NTU Philosophical Review

This paper will do two things. First to argue that the logical connectives are used to express mental acts, to do speech acts and propositional acts. They are used to expreepropositional ties. Second, from the first things to to say that every sentence or proposition must contain at least one logical connective, and every relation must intrinsically contain a direction. Several relevant theories are also examined.

D. Lewis asserts that 'We can agree with Parfit...that what matters in questions of personal identity is mental continuity or connectedness...At same time we can consistentlyagree with common sense...that what matters in questions of personal identity is identity', but D. Parfit believes that this cannot be done. The aim of this paper is to re-examinewhether Lewis's thesis, ‘the I-relation and the R-relation coincide', had been justified. In sections 2 and 3, I summarized Lewis' and Parfit's arguments separately. And the related cohabitationist's theory is introduced in section 4. After the discussion in section 5, I argue that Lewis's thesis cannot be justified.

As Dewey came to Chcago in 1894, there were many conflicts of educational thoughts in the academic world. With Hegelian dialetic, Dewey has synthesized successfully the antithesis of the viewpoint of the individual and that of the society， the emphasis on the subject-matter of the curriculum and that on the contents of the child's own experience. The teaching methods of "pouring in" and "drawing out "are shown to be both justified and equally one-sided.With functional analysis, the conflict of the theory of amusement and that of effort can be synthesized dialectically by a theory of genuine interest. Dewey puts constructive activities as unifying center of all curricula and contends that the genuine interst consists in the interpretability of the subjectmatter for child or the adaptability of the child's impulses, habits and experience to the new environment.Dewey reinterpreted the evolutionary method as a genetic or historic method and applied it, being methodically different from Hegelian dialectic, but in the same spirit of harmonious unification as the Hegelian dialectic, to solve the conflict of new education and old education by removal or reform of the institutional conditions.

Theories of reference are the most salient objects of philosophical reflection in the areas of the analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, applied logic, cognitive psychologg as well as linguistics. It is very natural to expect that every teachers, expert, philosopher, and every graduate student in these areas should be enlightened by such topics. We take a bird-eye view of recent theories of reference ( and name ) in this article, i.e., Millian theory/'Fido'-Fido theory, Fregean theory of sense and reference, Russellian theory of definite description and its modified theory (the cluster theary/the description theary), the rigid designation theory, the direct reference theory, the historical Chain theory/Causal theory and Minimalism. These theories are reviewed from their philosophical and historical aspects.Some of philosophic problems (which have been related to the research program of each theory, twenty problems in total) and their intended Solutions are briefly sketched by the author. The difficulties of all theories except the historical chain theory are presented and criticized. The difficulties of the latter 'will be discussed in a forthcoming paper. Finally, We present twenty useful problems/exercises for graduate students in the areas of the philosophy of language/theoretical linguistics/applied logic.