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1. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Leopold Hess Superessentialism and Necessitarianism: Between Spinoza and Lewis
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The paper concerns mutual relations between two metaphysical positions: “superessentialism,” claiming that all properties of every object are essential, i.e.necessary, and “necessitarianism,” claiming that everything is necessary, i.e. there is only one possible world. The theories of Spinoza and Lewis serve as examples. In section I the two positions are characterized. In section II and III interpretations of Spinoza’s and Lewis’s metaphysics are presented, and it is explained to what extent they can both be considered superessentialists and necessitarians. In section IV the two theories are compared. In section V three possible ways of arguing for superessentialism are presented. It is then shown that the premises of these arguments appear, at least implicitly, in both of the theories. In section VI additional premises are numbered which have to be further assumed to prove necessitarianism. In the final section it is shown how Lewis can claim that there are contingent facts, while being a superessentialist and a necessitarian. It is argued that his claim of contingency is a matter of semantics, not of metaphysics.
2. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Jan Woleński Logic in Religious Discourse
3. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Krzysztof Kiedrowski The Courage of Doing Philosophy: Essays Presented to Leszek Nowak
4. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Piotr Sikora Religious Truth and Religious Diversity
5. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Lotar Rasiński Power, Discourse, and Subject. The Case of Laclau and Foucault
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In this text the author draws on two contemporary accounts of power—by Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau—and, on the basis of thorough analysis and comparison, he argues for “the discursive account of power” (DAP) as a new concept reflecting the novel approach to the theory of power developed by these two philosophers. He opens with a broad methodological outline of contemporary concepts of power, distinguishing between the “classical” and the “modern” approaches. Basing his findings on Laclau’s and Foucault’s work, he then presents DAP as a theory characterized by decentralizing, non-normative, and conflict-based tendencies that does not exhibit many of the limitations that usually characterize both classical and modern concepts of power. In the second part of the article the author presents a detailed methodological analysis of Foucault’s and Laclau’s concepts of power, focusing on three axes: power, discourse, and the subject. The author dedicates the last section to a comparison of both approaches, concluding that DAP is an inspiring project that exceeds the limits of traditional liberal theories of power and politics.
6. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Philippe-André Rodriguez Dignity: Its History and Meaning
7. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Rafe McGregor Cinematic Realism Reconsidered
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The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the debate about cinematic motion in terms of the necessity for reception conditions in art. I shall argue that Gregory Currie’s rejection of weak illusionism—the view that cinematic motion is illusory—is sound, because cinematic images really move, albeit in a response-dependentrather than garden-variety manner. In §1 I present Andrew Kania’s rigorous and compelling critique of Currie’s realism. I assess Trevor Ponech’s response to Kania in §2, and show that his focus on the cinematic experience is indicative of the direction the debate should take. §3 demonstrates that the issue is underpinned by the question of the role of reception conditions in the experience of art. In §4 I apply my observations on reception conditions to the problem of cinematic motion and conclude that Kania’s objections are unsuccessful due to his failure to acknowledge the necessary conditions for cinematic experience.
8. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
M. Fletcher Maumus Proper Names: Attribution and Reference
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Principally under the influence of Saul Kripke (1972), philosophical semantics since the closing decades of 20th century has been dominated by thephenomenon Nathan Salmon (1986) aptly dubbed Direct Reference “mania.” Accordingly, it is now practically orthodox to hold that the meanings of proper names are entirely exhausted by their referents and devoid of any descriptive content. The return to a purely referential semantics of names has, nevertheless, coincided with a resurgence of some of the very puzzles that motivated description theories of names in the first place, to wit: the informativeness of true identity statements of the form ‘a=b’ and the failure of substitutivity salve veritate for co-referential names in propositional attitude ascriptions. I argue that a Metalinguistic Description Theory of proper names, which treats the meaning of an arbitrary proper name as roughly equivalent to the definite description ‘the bearer of NN,’ offers a novel, semantically innocent solution to these puzzles when synthesized with Keith Donnellan’s (1966) insight that descriptions are semantically ambiguous between attributive and referential meanings. The ensuing account is then defended against two well-known Kripkean objections to metalinguisticsemantics: the Circularity Objection and the Paderewski Puzzle.
9. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Robert S. Colter Thought, Perception, and Isomorphism in Aristotle’s De Anima
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Aristotle contends that in perception the sense organ is “made like” its object, but only “in a certain way.” Much controversy has surrounded these remarks, primarily about how to understand being “made like.” One camp has understood this to require literal exemplification, such that the sense organs manifest the sensible qualities of their objects. Others have understood likeness to require no physical alteration at all in the sense organs.I accept as a starting point in this paper that understanding perceptual likeness in terms of exemplification is a non-starter. By doing so, however, I also reject the easiest and most direct understanding of what it means for the sense organs to be “made like” their objects. Others who have shared this assumption have suggested that likeness consists in “isomorphism.” Unfortunately, they have not adequately explicated how this notion is to be understood, with the result that Aristotle’s theory of perception remains crucially underdeveloped. I argue that the key is to understand the form of isomorphism at work in Aristotle’s account of thinking.
10. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Renata Ziemińska Sextan Skepticism and Self-Refutation
11. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Karol Chrobak What Plurality of Realities? Some Critical Remarks on the Philosophy of Leon Chwistek
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This paper focuses on the theory of plurality of realities introduced by Leon Chwistek. A critical analysis of this theory and an extensional interpretation of Chwistek’s axiomatic descriptions of four realities lead to an epistemological interpretation of this theory. The word “plurality” in the title is a result of different waysof understanding the same original set of sense-data. This interpretation is contrasted with Kazimierz Pasenkiewicz’s ontological version of this theory. In the final parts of the paper the most important consequences of this theory are discussed. First, the ethical relativism postulated by Chwistek is criticized. Second, an attempt to illustrate the plurality of realities with an example of different styles of painting is discussed. Third, a critical rationalism in the form of a kind of practical attitude toward social reality, which results from the theory of plurality of realities, is outlined.
12. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Hartley Slater Logic is not Mathematical
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I first show in this paper how twentieth century Set Theory got into its greatest tangle by, amongst other things, regarding relational remarks like ‘Rxy’ asbinary functions. I then show how the lack of indexicality, and of ‘that’-clauses, in Modern Logic led that subject into its intractable difficulties with the Theory of Truth. Both errors arose not only through a contempt for ordinary language, but also through the related failure to recognise that being logical is not a matter of being brainy, but of being coherent. It is not a mathematical talent, but a literary one. Later in the paper I go on to demonstrate this same conclusion with respect to Modal Logic and General Intensional Logic, and in particular with respect to fictions, since these are the central items that have been misunderstood, as is witnessed in some recent writings of Graham Priest.
13. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Roman Murawski Jan Woleński, Essays on Logic and its Applications in Philosophy
14. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Jan Woleński August W. Sladek, Aus Sand bauen. Troppentheorie auf schmaler relatiomaler Basis. Ontologische, epistemologische, darstellungstechniszheMöglichkeiten und Troppenanalyse
15. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Maciej Zarych Spinoza o naturze ludzkiej, [Spinoza on Human Nature] by Przemysław Gut
16. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Martin F. Fricke Rules of Language and First Person Authority
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This paper examines theories of first person authority proposed by Dorit Bar-On (2004), Crispin Wright (1989a) and Sydney Shoemaker (1988). What all threeaccounts have in common is that they attempt to explain first person authority by reference to the way our language works. Bar-On claims that in our language selfascriptions of mental states are regarded as expressive of those states; Wright says that in our language such self-ascriptions are treated as true by default; and Shoemaker suggests that they might arise from our capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances. I argue that Bar-On’s expressivism and Wright’s constitutive theory suffer from a similar problem: They fail to explain how it is possible for us to instantiate the language structures that supposedly bring about first person authority. Shoemaker’s account does not suffer from this problem. But it is unclear whether the capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances really yields self-knowledge. Also, it might be that self-knowledge explains why we have this capacity rather than vice versa.
17. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Krzysztof Posłajko Odsłonić tajemnicę znaczenia, [To Reveal the Secret of Meaning] by Aleksandra Derra
18. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Alfredo Tomasetta Knowledge of Metaphysical Necessity. A Remark on Williamson
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According to Williamson’s epistemology of modality, we know metaphysical necessities by means of our knowledge of some specific counterfactualconditionals. In particular, Williamson’s idea is that we come to have knowledge of metaphysical necessities—which have the form □A—via our knowledge ofcounterfactual conditionals which have the form ~A□→┴. In this paper I claim that there are two different ways in which Williamson’s position can plausibly bearticulated, and that both ways lead to circularity.
19. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Clayton Peterson, Jean-Pierre Marquis A Note on Forrester’s Paradox
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In this paper, we argue that Forrester’s paradox, as he presents it, is not a paradox of standard deontic logic. We show that the paradox fails since it is the result of a misuse of (ROM), a derived rule in the standard systems. Before presenting Forrester’s argument against standard deontic logic, we will briefly expose the principal characteristics of a standard system Δ. The modal system KD will be taken as a representative. We will then make some remarks regarding (ROM), pointing out that its use is restricted to the standard system’s theorems, and cannot be applied to contingent conditionals. Finally, we will show that Forrester’s paradox is not a paradox of standard deontic logic, at least not in the sense he intended it to be. We show that the paradox cannot arise in KD since its semantical model is not rich enough to represent the intuitive (informal) validity of the conditional within Forrester’s paradox. We show that the paradox arises within a system that has a finer semantics.
20. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 2
Andrew Schumann Cellular Automaton of the Lord