Jeremiah Joven Joaquin

In this interview with W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr, we discuss the metaphysical and ethical questions of grouping and classifying people in terms of race and ethnicity. Outlaw is the author of [On Race and Philosophy] and one of the recognised pioneers of Africana Philosophy. Outlaw talks about growing up in racial segregation in Starkville, Mississippi, the Black Power movement, the notion of the Black intellectual, scholarship and teaching, and philosophizing about race. We discuss the ambiguity of the concept of philosophy of race and explore the concepts of raciality, categories, human sociality, evolution, and oppression. With his philosophical, political, and sociological influences, Outlaw asserts that racism makes no sense at all because the diversity of our species is one of our greatest assets; and in terms of survival, we are all of the same species though certain group-shared differences do matter.

The liar paradox results from a line of reasoning that starts with the liar sentence, ‘This sentence is false’ and ends with a contradictory conclusion, ‘The liar sentence is both true and false’. There have been solutions to the paradox that preserve the standard conception of truth and the classical notion of logical validity. In this paper, I explore nonstandard solutions to it. In particular, I focus on two non-classical solutions to the liar paradox; viz., the gappy and the glutty solutions. According to the gappy solution, the liar sentence is neither true nor false, and the reasoning that leads to the paradoxical conclusion is unsound. On the other hand, according to the glutty solution, the paradoxical conclusion is correct, but any subsequent reasoning from it is invalid. I show some ways of motivating each of these solutions. Next, I show what each implies about the notions of truth and validity, and how each solves the paradox. Finally, I highlight some of the more recent problems that could be pitted against each of these solutions.

In this paper, I provide a brief overview of the development of analytic philosophy in the Philippines. I first highlight the circumstances that led to its inception in the late 1930s, and some of the notable works by prominent Filipino analytic philosophers that helped shape the tradition. Next, I discuss the socio-political climate in the late 1950s through the 1970s that may have led some Filipino philosophers to move away from analytic philosophy. Finally, I explore some signs of its re-emergence in the late twentieth century and its possible trajectories in the twenty-first century.

Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading contemporary feminist philosopher. She has worked on analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and ancient philosophy. Her areas of interest are social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and critical race theory. Her 2012 book, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, collects papers published over the course of twenty years that link work in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language with social and political issues concerning gender, race, and the family. It was awarded the 2014 Joseph B. Gittler Prize for “outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences.” In this interview, done in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, we discuss her ideas on social practices, social structure, and structural explanation. We also delve into her debunking project of elucidating the notion of ideology in a way that links it with contemporary work in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, and to do justice to the materiality of social practices and social structures.

This paper develops a philosophical account of the relata of romantic love, the nature of the objects in a love-relation. This account holds that the lover who loves and the beloved who is loved are particular people who persist through time by having temporal parts. We show how such a perdurantist account could provide models of different kinds of romantic love: from the love of transitory lovers to the love of immortal beings; from the love of lifelong companions to the love of soulmates. Finally, two possible issues raised against this view will also be addressed.

Jc Beall’s off-topic interpretation of Weak Kleene logic offers a logic of ‘true-and-topic’ preservation. However, Nissim Francez has recently argued that being ‘off-topic’ is a relational and not an _absolute_ semantic property; as such, it fails to satisfy the conditions of truth-functionality. For Francez, this means that it ‘cannot serve as an interpretation of a truth-value’. In this paper, I propose a two-layered _re_interpretation of Beall’s off-topic semantics. This two-layered framework has two crucial features: a sentential topic-tagging device and a two-layered evaluation tool. I show that this framework results in a logic that preserves Beall’s key insight and addresses Francez’s concerns.

In “Sideways Music”, Ned Markosian presents the aesthetic value variance of sideways music as a case against what the Spacetime Thesis—the thesis that time is one of four similar dimensions that make up spacetime. Critics have already raised worries about the premises of his argument. In this paper, I focus on Markosian’s assumed aesthetic realism. I argue that there is a version of aesthetic realism—a version that admits aesthetic value gluts—that is consistent with both the Spacetime Thesis and the aesthetic variance of sideways music. If this is right, then sideways music may simply be a non-issue for proponents of the Spacetime Thesis.

In order to fulfil their essential roles as the bearers of truth and the relata of logical relations, propositions must be public and shareable. That requirement has favoured Platonist and other nonmental views of them, despite the well-known problems of Platonism in general. Views that propositions are mental entities have correspondingly fallen out of favour, as they have difficulty in explaining how propositions could have shareable, objective properties. We revive a mentalist view of propositions, inspired by Artificial Intelligence work on perceptual algorithms, which shows how perception causes persistent mental entities with shareable properties that allow them to fulfil the traditional roles of (one core kind of) propositions. The clustering algorithms implemented in perception produce outputs which are (implicit) atomic propositions in different minds. Coordination of them across minds proceeds by game-theoretic processes of communication. The account does not rely on any unexplained notions such as mental content, representation, or correspondence (although those notions are applicable in philosophical analysis of the result).

This collection brings together different philosophical points of view discussing two important aspects of human life, namely love and friendship, within the broad context of comparative philosophy. These points of view differ in terms of their cultural orientations - East or West, ancient or modern; philosophical methodologies - analytical, historical, experimental, or phenomenological, broadly construed; and motivation - explanatory, revisionary, or argumentative. The volume is a comparative treatment of how diverse philosophical cultures view love and friendship, such as how Aristotle and Confucius’ views on friendship are similar and different, how the ancient Greeks and the Buddhists view friendship and happiness, and how posthumous love is possible. With contributions from a diverse set of scholars, this book presents the emerging views of Southeast Asian philosophers compared with those of philosophers from other regions, including Europe and North America. The volume thus provides a multi-faceted way of understanding love and friendship across cultures, and will be relevant to scholars interested in philosophy, the history of ideas, Asian Studies, and religious studies.

In “A neglected reply to Prior’s dilemma” Beall [2012] presents a Weak Kleene framework where Prior’s dilemma for Hume’s no-ought-fromis thesis fails. It fails in the framework because addition, the inference rule that one of its horns relies on, is invalid. In this paper, we show that a more general result is necessary for the viability of Beall’s proposal – a result, which implies that Hume’s thesis holds in the proposed framework. We prove this result and thus show that Beall’s proposal is indeed viable.

In ‘Fuzzy gender: between female embodiment and intersex’, Ashley Tauchert offers a ‘fuzzy’ model for gender. Her proposed model aims to account for the normative boundaries of sex and gender, especially between females, transwomen, and intersexuals, in terms of a ‘gender line’ on which different gender categories are located. This reply paper aims to clear the fuzziness in Tauchert’s model by pointing out two critical problems. First, her model appears to be self-defeating, since the marginalized gender categories it attempts to empower are defined in terms of the hegemonic binarism of the ‘pure’ heterosexual male and the ‘pure’ heterosexual female, which it tries to dislodge. Second, her model implies an infinite number of possible gender categories along the gender line; being so, it becomes theoretically inert and practically inadequate. In lieu of the fuzzy model, this paper suggests an alternative model of thinking through the black/white and grey gender categories. This model utilizes the metaphor of gender galaxies, where each gender category is treated as an independent, socially-conferred galaxy; each having specific societal concerns and political agenda. This model, as will be argued, provides firmer grounding for the political aspirations of these various gender categories.

In ‘What on Earth is Logic?’, Michael Shenefelt and Heidi White offer this observation about the nature of logic: ‘If one tries to justify logic logically, one ends up arguing in a circle’. From this, they conclude that ‘logic is a horizon beyond which none of our earnest self-reflecting arguments can help us see’. While there is much to appreciate in how they developed this idea, there are several worrying points that could still be raised against their view. In this article, we outline such problems.Export citation.

In this paper, I address the problem about the role of academic philosophy for the feminist movement. I argue that the professionalization of feminism, especially within the sphere of academic philosophy, is detrimental to the stated goal of the feminist movement, which, as historically understood, is to procure women’s rights and liberties and to reassess the treatment of women by different social institutions. The thought is that if feminism were to reap the rewards of a socio-political change, feminists should stop their fantastic theorizing and start bringing their advocacies to the proper forums.

This article is a general introduction to the psychology of reasoning. Specifically, it focuses on the dual process theory of human cognition. Proponents of the said two-system view hold that human cognition involves two processes (viz., System 1 and System 2). System 1 is an automatic, intuitive thinking process where judgments and reasoning rely on fast thinking and ready-to-hand data. On the other hand, System 2 is a slow, logical cognitive process where our judgments and reasoning rely on reflective, careful analysis and data evaluation. Supposedly, these two cognitive processes are at play in every thinking task, and they sometimes work together and sometimes go against each other.

In elementary logic textbooks, Venn diagrams are used to analyze and evaluate the validity of syllogistic arguments. Although the method of Venn diagrams is shown to be a powerful analytical tool in these textbooks, it still has limitations. On the one hand, such method fails to represent singular statements of the form, “a is F.” On other hand, it also fails to represent identity statements of the form, “a is b.” Because of this, it also fails to give an account of the validity of some obviously valid arguments that contain these types of statements as constituents. In this paper, owing to the developments in the literature on Venn diagrams, we offer a way of supplementing the rules of the Venn diagram found in textbooks, and show how this retooled Venn diagram technique could account for the problem cases.