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101. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Danny Frederick P.F. Strawson on Predication
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Strawson offers three accounts of singular predication: a grammatical, a category and a mediating account. I argue that the grammatical and mediating accounts are refuted by a host of counter-examples and that the latter is worse than empty. In later works Strawson defends only the category account. This account entails that singular terms cannot be predicates; it excludes non-denoting singular terms from being logical subjects, except by means of an ad hoc analogy; it depends upon a notion of identification that is too vague; and it is unnecessarily complicated, relying on analogies where a more uniform explanation should be possible. But I show how the account can be corrected to avoid all these difficulties and to provide an accurate account of singular predication.
102. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Michael Horton Truth as One and Many
103. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Marta Szabat The World of Perception
104. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Jan Woleński Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre
105. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Jacek Wojtysiak Why there is Something rather than Nothing
106. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Joseph Agassi Contemporary European Philosophy, After Half-a-Century
107. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Leopold Hess Superessentialism and Necessitarianism: Between Spinoza and Lewis
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The paper concerns mutual relations between two metaphysical positions: “superessentialism,” claiming that all properties of every object are essential, i.e.necessary, and “necessitarianism,” claiming that everything is necessary, i.e. there is only one possible world. The theories of Spinoza and Lewis serve as examples. In section I the two positions are characterized. In section II and III interpretations of Spinoza’s and Lewis’s metaphysics are presented, and it is explained to what extent they can both be considered superessentialists and necessitarians. In section IV the two theories are compared. In section V three possible ways of arguing for superessentialism are presented. It is then shown that the premises of these arguments appear, at least implicitly, in both of the theories. In section VI additional premises are numbered which have to be further assumed to prove necessitarianism. In the final section it is shown how Lewis can claim that there are contingent facts, while being a superessentialist and a necessitarian. It is argued that his claim of contingency is a matter of semantics, not of metaphysics.
108. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Jan Woleński Logic in Religious Discourse
109. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Krzysztof Kiedrowski The Courage of Doing Philosophy: Essays Presented to Leszek Nowak
110. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Piotr Sikora Religious Truth and Religious Diversity
111. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 5 > Issue: 1
Lotar Rasiński Power, Discourse, and Subject. The Case of Laclau and Foucault
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In this text the author draws on two contemporary accounts of power—by Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau—and, on the basis of thorough analysis and comparison, he argues for “the discursive account of power” (DAP) as a new concept reflecting the novel approach to the theory of power developed by these two philosophers. He opens with a broad methodological outline of contemporary concepts of power, distinguishing between the “classical” and the “modern” approaches. Basing his findings on Laclau’s and Foucault’s work, he then presents DAP as a theory characterized by decentralizing, non-normative, and conflict-based tendencies that does not exhibit many of the limitations that usually characterize both classical and modern concepts of power. In the second part of the article the author presents a detailed methodological analysis of Foucault’s and Laclau’s concepts of power, focusing on three axes: power, discourse, and the subject. The author dedicates the last section to a comparison of both approaches, concluding that DAP is an inspiring project that exceeds the limits of traditional liberal theories of power and politics.
112. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Philippe-André Rodriguez Dignity: Its History and Meaning
113. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Rafe McGregor Cinematic Realism Reconsidered
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The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the debate about cinematic motion in terms of the necessity for reception conditions in art. I shall argue that Gregory Currie’s rejection of weak illusionism—the view that cinematic motion is illusory—is sound, because cinematic images really move, albeit in a response-dependentrather than garden-variety manner. In §1 I present Andrew Kania’s rigorous and compelling critique of Currie’s realism. I assess Trevor Ponech’s response to Kania in §2, and show that his focus on the cinematic experience is indicative of the direction the debate should take. §3 demonstrates that the issue is underpinned by the question of the role of reception conditions in the experience of art. In §4 I apply my observations on reception conditions to the problem of cinematic motion and conclude that Kania’s objections are unsuccessful due to his failure to acknowledge the necessary conditions for cinematic experience.
114. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
M. Fletcher Maumus Proper Names: Attribution and Reference
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Principally under the influence of Saul Kripke (1972), philosophical semantics since the closing decades of 20th century has been dominated by thephenomenon Nathan Salmon (1986) aptly dubbed Direct Reference “mania.” Accordingly, it is now practically orthodox to hold that the meanings of proper names are entirely exhausted by their referents and devoid of any descriptive content. The return to a purely referential semantics of names has, nevertheless, coincided with a resurgence of some of the very puzzles that motivated description theories of names in the first place, to wit: the informativeness of true identity statements of the form ‘a=b’ and the failure of substitutivity salve veritate for co-referential names in propositional attitude ascriptions. I argue that a Metalinguistic Description Theory of proper names, which treats the meaning of an arbitrary proper name as roughly equivalent to the definite description ‘the bearer of NN,’ offers a novel, semantically innocent solution to these puzzles when synthesized with Keith Donnellan’s (1966) insight that descriptions are semantically ambiguous between attributive and referential meanings. The ensuing account is then defended against two well-known Kripkean objections to metalinguisticsemantics: the Circularity Objection and the Paderewski Puzzle.
115. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Robert S. Colter Thought, Perception, and Isomorphism in Aristotle’s De Anima
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Aristotle contends that in perception the sense organ is “made like” its object, but only “in a certain way.” Much controversy has surrounded these remarks, primarily about how to understand being “made like.” One camp has understood this to require literal exemplification, such that the sense organs manifest the sensible qualities of their objects. Others have understood likeness to require no physical alteration at all in the sense organs.I accept as a starting point in this paper that understanding perceptual likeness in terms of exemplification is a non-starter. By doing so, however, I also reject the easiest and most direct understanding of what it means for the sense organs to be “made like” their objects. Others who have shared this assumption have suggested that likeness consists in “isomorphism.” Unfortunately, they have not adequately explicated how this notion is to be understood, with the result that Aristotle’s theory of perception remains crucially underdeveloped. I argue that the key is to understand the form of isomorphism at work in Aristotle’s account of thinking.
116. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Renata Ziemińska Sextan Skepticism and Self-Refutation
117. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Karol Chrobak What Plurality of Realities? Some Critical Remarks on the Philosophy of Leon Chwistek
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This paper focuses on the theory of plurality of realities introduced by Leon Chwistek. A critical analysis of this theory and an extensional interpretation of Chwistek’s axiomatic descriptions of four realities lead to an epistemological interpretation of this theory. The word “plurality” in the title is a result of different waysof understanding the same original set of sense-data. This interpretation is contrasted with Kazimierz Pasenkiewicz’s ontological version of this theory. In the final parts of the paper the most important consequences of this theory are discussed. First, the ethical relativism postulated by Chwistek is criticized. Second, an attempt to illustrate the plurality of realities with an example of different styles of painting is discussed. Third, a critical rationalism in the form of a kind of practical attitude toward social reality, which results from the theory of plurality of realities, is outlined.
118. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Hartley Slater Logic is not Mathematical
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I first show in this paper how twentieth century Set Theory got into its greatest tangle by, amongst other things, regarding relational remarks like ‘Rxy’ asbinary functions. I then show how the lack of indexicality, and of ‘that’-clauses, in Modern Logic led that subject into its intractable difficulties with the Theory of Truth. Both errors arose not only through a contempt for ordinary language, but also through the related failure to recognise that being logical is not a matter of being brainy, but of being coherent. It is not a mathematical talent, but a literary one. Later in the paper I go on to demonstrate this same conclusion with respect to Modal Logic and General Intensional Logic, and in particular with respect to fictions, since these are the central items that have been misunderstood, as is witnessed in some recent writings of Graham Priest.
119. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Roman Murawski Jan Woleński, Essays on Logic and its Applications in Philosophy
120. Polish Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 6 > Issue: 1
Jan Woleński August W. Sladek, Aus Sand bauen. Troppentheorie auf schmaler relatiomaler Basis. Ontologische, epistemologische, darstellungstechniszheMöglichkeiten und Troppenanalyse