realist is simply one who knows no more recondite reality than that which is represented in a true representation. C.S. Peirce Like many other philosophical problems, the grandly-named 'Problem of Universals' is difficult to define without begging the question that it raises. Laurence Goldstein, however, provides a helpful hands-off denotation of the problem by noting that it proceeds from what he calls The Trivial Obseruation:2 The observation is the seemingly incontrovertible claim that, 'sometimes some things have something in common'. The 1 Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buehler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 248. 2 Laurence Goldstein, 'Scientific Scotism – The Emperor's New Trousers or Has Armstrong Made Some Real Strides?', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol 61, No. 1 (March 1983), 40.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Ways of Being in Plato
    Binghamton University The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB) The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter 12-1991 Some Ways of Being in Plato Allan Silverman The Ohio State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://orb.binghamton.edu/sagp Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, Ancient Philosophy Commons, and the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Silverman, Allan, "Some Ways of Being in Plato" (1991). The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter. 200. https://orb.binghamton.edu/sagp/200 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). It has been accepted for inclusion in The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter by an authorized administrator of The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). For more information, please contact [email protected]. DRAFT: SOIVÍE W AYS O F BEING IN PLATO, BY ALLAN SILVERM AN; SAGP, NYC/91 A proper assay of Plato's ontology would treat of all the different kinds of things which, according to Plato, are said to be. It would divide those kinds into the primitive and, if there are any, the derived, and then show, where possible, how the latter kind of beings arise from the former. In addition, it might try to explain why Plato stkrts horn the primitives he does, that is, why he thinks them the bestarxai. Finally, perhaps, it would isolate and discuss any meta-principle which Plato relies on, and the very categories of the ontological theory, with the aim of showing how they are to be assimilated to the theory itself.
    [Show full text]
  • Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism
    Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism James Brusseau Facultad de Filosofia y Letras Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Acknowledgement I acknowledge Professor Alphonso Lingis for his contributions to this work. The task of contemporary philosophy has been defined: the reversal of Platonism. --Gilles Deleuze, 1968 Difference and Repetition Contents Introduction..............................................1 I Difference............................................ 1. Difference As Production And Limitation............... 2. The Eternal Return Does Difference: Production........ 3. See With My Own Eyes: Limitation...................... II Possession............................................ 4. Verbs And Nouns....................................... 5. Emily, The Patient, Bliss, Deleuze.................... 6. Desire, Not Want...................................... 7. Invitation To Possession.............................. III Alienation............................................ 8. Distance Without Measure.............................. 9. Rank Weeds And Fair Appearances....................... 10. Love Is For Other People.............................. Endnotes................................................... Introduction Experiences can be incestuous. They develop away from the general population; their genetic structures restlessly curve back into their own private histories. If they are going to be explained, they will have to explain themselves. Like sideshows at the travelling fair, it is not
    [Show full text]
  • Leibniz on the Expression of God
    AN OPEN ACCESS Ergo JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY LEIBNIZ ON THE EXPREssION OF GOD STEWART DUNCAN Department of Philosophy, University of Florida Leibniz frequently uses the notion of expression, but it is not easy to see what expres- sion is. This paper focuses on the case of the expression of God, which is prominent in the Discourse on Metaphysics. Leibniz says there that finite substances express God. That talk of expression seems not to fit with standard understandings of expression as involving isomorphism, or at least a structural similarity of the expressing thing and the expressed one. Beyond that general puzzle, the treatment of expression of God in the Discourse suggests several questions. Which substances did Leibniz believe expressed God? Why did Leibniz believe those substances expressed God? And did he believe that all substances expressed God in the same way and for the same reasons? In answering those questions, this paper distinguishes two views about expression in the Discourse; considers Leibniz’s reasons for holding that substances express their causes, and for thinking that minds have a particular similarity to God; and argues that Leibniz’s views about emanative causation may be helpful for understanding the unity of his apparently distinct views here. eibniz makes frequent use, in his philosophy, of the notion of expression. He L uses it, for example, in giving his definition of perception as the expression of a multitude in a simple.1 Expression itself appears to be some sort of representa- tion relation. Beyond that, however, it is rather less clear what expression is. Looking at Leibniz’s texts, there appears to be a repeated requirement that, for there to be expression, there must be a regular relation between the expressing thing and the thing expressed.2 It remains unclear, however, what this require- ment amounts to.
    [Show full text]