Aristotle is generally credited with the invention of logic. More than two thousand years ago, he noticed that good, persuasive arguments have certain kinds of shapes, or structures. Logic was born when he began to study those structures, which he called syllogisms, identifying underlying patterns of ordinary human reasoning and then devising simple methods which can be used to determine whether someone is reasoning correctly. Aristotle was aware that this was a momentous discovery, and he himself thought that all scientific reasoning could be reduced to syllogistic arguments. There are hints that Aristotle saw his syllogistic logic as providing useful practice for participants in ancient debating contests, contests which he himself would have encountered as a student in Plato’s Academy. There are also hints that Aristotle might have envisioned his syllogistic logic as providing a way to catalogue facts about science. But Aristotle never fleshes out any such details. His Prior Analytics, the text in which he presents his syllogistic, focuses on the mechanics of the syllogistic far more than on its interpretation, and in fact the comparative lack of interpretive detail has sometimes led scholars to suppose that what we have today of Aristotle’s logic is his own sometimes scrappy lecture notes or his students’ notes, and not a polished, finished work. But in the end these are of course only guesses. In modern times, the main scholarly interest in Aristotle’s ancient logic has focused increasingly on the proper interpretation of the mechanical methods which Aristotle invented and on their relation to his wider philosophy.

The Chao Lun (ca. 400 CE) is the main philosophical work of the Chinese Buddhist monk Sēngzhào, a student of Kumārajīva who first translated major Buddhist philosophical works like those of Nāgārjuna into Chinese. Sēngzhào develops a metaphysical conception of time according to which time is not real. What instead exists are an array of entirely static worlds - "time slices" in modern parlance (Sēngzhào's views are an early example of a "B-theory" of time). Our selves are being moved from one world to the next, creating an illusion of progression and things like causation. For Sēngzhào, enlightenment can be found by simply remaining in the present, not moving on to the next state. Sēngzhào leans both on Buddhist and on Daoist influences, but also develops an epistemologically less radical view in chapter 3 that, unlike those of Nāgārjuna and Zhuangzi, cannot be associated with skepticism.

This paper puts forth a functionalist difficulty for Sally Haslanger’s proposal for engineering our concept of ‘woman.’ It is argued that the project of bringing about better political function fulfillment cannot get off the ground in virtue of epistemic failure.

This paper begins with the idea that there are sometimes gaps in our shared linguistic/conceptual resources that make it difficult for us to understand our own social experiences, and to make them intelligible to others. In this paper, I focus on three cases of this sort, some of which are drawn from the literature on hermeneutical injustice. I offer a diagnosis of what the gaps in these cases consist in, and what it takes to fill them. I argue that these gaps are filled in, at least initially, by labels of a particular kind. Specifically, these are labels that allow us to see the experiences in question as novel instances of phenomena with which we are already normatively familiar. Further, I also show that these labels bring with them important downsides: they introduce distortions into our understandings of these experiences. Using a pair of case studies (‘statutory rape,’ ‘sexual harassment’), I illustrate these distortions.

Is it harmful to make generic claims about social groups? Those who say yes cite
the reinforcement of oppressive stereotypes and cognitive bias. Those who say no
cite the potential of generics to do good, rather than harm, by taking advantage of
the same mechanisms that perpetuate the harms. This paper analyzes generic utterances in the context of social justice efforts to weigh in on the debate about whether
and how generic utterances contribute to stereotypes and oppression. We need to
first pay more attention to what it means to utter generics in social justice contexts.
Doing so will allow us to distinguish those generic utterances that are helpful for
social justice projects from those that might impede their progress. I argue that there
is an important pragmatic sense in which generics can be undermined: especially
generics used in service of social justice claims. I then offer an epistemic thesis for
why some generics are more susceptible to being undermined by counter-examples
than others. I conclude that if we are interested in using generics in the service of
social justice, then there is reason to restrict the contexts in which we utter generics. In doing so, I challenge the conventional wisdom that generics are resistant to
counterexamples.