Analytic Philosophy Research Articles

The Hidden Metaphysics of J. M. E. McTaggart’s Paradox: Influence on The Analytic Philosophy of Time

This paper discusses the various interpretations of McTaggart’s paradox that have been proposed throughout the 20th and the 21st centuries. It is argued that the traditional interpretation of McTaggart’s paradox, one which states that no metaphysical assumptions are required, is unfounded, but is nevertheless vital to the development of the analytic philosophy of time. To support such a position, various works of McTaggart and R. Ingthorsson are cited, aiming to show the intention of the creator of the paradox. It is argued that if McTaggart’s metaphysical premises are accepted, the potential number of interpretations gets narrowed down; however, it is also shown that many of the critiques and discussions arising from the analytic philosophy of time’s discourse can be relatively easily resolved. It is thus concluded that an interpretation of McTaggart’s paradox that includes his metaphysical premises not only makes the paradox itself less ambiguous, but it also shows the importance of metaphysics to the analytic philosophy of time.

Ethics and International Trade: A Tale of Many Connections

In recent decades a growing number of analytic political philosophers have started to pay attention to the ethics or morality of international economic integration. In this paper we offer an overview of the normative questions related to international trade. The paper has eight parts and focuses on these topics starting from a conceptual definition of trade: the legal, institutional and governance dimensions of international economic exchange and related ethical questions; the idea that trade has distributive effects within participating countries; the distinction between the ethics of production and consumption; two specific international markets, the market for natural resources and that for weapons.

Analytic philosophy and scriptural interpretations

Analytic philosophy and scriptural interpretations

Феноменология сегодня: исторические проблемы и современные тенденции. Возвращаясь к дискуссии 1988 года (материалы «круглого стола»)

In April 2024, a round table titled “Phenomenology Today: Historical Problems and Contemporary Trends. Returning to the 1988 Discussion” was held, dedicated to discussing current problems in phenomenological research in the context of the historical development of phenomenology in the 21st century. The round table was organized by the journal “Voprosy Filosofii”, the Center for Phenomeno­logical Philosophy of the Faculty of Philosophy of RSUH, as well as participants in the Russian Science Foundation project “World, Language, Reality: European and Russian Philosophy in Conceptual and Terminological Dimensions”. Leading phenomenologists, historians of philosophy, and epistemologists participated in the round table. The focus was on the materials of the discussion “Phenomeno­logy and Its Role in Contemporary Philosophy” (Voprosy filosofii, 1988, No. 12). The following topics were discussed: How can the past 36 years in the global and domestic phenomenological movement be assessed? How has the subject configur­ation of phenomenology as a field of study changed? What are the directions of contemporary phenomenological discussions, the specifics of the phenomenolo­gical method and the limits of phenomenological description. Can it be said that the phenomenological method is applied today in the humanities and natural sci­ences, and if so, how effective is it? What is happening today in phenomenology, and what are the current discussions? Phenomenology and analytic philosophy: prospects and possibilities for comparison. The role of phenomenology in the for­mation of epistemological and ontological traditions in Russian philosophy. What has changed in this field over 36 years? The core of the discussions, sparked by the questions posed, became the problem of the relationship between historical reality and the language of philosophy, as well as the understanding of the value of phenomenological strategies in education and scientific activities

От эстетики к сомаэстетике: о формировании философской позиции Р. Шустермана

The subject of the article is neopragmatic aesthetics; its formation, methodological foundations and specificity of the object of research. To reveal the stated goal, the author turns to the works of the American philosopher Richard Shusterman, who most consistently and clearly substantiates his philosophical position. The American philosopher, despite the strong influence of the analytical school, restores the connection with pragmatism, with the aesthetics of John Dewey, points out the dead ends and problematic points of the analytical approach. The article presents the evolution of American philosophical aesthetics with an emphasis on the transitional stage from the analytic tradition to a neopragmatic one. It is shown that Shusterman’s attempt to get rid of the “Platonic stigma” in the philosophy of art is carried out at the expense of criticizing analytic aesthetics. Thus, Shusterman makes critical arguments about the established habit of identifying art in its multivariate manifestation with the notion of “high” fi ne art associated with the sublime and true art. Shusterman shifts the focus of attention from the problem of defining art to the analytics of aesthetic experience, which allows him to transform aesthetics into somaesthetics – a body-oriented, practical philosophical discipline. The author concludes that Shusterman’s concept of somaesthetics emerges in a polemic with fundamentalist foundations in aesthetics, namely, the tradition of distinguishing objects, works of art from what is not, i.e. defining art. The author notes that a key figure for the formation of the theoretical basis of somaesthetics was Shusterman’s acquaintance with the position of Noel Carroll, who moves from the search for the essence of art to the investigation of the internal standards and motives of art. Schusterman, picking up on this strategy, affirms his anti-essentialist position. In polemics with his colleagues, he shifts and rethinks the problem field of aesthetics, declaring war on “Platonism,” criticizing the Greek philosophical tradition, to which we owe the fact that practical activity has become valued much less than theoretical activity. Along with this, the author concludes about Shusterman’s sophistic strategy and logic of thinking, citing arguments from the work of postmodernist researcher Barbara Cassin.

How Tarskian are Carnap's Semantics?

It is a commonplace of the history of analytic philosophy that Carnap swiftly adopted Tarskian semantics in the mid-1930s. There is no doubt that, in a very general sense, this is true. But to what extent are the innovative technical details characteristic of Tarski's method, specifically the handling of quantification by way of a satisfaction relation between formulas and variable assignments, reflected in Carnap's writings on semantics? Curiously enough, their essentials are in place just before Carnap took the purported Tarskian turn, namely in the definition of analyticity he formulated some time between September 1932 and April 1933, but are missing from his publications on semantics after 1935 until the final chapter of Meaning and Necessity of 1947, at which point we find Carnap reverting to the use of specifically Tarskian techniques in the context of his novel semantics for quantified modal languages.

Philosophy, Literature, and the Avoidance of Reading

Abstract: “Philosophy of literature” is a thriving subfield of Anglo-American philosophy but virtually unknown within literary studies. This essay aims to address a significant methodological inadequacy that is characteristic of much work in “philosophy of literature”: the remarkable absence of sustained and close textual interpretation as a technique for argument and substantiation. Underlying this approach are assumptions about the separability of meaning from linguistic form that lie at the foundation of modern philosophical approaches to logic and language, instantiated here by Gottlob Frege’s 1918 essay “The Thought.” The implications of Fregean ideas are legible in the interpretive failings of “philosophy of literature.”

Tense-Logic and the Revival of Philosophical Theology

The article discusses Nicholas Wolterstorff’s explanations for the flourishing of philosophical theology in analytic philosophy by taking Arthur Norman Prior’s (1914–1969) development of tense-logic into account. Prior’s work challenged the prevailing anti-metaphysical norms in analytic philosophy and introduced an alternative understanding of the relationship between logic and metaphysics. Prior’s application of tense-logic to an analysis of the concept of existence in quantified tense-logic and his exploration of future contingency in branching time semantics provide a strong reason for why analytic philosophy naturally incorporates philosophical theology. These considerations lead us to modify Wolterstorff’s emphasis on the importance of meta-epistemology for the resurgence of philosophical theology. A development in logic was necessary. Furthermore, Prior’s importance questions the assumption that philosophical theology was a consequence of theistic philosophers seeking ways to defend theistic beliefs in analytic philosophy. This is not true for Prior. His invention of tense-logic and discussion of omniscience was driven by an existential interest in finding answers to philosophical problems concerning divine foreknowledge and human freedom which ultimately led him to reject his Christian beliefs.

Pelvic floor muscle training for female urinary incontinence: development of a programme theory from a longitudinal qualitative case study

BackgroundUrinary incontinence (UI) negatively affects the well-being of women globally. Pelvic Floor Muscle Training (PFMT) is a complex intervention that aims to decrease UI symptoms. Information about how the multiple complex components involved in PFMT achieve and maintain the desired effect are rarely studied as a whole. The evidence base lacks data about how women experience PFMT over time and in the longer-term. This study explored women’s experiences of biofeedback-assisted PFMT and PFMT alone, to identify and understand what influenced self-reported adherence to PFMT, and UI outcomes over time.MethodsThis rigorous longitudinal qualitative case study, nested within a randomised controlled trial, recruited forty cases (women with stress or mixed UI; 20 in biofeedback-assisted and 20 in PFMT alone group). A case included up to four semi-structured interviews with each woman (prior to starting PFMT, end of treatment [6 months], 12 months, 24 months). Analysis followed case study analytic traditions, resulting in a Programme Theory about PFMT from the perspectives of women with UI.FindingsThe theory demonstrates factors that motivated women to seek UI treatment, and how these influenced long-term adherence. Therapists who delivered PFMT played a crucial role in supporting women to know how to undertake PFMT (to have capability). Some, but not all, women developed self-efficacy for PFMT. Where women did not have PFMT self-efficacy, adherence tended to be poor. When women had PFMT self-efficacy, the conditions to support adherence were present, but contextual factors could still intercede to inhibit adherence. The intercession of contextual factors was individual to a woman and her life, meaning any particular contextual factor had inconsistent influences on PFMT adherence over time for individual women and exerted varying influences across different women.ConclusionLong term adherence to PFMT is a complex interaction between many different factors. Enquiring about an individual woman’s motivation to seek treatment and understanding the contextual factors that affect an individual woman will enable a practitioner to support longer-term adherence.

The Interaction of Continental and Analytical Philosophy in the Development of the Philosophy of Dialogue

The Interaction of Continental and Analytical Philosophy in the Development of the Philosophy of Dialogue

What Kind of ‘God’ do Hindu Arguments for the Divine Show? Five Novel Divine Attributes of Brahman

This article describes the ultimate ground of reality, Brahman, as a single power unfolding in concert in all things. It uses counterfactual argumentation to imply that a cosmos must consist of telic causal orders or manifested ‘powers’ as its most granular building block – and that they must be unified into a single whole. It is based on an argument for a single causally-conditioning substrate of all things recorded in India’s classical Sāṃkhya Kārikā and Brahma Sūtras; this was used by scholastic Vedāntic thinkers including the non-dualist Śaṃkara and the ‘transformationist’ Bhedābheda thinker Śrīnivāsa. It takes up arguments for satkārya, the pre-existence of a thing’s various transformations in potentio within its substrate, and employs them to paint a picture of reality as an ordered yet entangled pattern of causal trajectories. These manifest as the changing world we know. While Vedānta’s main motivation for making the arguments was to prove monism, this conception of an ‘immanent cause’ of all was also seen as divine. We see how this accords with moves in contemporary analytic philosophy to shift away from a broadly Humean model of constant conjunctions (reminiscent of key Buddhist approaches) toward a Neo-Aristotelian ‘metaphysics of powers’. But we also indicate how it may go further than most modern powers-metaphysicians in proposing a deeper connection between powers and what it is for there to be a cosmos at all.

Bibliometrics beyond citations: introducing mention extraction and analysis

Standard citation-based bibliometric tools have severe limitations when they are applied to periods in the history of science and the humanities before the advent of now-current citation practices. This paper presents an alternative method involving the extracting and analysis of mentions to map and analyze links between scholars and texts in periods that fall outside the scope of citation-based studies. Focusing on one specific discipline in one particular period and language area—Anglophone philosophy between 1890 and 1979—we describe a procedure to create a mention index by identifying, extracting, and disambiguating mentions in academic publications. Our mention index includes 1,095,765 mention links, extracted from 22,977 articles published in 12 journals. We successfully link 93% of these mentions to specific philosophers, with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. Moreover, we integrate the mention index into a database named EDHIPHY, which includes data and metadata from multiple sources and enables multidimensional mention analyses. In the final part of the paper, we present four case studies conducted by domain experts, demonstrating the use and the potential of both EDHIPHY and mention analyses more generally.

Agent Causation and Motivating Reasons

AbstractAgent causation, roughly stated, is the view that an agent can stand in direct causal relation to (at least some subset of) her actions. Although agent causation has had a patchy reputation throughout much of contemporary analytic philosophy, it is now considered by many to be a viable theoretical option in various domains in action theory. That said, agent‐causalists continue to grapple with a number of important issues. This paper focuses on one such issue—namely, how to integrate motivating reasons into a picture of agent causation. More specifically, I canvass a number of options for the agent‐causalist, focusing in particular on various causalist accounts, and flagging various problems along the way. I conclude with some brief considerations about how to move forward.

The life sciences and the history of analytic philosophy.

Comparative to the commonplace focus onto developments in mathematics and physics, the life sciences appear to have received relatively sparse attention within the early history of analytic philosophy. This paper addresses two related aspects of this phenomenon. On the one hand, it asks: to the extent that the significance of the life sciences was indeed downplayed by early analytic philosophers, why was this the case? An answer to this question may be found in Bertrand Russell's 1914 discussions of the relation between biology and philosophy. Contrary to received views of the history of analytic philosophy, Russell presented his own 'logical atomism' in opposition not only to British Idealism, but also to 'evolutionism'. On the other hand, I will question whether this purported neglect of the life sciences does indeed accurately characterise the history of analytic philosophy. In answering this, I turn first to Susan Stebbing's criticisms of Russell's overlooking of biology, her influence on J.H. Woodger, and her critical discussion of T.H. Huxley's and C.H. Waddington's application of evolutionary views to philosophical questions. I then discuss the case of Moritz Schlick, whose evolutionist philosophy has been overlooked within recent debates concerning Logical Empiricism's relation to the philosophy of biology.

Regrounding the Unworldly: Carnap’s Politically Engaged Logical Pluralism

Recent discussions of logical pluralism trace its origins to Rudolf Carnap’s principle of tolerance; indeed, the principle is seen as one of Carnap’s lasting philosophical contributions. In this paper, I will argue that Carnap’s reasons for adopting this principle are not purely logical, but are rather founded in the Vienna Circle’s manifesto—a programmatic document that brings the Circle’s philosophical work together with a program of social change. Building on work by Uebel, Romizi, and others, I argue that we must understand the principle in light of Carnap’s role in writing the manifesto, and thus as integrated into the larger philosophical and political goals of the Circle. This history illuminates the often-ignored relationship between Carnap’s logical pluralism and his political views. Finally, I turn to the political situation of the post-World War 2 period in the United States. During this time, the Circle’s emigres in the USA transitioned their work from active efforts to reform society to the technical work that we recognize as the foundation of American analytic philosophy today. In this final section, I argue that the reasons that Carnap distanced himself from the political foundations of his view were due in large part to McCarthy-era persecution of left-wing academics.

Spinoza and Spinozism in Twenty-First Century Anglophone Philosophy

In this paper, I survey some prominent developments in Spinoza scholarship in English-speaking countries in the past quarter-century. Picking up where Tom Cook left off in his analysis of the reception of Spinoza in Anglo-American philosophy in the hundred years after the founding of the Vereniging Het Spinozahuis (1897–1997) (“Spinoza's Place in Twentieth Century's Anglo-American Philosophy”), I seek to identify some of the main currents in the rich profusion of twenty-first century Spinoza scholarship in the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia. Scholarship on Spinoza’s metaphysics has continued to blossom, harkening back in some respects to the idealist interpretations with which Cook opens his survey. But whereas there was a notable lack of scholarly works on Spinoza’s moral and political philosophy in the twentieth century, there is now an abundance of scholarship in these fields. I will conclude by examining the reach of Spinozism in the twenty-first century, looking at the ways in which scholars and journalists have presented Spinoza’s philosophy to a non-academic readership, and exploring the ways in which contemporary metaphysicians and philosophers of emotion and cognition have cast their work under the “brand” of Spinozism.

G. H. von Wright on Logical Empiricism

Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003) started his studies in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki in 1934. His teacher, Professor Eino Kaila (1890–1958), was an associate of the Vienna Circle who had changed the course of Finnish philosophy with his own version of logical empiricism. Under Kaila’s supervision, von Wright wrote his early studies on probability and defended his doctoral thesis The Logical Problem of Induction in 1941. Von Wright met Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge in 1939 and 1947 and eventually became his successor there in 1948–1951. Later, von Wright characterized these two philosophers as his “father figures”: “Kaila had turned me into a logical positivist or empiricist. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thoroughly eradicated this personality of mine.” This article studies von Wright’s changing relation to logical empiricism. The main sources include his correspondence with Kaila in 1937–1958 and his books Den logiska empirismen (in Swedish in 1943; in Finnish in 1945) and Logik, filosofi och språk (in Swedish in 1957, in Finnish in 1958). In his “Intellectual Autobiography” (1989), von Wright described the former book as “a farewell to the philosophy of my student years”. Wittgenstein’s influence can be seen in von Wright’s denial of the unity of science and his cool cultural pessimism as expressed in his critical essays. But it is also evident that logic and exact thinking continued to be central tools and ingredients of his subsequent and highly appreciated work as an analytic philosopher.

Do Social Sciences Threaten the Autonomy of Ethics? Reconstructing the Marxian Metaethical Response

AbstractIn the present paper, I attempt to provide a reconstructed Marxian response to the question of whether the social (and behavioral) sciences constitute a philosophical threat to the autonomy of ethics. I suggest that shedding light on some aspects of the Marxian work (especially the Theses on Feuerbach), from the standpoint of the debate on naturalism in contemporary analytic philosophy, can offer valuable philosophical insights against the framework of scientific naturalism. This framework is responsible for presenting the social sciences as a philosophical threat to the autonomy of ethics. I argue that Marx detects and rejects three fundamental presuppositions of scientific naturalism: empiricism, ‘God’s point of view,’ and methodological individualism. I conclude that the Marxian view is a liberal naturalist perspective which allows both the scientific comprehension of the social world and the autonomy of ethics.

Spinoza’s Place in Twentieth Century Anglo-American Philosophy

This paper began as an address at the 100th anniversary celebration of the Vereniging het Spinozahuis in Amsterdam in 1997. I trace the highlights of Spinoza reception and scholarship in the Anglo-American philosophical community from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Beginning with the British Idealists’ enthusiasm for Spinoza as a systematic metaphysician, I move through the indifference of the (anti-metaphysical) positivists to the renewal of interest among more naturalistically-minded analytical philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century. Along the way there are brief discussions of a few individual thinkers who engaged with Spinoza in especially interesting or influential ways, such as Caird, Santayana, Russell, Wolfson, Hampshire, and Curley.

The nature of nonduality: The epistemic implications of meditative and psychedelic experiences

AbstractIn Jylkkä's (Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2022) Mary on Acid: Experiences of unity and the epistemic gap, the author contends that psychedelic experience, by inducing unitary—nondual—experiences of subject–object dissolution, brings to light the epistemic gap between unitary knowledge, constituted by experience, and relational knowledge, distinct from experience. Jylkkä draws a connection between the nondual experience as occasioned through psychedelic usage, and Buddhist contemplative practices. While Jylkkä's attempt to establish a dialogue between analytic philosophy, Buddhism and the science of psychedelics is laudable, we contend that more rigorous attention is required to characterizing nondual experience, the forms of experience occasioned by psychedelic use, and whether they truly constitute parallel to states cultivated through Buddhist practice traditions. While such parallelism may speak to a deeper unification, such a claim requires substantiation to avoid the perennialist eliding of the varied and rich engagement with nonduality across completive traditions. This article highlights the internal tensions that exist surrounding the nature of the nondual as elucidated across Indo‐Tibetan traditions, dangers of decontextualizing states induced through culturally embedded contemplative practices including the underrecognized epistemic function of ceremonial ethnomedicine usage in generating Indigenous metaphysics; and the under acknowledged potential of psychedelic substances for attenuating introspective bias in first‐person phenomenological inquiry.