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41. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Nicholas Rescher Kant’s Platonism
42. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Mateo Pietropaoli Around God Everything Becomes World: On the Disharmony Between Will and Conscience in Nietzsche’s Moral Thought
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The article aims to show the peculiar relationship in Nietzsche’s moral thought between the notions of will and life, on the one hand, and of conscience and truth, on the other. Central to any understanding of this relation is the concept of world, which represents the manifestation of a founding and unconscious will to power, namely the constant generation of a horizon of sense. Recalling several passages from Nietzsche’s works, the article expounds the possibility of a moral thought focused on a self-interpretation of man as the positing of a real world, neither true nor false. This world might be recognized as a real world only if the will is no longer understood as freedom of conscience, but as enhancement of life, namely as foundation of sense.
43. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Geoff Boucher Ultimate Questions: Habermas on Philosophy and Religion
44. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
D. Christopoulou, D. Anapolitanos, M. Alexiadou Hume’s Problem of Enumerative Induction Reconsidered: Building on Armstrong and Harman’s Accounts
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This paper addresses Harman’s approach to enumerative induction as a case of inference to the best explanation. Αfter taking under brief consideration Hume’s critique to induction, the paper argues that Harman’s proposal does not improve the situation since the same characteristics of induction and the kind of skepticism associated with it reappear in case of inference to the best explanation. Then the paper questions Armstrong’s attempt to upgrade Harman’s suggestion by regarding a necessitation relation among two universals (a natural law) as the best explanans of the n observed cases of an enumerative induction procedure. It holds that Armstrong’s modification of Harman’s approach faces some difficulties which arise in the context of his views about instantiated universals. Instead, the paper investigates the possibility to assign the role of the explanans to a metaphysically stronger condition. It suggests that accounts of natural laws as metaphysically necessary facts concerning natural kinds can contribute in an attempt for a more fertile application of Harman’s approach.
45. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Stefano Bertea Why One’s Practical Reasons Are Not Just One’s Own Private Affair
46. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Enrico Cipriani The Syntax of Proper Names
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In this paper, I will focus on the debate between descriptivism and antidescriptivism theory about proper names. In Section I, I will propose an historical reconstruction of the debate, and I will focus in particular on Russell and Kripke's treatments of proper names. Some criticisms will be advanced against Kripke's hypothesis of rigid-designator and, more clearly, against the consequent distinction between the epistemic and metaphysical level that Kripke proposes to explain identity assertions between proper names. Furthermore, I will argue, that, pace Kripke, Russellian treatment of proper names allows to capture all our semantic intuitions, and also those semantic interpretations which concern context-belief sentences. I will close Section I by focusing on a criticism that Kripke rightly points out against an example that Russell proposes in his On Denoting. Section II will be devoted to Russellian solution: I will show that not only Russell's logical treatment of proper names allows to answer to Kripke's criticism to Russell's example, but also that such treatment can disambiguate and express all our semantic intuitions about Frege's puzzle sentence “Hesperus is Phosphorus”. I will then show that, contrarily, Quinian solution (discussed in Section III) and Kripkian one (see Section IV) are not satisfactory to capture our semantic knowledge about Frege's sentence. Furthermore, in Section IV I will focus on Kripke's distinction between epistemic and metaphysical level to deal with identity assertions between proper names, and I will logically show that such distinction is not plausible. In Section V, then, I will show that Russellian solution allows to explain context-belief sentences, contrarily to what Kripke thinks. In VI, I will summarize what I have argued in the text and I will draw some morals.
47. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Alberto Abadia Review of the Fundamentals of Metaphysics
48. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 1
Andrew Cooper For the (Philosophical) Love of Poetic Beauty: Plato’s Hope in Republic
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It is a well-worn trope to view Plato’s banishment of the poets in Republic as a crude form of philistinism. In this paper I defend Plato against this charge. I argue that Republic does not present a final view of poetry, for it leaves room for a philosophical love of poetic beauty. First I analyse the political nature of Plato’s critique of poetry. I suggest that Plato does not reject the political order of change and decay, but opens space for a new kind of political project. I then suggest that Plato’s discussion of tragic poetry in Book X supports this claim, for it contains the hope for a reconfigured love of poetic beauty. I conclude that Plato does not limit aesthetic experience to artistic solace or metaphysical escapism, but opens a way to see aesthetic experience as a vital part of building a world in which it makes sense to live.
49. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Theodore Scaltsas Sharing a Property
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The Socratic discussion in the Hippias Major, 300-303, is not a passing comment on plural reference; it is a theory of plural subjecthood. It has escaped attention because it is a small part of a larger complex argument on the topic of which pleasures are fine. Socrates’s theory is further concealed by the fact that it is presented as an antithesis between Hippias and himself, whereas in fact, Hippias’s position becomes part of Socrates’s theory. I begin by examining Hippias’s position, and subsequently Socrates’ criticism of it. I then turn to Socrates’s further proposal, and the development of a theory of plural subjects that incorporates elements of Hippias’s position, and Socrates’s own. At the end, I address the question of the ontology of plural subjects. I argue that the key to sharing a property between subjects is not in the way that the plural terms refer to these subjects, or in any decomposition of the commonly owned property instance into parts distributed to these subjects. Rather, I follow Socrates in finding the common ownership of a property instance central to plural subjecthood, and develop an account of how this metaphysical function can be performed by the plural subjects without threatening their distinctness and plurality.
50. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Thomas Kjeller Johansen The Seperation of the Soul from Body in Plato’s Phaedo
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The view that the soul can exist separately from the body is commonly associated with dualism. Since Plato’s Phaedo (Phd.) argues that the soul is immortal and survives the death of the body, there seems to be reason to call Plato, in that dialogue at least, a ‘dualist’. Yet, as we know, there are many kinds of dualism, so we have thereby not said very much. Let me therefore start with some distinctions. First of all, we can distinguish between two kinds of dualism which say that the soul is a different kind of substance from the body. On one version, call it ‘strong’ substance dualism, no properties of mind can also be properties of body. Mind is defined as a kind of thing that uniquely has a certain property or set of properties, say consciousness, just as body is defined by its unique properties, say spatial extension. This would seem to be Descartes’ view. On another version, call it ‘weak’ substance dualism, no essential or defining properties of mind are also properties of body. This leaves it open whether the mind and body may share some accidental or non-defining properties. Finally, there is an even weaker kind of dualism which we may call property dualism. According to this view, there are mental properties which are distinct from and irreducible to bodily properties.4 However, these mental properties may or not be properties of an underlying substance that also has bodily properties. In other words, the same thing may have both mental and bodily properties, so having mental properties is not enough to make something a different kind of substance.
51. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Christof Rapp Tackling Aristotle’s Notion of the Will
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Although Aristotle’s name is regularly mentioned when it comes to the question of where the notion of the will historically derives from and although one of the most influential exponents of philosophical theories of the will, Thomas Aquinas, seems to think that he is just applying the Aristotelian theory, many historians of philosophy explicitly deny that Aristotle had a notion of the will. If we think that the notion of the will is among the notions that have been gradually developed in the history of philosophy, nothing is strange about saying that some philosophers prior to this development lacked this particular notion. However, Aristotle’s case is peculiar, because the same historians, who are reluctant to describe such a notion to Aristotle, admit that he played some role in the formation of the same notion. The line-up of more or less recent philosophers and scholars who are of the opinion that Aristotle had no notion of the will is a very remarkable one. This could almost be called a standard or default position, while the list of exponents of the opposed position, i.e. that Aristotle did have a notion or theory of the will, is much shorter.
52. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Michail Peramatzis METAPHYSICS A.7, 988b16-21: Aristotle’s Conclusion about his Predecessors on Causes
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The last six lines of Aristotle's Metaphysics A.7 draw some important conclusions about Aristotle's predecessors' (the Presocratics' and Plato's) grasp of the four types of cause. Aristotle argues that his account of his predecessors supports his conception of the four causes and his claim that in first philosophy, too, we should seek to understand our subject-matter on the basis of these four causes. I offer a detailed textual and philosophical interpretation of these lines, connect them with Aristotle's argument in Metaphysics A.1-6, and examine their metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological presuppositions.
53. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Lindsay Judson Hypotheses in Plato’s Memo
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I investigate the epistemic status of the hypotheses and other premises used in Socrates’ ‘arguments from a hypothesis’ in the Meno, and of the conclusions drawn from them, and argue that, while they are taken by Socrates to fall short of knowledge, he takes them all to have a positive epistemic status, and is not committed to advancing them only tentatively.
54. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Christos Y. Panayides Aristotle on Casual Determinism and Fatalism
55. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Charles Kahn Parmenides and the Origins of Greek Philosophy
56. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
David Charles Aristotle’s Nicomachean Function Argument: Some Issues
57. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 2/3
Gerhard Seel The Puzzles of the ‘Master Argument’ and their Solutions
58. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 4
Joby Varghese Misguided Explanation by the Application of Screening Off Via the Principle of Common Cause
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The Principle of common cause (PCC) has its significance in providing explanations of phenomena in terms of causal theories. Though the principle has its own epistemological advantages, there can be certain situations where the principle might fail. In the first part of the paper, I offer a preliminary assessment of the PCC and then I turn to make an attempt to illustrate those scenarios where the PCC might misguide us in providing explanation of phenomena in terms of common cause.
59. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 4
Luca Forgione Kant on the Reflecting Power of Judgment and Nonconceptual Content
60. Philosophical Inquiry: Volume > 41 > Issue: 4
Samuel Kahn Positive Duties, Maxim Realism and the Deliberative Field