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304The Epistemology of Mathematical NecessityIn Peter Chapman, Gem Stapleton, Amirouche Moktefi, Sarah Perez-Kriz & Francesco Bellucci (eds.), Diagrammatic Representation and Inference10th International Conference, Diagrams 2018, Edinburgh, UK, June 18-22, 2018, Proceedings, Springer-verlag. pp. 810-813. 2018.It seems possible to know that a mathematical claim is necessarily true by inspecting a diagrammatic proof. Yet how does this work, given that human perception seems to just (as Hume assumed) ‘show us particular objects in front of us’? I draw on Peirce’s account of perception to answer this question. Peirce considered mathematics as experimental a science as physics. Drawing on an example, I highlight the existence of a primitive constraint or blocking function in our thinking which we might ca…Read more
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296Naturalism and Wonder: Peirce on the Logic of Hume's Argument Against MiraclesPhilosophia 28 (1-4): 297-318. 2001.Peirce wrote that Hume’s argument against miracles (which is generally liked by twentieth century philosophers for its antireligious conclusion) "completely misunderstood the true nature of" ’abduction’. This paper argues that if Hume’s argumentative strategy were seriously used in all situations (not just those in which we seek to "banish superstition"), it would deliver a choking epistemological conservatism. It suggests that some morals for contemporary naturalistic philosophy may be drawn fr…Read more
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277A Properly Pragmatist Pragmatics: Peircean Reflections on the Distinction Between Semantics and PragmaticsPragmatics and Cognition 27 (2): 387-407. 2020.Although most contemporary philosophers of language hold that semantics and pragmatics require separate study, there is surprisingly little agreement on where exactly the line should be drawn between these two areas, and why. In this paper I suggest that this lack of clarity is at least partly caused by a certain historical obfuscation of the roots of the founding three-way distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics in Charles Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy of language. I then argue fo…Read more
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276Metaphysics — Low in Price, High in Value: A Critique of Global ExpressivismTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 54 (1): 64. 2018.Pragmatism’s heartening recent revival (spearheaded by Richard Rorty’s bold intervention into analytic philosophy Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) has coalesced into a distinctive philosophical movement frequently referred to as ‘neopragmatism’. This movement interprets the very meaning of pragmatism as rejection of metaphysical commitments: our words do not primarily serve to represent non-linguistic entities, but are tools to achieve a range of human purposes. A particularly thorough and …Read more
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271J. Brunning and P. Forster (eds), "The Rule of Reason" (review)Metascience 8 (1): 170-174. 1999.
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252Peter Olen: Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity (review)Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7 (3). 2019.Commentary on Peter Olen's book "Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity", originally prepared for an 'Author Meets Critics' session organized by Carl Sachs for the Eastern Division Meeting of the APA in Savannah, Georgia, on 5th January, 2018.
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228Peirce’s Reception in Australia and New ZealandEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6 (1). 2014."Although I think it is far to say that in what natives of this part of the world call 'downunder,' Peirce is still a minority interest, appreciation of his work appears to be growing slowly but surely..."
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227This is Simply What I DoPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1). 2003.Wittgenstein's discussion of rule-following is widely regarded to have identified what Kripke called "the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date". But does it? This paper examines the problem in the light of Charles Peirce's distinctive "scientific hierarchy". Peirce identifies a phenomenological inquiry which is prior to both logic and metaphysics, whose role is to identify the most fundamental philosophical categories. His third category, particularly sali…Read more
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219Huw PriceIn Graham Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand, Monash University Epress. 2010.A review of the life and work of the Australian philosopher Huw Price
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211Semi-Platonist Aristotelianism: Review of James Franklin, An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics: Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (4): 837-837. 2015.This rich book differs from much contemporary philosophy of mathematics in the author’s witty, down to earth style, and his extensive experience as a working mathematician. It accords with the field in focusing on whether mathematical entities are real. Franklin holds that recent discussion of this has oscillated between various forms of Platonism, and various forms of nominalism. He denies nominalism by holding that universals exist and denies Platonism by holding that they are concrete, not ab…Read more
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208Danielle Macbeth, "Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing" (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2015.This substantial book is a highly original and thorough work of synthetic first philosophy. Although it has some recognizable roots in the Kantian/Sellarsian tradition of the Pittsburgh school, it adds a wealth of precise discussion of examples from science and mathematics, made possible by Macbeth's dual training in arts and sciences. It presents a developmental story of human reason bootstrapping itself towards greater power and clarity through the Western tradition (which is the sole purview …Read more
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174“Logic, Ethics and the Ethics of Logic”In T. Thellefsen B. Sorensen (ed.), Charles Sanders Peirce in His Own Words, . pp. 271-278. 2014.This piece explores the meaning of the following quote from Charles Peirce (1902), ". . . the main reason logic is unsettled is that thirteen different opinions are current as to the true aim of the science. Now this is not a logical difficulty, but an ethical difficulty; for ethics is the science of aims. Secondly, it is true that ethics has been, and always must be, a theatre of discussion for the reason that its study consists in the gradual development of a distinct recognition of a satisfac…Read more
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159Towards a philosophy of academic publishingEducational Philosophy and Theory 48 (14): 1401-1425. 2016.This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in t…Read more
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156Giovanni Maddalena, "The Philosophy of Gesture: Completing Pragmatists' Incomplete Revolution" (review)Review of Metaphysics 72 (1): 143-147. 2018.Western Philosophy’s modern period has been very much shaped by a representationalism according to which “concepts” (earlier: “ideas”) assembled into “propositions” constitute the fundamental unit of meaning, thought, belief— and even, in the hands of 20th century philosophers such as G.E.M. Anscombe and Jaegwon Kim— action, conceived as performed under a description. What exactly a proposition consists in ontologically is not easy to explain in a manner consonant with prevailing scientific natu…Read more
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154Grasping Mathematical RealityCUADERNOS DE SISTEMÁTICA PEIRCEANA 7. 2015.This paper presents a Peircean take on Wittgenstein's famous rule-following problem as it pertains to 'knowing how to go on in mathematics'. I argue that McDowell's advice that the philosophical picture of 'rules as rails' must be abandoned is not sufficient on its own to fully appreciate mathematics' unique blend of creativity and rigor. Rather, we need to understand how Peirce counterposes to the brute compulsion of 'Secondness', both the spontaneity of 'Firstness' and also the rational intell…Read more
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151Paul Forster, "Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism" (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (1): 137-8. 2013.
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144Owen Holland, "Machine Consciousness" (review)Metapsychology Reviews Online 2004 (Sep): 1-5. 2004.
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144Comments on Diana B. Heney: "Toward a Pragmatist Metaethics" (review)Syndicate. 2018.This poised and articulate volume addresses an area of pragmatist philosophy as yet relatively unexplored in pragmatism's welcome revival. Neopragmatism's preoccupation with changing philosophers' view of the relation between language (or as Rorty puts it: "vocabularies") and reality, has largely focussed their discussions on the 'metaphysics & epistemology', rather than the 'value' side of philosophy, apart from Rorty's brief flirtations with edifying Western political discourse. Yet the nature…Read more
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135Gabriele Gava, "Peirce’s Account of Purposefulness: A Kantian Perspective" (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (2): 267-270. 2016.
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107Pragmatic realism: towards a reconciliation of enactivism and realismPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. forthcoming.This paper addresses some apparent philosophical tensions between realism and enactivism by means of Charles Peirce’s pragmatism. Enactivism’s Mind-Life Continuity thesis has been taken to commit it to some form of anti-realist ‘world-construction’ which has been considered controversial. Accordingly, a new realist enactivism is proposed by Zahidi (_Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,_ _13_(3), 461–475, 2014 ), drawing on Ian Hacking’s ‘entity realism’, which places subjects in worlds comp…Read more
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107Real Law in Charles Peirce's PragmaticismIn Howard Sankey (ed.), Causation and Laws of Nature, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 125--142. 1999.How scholastic realism met the scientific method
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103PragmatismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.An overview of a philosophical movement originating in the United States of America in the 19th century.
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98Engineering philosophyInternational Journal of Machine Consciousness 2 (1): 45-50. 2010.A commentary on a current paper by Aaron Sloman. Sloman argues that in order to make progress in AI, consciousness, "should be replaced by more precise and varied architecture-based concepts better suited to specify what needs to be explained by scientific theories". This original vision of philosophical inquiry as mapping out 'design-spaces' for a contested concept seeks to achieve a holistic, synthetic understanding of what possibilities such spaces embody. It therefore does not reduce to eith…Read more
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95“The Meaning of a Thought is Altogether Something Virtual”: Joseph Ransdell and His LegacyTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49 (4): 451. 2013.Joseph Ransdell (1931–2010), who received his Ph.D in philosophy from Columbia University in 1966, where he was advised by Sidney Morgenbesser, and spent most of his career at Texas Tech University, offered an original and focused challenge to academic philosophy at the end of the Second Millennium. His guiding philosophical passion was understanding how communication might best encourage and support truth seeking. This introduction to a special edition of the Transactions of the Charles S. Peir…Read more
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78The Purpose of the Essential IndexicalThe Commens Working Papers: Preprints, Research Reports and Scientific Communications. 2015.This paper takes indexicality as a case-study for critical examination of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics as currently conceived in mainstream philosophy of language. Both a ‘pre-indexical’ and ‘post-indexical’ analytic formal semantics are examined and found wanting, and instead an argument is mounted for a ‘properly pragmatist pragmatics’, according to which we do not work out what signs mean in some abstract overall sense and then work out to what use they are being put; rath…Read more
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59Phenomenology, Naturalism and Non-reductive Cognitive ScienceAustralasian Philosophical Review 2 (2): 119-124. 2018.Volume 2, Issue 2, June 2018, Page 119-124.
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43Letting reality biteTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44 (2): 208-212. 2008.Describes an experiment in teaching undergraduate epistemology, guided by Peirce’s pragmatic maxim.
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40Habits of Mind: New Insights for Embodied Cognition from Classical Pragmatism and PhenomenologyEuropean Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (2). 2022.Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on con…Read more
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39Peirce, Meaning, and the Semantic WebSemiotica 2013 (193): 119-143. 2013.This paper seeks an explanation for the challenges faced by Semantic Web developers in achieving their vision, compared to the staggering near-instantaneous success of the World Wide Web. To this end it contrasts two broad philosophical understandings of meaning and argues that the choice between them carries real consequences for how developers attempt to engineer the Semantic Web. The first is Rene Descartes’ ‘private’, static account of meaning (arguably dominant for the last 400 years in Wes…Read more
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38Philosophers and professors behaving badly: Responses to ‘named or nameless’ by Besley, Jackson & Peters. An EPAT collective writing projectEducational Philosophy and Theory 55 (3): 272-284. 2023.
Deakin, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Interest
2 more
Metaphilosophy |
History of Western Philosophy |
Meaning |
Truth |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Wilfrid Sellars |
Ludwig Wittgenstein |