By Travis McIntyre
Abstract: This paper concerns the concept of reference within the field of semantics. W. V. Quine argues in his Word and Object that the relation between words and the objects they refer to is metaphysically indeterminate; there are no facts in the world which can determine what objects words refer to. This paper refutes this thesis by expanding the available facts for establishing reference from behavioral facts (stimulus meaning) to include mental facts which include peoples‟ intentions (intentional semantics). I go on to point out how this new …

By Raj N. Patel
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Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are two great thinkers of the 19th century who had numerous points of philosophical intersection. Both had a distaste and suspicion for religious authority and instead emphasized individualism and subjectivity. However, one main area of disagreement between them the conception of the “ethical”: Nietzsche had a great distaste toward a conventional universal moral code of behavior, whereas it is precisely this universal ethic that characterizes Kierkegaard’s “ethical stage of life” which constitutes an important presupposition for his notion of the “religious stage of life”. …

By Gary Wang
In Hannah Arendt’s earlier work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, imagination is caught by totalitarian ideology leading to a denial of experience and a complicity in evil.[1] In her later work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she explicitly condemns Eichmann’s “lack of imagination” as evidence of his inability to think and as paradigmatic of her diagnosis of totalitarian evil as banal[2]. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt’s discussion centers on how imagination is central to the faculty of judgment to possibly resist evil.[3] The relationship between …

by ETHAN JERZAK
Abstract. I aim to resolve a difficulty that has plagued post-Kuhnian philosophy of science. This difficulty stems from a simultaneous commitment to two theses: (1) that successive paradigms are incommensurable to such an extent that they define different puzzles and therefore different worlds, and (2) that each paradigm ‘improves’ on the one it replaces in a non-trivial way. I work through Davidson’s objection to the idea of a conceptual scheme (of which a scientific paradigm is a special case), as well as Kuhn’s response, to get …

By Edmund Zagorin
ABSTRACT: The evolution of artistic expression is often understood to be co-productive with a certain apprehended teleology of culture: “progress”, a notion itself instantiated by false axiomatic assumptions concerning biological evolution. These meditations will seek to critically interrogate teleological assumptions by de-structively mapping the future evolution of artistic expression through a radically empirical attention to the flows of cultural raw materials, media-structures, mediums, memes and messages. By attending to processes associated with growing media digitzation, inter-connectedness and fragmenting attention span, these meditations will seek to illuminate a cultural …

By Joseph N. Rees
ABSTRACT: Many commentators are extremely critical of Heidegger’s ambiguous conflation of Being-with and das Man in Being and Time. The text of Division One, Chapter Four shifts between an ethically neutral and ontologically necessary account of Dasein’s Being-with-others and an ethically saturated and contingent account of the same phenomenon, leaving the reader confused as to whether Heidegger is accepting sociality as a necessary and inexorable condition of human existence or a pervasive yet ultimately contingent impediment to authentic existence. …

By Raafay Syed
John Stuart Mill, one of the most prominent British philosophers of the 19th century, has had a tremendous influence on political philosophy, ethical theory, and much of the liberal thought which has dominated contemporary Western culture. His libertarian viewpoints are espoused in his essay On Liberty, which is an unwavering defense of individual liberty and freedom from limitations imposed by society. A few years later, Mill published his essay Utilitarianism, in which he argues that utility is the fundamental principle of morality. The principle of utility, or the …

By Alex Ehrlich & AJ Durwin
Abstract: Ever since Plato described knowledge in the Theaetetus and the Meno, three criteria, namely justification, truth, and belief (JTB), have composed the traditional philosophical definition of knowledge. In his 1963 paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Edmund Gettier attempts to disestablish the traditional definition of knowledge. He utilizes a thought experiment in which a person appears to meet the knowledge criteria yet still does not seem to have knowledge. In this paper we clarify and specify the definition of knowledge, breaking the justification criterion …

By Nestor Bailly
Abbreviations for Heidegger and other works cited:
QT – The Question Concerning Technology
Ister – Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”
WAPF – What Are Poets For?
SR – Science and Reflection
OWA – The Origin of the Work of Art
PLT – Hofstadter’s Introduction to Poetry, Language, Thought
Zimmerman – Michael Zimmerman’s Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity
Ferry and Renaut – Heidegger and Modernity trans. Franklin Philip
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Here the question of the saving power potential of art against technology’s worlding as the standing-reserve will be addressed. Section I will provide a grounding analysis of Heidegger’s notions of technology and art …

By Michael Schwartz
Abstract: While there is significant variation in the theist’s description of God, there are nonetheless a set of attributes upon which there is general (but certainly not universal) agreement. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and is capable of interacting in the lives of humans. My purpose in this paper is to provide an account of God’s relation to time given an assumption of these three divine attributes. I will show that the task is unsuccessful for an eternal God (one that exists outside of time), and …