The Logic Of Concessive Statements,
2016
Touro College
The Logic Of Concessive Statements, Aharon Grenadir
School for Lifelong Education Publications
Concessive statements appear frequently in everyday reasoning. They are one of the eleven types of statement mentioned in the Ramchal‟s Sefer Derech Tevunos. In addition, in Talmudic discussions, every statement has a presupposition (hava-amina) and a conclusion (ka mashma lan). This goal of this research is to organize the categorizations of concessive statements that are stated in the technical literature. Using the distintinction in lomdus between dechiyah (overriding a law) and hutrah (removal of a law), a novel categorization can be added, according to the type of denial of the expectation by the main clause. That is the subject of …
Gronwall’S Inequality And Systems Of Integral Equations,
2016
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Gronwall’S Inequality And Systems Of Integral Equations, Bradford Garcia
Honors Theses
No abstract provided.
Avatars Of Oneself,
2016
Duquesne University
Avatars Of Oneself, Patrick L. Miller
Sophia and Philosophia
Zoe is an American woman who has found that “drawing the line and standing firm has always made me feel like a bitch, and, actually, I feel that people saw me as one too.”[3] For two years, however, she played an online role-playing game using a male character where “as a man I was liberated from all that.” She made mistakes in her unfamiliar role, but learned from them. “I got better at being firm but not rigid,” she says; “I practiced, safe from criticism.” Case is an American man, who plays a similar game but always appears as a …
Jane Austen Meets The Gps: Place And Space,
2016
Bates College
Jane Austen Meets The Gps: Place And Space, David Kolb
Sophia and Philosophia
When one reads Jane Austen’s novels, one finds that her heroines’ lives center around a beloved and comfortable home, in a local region including a small town, some neighboring estates, and local hills and valleys. It is a detailed and textured home area of nearby places reachable on foot or horse. One to three miles are walkable to a friend’s house or a favorite scenic hill. Beyond this region is no longer “home.” Fifteen or twenty-five miles can be distant.
Nietzsche And Heraclitus: Notes On Stars Without An Atmosphere,
2016
National Hellenic Research Foundation
Nietzsche And Heraclitus: Notes On Stars Without An Atmosphere, Niketas Siniossoglou
Sophia and Philosophia
I awake estranged from everyone. Words have lost their meaning; they sound indifferent and homonymous. The word No appears to mean Yes, or rather: Yes and No are malleable, ephemeral, and transparent. A decades-old or perhaps centuries-old movement of miry clay has resulted in a miscarriage of words. Iinquire whether anyone still holds the resources needed for a direct, sincere affirmation of life—a Yes that is definitively and essentially affirmative—or a No that is definitively and essentially negative—words bursting forth splendour like a crystal. I am told that formulations of this sort are incomprehensible; they are too metaphorical and, …
On The Relationship Of Alcibiades’ Speech To The Rest Of The Speeches In Plato’S Symposium[1],
2016
Belmont University
On The Relationship Of Alcibiades’ Speech To The Rest Of The Speeches In Plato’S Symposium[1], Andy Davis
Sophia and Philosophia
To get to the point immediately concerning how I think about the relationship between the first five speeches and Socrates’ speech: it seems to me the claim that Plato has only brought together inadequate perspectives on Eros in order to present Socrates’ speech over and against them as the only correct one is completely in error. Socrates himself does not deny these speeches their accolades, he comes back to many things in them as he assigns each single perspective its own due place. Much more, I believe that from the first speech to the last a decisive progress takes place, …
Kirkos,
2016
Eureka College
Kirkos, Prabhu Venkatarama
Sophia and Philosophia
Yesterday morning I received a newspaper clipping that changed the course of my life. It arrived in a small grey envelope, my mother’s Cyrillic handwriting on the front instantly recognizable by its beautiful loops and arches. I was expecting it; my mother had told me it was in the mail. The clipping was of an obituary, that of Robert Mascas, a younger cousin of mine who’d lived in my former hometown of Kirkos. He had turned eighteen three months ago, precisely seven years to the day after I had. The obituary didn’t mention what my mother had on the phone, …
Xanthippe To Her Mother,
2016
Belmont University
Xanthippe To Her Mother, Ginger Osborn
Sophia and Philosophia
The following is a translation of an ancient manuscript, presumably a late-Hellenistic school exercise, recovered from the so-called Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, which was entombed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BCE. The library was well-stocked with philosophical works, mostly of an Epicurean bent, but with a variety of other traditions represented as well. The text below is the result of the editorial work and translation of the Italo-Brtitish philosophical eccentric Michael Tommasi, completed presumably in Cambridge in the 1940s, but never published; his literary executors discovered the manuscript among his posthumous papers. Several revisions to Tommasi's …
Review Of Swimming Home, By Vincent Katz,
2016
Woodland Community College
Review Of Swimming Home, By Vincent Katz, Phillip Barron
Sophia and Philosophia
After a reading in San Francisco, I asked Katz about the significance of using the term “poetry” repeatedly throughout “Sidewalk Poem.” He answered, “poetry is about making, as much as any hand skill like carpentry or welding, but the craft of poetry is not respected.” For Charles Reznikoff and Federico Garcia Lorca, walking the streets of New York was integral to the act of writing poetry. The craft of poetry contains not only those moments when pen smears ink on paper or keyboard presses pixel on screen. Making poetry is more sensuous and active than the still, quiet moments that …
Nietzsche's Views On Plato Pre-Basel,
2016
Belmont University
Nietzsche's Views On Plato Pre-Basel, Daniel Blue
Sophia and Philosophia
In an essay published in 2004[1] Thomas Brobjer surveyed Nietzsche’s attitudes toward Plato and argued that, far from entering into a dedicated agon with that philosopher, he had little personal engagement with Plato’s views at all. Certainly, he did not grapple so immediately and fruitfully with him as he did with Emerson, Schopenhauer, Lange, and even Socrates. Instead, he merely “set up a caricature of Plato as a representative of the metaphysical tradition … to which he opposed his own.”[2] This hardly reflects the view of Nietzsche scholarship in general, but Brobjer argued his case vigorously by ranging broadly over …
Empty Souls: Confession And Forgiveness In Hegel And Dostoevsky,
2016
Elon College
Empty Souls: Confession And Forgiveness In Hegel And Dostoevsky, Ryan Johnson
Sophia and Philosophia
“Towards the end of a sultry afternoon early in July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned and in the direction of Kameny Bridge in central St. Petersburg.”[1] Right then, this young man, a former law student named Rodion Raskolnikov, is caught in an agonizing conversation with himself over whether or not to commit the ultimate crime: to murder an innocent person. Exasperated, wondering what to do with such a weighty decision, he cried aloud, “that’s why I don’t act, because I am always talking. Or perhaps I talk so much just because …
Toward A Kripkean Concept Of Number,
2016
Graduate Center, City University of New York
Toward A Kripkean Concept Of Number, Oliver R. Marshall
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Saul Kripke once remarked to me that natural numbers cannot be posits inferred from their indispensability to science, since we’ve always had them. This left me wondering whether numbers are objects of Russellian acquaintance, or accessible by analysis, being implied by known general principles about how to reason correctly, or both. To answer this question, I discuss some recent (and not so recent) work on our concepts of number and of particular numbers, by leading psychologists and philosophers. Special attention is paid to Kripke’s theory that numbers possess structural features of the numerical systems that stand for them, and to …
Wabi-Sabi Mathematics,
2016
Université du Québec à Montréal
Wabi-Sabi Mathematics, Jean-Francois Maheux
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Mathematics and aesthetics have a long history in common. In this relation however, the aesthetic dimension of mathematics largely refers to concepts such as purity, absoluteness, symmetry, and so on. In stark contrast to such a nexus of ideas, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi values imperfections, temporality, incompleteness, earthly crudeness, and even contradiction. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of “wabi-sabi mathematics” by showing (1) how wabi-sabi mathematics is conceivable; (2) how wabi-sabi mathematics is observable; and (3) why we should bother about wabi-sabi mathematics
Explanatory Proofs And Beautiful Proofs,
2016
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Explanatory Proofs And Beautiful Proofs, Marc Lange
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
This paper concerns the relation between a proof’s beauty and its explanatory power – that is, its capacity to go beyond proving a given theorem to explaining why that theorem holds. Explanatory power and beauty are among the many virtues that mathematicians value and seek in various proofs, and it is important to come to a better understanding of the relations among these virtues. Mathematical practice has long recognized that certain proofs but not others have explanatory power, and this paper offers an account of what makes a proof explanatory. This account is motivated by a wide range of examples …
Abstraction And Epistemic Economy,
2016
Chapman University
Abstraction And Epistemic Economy, Marco Panza
MPP Published Research
Most of the arguments usually appealed to in order to support the view that some abstraction principles are analytic depend on ascribing to them some sort of existential parsimony or ontological neutrality, whereas the opposite arguments, aiming to deny this view, contend this ascription. As a result, other virtues that these principles might have are often overlooked. Among them, there is an epistemic virtue which I take these principles to have, when regarded in the appropriate settings, and which I suggest to call ‘epistemic economy’. My purpose is to isolate and clarify this notion by appealing to some examples concerning …
What Do We Mean By Logical Consequence?,
2016
University of Puget Sound
What Do We Mean By Logical Consequence?, Jesse Endo Jenks
Summer Research
In the beginning of the 20th century, many prominent logicians and mathematicians, such as Frege, Russell, Hilbert, and many others, felt that mathematics needed a very rigorous foundation in logic. Many results of the time were motivated by questions about logical truth and logical consequence. The standard approach in the early part of the 20th century was to use a syntactic or proof-theoretic definition of logical consequence. This says that "for one sentence to be a logical consequence of [a set of premises] is simply for that sentence to be derivable from [them] by means of some standard system of …
The Philosophy Of Mathematics: A Study Of Indispensability And Inconsistency,
2016
Scripps College
The Philosophy Of Mathematics: A Study Of Indispensability And Inconsistency, Hannah C. Thornhill
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis examines possible philosophies to account for the practice of mathematics, exploring the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological outcomes of each possible theory. Through a study of the two most probable ideas, mathematical platonism and fictionalism, I focus on the compelling argument for platonism given by an appeal to the sciences. The Indispensability Argument establishes the power of explanation seen in the relationship between mathematics and empirical science. Cases of this explanatory power illustrate how we might have reason to believe in the existence of mathematical entities present within our best scientific theories. The second half of this discussion surveys …
Restall's Proof-Theoretic Pluralism And Relevance Logic,
2016
Old Dominion University
Restall's Proof-Theoretic Pluralism And Relevance Logic, Teresa Kouri
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Restall (Erkenntnis 79(2):279–291, 2014) proposes a new, proof-theoretic, logical pluralism. This is in contrast to the model-theoretic pluralism he and Beall proposed in Beall and Restall (Aust J Philos 78(4):475–493, 2000) and in Beall and Restall (Logical pluralism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006). What I will show is that Restall has not described the conditions on being admissible to the proof-theoretic logical pluralism in such a way that relevance logic is one of the admissible logics. Though relevance logic is not hard to add formally, one critical component of Restall’s pluralism is that the relevance logic that gets added must …
Ante Rem Structuralism And The No-Naming Constraint,
2016
Old Dominion University
Ante Rem Structuralism And The No-Naming Constraint, Teresa Kouri
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Tim Räz has presented what he takes to be a new objection to Stewart Shapiro's ante rem structuralism (ARS). Räz claims that ARS conflicts with mathematical practice. I will explain why this is similar to an old problem, posed originally by John Burgess in 1999 and Jukka Keränen in 2001, and show that Shapiro can use the solution to the original problem in Räz's case. Additionally, I will suggest that Räz's proposed treatment of the situation does not provide an argument for the in re over the ante rem approach.
A New Interpretation Of Carnap's Logical Pluralism,
2016
Old Dominion University
A New Interpretation Of Carnap's Logical Pluralism, Teresa Kouri
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Rudolf Carnap’s logical pluralism is often held to be one in which corresponding connectives in different logics have different meanings. This paper presents an alternative view of Carnap’s position, in which connectives can and do share their meaning in some (though not all) contexts. This re-interpretation depends crucially on extending Carnap’s linguistic framework system to include meta-linguistic frameworks, those frameworks which we use to talk about linguistic frameworks. I provide an example that shows how this is possible, and give some textual evidence that Carnap would agree with this interpretation. Additionally, I show how this interpretation puts the Carnapian position …
