METAPHILOSOPHY最新文献

This paper employs structural topic modeling (STM) to describe the academic philosophy landscape in Brazil. Based on a public national database, a corpus consisting of 12,515 abstracts of monographs defended in philosophy graduate programs between 1991 and 2021 was compiled. The final STM model identified 74 meaningful research topics, clustered into 7 thematic categories. This study discusses the prevalence of the most significant topics and categories, their trends across three decades, and their (positive or negative) association with the supervisor's gender. Results show the first empirical evidence that Brazilian philosophical research exhibits a greater focus on philosophers than on specific themes or problems. Moreover, by visualizing the variations in topic prevalence over time, it was possible to track the rise or decline of the major interest categories and topics. Finally, results also show which topics are more influenced or less influenced by gender.

This paper studies the structure of semantic theories over modular computational systems and applies the algebraic Theory of Institutions to provide a logical representation of such theories. A modular semantic theory is here defined by a cluster of semantic theories, each for a single program's module, and by a set of relations connecting models of different semantic theories. A semantic theory of a single module is provided in terms of the set of ∑-models mapped from the category Th of ∑-theories and generating a hierarchy of structures from an abstract model to a concrete model of data. The collection of abstract models representing different modules of a program is formalised as the category of institutions INS, where theory morphisms express refinements, integrations, and compositions between couples of modules. Finally, it is required that a morphism in INS at any level occurs iff the same morphism occurs at the lower level alongside the Th hierarchy.

This paper argues for a broad definition of philosophical sources and how Indigenous traditional knowledge fits that definition. It concludes by showing how, following the previous two points, an Indigenous document such as the Huarochirí Manuscript can be considered a philosophical source by academic philosophers. The paper has three sections: the first deals with the methodological point of addressing what can be considered as philosophy. This section presents a conversational approach to philosophy. This approach, although broad, properly captures the practices of inquiring about philosophical issues as is commonly done in Western academic circles, but without excluding the practices of non-Western cultures from being labelled as philosophical. The second section argues for the analytical distinction between a philosophical source, a philosophical text, and a philosophical insight. It shows that what makes a philosophical source such are the philosophical insights that it can provide. The final section shows how the Huarochirí Manuscript has merits making it worthy of being considered a philosophical source and thus a relevant academic source for those working in the field of philosophy.

This paper proposes an interpretation of Aristotle's understanding of tyche (τύχη), a Greek term that can be alternatively translated as luck, fortune, or fate. The paper disentangles various threads of argument in the primary sources to argue for a realist understanding of what we moderns call “luck.” In short, it contends that Aristotle's account of these issues is mostly correct and merits close attention when canvassing recent philosophical debates about luckology. Aristotle argues that science pertains to the general rule; it is not about the particular. Particular events have contingent content that exceeds the scope of science. Even if we could predict all future events with ultimate accuracy, we would still be left wondering why good or bad things happen to specific people. Although luck is not a scientific category, it has an existential reality that leaves momentous events open to metaphysical and even religious interpretation.

There is considerable disagreement and even confusion over what forms of border-crossing philosophizing are most appropriate to our times. Are comparative, cross-cultural, intercultural, blended, and fusion philosophy all the same thing? Some critics find what they call “comparative philosophy” to be moribund or problematically colonialist; others assert that projects like “fusion philosophy” are intellectually irresponsible and colonialist in their own way. Can we nonetheless identify a distinctive project of comparative philosophy and say why it is important? Based on a broad survey of approaches, this essay offers schematic answers to these questions, clarifies some persistent confusions, and stresses the constitutive gamble that lies at the heart of all comparative philosophy. There are several different ways to do comparative philosophy well; which method to employ depends on the values that motivate and the pragmatic situation that frames one's inquiry, and on the ways in which one or more communities receive and respond to one's contribution.

This essay aims to shed new light on the theoretical pertinence of classical Indian logic and epistemology in Benedetto Croce's criticism of Western Aristotelian and modern logic. As a matter of fact, Croce gave a positive and extraordinarily enterprising evaluation of “Indian Logic” in his review of Hermann Jacobi's Indische Logik (1905) and in his book Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept (1996 [1909]). Yet Croce's significant and considerable evaluation of “Indian Logic” has remained neglected until today. This essay tries to clear the field of some prejudices that misled scholarly research on Croce and Indian philosophy, and it glosses in detail the “neglected” judgment on “Indian Logic” in Croce's Logic. In doing so, it critically discusses some epistemological questions starting from Croce's philosophy, such as the character of “natural induction,” the relationship between language and thought, and the connection between historical languages and logical forms.