Metaphysics Commons^™

Model-Theoretic Arguments In Philosophy, Peter Susanszky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on model-theoretic arguments in philosophy, especially those of Quine, Davidson, and Putnam. In the first part, to ground the debate, I give a rigorous introduction to the salient parts of first-order model theory. I start the second part by giving an introduction to Quine's philosophy, and how the model-theoretic arguments fit into it. After considering how Donald Davidson adopted the Quinean lesson, I move on to Putnam's model-theoretic arguments. Putnam's spin on these model-theoretic considerations significantly departs from Quine and Davidson, while retaining many of the core ideas. Most importantly, I argue that the target of Putnam's …

Somatic Prosthetics For Planetary Resonance, Disha Dharesh Kumar R

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a 'crisis of imagination', the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as conscious at different levels and participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Information Pansycishm, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. …

A Modal Analysis Of Human Dignity, Alexander S. Eberspacher

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

This work examines the history of the human rights tradition and philosophically compares it to the natural law tradition as most pre-eminently developed in Catholicism. It then turns to examine how Catholicism offers a philosophically sound base for universal dignity through the light of Saul Kripke’s modal work, while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights cannot account for such.

The Principle Of Tolerance And Logical Pluralism, Teresa Kouri Kissel

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Logical pluralism is the view that there is more than one correct logic. This is in contrast with logical monism, which holds that only one is, and logical nihilism, which holds that none are. Monists are typically folks who defend a single logic, like Michael Dummett (2000) or Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D. Belnap (1975), as correct for guiding deductive reasoning.

Magicicada And Mathematics: What The Parochiality Of Our Explanations Means For The Indispensability Argument, Jadyn Malone

Philosophy Senior Theses

This thesis examines whether the indispensability argument justifies belief in the existence of mathematical entities. I adopt ontological naturalism, arguing that we should believe in entities that feature in our best scientific theories, which are determined through inference to the best explanation. The indispensability argument contends that because mathematical entities are explanatorily indispensable to our best scientific theories – as demonstrated by examples like the prime number explanation of cicada life cycles – we should believe they exist just as we believe in electrons and stars.

However, I identify a challenge: our scientific explanations are inherently parochial, shaped by human …

The Grim Reaper Argument Is An Argument For No One, Daniel Linford, Alex Malpass

Philosophy Faculty Publications

According to a prominent philosophical argument for the beginning of time – the Grim Reaper Argument (GRA) – had it been possible for the past to be infinite, then a provably impossible scenario could have been constructed. Such a scenario is not possible, so, the GRA concludes, the past cannot be infinite. Here, we show that the GRA includes one premise acceptable only for Humeans and another premise acceptable only for anti-Humeans. Since, plausibly, everyone is either a Humean or an anti-Humean, the GRA is an argument for no one. Additionally, we argue that there may not be a way …

Japanese-English Translation: Miki Kiyoshi —Thinking With Master Nishida (First Published In Fujin Kōron, August 1941) Complete Draft; Translated, Edited, And Revised By Christopher Southward, October 2022-September 2023 「西田先生のことども」、三木清著（初発 婦人公論、昭和十六年八月）, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Japanese-English Translation: Miki Kiyoshi —Thinking with Master Nishida (First Published in Fujin Kōron, August 1941) Complete Draft; Translated, Edited, and Revised by Christopher Southward, October 2022-September 2023「西田先生のことども」、三木清著（初発 婦人公論、昭和十六年八月）

Source text transcribed and published by Aozora Bunko–a compendium of public-domain Japanese literature, philosophy, and criticism

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Zero, Śūnya And Pūrṇa: A Comparative Analysis, Animisha Tewari

Comparative Philosophy

Due to apparent duality in this world, one has to face a lot of difficulties while searching for the Truth. Our ego is the root cause for perception of duality and this in turn leads to suffering. This suffering can only be extinguished by attainment of the Truth, i.e, non-duality. However, in order to enable the finite intellect to comprehend the incomprehensible non-duality, this undifferentiated whole is sometimes denoted by nothingness (śūnya) or fullness (pūrṇa). Non-duality is usually understood by the numeral ‘1’ which stands for unity or oneness. The main aim of this paper is …

Ineffability, Emptiness And The Aesthetics Of Logic, Andreas Kapsner

Comparative Philosophy

In this essay, I explore the nature of the logical analysis of Buddhist thought that Graham Priest has offered in his book The Fifth Corner of Four (5of4). The paper traces the development of a logical value in- troduced in 5of4, which Priest has called e. The paper points out that certain criticisms I have made earlier still stand, but focuses on a recon- ceptualization of 5of4 in which these arguments carry less weight. This new perspective on the book, inspired by a response to my arguments by Priest himself, sees the logical analysis of Buddhism …

Necessity, Essence And Analyticity: Toward An Analytic Essentialist Account Of Necessity, Dongwoo Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some truths could not have failed to hold. Such are called metaphysically necessary truths. As Michael Dummett once aptly formulated, the philosophical problem about necessity is twofold: what makes necessary truths necessarily true and how do we recognize them as such? This dissertation aims to address these questions by developing and defending a novel account of necessity, which has the following three main theses: (1) the necessity of a statement about an entity is established as a consequence of a general principle implying that if the entity is a certain way then it is necessarily that way and the fact …

Don’T Be So Fast With The Knife: A Reply To Kapsner, Graham Priest

Comparative Philosophy

The is a brief reply to the central objection against the construction of my The Fifth Corner of Four by Andi Kapsner in his “Cutting Corners: A Critical Note on Priest’s Five-Valued Catuṣkoṭi. This concerns the desirability of adding a fifth corner (ineffability) to the four of the catuṣkoṭi.

Cutting Corners: A Critical Note On Priest’S Five-Valued Catuṣkoṭi, Andreas Kapsner

Comparative Philosophy

Graham Priest has offered a rational reconstruction of Buddhist thought that involves, first, modeling the Catuṣkoṭi by a four valued logic, and then later adding a fifth value, read as “ineffability”. This note examines that fifth value and raises some concerns about it that seem grave enough to reject it. It then sketches an alternative to Priest’s account that has no need for the fifth value.

A Russellian Analysis Of Buddhist Catuskoti, Nicholaos Jones

Comparative Philosophy

Names name, but there are no individuals who are named by names. This is the key to an elegant and ideologically parsimonious strategy for analyzing the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi. The strategy is ideologically parsimonious, because it appeals to no analytic resources beyond those of standard predicate logic. The strategy is elegant, because it is, in effect, an application of Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions to Buddhist contexts. The strategy imposes some minor adjustments upon Russell's theory. Attention to familiar catuṣkoṭi from Vacchagotta and Nagarjuna as well as more obscure catuṣkoṭi from Khema, Zhi Yi, and Fa Zang motivates the …

Real Possibility: Modality And Responsibility, Julia Gaul

Honors Scholar Theses

Imagine: someone is backing out of a parking space and does not look in their rear view mirror. They subsequently hit a car that was passing by. One could argue that they simply could have avoided the accident had they looked in their mirror. This non-actual possibility, that they could have looked in the mirror, seems legally and morally relevant. One could also argue that they could have avoided the accident had they stuck their feet out of their window and sung La Marseillaise.

My leading questions is: how do we distinguish possibilities that are legally and morally relevant from …

Logical Pluralism And Vicious Regresses, Daniel Boyd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This material in this dissertation will be divided into two parts. The first part is a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in the philosophy of logic in the 20th century. The second part will focus on three different versions of logical pluralism, i.e., the view that there are many correct logics. In each case an argument will be developed to show that these versions of logical pluralism result in a vicious regress.

The material in part one will be divided into three chapters, and there are a few reasons for having a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in …

Pagan Winter, Samm Willard

Sophia and Philosophia

Isn’t this a lovely place to pick apart your lover’s face
Some say the river bank’s a sacred place
Others think that’s such a silly thing to say
But I would never try to prove them wrong on such a blissful day
The colors of the leaves will soon have changed
The yellows and the greens will fade to gray
But I will lose a quiet hour to the darkest day
A pagan winter’s on its way
I will see the death of God before it’s Christmas day
A pagan winter’s on its way
Well isn’t this some lovely clay …

Haunted By A Memory I Never Lived, Carlos Hiraldo

Sophia and Philosophia

I am haunted by a memory I never lived. My mother and father are sitting in their house in Brooklyn with my baby sister watching the 1969 moon landing. Born in 1971, I wasn’t there. But I spent my toddler years in the waning residue of excitement about the landing and listening to adults talk about where they had watched it. As a child, I was baffled by how vivid this event that occurred without me was to people of my parents’ age. Except for some surviving pictures of the living room, I never knew the house in which they …

Recapture, Transparency, Negation And A Logic For The Catuṣkoṭi, Adrian Kreutz

Comparative Philosophy

The recent literature on Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi centres around Jay Garfield’s (2009) and Graham Priest’s (2010) interpretation. It is an open discussion to what extent their interpretation is an adequate model of the logic for the catuskoti, and the Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā. Priest and Garfield try to make sense of the contradictions within the catuskoti by appeal to a series of lattices – orderings of truth-values, supposed to model the path to enlightenment. They use Anderson & Belnaps's (1975) framework of First Degree Entailment. Cotnoir (2015) has argued that the lattices of Priest and Garfield …

Call Thee Ishmael, Mark Backus

Sophia and Philosophia

“Moby-Dick is a strangely compelling book.”[1] Scholarship and commentary help the reader understand why Ishmael’s tale is so compelling, but not always why it is strangely so. The perennial search for a master key to unlock the strangeness of Moby-Dick beneath its infinite layers has added more mesmerizing layers, but if many of the proposed keys fit into the lock of Moby-Dick, why is there yet a sense that none have completely opened “the great flood-gates?” (Moby-Dick 22, hereafter “MD”). Is it because none of them are right, or that they are only partly right, or that …

Dialetheism, Paradox, And Nāgārjuna’S Way Of Thinking, Richard H. Jones

Comparative Philosophy

Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of emptiness, his ideas on “two truths” and language, and his general method of arguing are presented clearly by him and can be stated without paradox. That the dialetheists today can restate his beliefs in paradoxical ways does not mean that Nāgārjuna argued that way; in fact, their restatements misrepresent and undercut his arguments.

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Platonic Agonism: A Dialogical Addendum To Plato’S Sophist, Bennett Foster

Sophia and Philosophia

The following addendum to Plato’s Sophist was fabricated as a kind of experimental answer to a specific contextual question: What is the relation of Plato’s conception of philosophy to the practice of the agōn in Ancient Greece? For the “contest-system,”[1] to adopt Gouldner's phrase, has long been recognized as one of the salient features of Greek culture in the centuries leading up to Plato’s time.[2] Yet in the dialogues Plato never gives an explicit critique of the agōn the way he does other cultural phenomena, such as politics, poetry, rhetoric, education, etc. Many scholars have therefore concluded that Plato is …

Fictionalism, Semantics, And Ontology, Gordon Purves

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

This article expands upon the argument of a previous work which defended a variational account of scientific fictions. Specifically, I show that this understanding of scientific fictions can provide guidance for realist interpretations of scientific theories and models. Depending on a model's variational properties, different ontological commitments are appropriate, providing a principled way for a realist to moderate her views according to the structural properties of a given model. This reasoning is then applied the Lee-Yang theory and Kubo-Martin-Schwinger statistics, two foundational models in quantum statistical mechanics. The Lee-Yang theory is analyzed in a way that permits a robust realist …

Socratic Metaethics Imagined, Steve Ross, Lisa Warenski

Sophia and Philosophia

A time machine mysteriously appeared one day in ancient Athens. Curious about the future of philosophical dialogue, Socrates entered the device and traveled to the 21st Century. He spent several months in the United Kingdom and United States discussing metaethics before returning to Athens, now a devoted and formidable quasi-realist moral expressivist.

Platonism Of The Future, Patrick L. Miller

Sophia and Philosophia

Buying textbooks, writing syllabi, and putting on armor. This is how many students and teachers prepared to return to campus this past fall. The last few years have witnessed an intensifying war for the soul of the university, with many minor skirmishes, and several pitched battles. The most dramatic was last spring at Evergreen State, shortly before the end of the spring semester.[1] Perhaps the most dramatic since then has been at Reed College.[2] There is no shortage of examples, filling periodicals left and right. Wherever it next explodes, this war promises more ferocity, causing more casualties—careers, programs, ideals.

We Scholars, Mark Anderson

Sophia and Philosophia

As a graduate student in my late twenties, I began one winter to experience attacks of migraine fever while conducting research preliminary to the writing of my doctoral thesis. Long hours sitting alone in the basement rooms of university libraries, hunched over a creaking desk, chasing down references to obscure manuscripts, translating ancient languages from small-print editions of old books, copying extended extracts into my notes, formulating and recording my own insights and arguments—all this intellectual labor executed while hidden away from the sun drained me of the vigor I’d acquired as a child on walking tours with my father. …

In Memoriam: Richard Lane Tieszen (1951-2017)

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Moving, Moved And Will Be Moving: Zeno And Nāgārjuna On Motion From Mahāmudrā, Koan And Mathematical Physics Perspectives, Robert Alan Paul

Comparative Philosophy

Zeno’s Arrow and Nāgārjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (Mūlamādhyamakakārikā, MMK) Chapter 2 (MMK/2) contain paradoxical, dialectic arguments thought to indicate that there is no valid explanation of motion, hence there is no physical or generic motion. There are, however, diverse interpretations of the latter text, and I argue they apply to Zeno’s Arrow as well. I also find that many of the interpretations are dependent on a mathematical analysis of material motion through space and time. However, with modern philosophy and physics we find that the link from no explanation to no phenomena is invalid and …

Vol 8 No 2 Editor's Words, Bo Mou

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Vol 8 No 2 Contents Page

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.