The article intends to show the significance of Ch. Peirce’s ideas for development contemporary philosophy, find out main directions his criticism principles Cartesian and more broadly modern philosophy (where it comes from Descartes) consider positive program which he offers as an alternative Modern philosophy. Peirce starts a pragmatic semiotic approach human nature, consciousness cognition. ...

In a first part, I defend that formal semantics can be used as a guide to ontological commitment. Thus, if one endorses an ontological view O and wants to interpret a formal language L , a thorough understanding of the relation between semantics and ontologywill help us to construct a semantics for L in such away that its ontological commitment will be in perfect accordance with O . Basically, ...

In this paper I explore a position on which it is possible to eliminate the need for postulating abstract objects through abstraction principles by treating terms for abstracta as ‘incomplete symbols’, using Russell’s no-classes theory as a template from which to generalize. I defend views of this stripe against objections, most notably Richard Heck’s charge that syntactic forms of nominalism c...

I defend Joseph Melia’s nominalist account of mathematics from an objection raised by Mark Colyvan. The indispensability argument for the existence of mathematical entities such as numbers and sets has two premisses. The first is that mathematics is indispensable to science; that is, our best scientific theories imply the existence of numbers and other mathematical entities. The second premiss ...

Systematics balances uneasily between realism and nominalism, uncommitted as to whether biological taxa are discoveries or inventions. If the former, they might be taken as natural kinds. I briefly review some philosophers' concepts of natural kinds and then argue that several of these apply well enough to "eukaryote." Although there are some sticky issues around genomic chimerism and when euka...

This article offers a general discussion of the concept of universals in linguistics (and in general), spelling out different ways of understanding claims to universality and connecting such claims to other (often familiar) related distinctions, terminology and approaches such as competence and performance or I-language and E-language, evolutionary explanations, deep and surface universals, rat...