Tushar Malpani

This paper seeks to bring out the difference between the later Wittgenstein’s and Davidson’s view of actions with a special focus. Initially it contrasts their respective approaches to the correlative notions of wish, will (intention) and actions, an issue which has customarily been categorized as reason-approach of Wittgenstein as against the mental causation theory endorsed by Davidson. The ultimate aim of this paper is to integrate the ontology of actions with the semantic issue of the distinction between reference and description action-words, or that between the extensionalist and intensionalist approach to actions. The author demonstrates how Davidson in spite of conscientiously problematising the task of separating the mental causal antecedent from the action, goes on to undertake a hair-splitting analysis to sustain the split; and thereby preserve the extensional identity of actions. This extensional identity in Davidson’s scheme turns out to be as brute physical events with bare spatio-temporal outlines - lying beyond the various intensional ascriptions. For Wittgenstein on the other hand, actions are not caused by mental antecedents, but blend with wish, will and the so-called mental antecedents to forge an indissoluble whole, leaving no scope for the proposed bare extension to take shape. The paper concludes with a brief indication of McDowell’s treatment of this cause/reason polemics phrased in terms of the non-conceptualist versus conceptualist debate suggesting a new direction to engage with Wittgenstein’s insights on action.

The sustained and critical attention that Hobbes commands from twentieth century scholars proves the relevance of his philosophy to our concerns, but it cannot explain the occasion for such an attention. The chief aim of the present work is to provide an account of the reason for the sudden emergence of diverse interpretations of Hobbes that had cropped up in the twentieth century. This work argues that the arrival of the diverse interpretations cannot be answered only by looking at the developments within Hobbes’s political philosophy. We have to go outside Hobbes’s political philosophy to account for their arrival. The tenability of Hobbesian philosophy which is founded on Newtonian and Galilean theories that were subsequently contended by Einstein's Theory of Relativity is discussed in the light of the interpretations of four scholars – Leo Strauss, A E Taylor, J H Warrender, C B Macpherson – that attempted to provide alternative foundations such as Self-observation, Moral Imperative, Moral Obligation, Possessive Individualism, respectively. This book will be of considerable interest not only to the scholars of Hobbes, but also to those interested in the relationship between philosophy and science.

This paper argues for a different logical form for complex demonstratives, given that the quantificational account is correct. In itself that is controversial, but two aspects will be assumed. Firstly, there are arguments to believe that complex demonstratives have quantificational uses. Specifically, there are syntactic arguments. Secondly, a uniform semantics is preferable to a semantics of ambiguity. Given this, the proposed logical forms for complex demonstratives that are prevalent do not respect a fundamental property of quantifiers: permutation invariance. The reason for this is the attempt to retain, in the logical forms proposed, the strong intuitions of reference that uses of complex demonstratives display. The paper suggests that the directly referential intuitions surrounding complex demonstratives cannot be taken to be part of the semantics of the expression. There appears to be no need to do so, either. The paper defends the new logical form against various objections.