Volume 19, Issue 2 -

During the past few decades, Graham Priest has advocated for Dialetheism, the controversial position that some contradictions are true. Dialetheism entails that the Law of Non-Contradiction fails. In recent decades the philosophical community has begun to recognize the significant challenge posed by Priest’s arguments. Priest has primarily appealed to paradoxes of self-reference, such as the Liar Paradox, to support his position. Following Priest’s approach, I offer another argument for Dialetheism, which appeals to a self-referential paradox that has been more or less ignored in the philosophical literature on the subject: the paradox of the missing difference. When we reflect on the question ‘what is a concept?’ from the perspective of a classical model of conceptual analysis, we arrive at the paradox of the missing difference. Although contradictions may be improbable, when we reflect on the question ‘how is the domain of concepts possible?’ we are led to a startling principle: without dialetheia any theory concerning concept formation (from a classical perspective on concepts) would be impossible. Dialetheism is a necessary condition for the existence of a domain of concepts in general. As a result, Dialetheism may even be more central to philosophical reflection than even dialetheists themselves have recognized.

Theodor Adorno’s moral philosophical thinking has relevance to the philosophy of education in today’s neoliberal context. Traditionally, the rational idea of morality has been essential in the philosophy of education. However, the Adornian idea of the insufficiency of reason as the foundation of morality is something that has not been thoroughly explored. By examining the characteristics of neoliberal education through the lenses of Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, it becomes clear that education must be approached not as a commodity or driver of the economy but as a means to enrich the individual. This enrichment, which begins with facilitating prerequisites for the foundation of autonomy in early childhood, rejects the homogenization of neoliberal education and instead promotes the ideals of ongoing critical self-reflection and the resistance of norms.

It is widely held that as a nego suppositum , Chrysippus’ response to Diodorus Cronus’ Master Argument is that the impossible “this man has died” follows from the possible “Dio has died”. A principal claim of this article is that Chrysippus was not actually committed, against Diodorus, to the tenet that there are deductions and conditionals whereby from the possible the impossible follows. I argue that this is most likely part of a Chrysippean exemplum fictum of a real dialectical discussion and it merely reflects a Chrysippean dialectical strategy, a merely instrumental agreement (συγχώρησις) with Diodorus on the admissibility of some single-premised arguments. As historical evidence for my conjecture I highlight two key passages by Sextus Empiricus which help to understand that Chrysippus’ real tenet was an ancient implicational counterpart of a deictic version of the Identity-Elimination Rule, whereas most likely, according to Diodorus the identitarian major premiss of this rule is redundant, so that it must be eliminated.

In work that spans almost four decades, Michael Bratman has developed a rich account of human agency. At the centre of this account lies an understanding of intentions as individual planning states. A significant strand in this enterprise has been his work on shared agency, culminating in his 2014 monograph, which aims to extend his account of individual agency to cover cases of what he calls “modest sociality”, i.e. simple cases of acting together. Central to this endeavour is Bratman’s analysis of shared intention, which for him is not a sui generis phenomenon, but can be understood in terms of his concept of individual agency, as the main components of his account of shared intention are already available in his account of the intentions of a single person. In this paper, I want to critically examine Bratman’s approach to shared intention. I will proceed as follows: In Section 1, I will describe the analytic strategy that guides Bratman’s analysis. Section 2 will introduce his central claim that the fulfilment of a list of conditions suffices for a shared intention to be present. In Sections 3 to 5, I will discuss and criticise some of these conditions. In Section 6, I will draw some positive conclusions from my critical arguments.

The goal of this paper is to raise a novel objection to Lewis’s modal realist epistemology. After reformulating his modal epistemology, I shall argue that his view that we have necessary knowledge of the existence of counterparts ends up with an absurdity. Specifically, his analogy between mathematical knowledge and modal knowledge leads to an unpleasant conclusion that one’s counterpart exists in all possible worlds. My argument shows that if Lewis’s modal realism is true, we cannot know what is possible. Conversely, if we can know what is possible, his modal realism is false. In the remainder of the paper, I shall consider and block possible objections to my argument.