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41The Importance of Joint RespectPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (1): 217-221. 1996.George and I have been discussing Dividing Reality. It was my Canadian friend whose native language is supposed to have so many different words for snow and ice who suggested I was wasting my time with him and should try George. After all, he pointed out, George’s environment is so different from even the Arctic that we'd be getting a truly alien perspective. He at least understands ‘gricular', in fact he'd be happy to see more gricular things about, they might well be edible. George does not se…Read more
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41Characterizing and ClassifyingThe Monist 77 (3): 315-328. 1994.Regimentation of an intuitively plausible distinction enhances understanding of that distinction. In Carnap’s words, it is an explication. Properly employed, it is, in the case to be considered, and in almost all others, an indispensable aid to good philosophizing.
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40A Semantics for OntologyDialectica 39 (3): 193-215. 1985.SummaryLeśniewski presented his logical systems in a way which conformed to his nominalism, so the question arises whether Leśniewski's logic can be given a natural formal semantics which, unlike current versions, avoids commitment to abstract entities. Building on hints in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I develop the idea of a way of meaning which is the basis for what I call combinatorial semantics. I then consider whether this commits us to abstract objects or an intensional metalogic
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39WaysKriterion - Journal of Philosophy 7 (1): 12-15. 1994.ABSTRACT There is more than one way to kill a cat. What are ways? Very little has been written about them in general, but they appear at crucial places in many philosophical discussions. Clarity over the ontology of ways could help in several areas of philosophy. After indicating where ways have been mentioned, I discuss briefly the corresponding linguistic feature, adverbs of manner, before outlining three theories: a Platonistic one making ways a complex kind of function, a Davidsonian one in …Read more
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38On the Motives Which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism, by Roman IngardenJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 9 (2): 137-137. 1978.
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38Functional operations in Frege's BegriffsschriftHistory and Philosophy of Logic 9 (1): 35-42. 1988.Frege uses Greek letters in two different ways in his Begriffsschrift. One way is the familiar use of bound variables, in conjunction with variable-binding operators, to mark and close argument-places. The other, which is quite unfamiliar, employs letters to mark places for operators to reach into, without thereby closing these places. Frege thereby invents a powerful and compact notation for functional operations which can be recommended even today. His regrettable double use of Greek letters o…Read more
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37Linguistic Complexity and Argumentative Unity: A Lvov-Warsaw School SupplementStudies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric 36 (1): 101-119. 2014.It is argued that the source of complexity in language is twofold: repetition, and syntactic embedding. The former enables us to return again and again to the same subject across many sentences, and to maintain the coherence of an argument. The latter is governed by two forms of complexification: the functor-argument structure of all languages and the operator-bound-variable mechanism of familiar formal languages. The former is most transparently represented by categorial grammar, and an extensi…Read more
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36Armstrong and TropesIn Francesco Federico Calemi (ed.), Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong, De Gruyter. pp. 71-84. 2016.
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36Unless you live in the world of theatre or film or politics or sport, you rarely get to meet people whom you can truly describe as “larger than life”. Academia has more than its fair share of boring people: being clever does not mean being interesting. But one academic I met on several occasions before he died was definitely larger than life, and he was Polish. He was Father Józef Maria Bocheński.
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36Review of Mark Steiner: The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (1): 181-184. 2001.
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35Gestalt and functional dependenceIn Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia. pp. 158--190. 1988.
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34The Context of the Phenomenological MovementPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (3): 426-428. 1984.
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34To be and/or not to be the objects of meinong and HusserlIn Lila Haaparanta & Heikki Koskinen (eds.), Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic, Oxford University Press, Usa. pp. 241. 2012.
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33Bolzano, Brentano and Meinong: Three Austrian RealistsIn Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 109-136. 1999.Although Brentano generally regarded himself as at heart a metaphysician, his work then and subsequently has always been dominated by the Psychology. He is rightly celebrated as the person who reintroduced the Aristotelian-Scholastic notion of intentio back into the study of the mind. Brentano's inspiration was Aristotle's theory of perception in De anima, though his terminology of intentional inexistence was medieval. For the history of the work and its position in his output may I refer to my …Read more
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32Abstraktion ohne abstrakte GegenstandeZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 66 (1): 114-129. 2012.
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30Meaning and languageIn Barry Smith & David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy), Cambridge University Press. pp. 106. 1995.
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29Ontic Generation: Getting Everything from the BasicsIn Hieke Alexander & Leitgeb Hannes (eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Ontos Verlag. pp. 11--137. 2009.
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28Rescher on nomic necessityPhilosophical Studies 28 (3). 1975.(2) All X’s have to be Y’s is to be brought out by glossing the latter as a stronger, nomological generalization involving counterfactural claims, thus: (3) All X’s are Y’s and further if any z that is not an X were an X, then z would be a Y. Professor Rescher points out that while (1) is equivalent to its contrapositive..
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27The Price of Positivity : Mumford and NegativesIn Jean-Maurice Monnoyer (ed.), Metaphysics and Truthmakers, Ontos Verlag. pp. 331-333. 2007.
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26The University of Warsaw has a splendid modern library with 60,000 m 2 of floor space. It resembles a shopping centre. The long and elegant modern building on ulica Dobra, on the low ground between the old University and the Vistula, was opened in 1998 replacing the previous hopelessly inadequate facilities. It has an imposing sequence of copper-green “great texts” on its front side in Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Latin, Polish, music, and mathematics. These are international symbols, posting…Read more
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25Multivalence and Vagueness: A Reply to CopelandProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95. 1995.Peter Simons; Multivalence and Vagueness: A Reply to Copeland, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 201–210, https://
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25Objects and Objectives, Dignitatives and Desideratives: Meinong’s Objects of Cognition and AffectAxiomathes 27 (5): 443-453. 2017.Alexius Meinong is one of the foremost, most independent-minded, most distinctive, most misunderstood and most unjustly maligned of all philosophers. He was pilloried by his own teacher Brentano and his one-time admirer Bertrand Russell as what Gilbert Ryle called “perhaps the supreme entity-multiplier in the history of philosophy.” It is often enough to employ the adjective ‘Meinongian’ to cast a philosopher’s views into the outer darkness. But as supreme commentator J. N. Findlay observes, Mei…Read more
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25Bolzano sur les nombresPhilosophiques 30 (1): 127-135. 2003.Dans cet article, l’auteur présente la théorie bolzanienne du nombre. Il établit, sur la base d’une comparaison avec Frege, que la conception bolzanienne rencontre toutes les exigences d’une telle théorie tout en présentant plusieurs traits originaux, comme par exemple le fait qu’elle s’articule sur la base d’une théorie des « collections » , qui lui confèrent un intérêt philosophique certain. Tout en indiquant au passage un problème inhérent à la notion bolzanienne de Reihe, l’auteur présente l…Read more
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland