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Pluralistic Insight into Identity both for Ourselves and for Others
Get PDFI provide a method of investigating identity both for ourselves and for others by exploring the connection between William James’ pluralism and Hannah Arendt’s ideas on the self. In §2, I present James’ pluralism for how we can view our world and self, which will serve as the foundation for this investigation. In §3, I lay out how Arendt attributes the availability of identity for others in terms of action. The question of “Who are you?” is addressed in this section by applying James’ pluralism to Arendt’s notion of action. In §4, I apply Arendt’s notions of solitude and loneliness to an investigation of the identity of ourselves. I conclude that when we view the world pluralistically we can find insight into how to understand the identity of both ourselves and others
On The Sufficient Conditions for Trust: A Criticism of Katherine Hawley\u27s Commitment-Based Account of Trust
No full textIs Logic Empirical? Logical \u27Conventionalism\u27 from an Empirical Standpoint
Get PDFThe laws of classical logic are taken to be logical truths, and logical truths are taken to objectively hold. However, we might question our faith in these truths: why are they true? One often avoided approach is logical conventionalism, because it makes the logical truths dependent on somewhat intersubjective linguistic conventions. Another approach, proposed by Putnam (1975) and more recently Dickson (2001) or Maddy (2007), is to adopt empiricism about logic. On this view, logical truths are true because they are true of the world alone – this gives logical truths an air of objectivity unlike logical conventionalism. Putnam and Dickson both take logical truths to be true in virtue of the world’s structure, and the structure of the world is to be understood to be given by our best empirical theory, quantum mechanics. As it turns out, the structure of quantum mechanics apparently makes true the laws of quantum logic, and falsifies (one half of) the distributive law, something which was taken to be a logical truth under classical logic. Empiricists take this to indicate that the distributive law was not a logical truth to begin with. However, this argument assumes that there is a single determinate structure of the world prescribed by quantum mechanics. In this essay, I argue that this assumption is false, and that the structure of the world is underdetermined in quantum mechanics. Likewise, the choice of ‘true’ logic, as given by the world’s structure, is also underdetermined. This leads to what I call empirical conventionalism: the world alone fails to determine our logical truths. We need something broadly intersubjective, and thus less than objective, to fix our choice of logic even under empiricism. An attempt to avoid one form of conventionalism has thus led us back to another
ADIWA! PIAROA PHILOSOPHIES OF POWER, VIOLENCE, INGESTION, EXCRETION, BLOOD AND BEAUTY
Get PDFFor Amazonian peoples we have the question of just what is the relation of Power to Polity and Society? – How do these ideas of Polity and Power compare with Western paradigms and expectations? Unfortunately we find that there can be no relationship. Anthropology has decided that there is no comparison possible: looking at such concepts through Western paradigms, anthropologists have found, it seems, that peoples like those in the Amazon just don’t have them—no Power, no Society, and no accomplishment of something that could be called a Polity. Piaroa ideas on these topics are in fact certainly much more interesting and sophisticated than those we find embedded in Western institutions
