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49Freud's Ambiguous ConceptsJournal of Speculative Philosophy 3 (2). 1989.In this paper I propose to say something about why certain key psychoanalytic concepts, particularly that of the unconscious, are special because of a studied, and therapeutically important, ambiguity or paradoxicality which affects them. Before I examine these concepts, however, the first section of this paper discusses some of Sartre's views on psychological explanation. On the one hand, this gives me a way of introducing the dichotomy of self-evident irreducibility and existential lucidity wh…Read more
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44Much of traditional rabbinic hermeneutics, what I call "midrashic interpretation," appears to be of such a bizarre nature as to require some sort of explanation, or even justification. This essay attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for midrashic interpretation by placing it in the context of the idea (vaguely neo-platonic) that God is only fully realized as the result of a certain process, a process of which midrashic interpretation is an essential part. In the final section I attempt…Read more
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37A preface to the Japanese translation of my book _Donald Davidson_ in which I discuss two issues on which Davidson's thought developed substantially after the book was published. First, I explain a new argument, the triangulation argument, which has come to play a prominent part in Davidson’s recent work. Secondly, I enter in some detail into a continuing controversy over supervenience and the causal efficacy of the mental, since Davidson has advanced the issue with a new paper on the topic.
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28The Historicity of Artifacts: Use and Counter-UseMetaphysics 5 (1): 1-13. 2022.Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘queer use,’ I present and extend a neo-Aristotelian theory of artifacts to capture what I call ‘counter-use.’ The theory of artifacts is based on the idea that what they are, how they come to be, and what their functions are cannot be understood independently from each other. They come to exist when a maker imposes the concept of their substantial kind onto some matter by working on the matter to make an artifact of that kind out of it. The extensions to this …Read more
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22A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga!Tell It Slant Press. 2022.A Certain Gesture: Evnine's Batman Meme Project and Its Parerga! is an entirely original kind of work. It takes the form of commentaries on memes made with the image of Batman slapping Robin. The commentaries are written as if they were not authored by the same person who made the memes, allowing the author to consider himself and his work from the outside. The book defies genre by mixing discussions of philosophy, psychoanalysis, Judaism, language, and representation with self-writing and autot…Read more
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16On the Way to LanguageIn Lewis Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Library of Living Philosophers), Open Court. 1999.The paper is an examination of how Davidson's holism constrains his account of language learning. The problem is that holism implies that in learning a language we cannot pass through stages of knowing part of the language. Rather, some sense must be found for the notion of partly knowing the whole language.
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12Philosophy Through MemesIn Lee C. McIntyre, Nancy Arden McHugh & Ian Olasov (eds.), A companion to public philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2022.A paradigm of a meme, in its contemporary sense, is an image macro – an image copied by users, who customize it by adding their own text according to implicitly prescribed norms. The native medium of philosophy is language, generally in the form of either discursive text or Socratic discussion. This chapter suggests there are two features of human existence that stand to meme‐making in something of the same relation as spontaneous dance does to choreography. These features are bricolage and owne…Read more
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11European and American PhilosophersIn Robert L. Arrington (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophers, Blackwell. 2017.Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categ…Read more
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3Innate Principles and Radical InterpretationLocke Studies 18 33. 1987.This paper suggests that Locke's arguments against innate principles rest on a particular conception of what it is for things to be "in the mind." Understanding that notion in terms of presuppositions for radical interpretation allows us to see how some principle might be considered innate after all.
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The Relations Between Logic and ThoughtDissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 1996.Two traditional opinions about the relations between logic and thought are presented: first, that logic and thought have nothing to do with each other; second, that logic is the empirical science of thought. This second view is known as psychologism. I characterize a third view, which I call psycho--logicism, according to which logic is not dependent on thought, as in psychologism, but in which thought is dependent on logic-contrary to the first picture described. The argument for psycho-logicis…Read more
Coral Gables, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |