Sages and Cranks: The Difficulty of Identifying First-Rate Philosophers
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Abstract: In this paper, I explore the possibility of having authority as a philosopher. In the first section of the paper I give a general account of authority. In the second section, I argue that there are some situations in which we treat some philosophers as authoritative – for…
The Deliberative Democrat's _Idea of Justice_
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The Deliberative Democrat’s Idea of Justice In his recent book The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen has made democracy central to his theory of justice. If he is right, then justice is in practice going to be hard to come by without democracy. Yet as it stands Sen’s treatment of democracy is inadequate…
The aim of natural language semantics
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Abstract: What is the aim of semantic theorizing? What form should a semantic theory take? What constraints must a semantic theory meet? What sort of phenomena must such a theory explain? These are questions that philosophers struggled with at the time of the early development of natural language…