Volume 97, Issue 1

Abstract: The present article explores the motives behind the so-called ‘appropriation’ of Aristotelian logic by the Syriac-speaking community in the Near East from the sixth to the ninth centuries. While it is often assumed that the Syrians adopted Greek logic for religious, and polemical, ends, we aim to show rather that the underlying reasons given for the study of logic and its propagation through educational institutions were much the same among Syriac as they were for Greek practitioners of philosophy in Late Antiquity. There was a marked continuity between the late ancient Greek centres of learning and the Syriac monasteries. Syriac theologians rarely, if ever, sought to use Aristotle as a crutch in sectarian religious debates. There are implications for our understanding of how and why the Arabic renaissance in logic came about.

Abstract: There is clear evidence in the Critique of Pure Reason and in other works that Kant holds a thesis that asserts the coextensiveness of necessity and apriority. What has remained unclear and a subject of controversy in the literature is the exact content of this thesis and why Kant holds it. I argue for a new reading that explains the connection between the necessary and the a priori as Kant understands them and in a way that makes this thesis applicable to all the knowledge claims that Kant deems a priori . I begin by analyzing Kant’s conceptions of apodictic judgment and of necessity in its empirical use. I then offer an analysis of his conception of knowing as a specific epistemic attitude and the key notion of insight that belongs to it. Finally, I show how Kant’s explanations of these features of his epistemology make the claims of modern natural science, as Kant describes them, relevant examples of his conception of synthetic a priori knowledge. By approaching the question of the synthetic a priori through examples from natural science and not through those from mathematics or transcendental philosophy, as in the dominant approach to this problem, I offer a fresh perspective on Kant’s view that also allows us to question the overly demanding requirements that have come to be associated with it.

Abstract: Roman Jakobson praised a juvenile text by Husserl Zur Logik der Zeichen (Semiotik) as “an attempt to classify categories of signs and to answer to the question in which sense language, i. e., our most important system of signs, ‘promotes and on the other hand hinders Thought’.” However, it is only in his First Logical Investigation that Husserl gives a mature account of his theory of signs. This largely exegetical paper gives an analysis of Husserl’s First Logical Investigation . We discuss Husserl’s text against the background of the semiotics of the Habsburg Philosophy (Twardowski, Meinong), of early analytical philosophy (Frege) and of post-Fregean philosophy of language.

Abstract: The Kantian concept of self-legislation plays a central role in Robert Pippin’s influential interpretation of Hegel’s theory of freedom. I isolate two competing notions of freedom present within Pippin’s own specification of the concept: freedom as reflective transparency and freedom as self-identification with one’s deeds. The former is compatible with Hegel’s own quasi-Spinozist conception of freedom and allows for historical conceptual change. It is also consistent with Pippin’s truly Hegelian contention that the justification of “modern ethical life” must assume the form of a historical, developmental account, and that a plurality of our moral and social attachments can be integral to our freedom. The ideal of self-identification. however, and Pippin’s development of it in terms of self-legislation and a theory of the normative social conditions of rational agency, involves a dichotomous conception of freedom that is incompatible with Hegel’s. Pippin’s ultimate privileging of self-legislation thus introduces a tension into his account and prevents him from achieving his distinctly Hegelian ambitions.