Logical nihilism can be understood as the view that there are no laws of logic. This paper presents both a counterexample-based argument in favor of logical nihilism, and a way to resist it by using Lakatos' method of lemma incorporation. The price to pay is the loss of absolute generality.

How does being a woman affect one’s epistemic life? What about being black? Or queer? Standpoint theorists argue that such social positions can give rise to otherwise unavailable epistemic privilege. “Epistemic privilege” is a murky concept, however. Critics of standpoint theory argue that the view is offered without a clear explanation of how standpoints confer their benefits, what those benefits are, or why social positions are particularly apt to produce them. But this need not be so. This article articulates a minimal version of standpoint epistemology that avoids these criticisms and supports the normative goals of its feminist forerunners. With this foundation, we develop a formal model in which to explore standpoint epistemology using neighborhood semantics for modal logic.

The author argues that there is a strong connection between the dualisms that have strengthened and naturalized systematic oppression across history (man/woman, reason/emotion, etc.), and "classical" logic. It is suggested that feminism's response should not be to abandon logic altogether, but rather to focus on the development of alternative, less oppressive forms of rationality, of which relevant logics provide an example.

From the newsletter's introduction: "Lauren Eichler [...] examines the resonances between feminist and Native American analyses of classical logic. After considering the range of responses, from overly monolithic rejection to more nuanced appreciation, Eichler argues for a careful, pluralist understanding of logic as she articulates her suggestion that feminists and Native American philosophers could build fruitful alliances around this topic."

Kit Fine and Robert Adams have independently introduced a distinction between two ways in which a proposition might be true with respect to a world. A proposition is true at a world if it correctly represents the world. A proposition is true in a world, if it exists in that world and correctly represents it. In this paper, I clarify this distinction between outer and inner truth, defend it against recent charges of unintelligibly and argue that outer truth tracks counterfactual possibility while inner truth tracks counter-actual possibility. This connection allows us to clarify the relationship between possibility, possible actuality and the thesis of serious actualism, which is the thesis that nothing could have had a property without existing. I show that this undermines serious actualists' scruples against reading sentences like `Even if Socrates had not existed, he might have' as expressing true and genuinely de re propositions about Socrates. More generally, the connection I draw provides the serious actualist with a justification for treating actually existing but contingent objects differently from how he treats merely possible objects

Bernard Linsky and Edward Zalta have recently proposed a new form of actualism. I characterize the general form of their view and the motivations behind it. I argue that it is not quite new – it bears interesting similarities to Alvin Plantinga’s view – and that it definitely isn’t actualist.

Actualists routinely characterize their view by means of the slogan, “Everything is actual.” They say that there aren’t any things that exist but do not actually exist—there aren’t any “mere possibilia.” If there are any things that deserve the label ‘possible world’, they are just actually existing entities of some kind—maximally consistent sets of sentences, or maximal uninstantiated properties, or maximal possible states of affairs, or something along those lines. Possibilists, in contrast, do think that there are mere possibilia, that there are things that are not actual. They think that more exists than what actually exists. All I have done so far, though, is rephrase the slogan in various ways. To say that everything is actual is precisely to say that there are no things that do not actually exist, which is precisely to say that there are no mere possibilia, and which is also precisely to say that we cannot sep- arately quantify over what exists and what is actual. These claims all amount to the same thing. But what is that, exactly? What on earth does it mean to say that everything is actual, that there are no mere possibilia, and so on? What does the actualist slogan really come to? I think the literature is far from clear on this point, and that people work themselves into unnecessary muddles because of it. Indeed, certain confusions that I shall discuss in the first half of this article seem to be on the rise. It is high time to lay out the issues and the choice points as clearly as possible. There are two primary choices to be made; there are two axes along which versions of actualism can vary. One choice has to do with how to treat claims about things that merely could exist. The other choice has to do with the modal status of the view and of how we should think about the “actual” in actualism. I make no claim that the positions I will eventually endorse are star- tlingly new. I think that most people will agree with the decisions I make at both choice points and will in fact find some bits of this essay obvious. But not everyone agrees with my decisions, and it has been my experience that people differ remarkably about which bits they find obvious—a fact I find rather telling. My goal, then, is to show that the two axes are there and to clarify the consequences of the choices.