Emilio Méndez Pinto

The purpose of this essay is to expound the notion of apriority outlined by Tamara Horowitz in her “A Priori Truth” (1985), a suggestive work that has not received its deserved attention in Spanish-speaking philosophy. I will present Horowitz’s main theses, paying particular attention to her following claims: (i) the classical notion of apriority fails to explain the (supposed) incorrigible character of mathematical knowledge; (ii) this classical notion wrongly assumes that the a priori truth of a proposition p cannot affect our ability to know p except by affecting our ability to have precisely the ingredient concepts of p, and, despite (i), (iii) mathematical truth is the defining stereotype of a priori truth. As part of this general exposition I will discuss three reasons that Horowitz offers in favor of her account of the a priori, namely, that her account succeeds in characterizing some a priori truths that the classical account fails to characterize; that her account rescues our intuition that mathematical knowledge is, with respect to empirical knowledge, especially certain, and Horowitz’s reasons why it follows from her conception of the a priori that it is certainty, but not incorrigibility, the criterion which we must take into account in order to properly distinguish between a priori and non-a priori truths. Having done this, by way of conclusion, I will discuss a possible weakness in her theory of the a priori, a possible objection to it, and a similarity between her proposal and some of Wittgenstein’s ideas, developed in his On Certainty, concerning the ultimate foundations of the a priori and the empirical.

In this paper, I will present the main reasons that Charles Sanders Peirce had for considering logic as a normative science. I have divided this work into two sections. The first is dedicated to discussing the place that, according to Peirce, logic occupies in the “map of sciences”, and in it I present the reasons for Peirce’s (logical) anti–exceptionalism and for the relevance of a classification of the sciences. The second section is dedicated to the description of the main reasons of the American philosopher for considering logic as a normative science, paying particular attention to what, according to Peirce, is the central problem of logic and to his reasons why reasoning is deliberative.

In this work I examine the reasons offered by David Lewis in favor of tolerance in his works “Mill and Milquetoast” and “Academic Appointments: Why Ignore the Advantage of Being Right?” In the first section I expose and discuss the conception of tolerance that is the target of Lewis’s objections, namely, the conception defended by J.S. Mill. In the second section I expose and discuss Lewis’s main reasons in favor of tolerance and the advantages that, according to Lewis, has his position in relation to that of Mill. In the third section I discuss some of the philosophical and political consequences that seem to follow from Lewis’s proposal and from his criticisms of Mill’s conception of tolerance.

In this article I discuss the main theses of the realist political philosophy developed in recent years by Raymond Geuss and embodied in his famous Philosophy and Real Politics. Once the motivations behind Geuss’ project identified and its similarities and differences with the other great realistic philosophical-political project of our days, that of Bernard Williams, pointed out, I critically expose Geuss’ theses and his objections to the Kantian and Rawlsian ways of doing political philosophy. In addition to discussing the central points of his proposal, I present two general responses to it, one doctrinal and the other methodological.