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433How things might have been: Individuals, kinds, and essential properties - by Penelope Mackie (review)Philosophical Books 49 (1): 67-68. 2008.
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152Bad FaithPhilosophy 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
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114The Role of Kant’s Refutation of IdealismSouthern 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.
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100Internal Relations and Analyticity: Wittgenstein and QuineCanadian 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.
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96The Dignity of a Rule: Wittgenstein, Mathematical Norms, and TruthDialogue 42 (3): 419-446. 2003.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
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96Kant’s Private-Clock ArgumentKant Studien 88 (4): 442-461. 1997.Examining the effectiveness of the Kant’s Refutation of Idealism as a critique of a Cartesian account of consciousness, I argue that Kant's reasoning turns on the insight that self-knowledge presupposes independent temporal determination of the self. This insight bears an intriguing resemblance to claims about meaning and justification that appear in Wittgenstein's later work. Much as Wittgenstein rules out the possibility of a private language, whose meanings derive from acts of inner ostensive…Read more
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90Going around the vienna circle: Wittgenstein and verificationPhilosophical Investigations 28 (3). 2005.I argue that Wittgenstein’s short-lived verificationism (c.1929-30) differed from that of his contacts in the Vienna Circle in not being a reductionist view. It lay the groundwork for his later views that the meaning of a word is determined by its use and that certain "propositions of the form of empirical propositions" (On Certainty, §§96, 401, 402) act as "norm[s] of description" (On Certainty,§§167, 321). He gave it up once he realized that it contradicted his rejection of logical atomism, an…Read more
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82Realism and self-knowledge: A problem for BurgePhilosophical 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
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73Something less than paradise: The magic of modal realismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (3). 1991.Against the forces of modal ersatzism Lewis launches a variety of attacks, some of which are clearly compelling, others of which are less so. I argue that pictorial ersatzism cannot clearly be distinguished from magical ersatzism, and--more interestingly--that 'genuine' modal realism is subject to precisely the criticisms so fatal for the magical ersatzers.
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64Wittgenstein on Sensation and PerceptionRoutledge. 2016.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
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59Ebbs's Participant Perspective on Self-KnowledgeDialogue 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
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58Critical Notice of Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Jeffrey A. Bell, Andrew Cutrofello, and Paul M. Livingston (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (5): 694-713. 2017.This collection maintains a dialogue between the analytic and continental traditions, while aspiring to situate itself beyond the analytic-continental divide. It divides into four parts, Methodologies, Truth and Meaning, Metaphysics and Ontology, and Values, Personhood and Agency, though there is considerable overlap among the categories. History and temporality are recurrent themes, but there is a lot of metaphysics generally, with some philosophy of language, philosophy of social science, ethi…Read more
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57Replies to Hanson and MigottiDialogue 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.
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53Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology, By Annalisa Coliva (review)Analysis. forthcoming.Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology by Annalisa Coliva, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xii + 222 pp. £60.00.
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50Précis of Philosophy and Its Epistemic NeurosesDialogue 43 (3): 569-576. 2004.I outline the main arguments of my book, Philosophy and Its Epistemic Neuroses (Westview, 2000), in which I defend an anti-theoretical approach to traditional problems in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language, focusing especially on external-world scepticism, the indeterminacy of reference, relativism and first-person authority, contending that these problems arise from embracing philosophical commitments that are not quite contradictory, but which suffer from what I describe …Read more
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43Truth and Metaphor in Rorty’s LiberalismInternational 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.
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43Metaphor, Cognitivity, and Meaning-HolismPhilosophy 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
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31Putnam and the Difficulty of Renouncing All TheoryInternational 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.
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29Extended rationality: a hinge epistemologyAnalysis 77 (2): 476-476. 2017.Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology By ColivaAnnalisaPalgrave Macmilla, 2015. xii + 222 pp. £60.00.
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26Philosophy and its epistemic neurosesWestview Press. 2000.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
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21Hadot's later Wittgenstein: A critiquePhilosophical 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
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20Wittgenstein on Aspect‐Recognition in Philosophy and MathematicsPhilosophical 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
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19Being and Being TrueIdealistic Studies 29 (1-2): 33-51. 1999.Barry Allen, drawing on Wittgenstein's standard-metre example from Philosophical Investigations, argues there can be no determinate similarities or differences in the absence of a practice of measuring such similarities or differences. I contend that one can accept Allen's premises without accepting his conclusion if we draw a distinction between being and being true of the following sort: although it was not true, in the absence human or other epistemic practices, that water was H2O, nonetheles…Read more
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12Frank B. Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism-The Recovery of the World Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 15 (1): 32-35. 1995.
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8Wittgenstein on Names and Family ResemblancesEidos: 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.
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611. Moral Claims and Epistemic ContextsIn 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
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5Michael N. Forster, Wittgenstein on the Arbitrariness of Grammar (review)Philosophy in Review 25 (2): 104-106. 2005.