Following its welcome revival in the late twentieth century, metaphysics in the analytic tradition has succumbed to decadence, with an astonishing variety of outlandish and extreme positions or "metaphysical follies" being taken seriously. This has caused an inevitable backlash among more scientifically-minded philosophers and incurred the scorn of scientists. Much of the reason for this is the blithe ignoring of empirical science by armchair metaphysicians. The roles of empirical knowledge in good, scientific metaphysics are however unclear. In virtue of its maximal generality, metaphysics is remote from straightforward empirical checks. This article explores, with historical and contemporary examples, the ways in which empirical information may inform and be fed back into metaphysics, the disputed role of common sense, and the delicate balance to be maintained, within a fallibilist, scientific metaphysics, between speculative, categorial and empirical elements.

Abstract Following its welcome revival in the late twentieth century, metaphysics in the analytic tradition has succumbed to decadence, with an astonishing variety of outlandish and extreme positions or “metaphysical follies” being taken seriously. This has caused an inevitable backlash among more scientifically-minded philosophers and incurred the scorn of scientists. Much of the reason for this is the blithe ignoring of empirical science by armchair metaphysicians. The roles of empirical knowledge in good, scientific metaphysics are however unclear. In virtue of its maximal generality, metaphysics is remote from straightforward empirical checks. This article explores, with historical and contemporary examples, the ways in which empirical information may inform and be fed back into metaphysics, the disputed role of common sense, and the delicate balance to be maintained, within a fallibilist, scientific metaphysics, between speculative, categorial and empirical elements.

Following its welcome revival in the late twentieth century, metaphysics in the analytic tradition has succumbed to decadence, with an astonishing variety of outlandish and extreme positions or “metaphysical follies” being taken seriously. This has caused an inevitable backlash among more scientifically-minded philosophers and incurred the scorn of scientists. Much of the reason for this is the blithe ignoring of empirical science by armchair metaphysicians. The roles of empirical knowledge in good, scientific metaphysics are however unclear. In virtue of its maximal generality, metaphysics is remote from straightforward empirical checks. This article explores, with historical and contemporary examples, the ways in which empirical information may inform and be fed back into metaphysics, the disputed role of common sense, and the delicate balance to be maintained, within a fallibilist, scientific metaphysics, between speculative, categorial and empirical elements.

The aim of this paper is investigate Alexius Meinong’s theory of objectives. Peter Simons distinguishes this theory from the theory of states of affairs, propositions, objects of judgment, assumptions, and other so-called propositional attitudes. In this context Simons distinguishes between the two categories “objective” and “things”. The term “objective” stands for those objects that, according to Meinong, represent judgments. For the other category, the author suggests the designation “things”, which includes anything presentable by an idea and nameable by a term, such as substances, qualities, properties or relationships. The author highlights the innovative, idiosyncratic, and consistent character of Meinong’s work and presents convincing arguments questioning whether nonexistent objects exist.

This chapter is concerned with the second of the four books of Samuel Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity, which bears the title "The Categories." It occupies 164 pages, a fifth of the total. While most systematic metaphysicians treat of categories in some form, it is rare for one to discuss the topic at such length: what we have is practically a treatise within a treatise. Alexander understands categories to be those qualities of space-time that are pervasive and fundamental. A comparative exposition is given of Alexander's theory of categories, with allusions to Kant and Hegel. It is argued that one distinctive aspect of Alexander's theory of categories is that it is realist through and through, unlike Kant's. A critical evaluation is then given of how Alexander describes and infers his list of categories, showing what lessons there are to be learnt for contemporary metaphysics.

The predominant form of logic before Frege, the logic of terms has been largely neglected since. Terms may be singular, empty or plural in their denotation. This article, presupposing propositional logic, provides an axiomatization based on an identity predicate, a predicate of non-existence, a constant empty term, and term conjunction and negation. The idea of basing term logic on existence or non-existence, outlined by Brentano, is here carried through in modern guise. It is shown how categorical syllogistic reduces to just two forms of inference. Tree and diagram methods of testing validity are described. An obvious translation into monadic predicate logic shows the system is decidable, and additional expressive power brought by adding quantifiers enables numerical predicates to be defined. The system’s advantages for pedagogy are indicated.

Czeslaw Lejewski studied in Warsaw before the Second World War, after which he settled in England and resumed an academic career, becoming Professor of Philosophy in Manchester. His writings, all articles, continue and extend the ideas of his teachers, especially Stanislaw Lesniewski in logic and Tadeusz Kotarbinski in metaphysics.

When considering Alexius Meinong's treatment of the mind and associated issues, we confront an oddity. The sense in which he does not have a philosophy of mind as such is that he is singularly unconcerned with otherwise standard categories such as Geist or Psyche, which words hardly occur at all in his philosophical vocabulary. The obverse of this lack of ontological or methodological Angst about mind is that Meinong takes it for granted that we are consciously related to a world beyond our own experiences, a world of material and ideal, and even non-existent things. In 1894, a younger Brentano student Kazimierz Twardowski published his Habilitationsschrift with the title Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und Gegenstand der Vorstellungen Objects of cognitions are predicative in nature, and are linguistically expressed by whole sentences or clauses, not by names or phrases like presentations. Objectives quickly came to play a central part in Meinong's developing theory of objects.

Stanislaw Lesniewski was one of the two originators and drivers of the Warsaw School of logic. This article describes his work chronologically, from his early philosophical work in Lvov to his highly original logical systems of protothetic, ontology and mereology. His struggles to overcome logical antinomies, his absolute commitment to logical clarity and precision, and his antipathy towards set theory made his nominalistic approach to logic among the most original of the twentieth century, while his early death and the loss of his papers meant his work was only gradually discovered and appreciated outside Poland.

This paper surveys mereology, the theory of parts and wholes, focussing on its origins in Lesniewski, and noting its intended employment as a surrogate for set theory. We examine parallel and independent work by Whitehead, Leonard and Goodman, and outline the subsequent adventures of mereology, both in its formal guises and in its now intensive application within philosophical ontology.

In the twentieth century three approaches to modality dominated. One denied its legitimacy (Russell, Quine). A second made language the source of modality (Carnap). The third treats possible worlds as the source of truth for modal propositions (Kripke, Lewis et al.) Meinong’s account of modality is quite different from all of these. Like the last it has an ontological basis, but it eschews worlds in favour of a rich one-world ontology of objects and states of affairs, many of which notoriously fail to exist and some even more notoriously fail to be possible. We lay out the ontological basis of Meinong’s system and show how he accommodates standard modal notions. Two peculiarities of his system are investigated: his preference of possibility over necessity, and his treatment of degrees of possibility, which allows him to subsume probability theory in his account.

Perceptions, thoughts, pictures and expressions are all typically about something. In mental cases the relation is called intentionality, in pictures depiction, in expressions denotation. The nature of this aboutness has long been a topic for philosophical puzzlement and controversy. Whether it requires the existence of a kind of thing, quality or relation not found in inanimate nature, whether it is analysable, whether it comes in one or many forms, are all matters of dispute. The ontology of aboutness has to be at least plausibly conjectured if its features are to be represented within information systems that are sophisticated and capable enough to themselves represent representation. It falls therefore to the ontologist to investigate the entities and factors required and suitable to capture the form and matter of representation. This is no straightforward task, and there are many pitfalls. But it is a task that must be taken up if ontologies and the information systems that employ them are to advance to a stage where conjecture, diversity of opinion, (mis)information, uncertainty, falsehood, error, revision, contradiction and correction are to be smoothly represented and reconciled, and linked, as they must be, to action and decision, whether natural or artificial. Looking for help past and present, this paper sets about addressing that difficult task.

Reference can fail in a way that intentionality cannot. Though the stream of phenomenal experience typically does not fail to target (be about, refer to) objects outside, it may do. How does the mind go about targeting objects beyond itself? The speculative conjecture of this paper is that it does so by a type of process which can be called pointing, and that the acts or act-aspects of pointing can be called pointers. The notion of a pointer has several suggestive roots. One is the familiar physical gesture of pointing. Another is the existence of directional signs such as on roads. The third is the software data types making direct reference to memory locations in computers, also called 'pointers'. A final source is demonstrative pronouns and other deictic expressions in language, of which Peter Geach wrote, "a demonstrative pronoun. works like a pointer, not like a label". I suggest that there is in the mental cognitive repertoire a structurally and semantically analogous type of act which pierces the passivity of perception, directs us outside the machine, and prepares the way for drawing others' minds to the same thing.

Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) is one of the foremost, most independent-minded, most distinctive, most misunderstood and most unjustly maligned of all (and not just Austrian) philosophers. He was pilloried by his own teacher Brentano and his one-time admirer Bertrand Russell as what Gilbert Ryle called “perhaps the supreme entity-multiplier in the history of philosophy.” It is often enough to employ the adjective ‘Meinongian’ to cast a philosopher’s views into the outer darkness. But as supreme commentator J. N. Findlay observes, Meinong was a painstakingly careful and methodical thinker, who inched his way forward to his radical ontological views. Meinong maintained a running interest in ethics and value theory, and the subjective experiences of feeling and desire that correlate to these spheres, from his 1894 Psychological-ethical investigations in value theory to his late works Emotional presentation (Meinong in Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Philosophisch-historische Klasse. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1917) and the posthumous On the foundation of general value theory (1923). In the process he graduated from value subjectivism to value objectivism. In this paper we will survey Meinong’s mature theory of intentionality and its objects, with particular attention to the otherwise neglected dignitatives and desideratives.

DialecticaVolume 71, Issue 4 p. 669-671 Book Review Stefan Roski, Bolzano's Conception of Grounding, Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 2017, ix + 269 pp., €59.00, ISBN 978-3-465-03971-6. Peter Simons, Peter Simons psimons@tcd.ie Trinity College DublinSearch for more papers by this author Peter Simons, Peter Simons psimons@tcd.ie Trinity College DublinSearch for more papers by this author First published: 29 January 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/1746-8361.12209Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume71, Issue4December 2017Pages 669-671 RelatedInformation

Many mereological propositions are true contingently, so we are entitled to ask why they are true. One frequently given type of answer to such questions evokes truth-makers, that is, entities in virtue of whose existence the propositions in question are true. However, even without endorsing the extreme view that all contingent propositions have truth-makers, it turns out to be puzzlingly hard to provide intuitively convincing candidate truth-makers for even a core class of basic mereological propositions. Part of the problem is that the relation of part to whole is ontologically intimate in a way reminiscent of identity. Such intimacy bespeaks a formal or internal relation, which typically requires no truth-makers beyond its terms. But truth-makers are held to necessitate their truths, so whence the contingency when A is part of B but need not be, or B need not have A as part? This paper addresses and attempts to disentangle the conundrum.

The most famous achievement of Jan Łukasiewicz (1878–1956) was to give the first rigorous formulation of many-valued logic. In this paper I discuss his motivations for this, which were philosophical, and the legacy of his work.