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Now showing 1 - 10 of 27
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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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    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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    Animality in Lacan and Derrida: the deconstruction of the other
    (Springer, 2018) Department of Philosophy; Direk, Zeynep; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 5771
    In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida's last seminar, Derrida criticizes Lacan for making no room for animality in the Other, in the unconscious transindividual normativity of language. In this paper, I take into account the history of Derrida's interactions with Lacan's psychoanalysis to argue that Derrida's early agreement with Lacan's conception of subjectivity as split by the signifier gives place in his late thought to a deconstruction of Lacan's fall into humanist metaphysics, which makes a sharp moral distinction between the animal and the human in order to subordinate animals to the domination of mankind.
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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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    Can we "effectivize" spacetime?
    (Elsevier Sci Ltd, 2022) Department of Philosophy; Chen, Lu; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 329122
    According to effective realism, scientific theories give us knowledge about the unobservable world, but not at the fundamental level. This view is supported by the well-received effective -field-theory (EFT) approach to high energy physics, according to which even our most successful physical theories are only applicable up to a certain energy scale and expected to break down beyond that. In this paper, I advance new challenges for effective realism and the EFT approach. I argue that effective quantum gravity (EQG) does not give us a realistic theory of spacetime even within its scope of validity. This also exposes a general interpretative dilemma faced by all EFTs concerning their indispensable references to classical spacetime beyond their scope of validity.
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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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    Dretske on non-epistemic seeing
    (Wiley, 2017) Department of Philosophy; Demircioğlu, Erhan; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 193390
    In this article, I make a distinction between two versions of non-epistemicism about seeing, and bring explicitly into view and argue against a particular version defended by Dretske. More specifically, I distinguish non-epistemic seeing as non-conceptual seeing, where concept possession is assumed to be cognitively demanding, from non-epistemic seeing as seeing without noticing, where noticing is assumed to be relatively cognitively undemanding. After showing that Dretske argues for the possibility of non-epistemic seeing in both senses of the term, I target his thesis that a given subject (non-epistemically) sees all the objects that are visually differentiated in her visual field, where visual differentiation does not require that she notice those objects. I argue that the notion of a visual field deployed in the formulation of the thesis cannot be phenomenal and therefore that seeing without noticing amounts to mere visual confrontation (in a sense to be specified). I further argue that since the epistemicist does not (and need not) deny the existence of seeing without noticing in the sense of mere visual confrontation, there is a clear sense in which Dretske's non-epistemicism turns out to be trivial.
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    Dummett and Davidson on the dependence of thought on language
    (Beytulhikme Felsefe Cevresi, 2021) N/A; Department of Philosophy; Özaltun, Eylem; Faculty Member; Department of Philosophy; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 219281
    Both Dummett and Davidson believe that language is constitutive of thought. However, they do not believe exactly the same thing. Dummett believes that language is prior to thought, whereas Davidson believes that neither is prior to the other. Still, they share a common core that can be put as follows: language is necessary for thought. In order to understand this claim that I look at their arguments and show that for both philosophers the argument from objectivity is the main argument to secure their conclusion. I argue that for both of them natural language is the source of the objectivity of thoughts.
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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.