Negation in relevant logic, or its model-theoretic treatment using so-called Routley star, has been often criticized for lack of intuitive interpretation. In this talk, I respond to the criticism by showing a way of defining and explaining negation in terms of relevant implication, for which several types of intuitive, information-theoretic interpretation have been proposed. Indeed, the interpretation is slightly extended so that a connective of (relevant) exclusion can also be formulated, and our target negation is defined by collapsing a negation defined by implication and one defined by exclusion into one. Explaining this extended interpretation in relation to sequent calculus, I also show that the structure embodied in the interpretation underlies consequence relation in general, not confined to relevant logic.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 05 Nov 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Dr Takuro Onishi, Visiting Scholar at NUS, Department of Philosophy
Moderator: Dr Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Takuro Onishi is a visiting scholar at our Department of Philosophy. His stay is supported by the program “Japan-ASEAN Collaboration Research Program on Innovative Humanosphere in Southeast Asia” of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. In 2012 he received a Ph.D from Kyoto University for his thesis on proof-theoretic semantics. He has published several papers on Michael Dummett’s philosophy and non-classical logic.

I argue that a necessary condition for being wise is understanding how to live well. The condition, by requiring understanding rather than a wide variety of justified beliefs or knowledge, as Ryan and Whitcomb respectively require, yields the desirable result that being wise is compatible with having some false beliefs but not just any false beliefs about how to live well – regardless of whether those beliefs are justified or not. In arguing for understanding how to live well as a necessary condition for wisdom I reject the view, proposed by both Ryan and Whitcomb, that subjects such as chemistry lie within the domain of wisdom. I show that the argued for condition yields the desirable result that being wise is not a common achievement but that it is not something that can only plausibly be achieved in the modern era.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 29 Oct 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Shane Ryan, Soochow University, Taipei
Moderator: Dr. Eric Thomas Kerr

About the Speaker:

Shane Ryan is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Soochow University in Taipei. His Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology funded research project is on the topic of wisdom. In 2013 he was awarded his PhD from the University of Edinburgh for his thesis examining a virtue theoretic account of the nature and value of knowledge. He has published papers on epistemology and moral philosophy in journals such as Grazer Philosophische Studien and Utilitas. A number of his articles on epistemology and philosophy of education are forthcoming in edited volumes.

Taking its cue from the debate between Winch and Gellner, as well as picking up the earlier disputes about the human sciences between Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickerts this paper argues that: ‘Truth has primarily do with what we dwell in in our world-making and not just what can be rendered objectively via argument or reflection.’ While conceding that Gellner is correct to see the dangers of moral relativism in Winch’s Wittgensteinian approach, I argue that the relative-absolutist division is ultimately unhelpful when it comes to looking at human practices, and that entering into the ‘sprit’ of a world does not mean that one must simply go along with all its practices. At the same time I argue that the complexity of relationships that gather around practices and values means that identifying toxic behaviours is far from having solved a social problem.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Friday, 02 Oct 2015
Time: 10am – 12pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Wayne Cristaudo, University of Charles Darwin
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Wayne Cristaudo, previously at the University of Adelaide and the University of Hong Kong,  is Professor of Politics at Charles Darwin University. He has written and edited 17 books and special journal issues as well as numerous articles and book chapters on a diverse range of topics in philosophy and the history of ideas and social and political institutions. His books include Power, Love and Evil: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged; Religion, Redemption and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy; and A Philosophical History of Love.  He is presently writing the book Ideas and World-Making: Contribution to a Philosophical Anthropology.   

This talk explores what procedural semantics can do for the twin notions of structure and unity. Procedural semantics construes linguistic meaning as a procedure that delineates which objects of which type operate on which other objects of which type so as to yield which yet other objects of which type. I conceive of a multi-part structure as an interlocking system of objects. The two main sources of inspiration are Frege’s notion of Sinn and procedural semantics as known from computer science, where it contrasts with denotational semantics. The contrast, in broad terms, is the contrast between an intensional and an extensional conception of meaning. My working hypothesis is that predication holds the key to the unity of the fundamental category of atomic propositions in which a monadic property is predicated of an individual, as expressed by “Pluto is a planet” or “Five is odd”. Furthermore, I model predication is an instance of the procedure of functional application; predication is emphatically not a relation. The respective meaning of those two sentences is a procedure that prescribes how to obtain a property and an individual and apply the former to the latter so as to obtain a truth-value. (The truth-value obtained in the empirical example will be indexed to worlds and times.) A noteworthy departure from Frege is that I do not embrace unsaturated entities. His saturation metaphor means simply, in my theory, that certain entities are typed in such a way as to hook up as function and argument and yield a third entity beyond both of them as value. In cases like “Pluto is heavier than Mars” or “Five is larger than zero”, the unifier is still the procedure of functional application. But this procedure does not extend to all cases. The procedure of functional abstraction is called for as a different kind of unifier to unify different sorts of entities. For instance, while the innermost structure of the proposition that Pluto is a planet is the procedure of application, the outermost structure is the procedure of abstraction in order to obtain an empirical truth-condition from a truth-value. The general metaphysical picture that emerges is this. A rich structure such as a proposition is a case of procedures within procedures, structures within structures, unities within unities. The talk will show how this procedural approach avoids the two classical pitfalls of underdetermining structure as a mere list or sequence and adding on unifiers endlessly. The solutions will be framed within Tichý’s neo-Fregean Transparent Intensional Logic.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Wednesday, 23 Sep 2015
Time: 2pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Bjørn Jespersen, University of Barcelona
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Bjørn Jespersen is currently affiliated with the LOGOS Research Group in Logic, Language and Cognition at the University of Barcelona as a Marie Curie Fellow funded by a European Commission grant. Before that he held research and teaching positions at Delft University of Technology, the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Leiden University.

He obtained his PhD at the Masaryk University in the Czech Republic on a thesis devoted to reference and attitudes in Transparent Intensional Logic. He originally studied philosophy at the University of Aarhus in his native country of Denmark.

He is a co-author of the award-winning book Procedural Semantics for Hyperintensional Logic (Springer, 2010) and has published in excess of fifty papers and book chapters in, for instance, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Synthese Library, Studia Logica, Journal of Philosophical Logic, and most recently in Thought. He has co-edited a special section of Synthese containing papers on hyperintensionality, and will be co-editing a special issue of Synthese together with Manuel García-Carpintero containing papers on propositional unity, some of which were presented at the recent LOGOS conference on this topic.

His current project is devoted to the unity of structured, fine-grained propositions. He has published a paper on recent work devoted to this topic in Philosophy Compass. His two latest projects were on quantifying-in and modifiers. His general interest is philosophical logic and philosophy of language.

The two presentations that Dr Jespersen is giving at Singapore National University have previously been given at UC Irvine, UNAM, and University of Stockholm.

Kripke’s 1973 John Locke lectures, published by OUP in 2013 as Reference and Existence, defended a number of novel theses, among them a pretence account of the language used by authors and consumers of fiction, and an ontology of abstract fictional and mythical characters. But Kripke doesn’t extend this ontology to include surrogate fictional objects: special objects referred to by real names occurring in fiction. After describing the way our talk about Desdemona, for example, shows how language “supplies a referent” in the case of such sentences as ‘Some critics admire Desdemona’, he writes that “a referent, of course, need not be supplied if the work of fiction … is about ordinary entities.” If, to use his example, we admire Napoleon as he is portrayed in a certain story, it is Napoleon we are admiring, not a fictional surrogate for Napoleon. (In the typescript of the original John Locke lectures, but not the book, he made an exception for phrases like ‘the Napoleon of the story’.) In this talk I discuss problems for Kripke’s account, and motivate an alternative account that takes surrogate fictional objects more seriously (without falling into some kind of fictional realism).

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Friday, 04 Sep 2015
Time: 10am – 12pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Fred Kroon, University of Auckland
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Fred Kroon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. His main research areas are formal and philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, and he has authored papers in these and other areas for a range of journals, including the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Philosophical Review, The Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, and Noûs. His current research is mainly focused on fictionalism, the theory of reference, and the philosophy of fiction. He is on the editorial board of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and is a subject editor for 20^th century philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Three decades of economic and social reform have given rise to a brave new China. Whatever its achievements, this new China lacks something of the uttermost importance: a new moral subject that is fit to act morally and meaningfully in the post-communist way of life. The result is a prolonged moral crisis that has followed the reform as its shadow and is showing no signs of abating. At bottom this crisis is a crisis of moral subjectivity rather than merely of moral behavior. As such, it has profound implications not only for the moral and spiritual wellbeing of the Chinese but also for China’s political development. This talk explains the nature of the moral crisis, especially its causal relation to lack of freedom, and addresses its political implications, especially as regards China’s readiness for democracy.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 20 Aug 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Ci Jiwei, University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Jiwei Ci is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, and author of Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford University Press, 1994), The Two Faces of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Moral China in the Age of Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

I will begin by arguing that the most plausible version of ‘ought implies can’ is not the following: if one ought to do something, then one can do it right then. The most plausible version is rather one that we might call ‘ought implies could have’. This says instead, roughly, that if one ought to do something, then one could have done it. There are various things this might mean, though. After offering precise versions of the obvious candidates, I will argue that none of them will accommodate everything we want from an ‘ought implies can’ principle.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Thursday, 13 Aug 2015
Time: 3pm – 5pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: King Alexandra, SUNY Buffalo
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Alex King is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Buffalo and currently visiting ANU as a Research Associate in the School of Philosophy. She works on the ‘ought implies can’ debate in ethics and metaethics, as well as on practical reason and aesthetics.

Some philosophers, like Stoics and Buddhists, have taken anger to be categorically vicious. Others, following Aristotle, consider some instances of anger to be appropriate and essential to being a virtuous person. I reject both of these claims and offer an account of how ange can be morally virtuous even though it is not necessary for being a virtuous person.

Philosophy Seminar Series
Date: Wednesday, 12 Aug 2015
Time: 2pm – 4pm
Venue: AS3 #05-23
Speaker: Nic Bommarito, University of Buffalo
Moderator: Dr. Qu Hsueh Ming

About the Speaker:

Nic Bommarito is a Bersoff Fellow in the philosophy department at NYU and an Assistant Professor of philosophy at University at Buffalo. He studied at Brown University, Tibet University, and University of Michigan. His research focuses on questions in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and Buddhist philosophy.