Category: Logica Docens
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The Copula: Adorno Contra Heidegger
Time was when I was much interested in the philosophers of the Frankfurter Schule. That was in the 'seventies and 'eighties. Less interested now, I am still intrigued by Adorno's critique of Heidegger. Is it worth anything? For that matter, are Heidegger's ideas worth anything? Let's see. I will explain one aspect of Heidegger's notorious Seinsfrage,…
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Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions: A Two-Fold Ripoff
(This was written 30 January 2006. Paul Edwards, though he made some significant contributions to contemporary philosophy, was a notorious Heidegger-hater. I slap him around good in this piece, ending with a nice polemical punch. He asked for it, and he deserves it. Not that I think that much of Heidegger. Recently, controversy about the…
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Wonder at Existence
Existence elicited nausea from Sartre's Roquentin, but wonder from Bryan Magee: . . . no matter what it was that existed, it seemed to me extraordinary beyond all wonderment that it should. It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn't there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation — the least unlikely…
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Tribute to Morris R. Cohen: Rational Thought as the Great Liberator
Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947) was an American philosopher of naturalist bent who taught at the City College of New York from 1912 to 1938. He was reputed to have been an outstanding teacher. I admire him more for his rationalism than for his naturalism. In the early 1990s, I met an ancient lady at a…
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Arguments and Conditionals
The early Stoic logicians were aware of a distinction that most of us make nowadays but that certain medieval logicians, according to David H. Sanford (If P, then Q: Conditionals and the Foundations of Reasoning, p. 31), either missed or did not make. I am referring to the difference between arguments and conditional statements. Note…
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Errol Harris on Material Implication
Errol E. Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking: Logic and Reality (SUNY Press, 1987), pp. 38-39: Sometimes an excuse is offered for the paradoxical (one might say, illogical) character of material implication on the ground that the Philonian interpretation of the conditional is the weakest which will satisfy the requirement that the rule of detachment…
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The Meno Paradox and the Difference Between Paradoxes and Arguments
S. C. e-mails: I stumbled onto a question in my studies today that I am not sure how to resolve and you seem like just the person to ask. The question is this: what, exactly, makes a paradox different from a regular old argument? Consider: we tend to call paradoxes those arguments which seem sound…
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Five Serious Uses of Argument
Even among calm and reasonable people, few are persuaded by argument, even when it satisfies the canons of logic. Changes of view under dialectical pressure are seldom seen. Most just dig in and fortify their defenses. This raises questions about the utility of argument, debate, and discussion. Call me sanguine, call me naive – but…
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Enthymemes
An enthymeme is a truncated argument in which either one of the premises, or the conclusion, is left unstated. Some examples:
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Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic
Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii: My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution. The suggestion is that the…
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Three Senses of ‘Or’
‘Or’ is a troublesome particle in dire need of regimentation. Besides its two disjunctive meanings, the inclusive and the exclusive, there is also what I call the ‘or’ of identity. The inclusive meaning, corresponding to the Latin vel, is illustrated by ‘He is either morally obtuse or intellectually obtuse.’ This allows that the person in…
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Further Modal Concepts: Consistency, Inconsistency, Contradictoriness, and Entailment
I argued earlier that the validity of argument forms is a modal concept. But the same goes for consistency, inconsistency, contradictoriness, and entailment. Here are some definitions. 'Poss' abbreviates 'It is broadly-logically possible that ___.' 'Nec' abbreviates 'It is broadly-logically necessary that ___.' '~' and '&' are the familiar truth-functional connectives. 'BL' abbreviates 'broadly logically.'…
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Retortion and Non-Contradiction in Aristotle, Metaphysics, Gamma 3, 4
Retortion is the philosophical procedure whereby one seeks to establish a thesis by uncovering a performative inconsistency in anyone who attempts to deny it. It is something like that benign form of ad hominem in which person A points out to person B that some proposition p that B maintains is inconsistent with some other…
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Modal Confusion in Rand/Peikoff
Comments are on. If you have something intelligent and civil to contribute, please do. But I have zero tolerance for cyberpunks. If you fail to address what I actually say, or thoughtlessly spout the Rand party line, or show the least bit of disrespect to me or my commenters, then I will delete your comment.…