Although it has been something of a fetish for philosophers to distinguish between hallucination and illusion, the enduring problems for philosophy of perception that both phenomena present are not essentially different. Hallucination, in its pure philosophical form, is just another example of the philosopher’s penchant for considering extreme and extremely idealized cases in order to understan...

Broadly speaking there are two kinds of theories of truth, philosophical and logical. The philosophical theories of truth go back to the Greeks and forward to the present day. Among these are the correspondence, coherentist, pragmatist, deflationary and primitivist theories of truth. Logical theories of truth are roughly of two kinds, semantical (or definitional) and axiomatic. Tarski inaugurat...

A significant feature of contemporary science is the widespread use of mathematics in several of its subfields. In many instances, the content of scientific theories cannot be formulated without reference to mathematical objects (such as functions, numbers, or sets). In the hands of W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam, this feature of scientific practice was invoked in support of platonism (the view ...

Some of the best philosophers do not hold academic appointments in philosophy departments. Wouldn't you rather have the ghost of Frank Ramsey (the Cambridge mathematician who died in the 1920s) as a hall mate instead of some of your current colleagues? Confining our attention to the living, we find some economists among the more philosophically inclined intellectuals. The best of these fellow t...

1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a...

In a series of publications, we have proposed a foundational system of ontological categories which has been used to evaluate and improve the quality of conceptual modeling languages and models. In this article, we continue this work by employing theories from Formal Ontology, Cognitive Psychology and Philosophical Logic to systematically investigate some important modal aspects of the ontologi...

that roles that Frege wanted to be filled by his notion of sense could be filled by a single thing. I will be taking as a starting point one aspect of the Fregean notion of sense to draw a distinction between sense based theories of reference and direct reference theories. I will not insist on the identification of what is true and what is the referent for Frege of a sentence in indirect discou...