Theory of Argumentation

We can think of Christian philosophers as beginning with the following picture:

GOD ⇒ THE WORLD

where both ‘THE WORLD’ and ‘⇒’ are items in need of further explanation. In typical cosmological arguments, what Christian philosophers then aim to show is that there is a * such that

* ⇒ THE WORLD

where ‘THE WORLD’ and ‘⇒’ are given that particular further explanation.

What I propose to do in this paper, is to set out my reasons for thinking that there is no * such that that * ⇒ THE WORLD, on any interpretation of ‘⇒’ and ‘THE WORLD’ that would set this claim at odds with naturalism.

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

The work of Robert Alexy is closely associated with the “principle theory”. For Alexy himself, the principle theory represents the heart of his theoretical work, around which most of his publications are organized. In Alexy’s work, and in the work of his students, the label “principle theory” suggests theoretical unity. Despite this impression of unity, the principle theory is far more multilayered and multifaceted than the “unitary” label would suggest. The critique of Alexy’s principle theory, which is the topic of this article, has two objectives. First, I distinguish between the different types of theory which have found refuge under the unitary label. By clarifying the different theoretical aspirations pursued by proponents of the principle theory, I systematize these different theoretical and doctrinal efforts which are often not clearly separated in the debate. The critique aims to offer a framework within which to situate the different arguments and criticisms, so that it becomes clearer which type, level or aspect of principle theory the argument is about. This is the constructive part of the critique. Second, the critique aims to evaluate the theoretical and doctrinal positions and achievements of the various principle theories on each of the levels identified. This analysis is for the most part critical. The claim is that the principle theory is wrong on most counts and misunderstands itself by confusing the different levels of its theoretical and doctrinal aspirations. At its origins, as put forward by Josef Esser and Ronald Dworkin in the framework of a theory about the concept of law, it has its merit in rejecting the simplifications of positivist theories of adjudication. A defense of the role of specifically legal principles in the process of adjudication against arguments to the contrary from Larry Alexander and Ken Kress is offered. But the acceptance of legal principles does not entail a validity relation between the law and morality as supported by Alexy. As a theory of norms, the principle theory fails in its effort to claim a structural difference between rules and principles. It also fails as a methodological theory that reduces adjudication to subsumption under rules or the balancing of principles. It misunderstands itself when it is conceived as a doctrinal theory especially of fundamental rights as it is developed in Alexy’s main work “A Theory of Constitutional Rights”. The most promising aspect of Alexy’s principle theory could be its contribution to a more comprehensive theory of legal argumentation.

A relevant problem in political philosophy and political theory is the distinction between political and utopian arguments. The boundary between these two types of argumentation may be blurred, which leads us to the point when we often deal with contaminations of both ways of thinking in individual positions. This involves, for example, presenting a utopian argument as a political argument and vice versa. The main purpose of the article is to organize these issues by applying the argumentation model developed by Stephen Toulmin to the analysis of both theoretical approaches. The three main problems of this work are: 1) the distinction between political and ethical arguments; 2) identifying the proper structure of political argumentation; 3) evaluation of the coherence of the idea of a realistic utopia (proposed by John Rawls).

Título original em italiano: La ricerca qualitativa Publicado por Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna, 2011 Todos os direitos reservados. Nenhuma parte desta obra poderá ser reproduzida ou transmitida por qualquer forma e/ou quaisquer meios (eletrônico ou mecânico, incluindo fotocópia e gravação) ou arquivada em qualquer sistema ou banco de dados sem permissão escrita da editora. (Brasil) ISBN 978-88-15-14980-0 (Itália) Editado conforme o novo acordo ortográfico. Este livro foi composto e impresso pela Editora Vozes Ltda. Sumário Apresentação da coleção, 9 Prefácio, 11 Introdução, 15 1 A pesquisa qualitativa, 23 2 O desenho da pesquisa qualitativa, 46 3 A observação participante, 107 4 A entrevista discursiva, 166 5 O grupo focal, 221 6 Análise da documentação empírica e escrita, 266 Apêndices, 329 Glossário, 339 Referências, 341 Índice analítico, 361 Índice geral, 369

Qualitative methods have much to offer those studying health care and health services. However, because these methods have traditionally been employed in the social sciences, they may be unfamiliar to health care professionals and researchers with a biomedical or natural science background. Indeed, qualitative methods may seem alien alongside the experimental and observational quantitative methods used in clinical, biological and epidemiological research. Misunderstandings about the nature of qualitative methods and their uses have caused qualitative research to be labelled 'unscientific', difficult to replicate or as little more than anecdote, personal impression or conjecture. The first edition of this book, and the series of papers in the British Medical Journal on which the book was initially based, deliberately set out to counter this view. The growing interest in qualitative methods in health research, and their increasing acceptance in clinical and biomedical arenas, in the 10 years since the book was first published, suggest that such misunderstandings may be diminishing. The purpose of this book has therefore altered subtly. Its main aim continues to be to introduce the main qualitative methods available for the study of health and health care, and to show how qualitative research can be employed appropriately and fruitfully to answer some of the increasingly complex questions confronting researchers. In addition, the book considers the ethics of qualitative research and how to assess its quality and looks at the application of qualitative methods within different styles of research and in the emerging area of research synthesis.

William Lane Craig’s defence of kalam cosmological arguments has generated a large amount of discussion in the years since the publication of his book on that topic. John Mackie, Quentin Smith, Adolf Grunbaum and I are just some of the philosophers who have engaged in prolonged debates in the journals with Craig on issues which arise in connection with his defence of those arguments. Given the amount of discussion which has already taken place, one might be given to wonder whether there are any important points which remain to be made. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think that it is clear that there are important issues which have not been taken up in the previous discussion; I propose to take up one such set of issues in this paper.

The main question I want to address here is this: Given that someone presents you with an argument for a given conclusion, under what conditions should the person who presents the argument be prepared to agree that the argument is unsuccessful? Ultimately, my aim is to argue that, in light of some of the criticisms which have been made in the literature, Craig ought to be prepared to concede that what he calls “the kalam cosmological argument” is plainly an unsuccessful argument. However, much of the paper is taken up with consideration of preliminary matters which need to be addressed in order to provide a satisfactory answer to the main question.

In a full discussion of this main question, one would need to provide: (a) an account of rationality and rational belief revision; (b) an account of arguments; (c) an account of rational argumentation among rational agents; and (d) a discussion of the problems which arise as a result of the fact that we are not perfectly rational agents. I shall say a little about each of these topics, though I recognise that what I have to say will not amount to a thorough discussion of any of them. I shall then go on to apply the results from this part of the paper to the on-going debate about kalam cosmological arguments. Finally, I shall discuss two cases—one from Craig’s criticisms of Grunbaum (2000) and one from Craig’s criticisms of Oppy (1995b)—which it seems to me that those criticisms turn on misunderstandings of the proper framework within which rational argument takes place.

Here I bewail the slapdash and confusing way in which philosophers bandy about the word ‘incoherent’ (and ‘incoherence’ and ‘incoherently’).  To some it appears to mean: inconsistent; to others: pragmatically self-defeating; and to yet others: nonsensical, i.e. meaningless.  And often one is left guessing.

El presente artículo se ha propuesto comprobar que el argumento Ad Hominem no solo puede cumplir funciones diversas en el seno del intercambio polémico, sino que su estudio constituye una herramienta útil para comprender los conflictos y discursividades que atraviesan una sociedad en un momento de su historia. Para ello, el trabajo aborda como corpus el debate que sostuvieran el 9 de Octubre de 2007 el entonces presidente colombiano, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, y el periodista Daniel Coronell, el cual se inserta en la polémica que entonces atravesaba la esfera pública colombiana en torno a los presuntos vínculos del presidente con los antiguos líderes del cartel de Medellín y la situación de persecución que enfrentaban los periodistas críticos del gobierno. Se parte entonces de observar el Ad Hominem desde una perspectiva interaccional (Amossy, 1999), aplicando herramientas de la teoría de la argumentación, la pragmática y la retórica con el objeto de evaluar las funciones que éste cumple en el intercambio entre los participantes. Así, la investigación llama la atención sobre tres distintos usos del Ad Hominem a lo largo del debate analizado: cuando se lo emplea deliberadamente para evadir las preguntas y/o pedidos de aclaración; cuando constituye un procedimiento dirigido a criminalizar a la parte contraria frente a la audiencia; y cuando se lo usa como una forma de protesta. En base a ello el texto propone, en primer lugar, una discusión teórica sobre la justificabilidad argumentativa, retórica y ético-política del Ad Hominem, así como una reivindicación del discurso polémico en tanto objeto de análisis y de las funciones que éste cumple en el espacio público; y, en segundo lugar, una reflexión en torno a los conflictos y discursividades sobre los cuales dan razón los fenómenos observados a lo largo del trabajo con respecto a la sociedad colombiana.  Palabras clave: Argumentos Ad Hominem, Discurso polémico, Interacciones polémicas, Álvaro Uribe Vélez-Argumentos Ad Hominem, Daniell Coronell-Argumentos Ad Hominem

Nel 2001 l'Università di Padova attiva il primo insegnamento in Italia di Teoria dell'argomentazione. Dal 2006 una pionieristica Palestra di botta e risposta, all'insegna della Patavina Libertas, apre le sue sale d'allenamento agli studenti delle scuole superiori del Veneto e d'Italia e nel 2010 nasce l'Associazione per una Cultura e la Promozione del Dibattito - ACPD. L'esperienza di 12 tornei regionali e 5 nazionali ha prodotto questa guida al dibattito regolamentato, opera congiunta di un gruppo collaudato e solidale di docenti di filosofia e di pedagogia, esperti in comunicazione, in valutazione, in competenza informatica e documentale, linguisti, conduttori di blog di retorica, allenatori della scrittura e di oratoria, e soprattutto studenti "magnifici disputanti" protagonisti di campionati di dibattito, impegnati a mostrare la bellezza del ragionare e a far valere i propri argomenti a fronte di argomenti opposti.
Nel 2001 l’Università di Padova attiva il primo insegnamento in Italia di Teoria dell’argomentazione. Dal 2006 una pionieristica Palestra di botta e risposta, all’insegna della Patavina Libertas, apre le sue sale d’allenamento agli studenti delle scuole superiori del Veneto e d’Italia e nel 2010 nasce l’Associazione per una Cultura e la Promozione del Dibattito – ACPD. L’esperienza di 12 tornei regionali e 5 nazionali ha prodotto questa guida al dibattito regolamentato, opera congiunta di un gruppo collaudato e solidale di docenti di filosofia e di pedagogia, esperti in comunicazione, in valutazione, in competenza informatica e documentale, linguisti, conduttori di blog di retorica, allenatori della scrittura e di oratoria, e soprattutto studenti “magnifici disputanti” protagonisti di campionati di dibattito, impegnati a mostrare la bellezza del ragionare e a far valere i propri argomenti a fronte di argomenti opposti.

Foot argues that there are certain things that all human beings - perhaps all rational agents - need.  This gives a sense in which certain values and disvalues can be called 'objective'.  I suggest that, with certain relatively minor adjustments, her argument can be made cogent but that it cannot be used to show that there are objective answers to questions about what one should do when values conflict.  If Foot's own virtue ethics, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics or any other first-order moral system were to be established as objectively valid, this would require some completely different form of argumentation. 


Almost sixty years ago Philippa Foot published an article that began: To many people it seems that the most notable advance in moral philosophy during the past fifty years or so has been the refutation of naturalism; and they are a little shocked that at this late date such an issue should be reopened. It is easy to understand their attitude: given certain apparently unquestionable assumptions, it would be about as sensible to try to reintroduce naturalism as to try to square the circle. Those who see it like this have satisfied themselves that they know in advance that any naturalistic theory must have a catch in it somewhere, and are put out at having to waste more time exposing an old fallacy. This paper is an attempt to persuade them to look critically at the premises on which their arguments are based. 1 The paper in question was one of a number written by Foot around the time that were highly successful in reopening the issue of naturalism in ethics. Nowadays no one can just take it for granted that naturalism has been refuted, that there is a sharp distinction (or indeed any clear distinction) between fact and value or that it is impossible to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. This is not to say that the naturalists have been completely victorious, of course; only that naturalism is today a live option. I shall argue that Foot's paper contains an important insight and an equally important mistake; and that the insight and the mistake are linked. I believe that the thinking behind it has influenced the subsequent course of moral philosophy to a quite remarkable extent and that this has been in some ways beneficial and in some ways harmful – not surprisingly, if I am right in seeing it as containing both truth and error. I do not want to exaggerate the influence of this one paper 2 but I do not know of any other that so neatly encapsulates the coupled insight and mistake. The anti-naturalism that Foot is attacking she characterises as follows: It would not be an exaggeration to say that the whole of moral philosophy, as it is now widely taught, rests on a contrast between statements of fact and evaluations, which runs something like this: The truth or falsity of statements of fact is shewn by means of evidence; and what counts as evidence is laid down in the meaning of the expressions occurring in the statement of fact … It follows that no two people can make the same statement and count completely different things as evidence; in the end one at least of them could be convicted of linguistic ignorance. It also follows that if a man is given good evidence for a factual conclusion he cannot just refuse to accept the conclusion on the ground that in his scheme of things this evidence is not evidence at all. 3 But, on the view she is criticising, [w]ith evaluations, however, it is different. An evaluation is not connected logically with the factual statements on which it is based. One man may say that a thing is good because of some fact about it, and another may refuse to take that fact as any evidence, for nothing is laid down in the meaning of 'good' which connects it with one piece of 'evidence' rather than another. It follows that a moral eccentric could argue to moral conclusions from quite idiosyncratic premises; he could say, for instance, that a man was a good man because he clasped and unclasped his hands and never turned NNE after

It is important, when writing opinion essays, for students to
consider and integrate both arguments and counterarguments to develop
a final conclusion. In this article, the authors explored the effect of criteria
instruction and a graphic organizer to promote integration of arguments
and counterarguments. The researchers randomly assigned 84 participants
from an undergraduate educational psychology course to 1 of 4 conditions:
training only, organizer only, combined, and control. The graphic organizer
resulted in more refutations of counterarguments. However, criteria instruction
resulted in better integration of argument and counterargument (with
stronger rebuttals and more balanced reasoning). The authors discussed
how the 2 interventions may have activated somewhat different argumentation
schema in students.

If you wish to think/write about many dimensional things like the‭ ‘‬world‭’‬,‭ ‬persons,‭ ‬consciousness,‭ ‬human thinking etc,‭ ‬you should at least think multi-dimensional and many levelled.
Questioning the purpose,‭ ‬the subject-matter and the methodology,‭ ‬methods of the discipline. I have already dealt in detail about the disappearance of different subject from the philosophical discourse with the differentiation of other disciplines, as well as the involvement in philosophy in inter-disciplinary areas such as cognitive sciences, the creation of experimental philosophy and the philosophies of other discourses, eg art, religion, science, mathematics, sport and every subject possible. Philosophy has/is often interpreted as consisting of logic, which in has its own discourse, while other aspects or forms of logic really form part of mathematics. The doing of philosophy as the doing of (usually informal) logic is in some way related to this belief. As far as the method of philosophy goes, it is always seen as employing arguments, argumentation and reasoning. But all kinds of writing and talking employ arguments, argumentation, reasoning and informal logic – not just philosophy. I conclude with a discussion from theoretical physics (in the past associated with the philosophical discourse) that provides us with ontologies as philosophy used to do. Against that background I present articles on the multiverse, more conventional articles on our universe, our world, our physical reality and the origins of life. I think these are some of the many things that it is necessary that philosophy should take note of and consequently question itself, its aims, objectives, subject-matter and methodologies. We might then have something different than one-levelled and one-dimensional thinking and more many layered and levelled and multi-dimensional thinking. Is this not how our consciousness functions? On many levels, layers and dimensions simultaneously? So should this not be the manner in which we conceive of ‘it’, its nature and functioning? We, philosophy, should at least be thinking ( instead of individual concepts, or statements, linear thinking - we should simultaneously think on many layers, on many levels and in several dimensions) in terms of 3D, for example 3D scatter plots .By this I mean the many different aspects of the person (mentally and physically, socially, culturally, as well as our environment, planetary and universe context should be included in every concept we employ; each concept should therefore be at least like a 3D scatter plot image, including all these levels and information)

I argue here that Sellars' "Myth of the Given" is usually misinterpreted as having less extensive scope than it usually does.  On a sufficiently generic construal of the Myth, I argue that there is a distinctively phenomenological version of the Myth, one that can be found in the early Husserl but that is absent from Merleau-Ponty.  Merleau-Ponty's evasion of the phenomenological Myth bears directly on Robert Hanna's argument for Kantian Non-Conceptualism.

This paper looks at philosophical accusations of talking nonsense from the perspective of argumentation theory.  An accusation of this sort, when seriously meant, amounts to the claim that someone believes there is something she means by her utterance when in fact she means nothing whatsoever by it.  Such accusations may indeed be peculiar to philosophy.  They also involve the claim that there can be ILLUSIONS OF ARGUMENTATION, both inter- and intra-personal.  The problem of how one could possibly diagnose such illusions is raised and I suggest that, if there is a way, it will require a therapeutic rather than a polemical approach.  This suggestion is of course made by Wittgenstein and some of his followers but, in my view, it has remained undeveloped.  It often takes the form of a comparison with psychoanalysis.  I note that the more like psychoanalysis it becomes, the less like traditional argumentation, philosophical or otherwise, it will be.

The problem of restitution of cultural property is by no means a new one. This study’s aim is to reconstruct the philosophical-legal issues connected with restitution of cultural property by using the tools that philosophy of law supplies. Each concrete case of restitution, thanks to its presentation and analysis via the proposed method, does not so much become a case that is easy to solve – it will certainly remain a hard case – but rather its central features will become apparent, as a result of its concrete location in the space between morality, politics, economics, and law. In addition, it will become possible to distinguish and understand its complex structure of argumentation, and survey the typical arguments that occur in restitution discourse, in order to recognize them, organize them, and eventually raise them. The final effect of the study aims to be the creation of a theoretical model that will make it possible to look into every individual case relating to restitution.

This book is an introduction in a double sense. It is intended to introduce beginners in philosophy to the idea of philosophical nonsense and the problems it raises. But it is also addressed to professional philosophers, most of whom seem virtually unaware of the issue.

Certain philosophers, here called ‘nonsensicalists’, believe that much philosophy (philosophical questions as well as assertions) is simply nonsense in the strict sense of being meaningless. They proceed as though it were an established fact that there is such a thing as philosophical nonsense and the notion were quite unproblematic. By contrast, many other philosophers proceed as though either they had never heard of it or it were quite obvious that there is no such thing.

There can be little doubt that what the nonsensicalists are saying is of great importance – if they are right. But there are at least eight questions that must be addressed before anyone is in a position to start hunting down philosophical nonsense and they have all been woefully neglected.

The idea of philosophical nonsense goes back to Thomas Hobbes at least and yet its history remains largely unresearched.

In view of the neglect of the problems raised by the notion of philosophical nonsense, even by professional philosophers, it is not unduly optimistic to suggest that it is a topic to which relative newcomers to the subject might make a contribution.

Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that good philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that bad philosophy has put there and must make movements as complicated as the knots it unties. Is the notion of philosophical nonsense an essential aid to this – as Wittgenstein himself thought – or just another knot?

In this paper, we propose a framework for fostering argumentative skills in a systematic way in Philosophy and Ethics classes. We start with a review of curricula and teaching materials from the German-speaking world to show that there is an urgent need for standards for the teaching and learning of argumentation. Against this backdrop, we present a framework for such standards that is intended to tackle these difficulties. The spiral-curricular model of argumentative competences we sketch helps teachers introduce the relevant concepts and skills to students early on in their school career. The focus is on secondary schools, but the proposal can also be of use for learning and teaching in universities, especially in introductory classes. 1 Names are listed in alphabetical order. This text was written in the context of one of the working groups of the DFG-network "Argumentieren in der Schule" (Argumentation in Secondary Schools). The authors would like to thank all group members. A German translation of this paper is available at www.philovernetzt.de.

In this paper we focus on argumentation as sequence of idemes that, from a neurophisiological point of view, are neuromental configurations correlated by inherent bonds. Such sequence of idemes, in turn, is encoded in a sequence of arguments on the basis of bonds among sememes: so the linguistic-propositional structure reflects the semiotic structure, and the latter reflects the idetic structure of argumentation. We propose to analyse the argumentative structure from different perspectives: the linguistic-propositional perspective, which concerns syntactic bonds among the propositions, the semiotic perspective which regards sememes' nature and their function within the arguments, and the idetic-inherent perspective which refers to bonds among idemes involved in argumentation.

This article is focused on answering the question to what extent one can be a sceptic. Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism serves as a guide. In section 1, it is investigated whether three logical laws have a certain foundation or are subject to doubt. In section 2, Sextus’s way to deal with these laws is examined; the question arises how dogmatic his approach is. After that, a possible ‘reply’ by Sextus to the criticism receives attention. Section 3 is concentrated on a possible alternative to Sextus’s approach. Besides logical laws, some important methods are concerned.

This paper starts from Tractatus, 6.53, and ask how one could show someone ‘that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’.  Once one has fully mastered the ‘austere’ conception of nonsense – that nonsense has neither meaning, form, content, nor logic – the difficulties of the enterprise become evident.  It is not clear how one could be in a position to conclude much about an utterance without first finding a meaning in it.  Suggestions made by Guy Robinson, Edward Witherspoon and Hans-Johann Glock are considered but it is concluded that the last, best hope for nonsensicalism lies in a therapeutic approach.  I end with a plea for someone who is sympathetic to this aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to make a serious attempt to work out the details.

Dialogue games are a dynamic form of argumentation, with multiple parties pooling their arguments with the intention of settling an issue. Such games can have a variety of structures, and may be collaborative or competitive, depending on the motivations of the parties. Strategic argumentation is a class of competitive dialogue games in which two players take turns in contributing their arguments, each attempting to have an issue settled in the way that they would prefer. Thus strategic argumentation games are less about discovering a joint truth than about a player imposing their view on an opponent. They are reflective of legal argumentation. In the games we study, players have perfect information of the moves players make, but incomplete information on the possible moves (arguments) that other players have available to them. We look both at games using logically structured arguments and games using abstract arguments. We show that playing these games can be computationally hard. We also examine issues of corruption in such games, and discuss approaches to foiling it.

I argue that both Sellars and Merleau-Ponty should be read as radicalizing, in quite different ways, Kant's rejection of the sensory-cognitive continuum". In Sellars, this radicalization leads him to posit "sheer receptivity", as distinct from intuitive representations. In Merleau-Ponty, this radicalization leads him to describe "operative intentionality" or "motor intentionality" of the lived body. Hence we should distinguish between the kind of intentionality that does belong to the conceptual order (discursive intentionality) and the kind of intentionality that Merleau-Ponty examines (somatic intentionality). This distinction provides an alternative position to the debate between McDowell and contemporary Sellarsians (deVries, Rosenberg) if one rejects the assumption that intentionality belongs only to the conceptual order.

Almost sixty years ago Philippa Foot published an article that began: To many people it seems that the most notable advance in moral philosophy during the past fifty years or so has been the refutation of naturalism; and they are a little shocked that at this late date such an issue should be reopened. It is easy to understand their attitude: given certain apparently unquestionable assumptions, it would be about as sensible to try to reintroduce naturalism as to try to square the circle. Those who see it like this have satisfied themselves that they know in advance that any naturalistic theory must have a catch in it somewhere, and are put out at having to waste more time exposing an old fallacy. This paper is an attempt to persuade them to look critically at the premises on which their arguments are based. 1 The paper in question was one of a number written by Foot around the time that were highly successful in reopening the issue of naturalism in ethics. Nowadays no one can just take it for granted that naturalism has been refuted, that there is a sharp distinction (or indeed any clear distinction) between fact and value or that it is impossible to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. This is not to say that the naturalists have been completely victorious, of course; only that naturalism is today a live option. I shall argue that Foot's paper contains an important insight and an equally important mistake; and that the insight and the mistake are linked. I believe that the thinking behind it has influenced the subsequent course of moral philosophy to a quite remarkable extent and that this has been in some ways beneficial and in some ways harmful – not surprisingly, if I am right in seeing it as containing both truth and error. I do not want to exaggerate the influence of this one paper 2 but I do not know of any other that so neatly encapsulates the coupled insight and mistake. The anti-naturalism that Foot is attacking she characterises as follows: It would not be an exaggeration to say that the whole of moral philosophy, as it is now widely taught, rests on a contrast between statements of fact and evaluations, which runs something like this: The truth or falsity of statements of fact is shewn by means of evidence; and what counts as evidence is laid down in the meaning of the expressions occurring in the statement of fact … It follows that no two people can make the same statement and count completely different things as evidence; in the end one at least of them could be convicted of linguistic ignorance. It also follows that if a man is given good evidence for a factual conclusion he cannot just refuse to accept the conclusion on the ground that in his scheme of things this evidence is not evidence at all. 3 But, on the view she is criticising, [w]ith evaluations, however, it is different. An evaluation is not connected logically with the factual statements on which it is based. One man may say that a thing is good because of some fact about it, and another may refuse to take that fact as any evidence, for nothing is laid down in the meaning of 'good' which connects it with one piece of 'evidence' rather than another. It follows that a moral eccentric could argue to moral conclusions from quite idiosyncratic premises; he could say, for instance, that a man was a good man because he clasped and unclasped his hands and never turned NNE after

I originally entitled this paper ‘Why are there no uncontroversial examples of philosophical nonsense?’, but since this seemed apt to provoke rather superficial responses, I decided to re-title it.  In it I ponder the fact that, not only are there no uncontroversial examples of philosophical nonsense, there are no uncontroversial examples of what one might call ‘analogue philosophical nonsense’.  These would be non-philosophical cases of someone’s believing he means something when in reality he means nothing.  (Someone’s saying, ‘It’s 5 o’clock on the sun’ is sometimes offered as an example.)  I ask what conditions such cases would need to satisfy.  What would count as a compellingly clear case of an illusion of meaning?  Why has no one described one?

.Taking as my starting-point Cora Diamond’s paper ‘What nonsense might be’, I extend her ‘austere’ conception of nonsense to encompass the talking of nonsense.  We need to focus on the utterer as well as the utterance.  This brings out how difficult it is going to be to DIAGNOSE the talking of (philosophical) nonsense, without falling into the ‘sense that is senseless’ trap (PI, I, 500).  It is not clear to what extent Diamond sees the problem here.  I suggest that if there is a way round the difficulty, it will involve adopting a therapeutic approach.

Robert Brandom‟s expressivism argues that not all semantic content may be made fully explicit. This view connects in interesting ways with recent movements in philosophy of mathematics and logic (e.g. Brown, Shin, Giaquinto) to take diagrams seriously  as more than a mere „heuristic aid‟ to proof, but either proofs themselves, or irreducible components of such. However what exactly is a diagram in logic? Does this constitute a semiotic natural kind? The paper will argue that such a natural kind does exist in Charles Peirce‟s conception of iconic signs, but that fully understood, logical diagrams involve a structured array of normative reasoning practices, as well as just a „picture on a page‟.

The paper proposes a reconstruction of some fragments of Hegel’s Jena manuscripts concerning the natural genesis of recognitive spiritual consciousness. On this basis it  will be argued that recognition has a foothold in nature. Such a reading of recognition will be contrasted with contemporary constructivist interpretations such as those offered by Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard. As a consequence of our reconstruction of its emergence from nature, recognition should not be understood as a bootstrapping process, that is, as a self-positing and self-justifying normative social phenomenon, intelligible within itself and independently of anything external to it.

Edward Witherspoon distinguishes Wittgenstein’s conception of nonsense from Rudolf Carnap’s.  The latter does not fully take into account the fact that, if something really is nonsense, it has no more meaning than ‘Ab sur ah’ and therefore cannot have any logical properties.  He finds the Carnapian conception even in professed Wittgensteinians such as Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker who think of themselves as rejecting it.  My question is where this leaves the notion of PHILOSOPHICAL nonsense.  Could anything that was utterly devoid of content play the crucial deceptive role that nonsensicalists, including Wittgensteinians, assign it?  Could it ever be detected if it did?

I suggest that, although the nonsensicalist challenge (obviously) matters, it has, at least in its Wittgensteinian form, been widely ignored.  On the other hand, those who still adhere to nonsensicalism (mainly Wittgensteinians) have been equally remiss in their failure to examine its presuppositions.

This paper is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work through the concept of immanent causality. Deleuze finds in Spinoza a philosophy of immanent causality used to solve the problem of the relation between substance, attribute and mode as an expression of substance. But, when he proceeds to take up this notion of immanent causality found in Spinoza in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze instead inverts it into a modal one such that the identity of substance may be said only of the difference of the modes. Complicating this further, Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plateaus that substance, attribute, and mode are each, themselves, multiplicities. What is Philosophy? takes up immanent causality once again, this time through a constructivist lens aimed at resolving the question of the relation between philosophical multiplicities: 'plane,' 'persona,' and 'concept.' By following the different formulations of immanent causality in these works this essay hopes to discover the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work.

Eine etwas gekürzte Fassung dieses Aufsatzes ist erschienen in: Christian Denker (Hrsg.), Lebensform Wittgenstein. Bilder und Begriffe, Wien (Passagen Verlag) 2009 Information unter: http://www.passagen.at/cms/index.php?id=62&isbn=9783851658958&L=0 Wenn wir nicht gerade Neurowissenschaftler sind, glauben wir im Normalfall nur in einem metaphorischen Sinn, dass sich die Gedanken im Kopf befinden. Freilich kommt so eine Ausdrucksweise vor, aber damit wird zumeist auf eine vage Art auf den Zusammenhang von Denktätigkeit und Gehirntätigkeit Bezug genommen. Dass ein derartiger Zusammenhang besteht, wird von kaum jemand bezweifelt, aber wenn nach einer Konkretisierung gefragt wird, erhält man häufig nur sehr unklare Antworten oder die Befragten ziehen sich auf die Aussage zurück, dass sich das eben nicht so leicht sagen lasse. Abgesehen davon wird das Denken als eine äußerst private und individuelle Angelegenheit betrachtet. »Die Gedanken sind frei«, das ist ein Diktum, das in diesem Sinne verstanden wird. Niemand hat Zugriff auf meine Gedanken, es sei nicht möglich, die Gedanken anderer zu lesen etc. Das wird häufig vorgebracht, außer in jenen Shows, die geradezu den besten Gedankenleser küren wollen. Aber selbst dort wird von der Voraussetzung ausgegangen, dass das Prozedere des Denkens oder die Gedankenproduktion, wenn man so will, zunächst von isolierten Subjekten vollzogen wird. Es ist dann nur die Frage, wie es sich mit der Unzugänglichkeit bzw. angeblichen Zugänglichkeit verhält. Für unsere Zwecke geht es nun nicht darum, die Kontexte zu konstruieren, in welchen es sinnvoll und angebracht sein kann, sich der erwähnten Ausdrucksweisen zu bedienen. Und das ist zugleich auch ein erster wichtiger Punkt bei Wittgenstein. Er macht uns nämlich darauf aufmerksam, dass es Situationen geben kann, bei welchen es nicht erklärungsbedürftig ist, zu sagen, dass der Ort des Denkens in unserem Kopf sei. Es käme aber darauf an, die

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.