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Department: search.filters.department.Department of PhilosophyFull Text: Yes

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
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    PublicationOpen Access
    A principle of universal strife: Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty's critiques of Marxist universalism, 1953-1956
    (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) Department of Philosophy; Chouraqui, Frank; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
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    PublicationOpen Access
    An algebraic approach to physical fields
    (Elsevier, 2021) Fritz, Tobias; Department of Philosophy; Chen, Lu; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
    According to the algebraic approach to spacetime, a thoroughgoing dynamicism, physical fields exist without an underlying manifold. This view is usually implemented by postulating an algebraic structure (e.g., commutative ring) of scalar-valued functions, which can be interpreted as representing a scalar field, and deriving other structures from it. In this work, we point out that this leads to the unjustified primacy of an undetermined scalar field. Instead, we propose to consider algebraic structures in which all (and only) physical fields are primitive. We explain how the theory of natural operations in differential geometry-the modern formalism behind classifying diffeomorphism-invariant constructions-can be used to obtain concrete implementations of this idea for any given collection of fields. For concrete examples, we illustrate how our approach applies to a number of particular physical fields, including electrodynamics coupled to a Weyl spinor.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Awareness of ignorance
    (De Gruyter, 2020) Department of Philosophy; İnan, Halit İlhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 144349
    Despite the recent increase in interest in philosophy about ignorance, little attention has been paid to the question of what makes it possible for a being to become aware of their own ignorance. In this paper, I try to provide such an account by arguing that, for a being to become aware of their own ignorance, they must have the mental capacity to represent something as being unknown to them. For normal adult humans who have mastered a language, mental representation of an unknown is enabled by forming linguistic expressions whose content is grasped, but whose referent is unknown. I provide a neo-Fregean, a neo-Russellian, and then a unified account of this. On that basis, I then argue further that the content of ignorance can always be captured by a question. I then distinguish between propositional ignorance and non-propositional ignorance and argue that propositional ignorance attributions can be of three types, that-ignorance, whether-ignorance, and fact-ignorance. I conclude by arguing that the acquisition of truths, even when it yields knowledge that is certain, does not always eliminate one's ignorance and that there is a degree of ignorance in almost everything we claim to know.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Book review: The idea of comedy: history, theory, critique
    (Penn State University Press, 2007) Department of Philosophy; Freydberg, Bernard; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Dilemma for epistemic infinitism
    (Beytulhikme Felsefe Çevresi, 2020) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 193390
    I argue that epistemic infinitism can offer a non-skeptical stance only by forgoing the very ground for thinking that it is true. / Epistemik sonsuzluğun, ancak, doğru olduğunu düşünmek için zemin hazırlayarak kuşkucu-olmayan bir duruş sunabileceğini iddia ediyorum.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Epistemic infinitism and the conditional character of inferential justification
    (Springer, 2018) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
    In this paper, I will present and defend an argument from the conditional character of inferential justification (the argument from conditionality) against the version of epistemic infinitism Klein advances. More specifically, after proposing a distinction between propositional and doxastic infinitism, which is based on a standard distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, I will describe in considerable detail the argument from conditionality, which is mainly an argument against propositional infinitism, and clarify some of its main underlying assumptions. There are various responses to be found in Klein's works to this argument, and my aim is to show that none of those responses can be plausibly held without infinitism losing its title to being a genuine non-skeptical alternative.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Foucault, critique, subjectivity
    (Routledge, 2017) Department of Philosophy; Rossi, Andrea; Teaching Faculty; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
    This article interprets Foucault's intellectual project by analysing the relation between his understanding of critique and the political conditions of subjectivation out of which it emerged. After reviewing some of the most typical criticisms of Foucault's work (and especially those maintaining that genealogy can only be rooted in a non-genealogical and universal conception of power), the argument shows in what sense he conceived of critique as a form of resistance and how the latter, in turn, was theorised as a force co-extensive to the power it counters. The paper goes on to argue that his theory of resistance is not necessarily to be viewed as a metaphysical representation of the immutable nature of political struggle, but might well be interpreted in performative terms, i.e. as a strategic re-inscription of existing political-discursive formations. More precisely, the analysis shows in what way Foucault's articulation of critique represented an attempt to displace the forms of subjectivation that underpin anthropological thought and the government of the self in the modern age.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Harman on mental paint and the transparency of experience
    (Institute of Philosophy (SAS), 2020) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 193390
    Harman famously argues that a particular class of anti-functionalist arguments from the intrinsic properties of mental states or events (in particular, visual experiences) can be defused by distinguishing "properties of the object of experience from properties of the experience of an object" and by realizing that the latter are not introspectively accessible (or are transparent). More specifically, Harman argues that we are or can be introspectively aware only of the properties of the object of an experience but not the properties of the experience of an object and hence that the fact that functionalism leaves out the properties of the experience of an object does not show that it leaves out anything mentally relevant. In this paper, I argue that Harman's attempt to defuse the anti-functionalist arguments in question is unsuccessful. After making a distinction between the thesis of experiencing-act transparency and the thesis of mental-paint transparency, (and casting some doubt on the former,) I mainly target the latter and argue that it is false. The thesis of mental-paint transparency is false, I claim, not because mental paint involves some introspectively accessible properties that are different from the properties of the objects of experiences but because what I call the identity thesis is true, viz. that mental paint is the same as (an array of) Properties of the object of experience. The identification of mental paint with properties of the object of experience entails that the anti-functionalist arguments Harman criticizes cannot be rightly accused of committing the fallacy of confusing the two.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    In defense of conditional uniqueness
    (University of Warsaw, 2022) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 193390
    The Uniqueness Thesis (U), defended by the uniquer and rejected by the permissivist, asserts that, necessarily, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude one can take towards a proposition, given a particular body of evidence. U faces a well-known, paralyzing objection from the permissivist, which I call “the simplicity objection,” which rests on the idea that evidence is not the sole determinant of rationality. In this paper, after maintaining that the ongoing dialectic between the uniquer and the permissivist has led to an exaggeration of differences, I bring into focus another, non-equivalent yet substantive (non-trivial) thesis in the vicinity, which I call “the Conditional Uniqueness Thesis” (U*), according to which if evidence is the sole determinant of rationality, then U is true. The hope is to achieve a rapprochement between the uniquer and the permissivist by showing that U* is true. To this end, I examine the argument Roger White offers in favor of U, which I call “the argument from evidential support” (AES), and argue that it is both unpersuasive for the defender of the simplicity objection and unnecessarily strong for establishing its own conclusion. I then offer a sufficiently weakened version of AES, which I call AES*, and argue that AES* is sound, if interpreted as an argument for U*.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Nietzsche’s science of love
    (De Gruyter, 2015) Department of Philosophy; Chouraqui, Frank; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities
    In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology of love by tracing Nietzsche’s questioning about science. I examine how the evolution of Nietzsche’s thinking about science and his increasing suspicion towards it coincide with his interest for the question of love. Although the texts from the early and middle period praise science as an antidote to asceticism, the later texts seem to associate the scientific spirit with asceticism. I argue that this shift is motivated by Nietzsche’s realization that asceticism and science share the same fetish of facts. It is now for Nietzsche no longer a matter of proving the socalled facts of the backworlds wrong (something science is very capable of doing), but a matter of rejecting the very structure of thought that reduces a shapeless reality into a series of facts, subjects and objects. It is this second attitude that Nietzsche regards as the common core of science and asceticism. From this critique of science and its correlative critique of facts, Nietzsche begins searching for a counter-attitude able to perform the reduction of the factual attitude. This is the attitude he calls love. Although Nietzsche’s concept of love has often been elucidated in terms of its object or its subject, I argue that such interpretations precisely defeat Nietzsche’s point, which is to recover a ground that precedes the division of the world into facts, subjects and objects. Love becomes the name of this intra-relationship of being, opening up to new perspectives on Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power.