" This paper proposes to revive the
twenty-year old debate on the question of whether
Craig’s theorem poses a challenge to the empirical
underdetermination thesis. It will be demonstrated that
Quine’s account of this issue in his paper
"Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World"
(1975) is mathematically flawed and that Quine makes too
strong a concession to the Craigian challenge. It will
further be pointed out that Craig’s theorem would
threaten the empirical underdetermination thesis only
if the set of all relevant observation conditionals could
be shown to be recursively enumerable — a condition
which Quine seems to overlook —, and it will be
argued that, at least within the framework of
Quine’s philosophy, it is doubtful whether this
condition is satisfiable. " |
"A dialetheia is a true
contradiction, a statement, A, such that both it
and its negation, ¬A are true. Hence, dialeth(e)ism
is the view that there are true contradictions.
Dialetheism opposes the so-called Law of
Non-Contradiction (LNC) (sometimes also called the Law
of Contradiction): for any A, it is impossible
for both A and ¬A to be true. Since
Aristotle's defence of the LNC, the Law has been
orthodoxy in Western philosophy. Nonetheless, there are
some dialetheists in the history of Western Philosophy.
Moreover, since the development of paraconsistent logic
in the second half of this century, dialetheism has now
become a live issue once more [ ... ]". |
"[ ... ] Let us start from a
comparison of Leibniz views to those of Rene Descartes
(1596-1650). Why should we start in this way? The answer
is as follows. There are two Leibniz's views, to be
discussed in this essay, which oppose each other, namely
his (i) explicit belief in the possibility of automation
of the processes of producing knowledge, and his (ii)
implicit questioning of the same possibility because of
the role attributed by him to perception as
characteristic of organic life [ ...]". |
