Volume 37, Issue 92

This is a reply to objections put forward in the last issue of Conceptus by Sebastian Paasch against my reconstruction of Anselm’s argument in Proslogion II. Paasch’s objections did not result in a correction of my reconstruction; nevertheless, they helped me in improving substantially my arguments in favour of this reconstruction.

In this article we define in an exact and clear way a many-sorted axiomatical first-order system with identity and we prove its weak consistency and weak completeness. In e.g. Wang (1952) and Oberschelp (1962), the necessary definitions and proofs are often only sketched. In this article we intend to present a complete demonstration of each result. Thus we will set out each proof in a systematic way, stating all necessary definitions and lemmata. The base of our system is the axiomatical system in Mates (1972), pp. 215ff, but we do without propositional constants and propositional variables.

The aim of this paper is to infer conclusions about the temporality of the physical world from central features of the measurement of time. In order to do so it makes a distinction between the passage of time and the measurement of the passage of time. Whilst the passage of time can be experienced on the basis of, say, chaotic processes, the measurement of the passage of time requires certain physical regularities. But regularity is not sufficient and it is important to highlight the connection between time, regularity and invariance in the measurement of time, especially with respect to classical physics, the Special theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. It is only after this connection has been clarified that the paper considers the dispute on whether the physical world is static or dynamic. As there are clearly both time-symmetric physical laws and time-asymmetric physical processes, the question is empirically underdetermined because the evidence is at present compatible with two incompatible views about the temporality of the physical world.

According to moral objectivists, there is a unique true answer to all moral questions. This article examines some of the most central difficulties affecting the position of moral relativists (the traditional opponents of objectivists) and concludes that the objectivist approach proposes in the end a more charitable interpretation of our moral discourse.

C. L. Hamblin’s second postulate on questions says that ” knowing what counts as an answer is equivalent to knowing the question.“ This assumption has often been adopted by others, yet it is still in need of interpretation. After presenting Hamblin’s postulate in the context of his essay from 1958, and placing it into the context of the two other postulates advocated there, this paper discusses two early suggestions by C. F. Presley as well as the ” set-of-answers methodology“ in formal approaches to the theory of questions. It then develops a pragmatic view based on an inferentialist semantics (Dummett, Brandom), assuming that the propositional content of questions can be identified with their presuppositions. At the end, Hamblin’s postulate survives in a significantly modified form; it only applies to the propositional content of questions, and understanding a question turns out to be a matter of degree.