Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Sense Of Life In Language Love And Literature, Lawrence Kimmel

Lawrence Kimmel

The fundamental human activity of telling stories, extended into the cultural tradition of literature, leads to the creation of alternative worlds in which we find resonance with the whole range of human thought and emotion from different and often conflicting perspectives. Fiction has no obligation to the ordinary strictures that bind our public lives, so the mind is free, engaging in literature, to become for the moment whatever imagination can conceive. So we become, in fictive reality, madman and poet, sinner and saint, embrace and embody sorrow and joy, hope and despair and all the rag tag feelings that flesh …

Quantifiers, Domains, And (Meta-) Ontology, Lajos L. Brons

Lajos Brons

In metaphysics, quantifiers are assumed to be either binary or unary. Binary quantifiers take the concept(s) "all of" and/or "some of" as primitive(s); unary quantifiers take the concept(s) "everything" and/or "something" as primitive(s). Binary quantifiers (explicitly) range over domains. However, "everything" and "something" are reducible to the binary quantifiers "all of" and "some of": "everything" is all of some implied domain, and there is no natural, default, or inherent domain U such that everything is all of U. Therefore, any quantifier ranges over a domain, and is thus binary, and there are no unary quantifiers.

This implies that if two …

Retroactive Harms And Wrongs, Steven Luper

Steven Luper

According to t he immunity thesis, nothing that happens after we a re dead harms or benefits us . It seems defensible on the following basis : 1. If harmed (benefitted) by something , we incur the harm (benefit) at some time. 2. So if harmed (benefitted) by a postmortem event, we incur the harm (benefit) while alive or at some other time . 3. But if we incur the harm (benefit) while alive , backwards causation occurs. 4. And if we incur the harm (benefit) at any other time, we incur it at a time when we do not …

Restorative Rigging And The Safe Indication Account, Steven Luper

Steven Luper

Typical Gettieresque scenarios involve a subject, S, using a method, M, of believing something, p, where, normally, M is a reliable indicator of the truth of p, yet, in S’s circumstances, M is not reliable: M is deleteriously rigged. A different sort of scenario involves rigging that restores the reliability of a method M that is deleteriously rigged: M is restoratively rigged. Some theorists criticize (among others) the safe indication account of knowledge defended by Luper, Sosa, and Williamson on the grounds that it treats such cases as knowledge. But other theorists also criticize the safe indication account because it …

False Negatives, Steven Luper

Steven Luper

In Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick suggested that knowing that some proposition, p, is true is a matter of being “sensitive” to p’s truth-value. It requires that one’s belief state concerning p vary appropriately with the truth-value of p as the latter shifts in relevant possible worlds. Nozick fleshed out this sketchy view with a specific analysis of what sensitivity entails. Famously, he drew upon this analysis in order to explain how common-sense knowledge claims, such as my claim to know I have hands, are true, even though we do not know that skeptical hypotheses are false. His explanation hinged on …