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Naming and Necessity
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In this paper, the authors make a connection between the mind-body problem and the so-called "identity thesis" in analytic philosophy, which has wide-ranging implications for other problems in philosophy that traditionally might be thought far-removed.Abstract:
I hope that some people see some connection between the two topics in the title. If not, anyway, such connections will be developed in the course of these talks. Furthermore, because of the use of tools involving reference and necessity in analytic philosophy today, our views on these topics really have wide-ranging implications for other problems in philosophy that traditionally might be thought far-removed, like arguments over the mind-body problem or the so-called ‘identity thesis’. Materialism, in this form, often now gets involved in very intricate ways in questions about what is necessary or contingent in identity of properties — questions like that. So, it is really very important to philosophers who may want to work in many domains to get clear about these concepts. Maybe I will say something about the mind-body problem in the course of these talks. I want to talk also at some point (I don’t know if I can get it in) about substances and natural kinds.read more
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Necessarily, salt dissolves in water
TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that a certain law of nature, namely that common salt (sodium chloride) dissolves in water, is metaphysically necessary, which conflicts with a widely shared intuition that the laws of nature (most if not all) are contingent.
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Kuhn’s wrong turning
TL;DR: The authors argue that the development of Kuhn's own thought was in a direction opposite to that of the mainstream of the philosophy of science, and that the most valuable contribution is to be found in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and not in his later work.
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The chemistry of substances and the philosophy of mass terms
TL;DR: In this paper, it is argued that the notion of essential properties of a substance is defined by its physical properties, which are different for different isotopes, and that what are called essential properties are only so relative to our knowledge or way of looking at the world no matter how sensible the definition of substance may seem.
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Philosophies of Difference
Abstract: We might call the philosophical period in France ranging from the 1962 publication of Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy to Michel Foucault’s death in 1984 “the epoch of difference.” That period saw the publication of Deleuze’s 1968 Difference and Repetition , Jacques Derrida’s major 1967 and then 1972 works with the appearance of differance and related concepts, Emmanuel Levinas’s 1978 Otherwise than Being ( Totality and Infinity was published in 1961, but its influence developed later), and Foucault’s work from the 1966 The Order of Things through the second and third volumes of his History of Sexuality . This period also saw related works by Jean-Francois Lyotard (1988 [1983]), Jean Baudrillard (1994 [1981]), and perhaps the most well known of Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, 1983’s The Inoperative Community . Although the treatments of difference in these works are extraordinarily diverse, it is remarkable how deeply the major thinkers (with the possible exception of Foucault, whose relation to difference is more indirect) are concerned with the idea of difference and its role in constructing a philosophical position. And although I have, a bit arbitrarily, marked 1984 as the end of this “epoch,” its influence continues well beyond that date.
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Counterpart theory and quantified modal logic
TL;DR: JSTOR as discussed by the authors is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship, which is used to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources.