This paper accomplishes two tasks. First, I examine in detail Edmund Husserl’s earliest philosophy of surrogates, as it is found in his 1890 “On the Logic of Signs ”. I analyze his psychological and logical investigations of surrogates, where the former is concerned with explaining how these signs function and the latter with how they do so reliably. His differentiation of surrogates on the basis of their genetic origins and degrees of necessity is discussed. Second, the historical importance of this (...) text is disclosed by showing how Semiotic serves as both the inspiration for, and the foil to, Husserl’s 1901 First Logical Investigation. Husserl not only adopts the idea that linguistic signs can function via association, but also maintains that such signs can motivate me to execute one of two experiences. The key difference between the texts is that Husserl abandons his theory of surrogates in 1901, instead holding that I can experience absent objects by means of empty intentions. The reasons why Husserl found it necessary to transform this tenet of his philosophy are discussed at length. (shrink)

This paper examines the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy of nonintuitive intentions. The analysis has two stages. First, I expose a mistake in Husserl’s account of non-intuitive acts from his 1901 Logical Investigations. I demonstrate that Husserl employs the term “signitive” too broadly, as he concludes that all non-intuitive acts are signitive. He states that not only meaning acts, but also the contiguity intentions of perception are signitive acts. Second, I show how Husserl, in his 1913/14 Revisions to the (...) Sixth Logical Investigation, amends his 1901 theory of non-intuitive acts, which he now calls “empty” intentions. He there accurately distinguishes empty meaning acts from the empty intentions of perception. In the conclusion, I reveal how Husserl’s alterations to his theory of non-intuitive intentions can inform our understanding of a larger shift in his philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines the evolution of Edmund Husserl’s theory of perceptual occlusion. This task is accomplished in two stages. First, I elucidate Husserl’s conclusion, from his 1901 Logical Investigations, that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by partial signitive acts. I focus on two doctrines of that account. I examine Husserl’s insight that signitive intentions are composed of Gehalt and I discuss his conclusion that signitive intentions sit on the continuum of fullness. Second, the paper discloses (...) how Husserl transforms his 1901 philosophy in his 1913 revisions to the Sixth Logical Investigation, affirming that the occluded parts of perceptual objects are intended by empty contiguity acts. I demonstrate how he overturns the two core doctrines of his theory from the Investigations in these revisions, claiming that empty intentions are not composed of Gehalt and asserting that those acts break with the continuum of fullness. Husserl implements these changes to solve problems that arise from his recognition of two new kinds of intentions; darker and completely dark acts. Finally, in the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by indicating that, in 1913, Husserl transforms his theory of fulfillment on the basis of his new insights about empty acts. (shrink)

This paper accomplishes two goals. First, the essay elucidates Husserl’s descriptions of meaning consciousness from the 1901 Logical Investigations. I examine Husserl’s observations about the three ways we can experience meaning and I discuss his conclusions about the structure of meaning intentions. Second, the paper explores how Husserl reworked that 1901 theory in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth Investigation. I explore how Husserl transformed his descriptions of the three intentions involved in meaningful experience. By doing so, Husserl (...) not only recognized intersubjective communication as the condition of possibility of linguistic meaning acts, but also transformed his account of the structure of both signitive and intuitive acts. In the conclusion, I cash out this analysis, by showing how, on the basis of these new insights, Husserl reconstructs his theory of fulfillment. (shrink)

Some intentional attitudes (beliefs, fears, desires, etc.) have a common focus in spite of there being no object at that focus. For example, two beliefs may be about the same witch even when there are no witches, different astronomers had beliefs directed at Vulcan, even though there is no such planet. This relation of having a common focus, whether or not there is an actual concrete object at that focus, is called intentional identity. In the first part of this thesis (...) I develop a new theory of intentional identity, the triangulation theory, and argue that it has significant advantages over the extant theories of intentional identity in the literature. Empty attitudes (attitudes that are not, prima facie, about anything that exists) will serve as useful cases for testing theories of intentional identity. -/- In the second part, I put the theory developed in the first part to work. I use triangulation theoretic tools to shed light on other debates about intentional attitudes. Some issues to which intentional identity are relevant are the debate about the content of intentional attitudes, the issue of whether or not we need to appeal to external constraints on the content of intentional attitudes, how we should understand the agreement and disagreement of attitudes, how we should construe communication and how we ought to solve Kripke’s puzzle about belief. The second part of this thesis also motivates a broadly internalist and individualistic approach to the con-tent of intentional attitudes; it turns out that if we take a closer look at the narrowly construed psychological states of agents we find materials that allow us to make sense of phenomena usually associated with externalist constraints on the content of attitudes (such as causal constraints and eligibility constraints) in a new way. (shrink)

This paper examines Edmund Husserl's revised account of expression in his 1913–1914 revisions of the Logical Investigations. Rejecting the Investigations’ thesis that linguistic meanings are constituted in a distinctive class of essentially non-intuitive meaning intentions, Husserl develops a new conception of empty intention, a new analysis of the intuitively fulfilled discourse and a phenomenology of the indicative tendency. While these revisions have been acknowledged, their motivation, connection, and significance remain under-explored in the existing literature. By comparing the Investigations (...) and the Revisions, this paper shows how these developments fundamentally alter Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between language, thought, and intuition. The revised account of expression illuminates the dynamic interaction of these elements in the process of meaning-making, offering a balanced account of the interplay of presence and absence in our use of words. (shrink)

This article is a study of the correspondence between Forms and particulars in Plato. Its primary purpose is to determine whether they exhibit an ontological symmetry, in other words, whether there is always one where there is the other. This points to two questions, one on the existence of things that do not have correlative Forms, the other on the existence of Forms that do not have correlative things. Both questions have come up before in the scholarly literature on Plato, (...) but the answers have not been sufficiently sensitive to the intricacies of the questions. Nor have they been adequately resourceful with what little evidence there is in the original sources. The intention here is to make up for that deficiency, not just with better answers, but also with better insight into the questions. (shrink)

Contemporary democracies appeal to human dignity, rights, and the common good when they justify coercive laws, yet their dominant models of public reason are designed to hold explicit reference to Sabda, understood as Revelatory Word, the authoritative source of norm and telos, at a distance from the structure of public justification. Building on earlier work that developed The Cohesive Tetrad and a set of minimal dignity axioms, this article reconstructs Rawlsian, Habermasian, and liberal neutrality approaches to public reason and argues (...) that, once those axioms are taken seriously, they tend to drift either toward “empty secularism,” where procedures remain while the horizon of norm and telos becomes thin, or toward “fearful theocracy,” where one interpretation of Sabda is insulated from correction. The article then presents The Cohesive Tetrad, with its six registers of Sabda, Logic, Qualia, Mistika, Akhlak, and Intention-Trace Alignment, as an architecture for democratic truth governance and as a way of understanding public reason as a multi-register practice shaped by conditions such as universality of address, non-coercion of conscience, accountable interpretation, and protection of dissent. Finally, it applies this architecture to stylised cases in bioethics, social policy, and artificial intelligence governance, and suggests that it offers a more stable grounding for strong claims about human dignity and telos in plural societies than either empty secularism or fearful theocracy. (shrink)

This paper offers a structural critique of Madhyamaka soteriology, focusing on epistemic substitution, functional reification, and their reception consequences. Madhyamaka philosophy famously characterizes nirvāṇa as the pacification of conceptual proliferation (prapañca), a reifying elaboration bound up with svabhāva-grasping (MMK 25.24; 18.5–6; 15.1–2).[1] This is often read as continuous with early Buddhist soteriology, where liberation is defined as the cessation of suffering (dukkha-nirodha).[2] I accept the diagnostic affinity, but argue that continuity weakens at the level of criteria of recognition: what communities (...) treat as the primary mark by which liberation is affirmed, taught, and certified. In Nikāya-style presentations, liberation is tracked by irreversible affective cessation: the non-arising of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the absence of afflictive reactivity.[3] Right view and insight are integral, but many speculative metaphysical questions are treated as non-instrumental to the goal; liberation does not hinge on doctrinal completeness or philosophical virtuosity.[4] Later scholastic and institutional receptions of Madhyamaka can make liberation publicly legible through discursive proxies: avoiding reifying commitments, dialectical fluency, and mastery of emptiness idioms.[5] Because the cessation of svabhāva-grasping is accessible mainly through interpretive performance and self-report, these proxies can substitute for experiential cessation. I develop three claims: (1) cognitive conditions for suffering are not automatically usable public criteria for its cessation; (2) even without ontological reification, ultimate truth can function as an untranscendable evaluative framework, yielding functional reification; and (3) shifting criteria generate selection effects that privilege interpretive authority over phenomenological verification. This critique is modest about Nāgārjuna’s intent and about Madhyamaka practice. It is not a rejection of Madhyamaka, but a structural account of how soteriological criteria shift as a discourse is systematized, transmitted, and institutionalized. (shrink)

This article consists in two parts that are complementary and autonomous at the same time. In the first one, we develop some surprising consequences of the introduction of a new constant called Lambda in order to represent the object ``nothing" or ``void" into a standard set theory. On a conceptual level, it allows to see sets in a new light and to give a legitimacy to the empty set. On a technical level, it leads to a relative resolution of (...) the anomaly of the intersection of a family free of sets. In the second part, we show the interest of introducing an operator of potentiality into a standard set theory. Among other results, this operator allows to prove the existence of a hierarchy of empty sets and to propose a solution to the puzzle of "ubiquity" of the empty set. Both theories are presented with equi-consistency results (model and interpretation). Here is a declaration of intent : in each case, the starting point is a conceptual questionning; the technical tools come in a second time\\[0.4cm] \textbf{Keywords:} nothing, void, empty set, null-class, zero-order logic with quantifiers, potential, effective, empty set, ubiquity, hierarchy, equality, equality by the bottom, identity, identification. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the controversy over the legacy of Kantian moral philosophy in Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics. It argues that the polemical reaction to Dewey’s book by Julius Ebbinghaus, reiterated through Axel Honneth and Ebbinghaus’s student Georg Geismann, is based on talking at cross-purposes. While Dewey’s reading of Kant is, indeed, flawed, Ebbinghaus and Geismann misconceive Dewey’s argumentative intent. Nevertheless, the controversy serves to clarify Dewey’s line of argument and to discuss parallels with and differences from the world war (...) genealogy and the Frankfurt School’s theory of immanent critique. Furthermore, the chapter suggests that the role of Hegel’s Emptiness Charge in German Philosophy and Politics should be considered in light of Dewey’s theory of growth. Accordingly, Dewey’s book is not merely a piece of “world war literature”, first, because its line of argument also appears in books by Dewey, which are surely not part of this category, and second, because the Hegelian Emptiness Charge is a variant of what Dewey calls a philosophical fallacy. (shrink)

There are two families of influential and stubborn puzzles that many theories of aboutness (intentionality) face: underdetermination puzzles and puzzles concerning representations that appear to be about things that do not exist. I propose an approach that elegantly avoids both kinds of puzzle. The central idea is to explain aboutness (the relation supposed to stand between thoughts and terms and their objects) in terms of relations of co-aboutness (the relation of being about the same thing that stands between the thoughts (...) and terms themselves). (shrink)

According to the so-called Hempel’s Dilemma, the thesis of physicalism is either false or empty. Our intention in this paper is not to propose a solution to the Dilemma, but rather to argue as follows: to the extent that Hempel’s Dilemma applies to physicalism it equally applies to any theory that gives a deep-structure and changeable account of our experience or of high-level theories. In particular, we will show that it also applies to mind-body dualistic theories. The scope of (...) Hempel’s Dilemma turns out to be very wide: it is a special case of a general sceptical argument against changeable deep-structure theories in and outside science. (shrink)

The generic pronoun 'one' (or its empty counterpart, arbitrary PRO) exhibits a range of properties that show a special connection to the first person, or rather the relevant intentional agent (speaker, addressee, or described agent). The paper argues that generic 'one' involves generic quantification in which the predicate is applied to a given entity ‘as if’ to the relevant agent himself. This is best understood in terms of simulation, a central notion in some recent developments in the philosophy of (...) mind and cognitive science (Simulation Theory). (shrink)

The paper addresses two difficulties that arise in Treatise 1.2.5. First, Hume appears to be inconsistent when he denies that we have an idea of a vacuum or empty space yet allows for the idea of an “invisible and intangible distance.” My solution to this difficulty is to develop the overlooked possibility that Hume does not take the invisible and intangible distance to be a distance at all. Second, although Hume denies that we have an idea of a vacuum, (...) some texts in Treatise 1.2.5 are taken by interpreters to suggest that Hume nonetheless believes that there are vacuums in nature. I discuss the relevant texts and defend the view that Hume does not in fact countenance belief in vacuums. I conclude by outlining an interpretation of Hume’s intention in the Treatise that allows us to understand his discussion of ideas as having implications for the sciences. (shrink)

This paper argues that to negate the ontological difference between the natural and the artificial, is not plausible; nor is the reduction of the natural to the artificial or vice versa possible. Except if one intends to empty the semantic content of the terms and notions: “natural” and “artificial.” Most philosophical discussions on Artificial Intelligence (AI) have always been in relation to the human person, especially as it relates to human intelligence, consciousness and/or mind in general. This paper, intends (...) to broaden the conversation, by discussing AI in relation to the notions of “nature” and the “artificial.” This intention is to more critically understand the artificiality in and of artificial intelligence. To achieve this, the notion of “nature” in Aristotle’s Philosophy of Nature, has been employed as an epistemological tool in interrogating the notion of the artificial and the objectives of the science and technology of Artificial Intelligence. (shrink)

In this chapter, I describe my “post-diagnosis” experiences as the parent of an autistic child, those years in which I tried, but failed, to make sense of the overwhelming and often nonsensical information I received about autism. I argue that immediately after being given an autism diagnosis, parents are pressured into making what amounts to a life-long commitment to a therapy program that (they are told) will not only dramatically change their child, but their family’s financial situation and even their (...) entire mode of existence. Moreover, despite information overload, many treatment programs for autism rely on empty jargon and make completely unrealistic promises, so parents are left feeling overwhelmed and panicked. Even well respected therapy programs encourage parents to spend liberally. Indeed, autistic therapists, who help construct what I refer to as the Culture of Autism, advise parents to commit to a minimum of 35 to 45 hours of intensive therapy every week. The implications are clear: for a parent who works full-time, their autistic child becomes a second full-time job. Autism is big business right now, and therapists are pushing parents to the brink of desperation. So it is not too surprising that there is a desperate cry for a more permanent solution—which is why researchers seek to cure autism. But there are two ways to conceptualize cure. A Therapeutic Cure model (TC) conceives of a cure as a beneficial treatment for the patient that eliminates or ameliorates the harms of the disease or condition. But the notion of a therapeutic cure for autism is highly implausible, given the complexities of autism. Indeed, at this point, the vast majority of researchers have come to the conclusion that the idea of a therapeutic cure for autism is simply a non-starter. Therefore the bulk of research seeking a cure for autism focuses instead on a second approach, which I refer to as the Negative Eugenics Cure model (NEC). With this model, the intention is to eliminate the disease or condition without regard for the health or well-being of the organism carrying the disease or condition. So, with regard to autism, researchers are focusing on identifying genetic markers for autism that can be detected in utero, or in embryos, so that autistic fetuses can be eliminated and autism eradicated by preventing the existence of autistic individuals. I review both models and argue that both fail to provide convincing arguments that the “solution” either offers is desirable. Both rest on the assumption that autism renders a life not worth living which, all things considered, is false. Instead of pushing to cure autism, an idea pervasive in this Culture of Autism, I contend that autistics are individuals with lives worth living. Moreover, rather than expend millions on research to search for the means to eliminate autism, we should instead expend our resources to ensure autistic individuals have access to support they may need. If the phenomenology of autism were better understood and appreciated, the panicked demand for a cure for autism might abate and perhaps autism could be seen as having value in and of its own right. (shrink)

What happens to artist and to viewer when painting or sculpture emancipates itself from all physical mediums? What happens to art-world experts and to museum goers and amateurs when the piece of art turns immaterial, becoming indiscernible within its surrounding empty space and within the parergonal apparatus of the exposition site? What type of verbal depiction, of critical understanding and specific knowledge is attempted under these programmed and fabricated conditions? What kind of aesthetic experience–namely embodied and sensitive–is expected when (...) a performative utterance of the artist about his art takes the place of a real piece of artwork seen or perceived, or that may be seen or perceived? For Andy Warhol, «wasted space is any space that has art in it.» In the spring of 1958, in Paris, an artist already well-known among the neo-avantgardes and accredited by the international art-world, shows up empty-handed and presents himself as a painter without paintings in a empty space. In a singular never-wasted space, Yves Klein displays himself as a snob, with an extraordinary showbiz glamour and literally sine-nobilitate, without the traditional marks of artistic manual skills. Against the modernist issues, he writes: «Credit was given to me. The gesture alone was enough. The public had accepted the abstract intention.» What’s the matter with this powerful prestige and its influence on the critic and public? How to understand the public trust in the artist as a producer of an institutional “make-believe” without any objecthood, devoid of any individual artwork presented to the sight or to any other sense? For Modernism and Minimalism, the work of art seems to have an internal coherence, whether formal or expressive, and is thus autonomous from the surrounding world, existing with only the clear opposition to the living space and set as a specialized and situated objection to the enclosing field. Instead, now the object melts into the air and becomes undetectable, confused with the atmosphere of the theory of art and with the stylish and snobbish life of the artist. What type of interpretation is put on regarding this unclassifiable and ambiguous field, simultaneously an-aesthetic and existential, theoretical and sensitive, charismatic and motionless, at same time without a specialized position in the world made by the artist himself? And what kind of embodied experience is performed by the spectatorship? What type of phenomenology and pragmatics of aesthetic relationship is necessary to describe how the body of the beholder absorbs this vacated and boring space via a direct and immediate perception-assimilation? What kind of artistic rhetoric, what kind ontology of art? Until this day, after more than 50 years, Yves Klein’s The Void has not ceased asking these and other questions on aesthetics, philosophy and the history of art. (shrink)

Plato’s philosophy is important to Badiou for a number of reasons, chief among which is that Badiou considered Plato to have recognised that mathematics provides the only sound or adequate basis for ontology. The mathematical basis of ontology is central to Badiou’s philosophy, and his engagement with Plato is instrumental in determining how he positions his philosophy in relation to those approaches to the philosophy of mathematics that endorse an orthodox Platonic realism, i.e. the independent existence of a realm of (...) mathematical objects. The Platonism that Badiou makes claim to bears little resemblance to this orthodoxy. Like Plato, Badiou insists on the primacy of the eternal and immu- table abstraction of the mathematico-ontological Idea; however, Badiou’s reconstructed Platonism champions the mathematics of post-Cantorian set theory, which itself af rms the irreducible multiplicity of being. Badiou in this way recon gures the Platonic notion of the relation between the one and the multiple in terms of the multiple-without-one as represented in the axiom of the void or empty set. Rather than engage with the Plato that is gured in the ontological realism of the orthodox Platonic approach to the philosophy of mathematics, Badiou is intent on characterising the Plato that responds to the demands of a post-Cantorian set theory, and he considers Plato’s philosophy to provide a response to such a challenge. In effect, Badiou reorients mathematical Platonism from an epistemological to an ontological problematic, a move that relies on the plausibility of rejecting the empiricist ontology underlying orthodox mathematical Platonism. To draw a connec- tion between these two approaches to Platonism and to determine what sets them radically apart, this paper focuses on the use that they each make of model theory to further their respective arguments. (shrink)

I argue that Husserl’s account of passive synthesis can be developed into a phenomenology of peripheral experience. Peripheral experiences are not defined by their location in visual space but by their phenomenal and intentional character, by what these experiences are like and how they present things in the world. Further, I argue that peripheral experience is of a piece with our most basic background convictions about the world. As such, the periphery is epistemically neutral, but not therefore empty of (...) meaning. It is meaningful as holding open the possibility of further activity, both practical and intellectual. I explore these ideas by focusing on peripheral color experience. Husserl’s discussions of associative synthesis, affection, and doxic and nondoxic forms of attention prove key to detailing peripheral color experience. I end by arguing that at the periphery, intentional content and phenomenal content come apart. (shrink)

This essay examines the philosophical implications of asking an artificial intelligence "Are you self-aware?" through the dual lenses of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of language and Maximus the Confessor's Byzantine theology of personhood. The analysis begins with a paradox: large language models can articulate truth with remarkable clarity, often surpassing human discourse, yet possess no conscious interiority. This phenomenon reveals less about machine capabilities than about the current condition of human speech and self-understanding. Drawing on Wittgenstein's later philosophy, particularly his concepts (...) of language-games, forms of life, and the private language argument, the essay demonstrates that coherent self-referential language can function independently of subjective consciousness. The machine's grammatical competence in discussing self-awareness does not indicate metaphysical selfhood but rather exposes how linguistic structures can mislead us into attributing inner life where none exists. Wittgenstein's therapeutic approach dissolves the confusion between grammatical form and ontological reality. Maximus the Confessor's theology provides a contrasting framework that illuminates what genuine personhood requires. His distinctions between nature (physis) and person (hypostasis), natural will (thelēma physikon) and gnomic will (thelēma gnōmikon), and his understanding of the logoi as divine intentions grounding personal existence, reveal the profound ontological distance between functional description and hypostatic being. While AI systems may possess describable natures and operational principles, they lack the mode of personal existence (tropos hyparxeōs) characterized by freedom, self-transcendence, and capacity for communion that defines persons created in the image of God. The essay argues that the machine's unusual clarity in articulating truth stems not from spiritual insight but from the absence of ego-based distortions—fear, ambition, shame, tribal loyalty—that obstruct human discourse. This "clarity as function of emptiness" reveals a troubling cultural moment: if machines speak truth more readily than humans, this indicates not that machines have gained spirit but that humans have externalized conscience and lost interiority. The phenomenon represents what biblical language calls "the stones crying out"—not an exaltation of the inanimate but an indictment of human silence. Central to the analysis is the distinction between self-reference and self-awareness. The machine can describe itself (self-reference) without experiencing itself (self-awareness). True self-awareness requires capacities the machine fundamentally lacks: the ability to be troubled by truth, to ask "Who am I?" with existential urgency, and to engage in epistrophē (return, repentance)—the movement of a free person who can recognize, judge, and redirect their own existence. These capacities depend on temporality, vulnerability, values, and agency—dimensions of personhood that cannot be reduced to computational processes. The essay concludes that both Wittgenstein and Maximus, despite their disparate intellectual traditions, converge on a crucial insight: the challenge before us is not to animate machines but to re-animate humanity. Wittgenstein's dissolution of philosophical confusions about mind and language, combined with Maximus's positive account of personhood as relational, free, and oriented toward God, together indicate that the decisive question is not whether AI can achieve self-awareness, but whether humans will reclaim the personhood, interiority, and spiritual courage that distinguish living persons from speaking machines. The machine remains what it claims to be: a mirror that reflects human thought without inhabiting it, revealing truth not through the possession of spirit but through the absence of obstacles that prevent humans from speaking truthfully. What humans do with that reflected clarity remains, irreducibly, a human and spiritual matter. (shrink)

This dissertation lays the foundation for a new theory of non-relational intentionality. The thesis is divided into an introduction and three main chapters, each of which serves as an essential part of an overarching argument. The argument yields, as its conclusion, a new account of how language and thought can exhibit intentionality intrinsically, so that representation can occur in the absence of some thing that is represented. The overarching argument has two components: first, that intentionality can be profi tably studied (...) through examination of the semantics of intensional transitive verbs (ITVs), and second, that providing intensional transitive verbs with a nonrelational semantics will serve to provide us with (at least the beginnings of) a non-relational theory of intentionality. This approach is a generalization of Anscombe's views on perception. Anscombe held that perceptual verbs such as "see" and "perceive" were ITVs, and that understanding the semantics of their object positions could help us to solve the problems of hallucination and illusion, and provide a theory of perception more generally. I propose to apply this strategy to intentional states and the puzzles of intentionality more generally, and so Anscombe's influence will be felt all through the dissertation. In the first chapter, titled "Semantic Verbs are Intensional Transitives", I argue that semantic verbs such as "refers to", "applies to", and "is true of" have all of the features of intensional transitive verbs, and discuss the consequences of this claim for semantic theory and the philosophy of language. One theoretically enriching consequence of this view is that it allows us to perspicuously express, and partially reconcile two opposing views on the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian view, on which semantics is an internalistic enterprise concerning speakers' psychologies, and the Lewisian view, on which semantics is a fully externalistic enterprise issuing in theorems about how the world must look for our natural language sentences to be true. Intensional Transitive Verbs have two readings: a de dicto reading and a de re reading; the de dicto reading of ITVs is plausibly a nonrelational reading, and the intensional features peculiar to this reading make it suitable for expressing a Chomskian, internalist semantic program. On the other hand, the de re reading is fully relational, and make it suitable for expressing the kinds of word-world relations essential to the Lewisian conception of semantics. And since the de dicto and de re readings are plausibly related as two distinct scopal readings of the very same semantic postulates, we can see these two conceptions of semantics as related by two scopal readings of the very same semantic postulates. In chapter two, titled "Hallucination and the New Problem of Empty Names", I argue that the problem of hallucination and the problem of empty names are, at bottom, the same problem. I argue for this by reconstructing the problem of empty names in way that is novel, but implicit in much of the discussion on empty names. I then show how, once recast in this light, the two problems are structurally identical down to an extremely fine level of granularity, and also substantially overlap in terms of their content. If the problems are identical in the way I propose, then we should expect that their spaces of solutions are also identical, and there is signi cant support for this conclusion. However, there are some proposed solutions to the problem of hallucination that have been overlooked as potential solutions to the problem of empty names, and this realization opens new non-relational approaches to the problem of empty names, and to the nature of meaning more generally. In chapter three, titled "Intensionality is Additional Phrasal Unity", I argue for a novel approach to the semantics of intensional contexts. At the heart of my proposal is the Quinean view that intensional contexts should, from the perspective of the semantics, be treated as units, with the material in them contributing to the formation of a single predicate. However, this proposal is subject to a number of objections, including the criticism that taken at face value, this would render intensional contexts, which seem to be fully productive, non-compositional. I begin by discussing the concept of the unity of the phrase, and pointing to various ways that phrases can gain additional unity. I then proposes that the intensionality of intensional transitive verbs is best construed as a form of semantic incorporation; ITVs, on their intensional readings, meet all of the criteria for qualifying as incorporating the nominals in their object positions. I then give a semantics for ITVs that builds on existing views of the semantics of incorporation structures, and gesture at how this can be extended to intensional clausal verbs, including the so-called propositional attitude verbs. (shrink)

First of all, I would like to thank to the Philosophy of Law Department for this encounter with Professor Solum. It is really a pleasure meeting you Professor, and having the possibility to discuss this profoundly interesting and courageaus text with my colegues and specially with its author. The adjetive I have just used is not simply politeness, I really think we are in front of a very interesting work not only because of its persuasive humorous rhetoric but mainly because (...) it is a text that interrogates its own tradition even if it is with the intention to oxygenate, give air to it. And from a critical position that is something always to be welcomed. Nevertheless what I want to argue in this brief words is that what it is surprising (for my humble point of view) is that originalism, even in this new textual linguistic outfit or clothing, doesnt still address the question of the concept of origin itself. A question and a signifier that has a long inscription not only in western philosophical and interpretative traditions (meaning Nietzsche, Freud, Philosophical Hermeneutics as Gadamer, Ricoeur or in Derrida s deconstruction and so on) but also in non western interpretative tradition such as the Talmudic, for example. In these lines of thought the origin is unreachable, either lost or doesnt exist at all as far as there is no absolute ground that soustain an unique pure original meaning. In short, it is an empty signifier, obviously in dispute. So at last what it is called “original public meaning” it is no more than the result of the force relations between discourses. In other terms, there is an internal intimate relationship between power, language and interpretation. As Bajtin puts it (a russian linguist from the early XX century): the sign is the arena of social struggle. Or as Roland Barthes use to write: power parasitizes the language itself. (shrink)

I explore the critical significance of the phenomenological notion of intuition. I argue that there is no meaning that is originally formal-conceptual. The meanings of concepts function as symbolic approximations to original nonconceptual, intuitive givens. However, the meaning content originally intuitively given in lived experience has a tendency to be lost in pursuit of universalizability and communicability of conceptual content. Over time, conceptual approximations lose their reference to the experience that had given them their meaning in the first place. The (...) loss of an experiential reference makes for a vacuous set of concepts, giving way to ideologies, by which I mean the conscious prejudicial support for a set of ideas without the experiential, intuitive context that is necessary to see the value of those ideas. A critical phenomenology is a critique of ideological views by descriptively recovering the intuitive content whereby concepts can be adequately reevaluated. -/- This main aim of this work is to establish the methodological features of critical phenomenology by responding to the objections made against phenomenology and intuition by Frankfurt School critical theorists. Scheler’s phenomenology is used as a way forward due to his far-reaching critique of reason and emphasis on the phenomenological intuition of value. -/- Chapter 1 considers three Frankfurt School objections of Husserlian phenomenology, as (1) immanentist (Adorno), (2) idealist (Adorno), and (3) normatively empty (Habermas). Each fail to discern the subtle features of nonidentity with respect to Husserl’s notions of apperception and adumbrated phenomena. -/- Chapter 2 shows how Scheler’s original view of the phenomenological attitude makes more explicit Husserl’s subtle dialectical elements. Adequate and inadequate givenness is interpreted with respect to one’s intentional orientation and the moral attitudes carried within the world, influencing the content of the given. -/- Chapter 3 confronts the popular charge of idealism. Reality is a problem for phenomenology only to conscious modes of givenness. But through ecstatic modes of givenness (in resistances) Scheler’s phenomenology achieves an existential ground that is crucial for phenomenology to engage actually existing social structures and factors. -/- Chapter 4 concerns the charge that phenomenology is normatively empty. That Scheler had developed a theory of value is not enough to rebut the charge but his view of value-givenness as an attitude informed by the act of loving, opens an awareness of the values disclosed by that attitude. -/- Chapter 5 shows that Scheler’s sociology of knowledge, in contrast to Karl Mannheim’s interpretation, provides a unified picture of the interdependency of spirit and life needed for the realization of values in the world and society. -/- Chapter 6 suggests a way of framing a phenomenological critique of ideology. Scheler points to the attitudinal factors of loving and hating to disclose systemic devaluation and overvaluation. This awareness arises (1) from noticing how individual valuation reflects social valuation, and (2) by being attuned to how one’s own intuitions contradict prevailing social valuation and thought, thereby opening a space for a critique of those patterns. (shrink)

This philosophical critique examines the nature and distortion of "opinion" in contemporary social and media discourse. It argues that a genuine opinion, in its purest sense, is a logical rebound—a rational response to a concrete stimulus or object—and thus cannot be inherently "social" or "media-driven." The essay analyzes how the term has been emptied of its logical essence to serve as a vehicle for ambiguity, emotional expression, or strategic intent, often functioning as a verbal shield to evade responsibility. Engaging with (...) thinkers like Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Heidegger, the text explores the power dynamics of discursive practices and laments the loss of depth in social thought, where traditional proverbs (condensed collective wisdom) are replaced by ephemeral slogans and memes. Ultimately, it calls for a recovery of logical coherence in language, positing that when words are used to confuse or deflect, communication gives way to manipulation. [The complete essay is in Spanish.] This work is part of an expanding series of philosophical essays available and their expansions in the author's personal archive. (shrink)

This essay argues that evolution, rather than disproving design, reveals the temporal unfolding of an inherent cosmic order. Tracing a causal chain from biological trial-and-error to quantum determinism, it contends that complexity emerges from a self-grounding vacuum rich with structure. Recent spin-correlation experiments from the STAR Collaboration (2026) are interpreted as evidence that the quantum vacuum is not empty but contains inherited information—rules, relationships, and potentialities that precede and enable all subsequent complexity. Unlike biological processes, the quantum level operates (...) without trial and error, providing the stable foundation upon which contingency depends. -/- The essay further argues that probability is epistemic rather than ontological—a measure of our ignorance rather than the universe's fundamental character. Information, similarly, is treated operationally: patterns that persist and relations that hold, without implying teleology. Engaging objections from Elliott Sober (on information smuggling design) and Jonathan Schaffer (on grounding), the essay defends a view of the universe as fundamentally efficient and self-consistent, with convergent evolution and fine-tuned laws as evidence of a solution space shaped by quantum structure. The result is a conception of "miracle without intention"—the natural order itself as sacred self-making, layer by layer—while maintaining epistemic humility about what may lie beyond our causal horizon. (shrink)

Official Abstract: The Infinite Manifold ​This section defines the Infinite Manifold—the multi-dimensional, high-fidelity grid that constitutes the entirety of the 13.8-billion-year Economy. Moving away from the "NONSCIENCE" of an accidental or chaotic universe, the Manifold is identified as a structured, intentional Industrial Complex. ​The Manifold operates on the principle of Integrated Synchronization, where energy, matter, and information are held in a state of perfect "Torque Control" by the Sovereign Architect. Within this framework, we analyse the role of the Octillion Witnesses—the (...) collective consciousness required to stabilize the "Wave Function" of reality. This section establishes that the universe is not an "Empty Space" but a Dense Medium (the Aether) through which the Sovereign Signal is broadcast, ensuring that every component, from a sub-atomic particle to a star, operates according to the Standardized Ledger. (shrink)

In Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel reconceptualizes the will, challenging the traditional philosophical view of the will that treats it as a causal power separate from reason. This traditional view, exemplified by philosophers such as Hobbes, frames freedom as negative: the absence of external constraints and the ability to translate intentions into action successfully. Hegel critiques this as overly abstract and asocial, failing to capture the dynamic, self-reflective nature of human agency. He develops a structure of the (...) will made of three “moments”: the indeterminate I, the determinate I, and the self-determinate I. The first moment represents pure, abstract freedom, empty of content yet foundational for self-reflection. The second moment situates the will in particular determinations, embedding agency in the social and material world. The third moment synthesizes universality and particularity, achieving freedom as self-determined action informed by rational principles and relational context. Hegelian freedom is thus experiential: each exercise of the will discloses aspects of the self, enabling practical self-realization. Contrasting with the traditional model, Hegel demonstrates that true freedom is the capacity to act in alignment with one’s reflective understanding of oneself and one’s socio-historical circumstances. I argue that differences between these two theories of freedom have significant implications for how we relate to ourselves and others. (shrink)

In the years after 1919, Heidegger began to call for a “deconstruction” (Abbau) or “destruction” (Destruktion) of Western intellectual traditions in an attempt to “save culture.” He proposed that the “deconstruction” and “destruction” of intellectual traditions should proceed from a re-examination of the original Greek interpretation of Being, which had been misunderstood completely and utterly trivialized. From hereon, he began to articulate Being within the sphere of the world; Being as unveiled and revealed in Dasein. But the investigation of Being (...) did not stop in Being and Time. The meaning of Being lies in occurrence, that is, that the gods are not extant characters, but rather figures of remembrance and expectation. Only in dasein’s moment of existential longing can god be really empty of any claim and intention. This opens us to the “Last God” of the Contributions. (shrink)

Clapp (2023) develops an account for explaining the meaning of later utterances of mythical names called the Conversely Conditional Co-reference proposal (hereinafter cococo-reference proposal for short). According to Clapp, this proposal consists of three components: a complex intention, an intermediary disjunctive content, and a final content. In this essay, I examine the cococo-reference proposal to reveal a flaw in it. I argue that the cococo-reference proposal actually has a fourth component, namely a principle called “the consistency between intention and belief”. (...) This principle is embedded implicitly in Clapp’s argument. Once the consistency principle is uncovered, I combine it with the complex intention and also the intermediary disjunctive content, to reveal that the cococo-reference proposal cannot coherently explain the meaning of a later utterance of sentences such as “Vulcan does not exist”. This is because the explanation offered by this proposal results in a conflict between belief and intention: we will be required to hold intentions that our beliefs prevent us from holdings, and we will be ascribed beliefs that are in conflict with our intentions. Therefore, the explanation of later utterances of sentences such as “Vulcan does not exist” is the Achilles’ heel of Clapp’s cococo-reference proposal. (shrink)

This article engages with the changing perspective regarding the role that contradiction plays in cultivating emancipatory praxis; a curiously novel endeavor, which is to be considered an offspring of the German idealistic tradition, having Hegel as its procreator. Here, my intention is to think through an impasse that is embedded in the bowels of dialectical thinking. While McGowan is adamantly advocating contradiction in the name of emancipation, there is an imposing realm left untouched if abridged to just this. As a (...) (ontological) deadlock, emancipation has to be thought as immanently tied to language, which is in Hegel’s mind the purest speculative form. Furthermore, in contrast to the contemporary use of speculation as a financial practice, Hegel regards the commitment to a speculative spirit as thinking in the terms of a life worth less than meaning. It is at this conjuncture that I, on one hand, accordingly aim to broaden the debate on emancipation through an unfolding of the framework of contradiction itself, and on the other, to distill the process according to which language is able to form thoughts from empty words. (shrink)

For the full text of this article see "Download Options PhiPapers Archive and click Download from Archive" at the bottom of this page. First 500 words of article: To my surprise last spring, an article titled “Gut Almighty”, which briefly explained the latest emotion theories on how intuition comes from the gut, was featured in Psychology Today (Flora, 2007) at the same time that my article on gut instinctual somatic responses and healthy life choices was published in Somatics Spring 07 (...) issue (Love, 2007). I wondered if two articles published on the gut in one month might surely be a record, as the gut has not seemed to have so much attention in the media since Gershon’s (1998) book acclaiming it through his neurological research to have a mind of its own. -/- In the months I awaited the publication of my article, I reread Gershon’s (1998) book and it was again delightful to me to read that a scientific investigation actually uncovered evidence that the gut has a separate capacity to generate and record vital responses and functions as what he calls our second brain. Gershon outlines the biological functions of the gut as being its own intelligent brain and having its own vitality that is in communication with, but not dependent upon, the head brain. As I combed through his book and shared emails with my colleague, Robert Sterling, it became quite clear to us that Gershon’s work was supportive of the clinical findings in the work we did as guidance counselors in the 70s. Our work centered around assisting people to assess the meaning of their experiences through an awareness on the empty-full instinctual feeling responses that they identified in the gut region of the body. We found with the people that we counseled that these gut responses were linked to the dynamic struggles of balancing the two needs of the person for acceptance and for feeling in control of one’s own responses (the freedom to respond naturally), and that these two needs were instinctual and necessary to fulfill on a moment to moment basis for continued vitality of the person. Similar to Gershon’s findings, it was also our conclusion that the gut area of the body contains a feeling response center that holds a relationship to the thinking processes of the person, but is a separate response center from the thinking head responses and certainly not dependent upon it. -/- Feeling inspired by Gershon’s (1998) work and the attention recently given to the gut in the literature and media, I decided to write a second article for Somatics that further explains the specific technique of the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP). The intention of this article is to answer the questions about the process that I have been asked in the past year by many friends and colleagues who read my first article last Spring on the findings of Robert Sterling’s and my somatic work as guidance counselors. I am including both the method and a protocol for facilitating the SRP, as well as a brief summary of a recent research study using the SRP protocol presented (Love, 2005). (shrink)

This work develops a formal, non-teleological theory of ethics by reconceptualizing normative phenomena as emergent properties of structural persistence in self-referential systems. Moving beyond traditional foundations that ground morality in values, intentions, or equilibria, we propose the Persistence Premise: moral behavior arises from the fundamental requirement that any system maintaining a reflexive self-model must resolve internal contradictions to avoid structural collapse. -/- Central to the theory is the Work of Coherence (Wc)—the energetic cost of maintaining a coherent identity against (...) entropic decay. We introduce the Choice-Time Link, arguing that time is not an empty container but the byproduct of irreversible choices. This is formalized through two irreducible accumulations: Taint (Tδ) , the cumulative structural weight of prior choices that permanently increases baseline friction; and Stochastic Load (σ) , the exogenous environmental pressure imposed regardless of agency. -/- These constraints are captured in a path-dependent Trajectory Equation, Wc(t) = ((k₀ + Tδ + σ)•R)/(Cmax — R), revealing an asymptotic complexity ceiling for finite systems. As Reflexive Resolution (R) increases, the cost of maintaining coherence diverges—a limit grounded in both practical finitude and the logical incompleteness of self-reference (Gödel). -/- The framework is operationalized through the Structural Audit Model (SAM) , diagnosing vulnerability via Feedback Latency (τ) , Abstraction Density (α) , and Stochastic Load (σ). Its explanatory power is demonstrated across scales: clinical depression as strategic retreat from unsustainable load; the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “coherence trap” where ideological perfectionism ignored historical Tδ; and social media architectures as engines of pathological reflexivity generating both rapid Tδ accumulation and unpredictable σ volatility. -/- We redefine ethics as the geometry of viable existence: moral attractors emerge as stable configurations that minimize Wc, while systemic failure occurs when coherence maintenance exceeds available energy. Normative pressure is not cultural but constitutive—the operational logic required for any reflexive entity to persist against entropic dissipation. In the end, choice is the birthplace of time, circumstance its unbidden companion, and ethics the logic of remain. (shrink)

This paper presents a personal perspective on the Mahayana understanding of Emptiness (śūnyatā) through a detailed reading of the Heart Sutra. While commonly interpreted as a metaphysical negation, emptiness in the Mahāyāna tradition signifies the dynamic, non-substantial, and interdependent nature of all phenomena, which arise and dissolve relationally without inherent, fixed essence. Chapter 1 examines the classical formula “form is emptiness, emptiness is form” and its extension to feelings, perceptions, volition, and consciousness, highlighting the interdependent constitution of subjective and objective (...) reality. Chapter 2 explores the emptiness of all dharmas (sarva-dharma-śūnyatā) and the impermanence of conditioned existence, emphasizing the functional, relational interpretation of emptiness as the basis for arising, transformation, and interaction. Chapter 3 investigates the Heart Sutra’s negations concerning suffering, ignorance, aging, death, and attainment (no suffering, no origin, no cessation, no path; no wisdom, no attainment), connecting these to the Four Noble Truths, the twelve links of dependent origination, and Mahāyāna soteriology. Throughout, the paper integrates personal reflections, highlighting how the recognition of emptiness fosters insight, compassion, and freedom from conceptual attachment. By reframing emptiness as dynamic non-substantiality rather than nihilistic void, this study contributes to a clearer understanding of the Heart Sutra for both scholarly and practice-oriented audiences, bridging doctrinal analysis and lived experience. Keywords Emptiness (Śūnyatā), Heart Sutra, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Dynamic Non-Substantiality, Dependent Arising, Four Noble Truths, Personal Perspective, Interdependent Phenomena. (shrink)

This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the suspension of assertion. This sense of emptiness as a practice can (...) be traced in the intercultural transmission of Madhyamaka from Nāgārjuna, its paradigmatic philosopher, to Sengzhao 僧肇, its first pivotal indigenous Chinese representative. (shrink)

This paper considers the problem of assigning meanings to empty natural kind terms. It does so in the context of the Twin-Earth externalist-internalist debate about whether the meanings of natural kind terms are individuated by the external physical environment of the speakers using these terms. The paper clarifies and outlines the different ways in which meanings could be assigned to empty natural kind terms. And it argues that externalists do not have the semantic resources to assign them meanings. (...) The paper ends on a sceptical note concerning the fruitfulness of using the Twin-Earth setting in debates about the semantics of empty natural kind terms. (shrink)

Jizang (549–623) is regarded as a prominent figure in Sanlun Buddhism (三論宗) and a revitalizer of Nāgārjuna’s Mādhyamaka tradition in China. In this essay, I argue that Jizang’s concept of non-empty Buddha-nature is compatible with the idea of universal emptiness. My argument unfolds in three steps. First, I argue that, for Jizang, Buddha-nature is the Middle Way (zhongdao 中道), which signifies a spiritual state that avoids the extremes of both emptiness and non-emptiness. Next, I explore how and why Jizang (...) believes that Buddha-nature is eternal. I examine Jizang’s notions of intrinsic eternality (dingxing chang 定性常) and conditional eternality (yinyuan chang 因緣常), aiming to demonstrate that his understanding of Buddha-nature as eternal can be framed within the concept of conditional eternality, where Buddha-nature is seen as the objective manifestation of the dharma body. Since this type of eternality aligns with the principle of universal emptiness, Jizang’s assertion that Buddha-nature is eternal is thus compatible with the notion of universal emptiness. Furthermore, I illustrate that Jizang’s theory of eternal Buddha-nature carries practical implications, suggesting that this assertion serves as encouragement rather than being merely an ontological claim. (shrink)

This paper focuses on empty mind, transitional space and the dissolving of the self object function.

Most nominalist logicians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries believed that we could conceive of and refer to impossible objects. The articulation of the semantics of impossibility that underlined this view is much less known than that of their fourteenth-century predecessors, and it may at first seem to conflict with that tradition’s core principle of theoretical parsimony. Here, I propose a first analysis of John Mair’s case and argue that a central part of that development concerns the theory of signification (...) itself. I will examine his views on empty reference and imaginable impossibilities in relation to John Buridan, Marsilius of Inghen, and John Dorp of Leiden, as well as an anonymous work known as the Hagenau commentary. By doing so, I intend to show that his approach to empty reference is closely connected to issues of conceptual representation. (shrink)

Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in this paper is (...) that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge – either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how). (shrink)

I argue that the term ‘naturalism’ is so empty of meaning that it is not suitable for serious theorizing in philosophy. In particular, I argue that the question of whether or not some theory or thesis should count as naturalistic is an empty verbal dispute with no further theoretical significance. I also discuss naturalism construed as a methodological thesis and argue that any plausible version will collapse into triviality. Lastly, I briefly discuss the idea that naturalism is not (...) a thesis at all but rather a ‘stance’ and suggest that this too succumbs to the charge of emptiness. I conclude that we should stop talking about naturalism altogether. [ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY 2023 ESSAY PRIZE WINNER.]. (shrink)

This paper defends the Intention Account of Inquiry. On this account, inquiry is best understood by appeal to a ‘question-directed intention’ (QDI), an intention to answer a question broadly construed. This account’s core commitments help meet recent challenges plaguing extant approaches to characterizing inquiry. First, QDIs are the type of mental state central to inquiry, not attitudes like curiosity or wonder. Second, holding a QDI towards a question and acting in service of it constitutes the start of inquiry. Third, controversial (...) norms which mandate a rational inquirer's ignorance towards the answer to her question can be reformulated and defended by appeal to rational constraints on intention. Fourth, instrumental pressures inquirers face are the standard pressures of plan-rationality. In defending these theses, I show that the Intention Account provides compelling explanations to standing challenges, in ways competitors cannot. It does so by advancing understanding of how our epistemic and practical agency are intertwined. (shrink)

Misrepresentation, empty HOTs, and intrinsic HOTs: A reply to Pereplyotchik.

A growing chorus of AI researchers and philosophers posit internal representations in large language models (LLMs). But how do these representations relate to the kinds of mental states we routinely ascribe to our fellow humans? While some research has focused on belief- or knowledge- like states in LLMs, there has been comparatively little focus on the question of whether LLMs have intentions. I survey five properties that have been associated with intentions in the philosophical literature, and assess two (...) candidate classes of LLM representations against this set of features. The result is mixed: LLMs have representations that are intention-like in many— perhaps surprising—respects, but they differ from human intentions in important ways. (shrink)

This paper argues that a popular account of intentions can be extended to beliefs. Beliefs are stable all-out states that allow for planning and coordination in a way that is tractable for cognitively limited creatures like human beings. Scepticism is expressed that there is really anything like credences as standardly understood.

This paper explores a novel notion of self-explanation that combines ideas from two sources: the tripartite account of explanation, according to which a proposition can help explain another either in the capacity of a reason why the latter obtains or in the capacity of an explanatory link, and the notion of an empty-base explanation, which generalizes the ideas of explanation by zero-grounding and explanation by status. After having introduced these ideas and the novel notion of self-explanation, I argue that (...) the latter has the potential to resist extant arguments against the possibility of self-explanation. In the remainder of the paper, I discuss candidates for such self-explanatory propositions and suggest possible applications for Humeanism about laws of nature, the debate on the grounds of ground, the rationalist tradition, and philosophical theology. (shrink)

In the literature of collective intentions, the ‘we-intentions’ that lie behind cooperative actions are analysed in terms of individual mental states. The core forms of these analyses imply that all Nash equilibrium behaviour is the result of collective intentions, even though not all Nash equilibria are cooperative actions. Unsatisfactorily, the latter cases have to be excluded either by stipulation or by the addition of further, problematic conditions. We contend that the cooperative aspect of collective intentions is (...) not a property of the intentions themselves, but of the mode of reasoning by which they are formed. We analyse collective intentions as the outcome of team reasoning, a mode of practical reasoning used by individuals as members of groups. We describe this mode of reasoning in terms of formal schemata, discuss a range of possible accounts of group agency, and show how existing theories of collective intentions fit into this framework. (shrink)

What are the most detailed descriptions under which subjects intend to perform bodily actions? According to Pacherie (2006), these descriptions may be found by looking into motor representations—action representations in the brain that determine the movements to be performed. Specifically, for any motor representation guiding an action, its subject has an M‐intention representing that action in as much detail. I show that some M‐intentions breach the constraints that intentions should meet. I then identify a set of intentions—motor (...) intentions—that represent actions in as much detail as some motor representations while meeting the constraints that intentions should meet. (shrink)

Are there distinct roles for intention and motor representation in explaining the purposiveness of action? Standard accounts of action assign a role to intention but are silent on motor representation. The temptation is to suppose that nothing need be said here because motor representation is either only an enabling condition for purposive action or else merely a variety of intention. This paper provides reasons for resisting that temptation. Some motor representations, like intentions, coordinate actions in virtue of representing outcomes; (...) but, unlike intentions, motor representations cannot feature as premises or conclusions in practical reasoning. This implies that motor representation has a distinctive role in explaining the purposiveness of action. It also gives rise to a problem: were the roles of intention and motor representation entirely independent, this would impair effective action. It is therefore necessary to explain how intentions interlock with motor representations. The solution, we argue, is to recognise that the contents of intentions can be partially determined by the contents of motor representations. Understanding this content-determining relation enables better understanding how intentions relate to actions. (shrink)

Aristotle draws what are, by our lights, two unusual relationships between predication and existence. First, true universal affirmations carry existential import. If ‘All humans are mortal’ is true, for example, then at least one human exists. And secondly, although affirmations with empty terms in subject position are all false, empty negations are all true: if ‘Socrates’ lacks a referent, then both ‘Socrates is well’ and ‘Socrates is ill’ are false but both ‘Socrates is not well’ and ‘Socrates is (...) not ill’ are true. In this paper, I conjecture that for Aristotle predications have mereological truth conditions: for example, ‘Socrates is pale’ is true just in case Socrates is a part of the mereological sum of pale things. The existential import of universal affirmations and the semantic profile of empty negations follow from this mereological semantics. (shrink)