Paradox Of Philosophy Research Articles

О темах, идеях и парадоксах философии Н.А. Бердяева

О темах, идеях и парадоксах философии Н.А. Бердяева

Judge Hercules or Judge Bayes?

This paper explores two possible connections between hard cases in law and Newcomb’s Paradox in philosophy. One is that Newcomb’s Problem is like a “hard case” in law -- i.e. a choice problem with conflicting and equally logical solutions. The other is that the superior being in Newcomb’s Problem and the mythical Judge Hercules in Ronald Dworkin’s theory of law are the same person. In particular, we claim that Judge Hercules, who we would rechristen Judge Bayes, has the near-perfect ability to predict the outcome of hard cases.

Answers to Pre-Zeno Paradoxes

In this paper, we propose a new approach, owing to the pioneering works carved out by Heidegger and Wittgenstein in the first half of 20th Century, to study Paradox in Philosophy and use it to develop new solutions to three ancient Greek paradoxes that were all discovered before Zeno’s Paradox and are discussed by Roy Sorensen in the first three chapters of his ‘A Brief History of Paradox’, i.e. Anaximander’s riddle of origin, Hiappasus’ finding of incommensurability in reality, and Parmenides’ argument against the possibility of thinking What is Not. In early times, they were treated as independent philosophical inquiries and there have been no positive answers to them. Our new solutions resolve them positively and show that the introduction of ‘Being of a Thing’ Concept as the key to all of them. As these paradoxes are dealing with basic inquiries into elemental concepts in science such as the origination of universe (Chicken-and-Egg Question), mathematical nature of the reality, analytic structure of thoughts and intentionality etc., advances in the understanding of them is instrumental to new developments in the studies of the foundation of general science that will lead to significant progresses in frontier of various disciplines, e.g. Quantum Mechanics in Physics, Behavior Theory in Economics, Continuum Hypothesis in Mathematics, Human Consciousness in Psychology etc.. In addition, the outcome paves the way to exploring alternative solutions to Zeno’s Paradox so as to uncover a few pieces of fundamental truth about the universe and the human world.

Sorites paradox and vague geographies

The sorites paradox is ranked among the top five paradoxes of philosophy (Sainsbury, Paradoxes, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995). It is simply stated as ‘what is a heap’. Deriving from the paradox is a definition of vagueness, which is contrary to the Boolean concept of the world implicit in much geographical teaching and thought, and the representation of geographical information in modern geographical information system. The argument of Sorites Paradox is suggested as a test of whether a concept is vague. If that concept is sorites susceptible, then it should be modelled as a vague concept, otherwise a Boolean model may be appropriate. The recognition of whether or not a particular concept is sorites susceptible does not have to influence the methods of analysis. It should merely inform the interpretation, and the investigator and reader should be aware that the outcome of the analysis is only one of a set of possible outcomes, which depends on how the vague concept is crispened. Furthermore, it is argued here that very many geographical phenomena (relations, objects and processes) can be shown to be sorites susceptible, and so vague, both generically and genetically. Vagueness can be addressed by multi-valued logic and applications of fuzzy set theory (the most common method of implementing multi-valued logic) to geography are reviewed. A formal recognition of vagueness in geographical phenomena is long overdue, and should be welcome in geographical analysis and, certainly, in geographical information systems.