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121How original a work is the tractatus logico-philosophicus?Philosophy 77 (3): 421-446. 2002.Wittgenstein's Tractatus is widely regarded as a masterpiece, a brilliant, if flawed attempt to achieve an ‘unassailable and definitive … final solution’ to a wide range of philosophical problems. Yet, in a 1931 notebook, Wittgenstein confesses: ‘I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else’. This disarming self-assessment is, I believe accurate. Th…Read more
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72Stephen Clark, the laws of logic and the soritesPhilosophy 84 (1): 135-143. 2009.A standard method for refuting a set of claims is to show that it implies a contradiction. Stephen Clark questions this method on the grounds that the Law of Non-Contradiction, together with the other fundamental laws of logic do not accord with everyday reality. He accounts for vagueness by suggesting that, for any vague predicate 'F', an ordinary object is typically to some extent both F and not-F, and that objects do not change abruptly from being F to being not-F. I challenge Clark's 'decons…Read more
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32Fallacious ReasoningTeaching Philosophy 18 (2): 139-146. 1995.The author recommends an involved study of logical fallacies in order to provide a database of testable hypotheses for error reasoning. The purpose of the study is to make the study of logical fallacies accessible to a wider audience. Following a recent study conducted by Ludwig Schlecht, the author presents a diagnostic method to illustrate how an argument can be fallacious from the breach of particular rational principles. The diagnosis method also serves as investigation into other forms of a…Read more
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Clear and Queer Thinking: Wittgenstein's Development and His Relevance to Modern ThoughtMind 110 (437): 207-211. 2001.
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128Paradoxical partners: semantical brides and set-theoretical groomsAnalysis 73 (1): 33-37. 2013.Is there a key for ‘translating' some set-theoretical paradoxes into counterpart semantical paradoxes and vice-versa? There is, and this encourages the hope of a unified solution. The solution turns not on inventing new axioms that do not entail contradiction, but on imposing a completely intuitive restriction on the comprehension axiom of naive set theory in order to avoid illegitimate (circular) stipulation
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26A Buridanian discussion of desire, murder and democracyAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 70 (4). 1992.This Article does not have an abstract
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University of KentRegular Faculty
University of St. Andrews
PhD, 1977