•  19
    Hadot's later Wittgenstein: A critique
    Philosophical Investigations 47 (2): 178-203. 2024.
    Pierre Hadot is best known as a historian of ancient philosophy and for advocating the relevance of ancient thinking for contemporary lives. What is less well known is that he was one of the first French philosophers to take a serious interest in the work of Wittgenstein, publishing between 1959 and 1962 two essays on the Tractatus and two on the Philosophical Investigations, since republished as Wittgenstein et les limites de langage (Paris: J. Vrin, 2010). Only two of these essays are availabl…Read more
  •  20
    Wittgenstein on Aspect‐Recognition in Philosophy and Mathematics
    Philosophical Investigations 44 (1): 71-98. 2021.
    Although Wittgenstein’s most extensive discussion of aspect‐recognition appears in Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, aspect‐recognition was of interest to Wittgenstein almost from the beginning of his engagement with philosophy at Cambridge in 1912. However, the nature of that interest changes upon his return to Cambridge in 1929, and that change in turn is connected with the inter‐related ideas that philosophical clarity rests on recognising aspects of our grammar and that mathematic…Read more
  •  25
    Extended rationality: a hinge epistemology
    Analysis 77 (2): 476-476. 2017.
    Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology By ColivaAnnalisaPalgrave Macmilla, 2015. xii + 222 pp. £60.00.
  •  57
    Replies to Hanson and Migotti
    Dialogue 43 (3): 595-606. 2004.
    I respond to criticisms of my book, Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses (Westview, 2000), by Mark Migotti and Phil Hanson.
  •  93
    RésuméPaul Boghossian soutient contre Wittgenstein que le normativisme au sujet de la logique et des mathématiques est incompatible avec le fait de tenir les énoncés logiques et mathématiques pour vrais et que le normativisme entraîne une régression indue. Je soutiens, pour ma part, que le normativisme n'entraîne pas une telle régression, parce que les normes peuvent être implicites et que le normativisme peut bien être «factualiste» si l'on rejette ce que Rockney Jacobsen appelle le «cognitivis…Read more
  • The World, Others and the Self: Philosophy and its Epistemic Neuroses
    Dissertation, University of Alberta (Canada). 1993.
    I explore dichotomous treatments of subjectivity and objectivity in accounts of knowledge of the world, others and the self. In Chapters 1-5 I argue that realism and relativism suffer forms of epistemic neurosis--each is undermined by its own account of objectivity. ;The realist sees the world and semantic notions, like truth and reference, as independent of our abilities to know about them. This implies the self-defeating result that we could be totally wrong about the meanings of our words, si…Read more
  • J.E. Malpas, Donald Davidson And The Mirror Of Meaning (review)
    Philosophy in Review 13 165-168. 1993.
  •  59
    Ebbs's Participant Perspective on Self-Knowledge
    Dialogue 41 (1): 3-26. 2002.
    It is sometimes objected that anti-individualism, because of its assumption of the constitutive role of natural and social environments in the individuation of intentional attitudes, raises sceptical worries about first-person authority--that peculiar privilege each of us is thought to enjoy with respect to non-Socratic self-knowledge. Gary Ebbs believes that this sort of objection can be circumvented, if we give up metaphysical realism and scientific naturalism and adopt what he calls a “partic…Read more
  •  8
    Wittgenstein on Names and Family Resemblances
    Eidos: The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophy 9 (1): 11-30. 1990.
    This paper (published in Eidos: The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophy, not Revista Filosofia de la Universidad del Norte) elaborates and defends Renford Bambrough's contention that Wittgenstein's discussion of family resemblances dissolves the traditional problem of universals, without slipping into either nominalism of realism.
  •  6
    11. Moral Claims and Epistemic Contexts
    In Susan Sherwin & Peter Schotch (eds.), Engaged Philosophy: Essays in Honour of David Braybrooke, University of Toronto Press. pp. 271-300. 2006.
    In "What Truth Does the Emotive-Imperative Answer to the Open-Question Argument Leave to Moral Judgments?" David Braybrooke claims that the justification of a moral claim is independent of the justification of morality generally–that ethical justification does not have to be traced back to meta-ethical justification. I support this claim by appealing to a contextualist theory of epistemic justification. Drawing on the work of Michael Williams and Robert Brandom, I contend, first, that every clai…Read more
  •  4
    Being and Being True
    Idealistic Studies 29 (1-2): 33-51. 1999.
    "Being this or that, same or different," says Barry Allen, "stands or falls with the circumstances of historically contingent practice". There is, he claims, no similarity or difference in the total absence of linguistic practice, and thus, counterfactual claims about what would have been the case, had language users never evolved, have no truth-values.
  •  43
    Truth and Metaphor in Rorty’s Liberalism
    International Studies in Philosophy 28 (4): 1-21. 1996.
    I argue against some of Rorty's radical critics, and against Rorty himself, that there is no necessary connection between his views about truth and metaphor, on one hand, and his liberalism, on the other. Indeed, Rorty's anti-essentialism can be viewed as making a contribution to the critique of ideology in a sense that I extract from Marx and Engels.
  •  26
    Philosophers have often thought that concepts such as ”knowledge” and ”truth” are appropriate objects for theoretical investigation. In a discussion which ranges widely over recent analytical philosophy and radical theory, Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses takes issue with this assumption, arguing that such theoreticism is not the solution but the source of traditional problems in epistemology (How can we have knowledge of the world around us? How can we have knowledge of other minds and cul…Read more
  •  51
    Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology by Annalisa Coliva, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xii + 222 pp. £60.00.
  •  64
    The main interpretive claim of this book is that both Wittgenstein’s mature philosophical method and his much misunderstood critique of private language have their roots in his critique of the misleading metaphor of phenomenal space–that is, the misleading, figurative analogy between physical space, or space simpliciter, and phenomenal space, or the “space” of appearances. His critique of this metaphor extends from his rejection of sense-data (Chapters 2 and 3), to his investigation of the asymm…Read more
  •  81
    Realism and self-knowledge: A problem for Burge
    Philosophical Studies 86 (3): 303-325. 1997.
    Tyler Burge says that first-person authority can be reconciled with anti-individualism about the intentional by denying part of the "Cartesian conception" of authority, which claims that I am actually authoritative about my intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This clause, he says, wrongly conflates the evaluation-conditions for sceptical doubts about the "external" world with the conditions for classifying intentional attitudes in counterfactual situations. This paper argues that…Read more
  •  42
    Metaphor, Cognitivity, and Meaning-Holism
    Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (4). 1998.
    Some philosophers influenced by Quine's meaning-holism agree that metaphor matters for science and for language in general, but they part ways over whether metaphors are cognitive. Hesse holds that metaphors have special cognitive content, apart from the literal content of the expressions used metaphorically. Davidson and Rorty deny this. I offer a partial reconciliation, allowing that metaphor has a noncognitive dimension, but holding that there is no sharp boundary between the literal and the …Read more
  •  98
    Internal Relations and Analyticity: Wittgenstein and Quine
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 26 (4). 1996.
    L'A. défend la thèse selon laquelle Wittgenstein développe une conception pragmatique et linguistique des relations internes qui définissent les vérités nécessaires: 1) qui n'implique pas l'analyticité de toutes les propositions exprimant des relations internes, 2) qui établit une distinction entre l'analytique et le synthétique, 3) qui s'avère compatible avec la critique de l'analyticité entreprise par Quine.
  •  10
  •  110
    The Role of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 51-67. 1991.
    This paper argues that the Refutation of Idealism is a clear development of a line of thought expressed in the Transcendental Deduction and the Fourth Paralogism in the 1781-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This general line of thought is that the possibility of systematic delusion about the nature of the empirical world is ruled out, in part, by the fact that illusion presupposes a background of veridical perception.
  •  31
    Putnam and the Difficulty of Renouncing All Theory
    International Studies in Philosophy 35 (4): 55-82. 2003.
    This paper examines the dispute between Putnam and Rorty concerning truth and rational acceptability, arguing that Putnam's criticisms of Rorty mostly miss the point and that if we treat idealized rational acceptability as immunity to self-defeating doubt, then we can see it as a sufficient, though not necessary, condition of truth.
  • Julian Roberts, The Logic of Reflection (review)
    Philosophy in Review 13 113-115. 1993.
  •  152
    Bad Faith
    Philosophy 64 (249). 1989.
    In 'Sartre on Bad Faith' Leslie Stevenson attempts to formulate the Sartrean notion of bad faith. According to Stevenson, someone is in bad faith, if she reflectively denies some state of affairs, of the truth of which she is pre-reflectively aware. Jeffrey Gordon counters with the criticism that, although Stevenson's analysis of Sartre is correct, it is a position which is philosophically indefensible. I argue that Stevenson's reflective denial account falls to Gordon's criticism, but that it i…Read more
  •  5
    Michael N. Forster, Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (review)
    Philosophy in Review 25 (2): 104-106. 2005.