- Journal Details
- Format
- Journal
- eISSN
- 2182-2875
- First Published
- 01 Dec 1996
- Publication timeframe
- 4 times per year
- Languages
- English, Portuguese
Search
- Open Access
The weak collective agential autonomy thesis
Page range: 215 - 234
Abstract
Can a collective be an agent in its own right? Can it be the bearer of moral and other properties that we have traditionally reserved for individual agents? The answer, as one might expect, is ‘In some ways yes, in other ways no.’ The way in which the answer is ‘Yes’ has been described recently by Copp; I intend to discuss his position and defend it against objections. This describes a fairly weak form of autonomy that I will claim does not require the abandonment of methodological individualism or our commonplace intuitions about individual responsibility. I will also discuss, and reject, a stronger conception of autonomy suggested especially by the work of Pettit that would result in methodological individualism.
Keywords
- Collective responsibility
- collective agency
- methodological individualism
- supervenience
Abstract
A traditional view is that all necessary truths are analytic. A frequent objection is that certain claims of color incompatibility – e.g., ‘Nothing is both red and green all over’ – are necessarily true but not analytic. I argue that this objection to the traditional view fails because such color incompatibility claims are either analytic or contingent.
Keywords
- Necessity
- analyticity
- color
- color incompatibility
- Open Access
What photographs are (and what they are not)
Page range: 239 - 254
Abstract
- Open Access
First-order logic and some existential sentences
Page range: 255 - 270
Abstract
‘Quantified pure existentials’ are sentences (e.g., ‘Some things do not exist’) which meet these conditions: (i) the verb EXIST is contained in, and is, apart from quantificational BE, the only full (as against auxiliary) verb in the sentence; (ii) no (other) logical predicate features in the sentence; (iii) no name or other sub-sentential referring expression features in the sentence; (iv) the sentence contains a quantifier that is not an occurrence of EXIST. Colin McGinn and Rod Girle have alleged that standard first-order logic cannot adequately deal with some such existentials. The article defends the view that it can.
Keywords
- Colin McGinn
- existence
- existentials
- quantification
- Rod Girle
Abstract
- Open Access
Wittgenstein’: Mind, Meaning and Metaphilosophy
Page range: 289 - 295