E. J. Lowe

(1950 - 2014)

N. Denyer, Language, thought and falsehood in ancient Greek philosophy. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. xi + 222 pp. £35.00 Luis Vega, La trama de la demostración.. Madrid: 1990, Alianza Editorial, 413 pp. No price stated Daniel D. Merrill, Augustus De Morgan and the logic of relations. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990. xi + 259 pp. Dfl. 185/$ 114.00/£64.00 Georg Cantor, Briefe. Edited by Herbert Meschkowski and Winfried Nilson. Berlin, etc: Springer‐Verlag, 1991, viii + 535 pp. DM 158. The selected letters of Bertrand Russell. Volume 1: the private years. Edited by N. Griffin. London: Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 1992. xxi + 553 pp. £25.00 Hourya Sinaceur, Corps et modèles. Paris, Vrin, 1991. 496 pp. 198 Ffr William Aspray, John von Neumann and the origins of modern computing. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The MIT Press, 1990. xvii + 376 pp., 8 + 22 pits. £31.50 Charles S. Chihara, Constructibilily and mathematical existence. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. xv + 282 pp. £32.50 Penelope Maddy, Realism in mathematics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. xi + 204 pp. £25.00 Peter Hylton, Russell, idealism, and the emergence of analytic philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. xvii + 420 pp. £48.00/$!20.00 R. Barrett and R. Gibson. Perspectives on Quine. Oxford: basil blackweil, 1990. xxiii ‐f 358 pp. £31.50 D. Bell and Cooper, The analytic tradition. Meaning, thought and knowledge. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. xi + 225 pp. £35.00 Francis Watanabe, Critical thinking; an introduction to reasoning. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. xv+542 pp. £25.00 A. Cattani, forme delVargomentare. II ragionamento tra logica e retorica. Padova: Edizicmi C.B. 1990. 174 pp. 22.00 lire J. K. Lambert, Philosophical applications of free logic. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 309pp. £40.00 G. Priest, R. Routley and J. Norman, Paraconsistent logic. Essays on the inconsistent. München, Hamden, Wien: Philosophia Verlag, 1989. xxii + 716pp. 398 DM Timoethy Williamson, Identity and discrimination. Oxford: Blackwell. 1990. xi + 173 pp. £30.00 Victor Sánchez, Studies on natural logic and categorial grammar. Amsterdam. 1991. vi + 197 pp. No price stated G. Klima, Ars Artium: essays in philosophical semantics, mediaeval and modern. Budapest: Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1988. 185 pp. No price stated Andrea Nye, Words of power: a feminist reading of the history of logic, New York and London, Routlcdge, 1990. xiii + 190pp. £9.99 T. M. Seebhom, D. Follesdal and J. N. Mohanty, Phenomenology and the formal sciences. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kiuwer Academic Publishers, 1991. viii + 262 pp. £51,00/$!86.00/DK 150 Hans Burkhardt and Barry Smith, Handbook of metaphysics and ontology, 2 vols. Philosophia Verlag, Munich, Philadelphia, Vienna: 1991. 1005 pp. DM650/$ 433.50/£210

E. J. Lowe, a prominent figure in contemporary metaphysics, sets out and defends his theory of what there is. His four-category ontology is a metaphysical system which recognizes four fundamental categories of beings: substantial and non-substantial particulars and substantial and non-substantial universals. Lowe argues that this system has an explanatory power which is unrivalled by more parsimonious theories and that this counts decisively in its favour. He shows that it provides a powerful explanatory framework for a unified account of causation, dispositions, natural laws, natural necessity and many other related matters, thus constituting a full metaphysical foundation for natural science.

Until quite recently, mind-body dualism has been regarded with deep suspicion by both philosophers and scientists. This has largely been due to the widespread identification of dualism in general with one particular version of it: the interactionist substance dualism of Réné Descartes. This traditional form of dualism has, ever since its first formulation in the seventeenth century, attracted numerous philosophical objections and is now almost universally rejected in scientific circles as empirically inadequate. During the last few years, however, renewed attention has begun to be paid to the dualistic point of view, as a result of increasing discontent with the prevailing materialism and reductionism of contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. Awareness has grown that dualism need not be restricted to its traditional form and that other varieties of dualism are not subject to the difficulties commonly raised against Descartes' own version of it. Interest in these alternative versions of dualism is growing fast today, because it seems that they are capable of capturing deep-seated philosophical intuitions, while also being fully consistent with the methodological assumptions and empirical findings of modern scientific work on the human mind and brain. The object of this book is to provide philosophers, scientists, their students, and the wider general public with an up-to-date overview of current developments in dualistic conceptions of the mind in contemporary philosophy and science.

In recent years numerous attempts have been made by analytic philosophers to _naturalize _various different domains of philosophical inquiry. All of these attempts have had the common goal of rendering these areas of philosophy amenable to empirical methods, with the intention of securing for them the supposedly objective status and broad intellectual appeal currently associated with such approaches. This volume brings together internationally recognised analytic philosophers, including Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen and Robert Audi, to question the project of naturalism. The articles investigate what it means to _naturalize_ a domain of philosophical inquiry and look at how this applies to the various sub-disciplines of philosophy including epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of the mind. The issue of whether naturalism is desirable is raised and the contributors take seriously the possibility that excellent analytic philosophy can be undertaken without naturalization. Controversial and thought-provoking, _Analytic Philosophy Without Naturalism_ examines interesting and contentious methodological issues in analytic philosophy and explores the connections between philosophy and science.

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 Categories and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action.

This chapter focuses on John Locke's theory of language, and considers more generally what one might expect a philosophical theory of language to achieve. It examines the merits of Locke's approach to the nature of language and thought. Locke's interest in language seems to focus first and foremost on its expressive character rather than on its semantic relations and properties. The chapter analyzes what Locke believes to be the basic function of language. The privacy of ideas may appear to create a serious difficulty for Locke. Locke himself insists on this privacy, saying that ideas are "invisible, and hidden from others". Locke's theory of abstraction is a theory which he advances in order to explain how the general terms in a language play their distinctive roles. In the Essay, Locke offers brief but quite different account of the linguistic function of what he calls "particles".

Non‐Cartesian substance dualism is a position in the philosophy of mind concerning the nature of the mind‐body relation or, more exactly, the person‐body relation. Whereas Cartesian substance dualism takes subjects of experience to be necessarily immaterial and indeed nonphysical substances, non‐Cartesian substance dualism does not insist on this. This distinctive feature of non‐Cartesian substance dualism gives it certain advantages over Cartesian dualism, without compelling it to forfeit any of the intuitive appeal that attaches to its more traditional rival. In this chapter, the author's own view is that the self is indeed a simple substance. The simplicity of the self goes some way toward explaining its unity, including the unity of consciousness that characterizes its normal condition. A divided consciousness is in principle consistent with self‐identity: what is not consistent with this is a radical disunity of beliefs and values, manifested in a radical inconsistency of thought and action.

In his paper ‘‘Bad luck once again’’ Neil Levy attacks our proof of the consistency of libertarianism by reiterating a time-worn compatibilist complaint.1 This is, that what is not determined must be due to chance. If A has a choice of X or Y, neither X nor Y being causally determined, then if A chooses X it can only be by chance, never for a reason. The only ‘‘reason’’ that could explain the choice of X over Y would have to be a causally sufficient reason, which would rule out A’s having a genuine choice in the first place. Either X is causally necessitated or X is realized by sheer luck. But that these are the only alternatives is untrue. The exercise of deliberative reason opens the way between the Scylla of causal necessitation and the Charybdis of chance, as we shall try to make clear. The central core of Levy’s argument is that any attempt to give a reasons-based explanation of a contrastive fact must fail. A contrastive fact is a fact of the kind ‘‘Jane decides to vacation in Hawaii rather than Colorado,’’ or ‘‘Jane assigns a greater weight to surfing that to white-water rafting.’’ In the last three paragraphs of his paper Levy argues that Jane’s assigning more weight to surfing than to rafting cannot be a reasons-based assignment, because, as he puts it, ‘‘the reasons that would explain the weighting are the weighted reasons themselves.’’ Similarly, prior to making her Hawaii⁄ Colorado decision, Jane has..

Patrick Grim, The incomplete universe:totality, knowledge, and truth. Cambridge, Mass, and London: The MIT Press, 1991. xiv + 165pp. £22.50 Jan SebestikLogique et mathématique chez Bernard Bolzano. Paris:Vrin, 1992. 522 pp. 198Fr J. De Lorenzo, Kant y la matemâtica. El uso constructivo de la razön pura Madrid:Editorial Tecnos, 1992. 180 pp. No price stated F. Coniglione, R. Poli And J. Woleintski, Polish scientific philosophy:The Lvov-Warsaw school. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1993. xi + 358pp. No price stated I. Kant Lectures on logic. Translated and edited by J. Michael Young. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxxii + 695 pp. £55.00 Michael Dummett, The seas of language. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1993. xvii + 482 pp. £40.00 Stephen Read,, Sophisms in medieval logic and grammar. Acts of the Ninth European Symposium for Medieval Logic and Semantics held at St Andrews, June 1990. Dordrecht, Boston, London:Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993. xvii + 421pp. $157.50 James D. McCawley, Everything that linguists have always wanted to know about logic∗ ∗but were ashamed to ask. Second edition. Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press, 1993. xxi + 633pp. £25.95/$37.50 ; £79.25/$113.75 Theodor Ebert, Dialektiker und frühe Stoiker bei Sextus Empiricus. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der Aussagenlogik. Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. 347 pp. DM 85.00 Entre la logique et la foi. Entretiens avec Joseph-M. Bochenski recueillis par Jan Parys. Translated from the Polish by Eric Morin-Aguilar. Montricher :Editions Noir-sur-Blanc, 1990. 353 pp. SFr 40.00 Noel Balzer, The human being as a logical thinker. Amsterdam and Atlanta:Rodopi 1993, 148 pp. No price stated R. I. G. Hughes, A philosophical companion to first-order logic. Indianapolis:Hackett, 1993, viii + 309 pp. No price stated Shahid Rahman, Über Dialoge, Protologische Kategorien und andere Seltenheiten, Frankfurt, Peter Lang Verlag, 1993. 318 pp. No price stated Claire Ortiz Hill, Word and object in Husserl, Frege, and Russell. The roots of twentieth century philosophy. Athens, Ohio:Ohio University Press, 1991. xiii + 215pp., $34.95

In Lowe (2007), I queried the validity of the following inference-schema: This issue is an important one, because it seems to be something like this schema that is relied upon by those philosophers who seek to establish a posteriori truths about the essences of particular entities – notably, particular chemical substances, such as water and gold – by appeal to a combination of empirical information about those entities and certain (alleged) essential truths of a general and a priori character. As one illustration of schema (I), I cited the following inference: I raised various doubts about the validity of this particular inference, whose conclusion (3a) is, if true, an a posteriori truth about the essence of a particular man, John. (Clearly, if the truth of (3a) can be established only by inference from (1a) and (2a), then, since (2a) is undoubtedly an a posteriori claim, (3a) can only be an a posteriori truth.) I also raised more general doubts about schema (I).

When, for example, we say of something that it ‘is an object’, or ‘is an event’, or ‘is a property’, we are engaging in categorial predication: we are assigning something to a certain ontological category. Ontologicalcategorization is clearly a type of classification, but it differs radically from the types of classification that are involved in thetaxonomic practices of empirical sciences, as when a physicist saysof a certain particle that it ‘is an electron’, or when a zoologist saysof a certain animal that it ‘is a mammal’, or when a meteorologist says of a certain weather‐phenomenon that it ‘is a hurricane’. Classifications of the latter types presuppose that the items being classified have already been assigned to appropriate ontologicalcategories, such as the categories of object, species, or event. What do categorial predications mean? How are their truth‐conditions to be determined, and how can those truth‐conditions be known to be satisfied? Do they have truthmakers? Questions like these are amongst those addressed in the present paper.