Kenneth Rankin

In The Recovery of the Soul, Kenneth Rankin suggests that the current impasse over solutions to many philosophical problems is the result, in part, of a failure to consider how each of these problems bears on the rest. Rankin shows that a libertarian theory of free will, an A-theory of time, a corporealist theory of personal identity, and a non-relativist interpretation of the foundation of ethics all contribute to or are derived from a psychocentric form of physicalism. The proposed Modal Identity thesis identifies the mind, or that which ensouls the body, with a strictly physical power, the power to act intentionally from occasion to occasion in any one of several mutually exclusive ways. Rankin argues further that the non-arbitrary individuation of particular physical things derives from the causal powers they possess. The distinctive power that ensouls our bodies is identified as the primary causal power: all other powers derive their status as powers from it in so far as they are constitutive, or instruments, of it. Rankin demonstrates that many of our ontological preconceptions are Aristotelian in origin. The psychocentric physicalism of the central thesis is a response to Aristotle's question "What is being?" and in the earlier chapters of the book Aristotle's contributions to a theory of being are used as a preliminary study to suggest which parts of these preconceptions should be kept and which revised. Later chapters suggest that failure to resolve many philosophical problems results in part from the failure of Aristotle's philosophy to fulfil its promise.

To be truly provocative and outrageous the superior philosophical sophistry will commonly possess four somewhat adventitious features. I shall rate it as classic if it has all four. First, and least adventitiously, the argument will be crisp and initially seductive. Second, by the standard the sophistry sets direct rebuttal will be laborious and diffuse. Third, the recipe for the latter will prescribe that we pick out some hitherto unarticulated logical principle such that if the principle be true then the sophistical argument must be invalid, and then, on the strength of that consequence assume the principle to be true. Consequently and fourth, as an antidote parody is supreme. With a persuasive absence of fuss and bias we can turn the tables if we show that, if the sophistical argument were really valid, then some structurally similar argument would prove just as consummately far too much. In short, from the rhetorical point of view at least, Gaunilo is more lethal than Kant. Even if the similarity is defective, the sophist will lose some of his adventitious and insufferable poise, if he ventures to show why.

Wittgenstein argues that understanding a language consists of mastery of techniques for playing language‐games rather than some sort of mental state or episode such as mental imagery, rule invocation, or atmosphere investing our experience of words. His elimination of the three mentalistic alternatives presupposes the peculiar distinction, or its virtual lack, between speaker and listener presupposed by his positive claim, instead of establishing the latter. This paper vindicates the episodic nature of certain types of understanding, and gives each of his three alternatives a suitably qualified role therein, by drawing the distinctions in a less biassed way.