Roger Teichmann

Is a Tenseless Language Possible

Whether it takes the form of a translation or of giving truth-conditions, any putative reduction of tensed language to tenseless language will be undermined if it can be shown that there could be no genuinely tenseless language. A similar problem faced traditional phenomenalism: it was far from clear that there could be a ‘language of sense-data’. Either the imagined language was no language at all, or it was dependent upon object-language, not the other way around. A parallel dilemma faces tenseless reductionism. In spelling out what a tenseless language would be like, one either ends up with something that no creature could have as a language, or with something that is parasitic upon tensed language - not the other way around.

Time and change

The observation that time and change are connected in some intimate and important way is almost as old as philosophy itself. Change necessarily takes time: roughly speaking, an assertion of change will amount to, or at any rate entail, ‘For some p, p and later not-p’. Conversely, certain features of time have seemed to many philosophers to be accountable for in terms of (or even to be reducible to) features of change.

Nature, reason, and the good life : ethics for human beings

Introduction 1. Reasons and Reactions 2. Human Agency 3. Pleasure and Pain 4. The Good Life 5. Philosophy References Index

Rational Choice Theory and Backward-Looking Motives

The paper argues that the philosophical underpinnings of rational choice theory are vitiated by consideration of the phenomenon of backward-looking motives, such as gratitude, fidelity, and many forms of honesty. Attempts to describe the actions and decisions of those acting from such motives in the terms of rational choice theory fail, and the model of human conduct which is implicit in the theory is both inadequate in itself and pernicious in its general influence. A picture may emerge of the human person as a repository of atomistic ‘experiences’, inhabiting a present from the vantage-point of which his relations to past and future ‘selves’ are contingent, and his responsibilities and commitments correspondingly fluid. And in economics, a supposedly ‘neutral’ account of rational choice in fact encourages and sustains a simple-minded utilitarian ethic.

Ethik und Philosophie: Aristoteles und Wittgenstein im Vergleich

Indem Wittgenstein jede Moralphilosophie auslegt, erscheint dasjenige, was er interpretiert, wenig mit Aristoteles oder einer aristotelischen Ethik zu tun zu haben. Wittgensteins Vorstellung von ›dem Ethischen‹ ist sogar so weit von Aristoteles entfernt, dass der Eindruck entsteht, beide Philosophen diskutierten uber vollig verschiedene Dinge. Jedenfalls konnen wir dies denken, wenn wir uns Wittgensteins Bemerkungen zur Ethik, z. B. im Tractatus oder im Vortrag uber Ethik, anschauen.

Ryle on Hypotheticals

In ‘General Propositions and Causality’ (1929), F. P. Ramsey argued that for a large class of general propositions of the form ‘All Fs are Gs’, any such proposition amounts to a sort of rule: ‘If I meet an F, I shall regard it as a G’ (p. 149). 1 For Ramsey, to express a rule of this sort is the same as expressing or reporting a psychological ‘habit’. That wouldn’t rule out genuine disagreement between somebody who uttered the quoted rule and somebody who, for example, uttered the rule ‘If I meet an F, I shall regard it as a non-G’, on account of its being possible for one to be proved right in what he believes (e.g. ‘This F is a G’) and the other wrong. Still, it would arguably be an improvement on Ramsey to infuse proper objectivity into the rule corresponding to ‘All Fs are Gs’ by re-phrasing it more impersonally, as ‘If one meets an F, one should regard it as a G’.

The Importance of the Past

A bias against the past is a feature of our Zeitgeist , and has a number of manifestations. One of these is the dominant model of rational agency as geared towards producing effects or outcomes, a model which cannot make sense of the cogency of backward-looking reasons for action. I discuss the nature of such reasons, and the way of perceiving and understanding the past which goes with them. This mode of understanding the past is one of the things that gives substance to the idea that the past has a reality lacked by the future, a reality which among other things makes the past a possible object of contemplation (as in the study of history). Such contemplation is a crucial component of eudaimonia .

The Anscombe-Lewis Debate

Abstract In Anscombe’s ‘Reply’ to chapter three of Lewis’ Miracles we may discern the influence of her teacher and friend, Wittgenstein, especially in two features of it: (i) Anscombe’s insistence on the variety and diversity of types of explanation, and of senses of ‘because’; (ii) her claim that a person’s reasons for thinking something, or for that matter motives in doing something, are not to be thought of as ‘inner’ processes or events. Lewis argued that an explanation why someone believes that P which alludes to the person’s reasons (grounds) for believing that P must be incompatible with any putative ‘naturalistic’ explanation of their believing that P; but in the light of (i) and (ii), Anscombe countered that he had demonstrated no such incompatibility. Nevertheless, as her much later comments on that early debate of her career show, she thought that Lewis’s chapter, both in its original, but even more in its revised, form, was struggling with a genuine and deep problem, one which (she writes) has...

Chapter 1 The complete description of temporal reality

Publisher Summary This chapter explains the concept of temporal reality in detail. McTaggart prefaces his discussion with the distinction between A-series and B-series. The A-series is a series of positions in time, as they are past, present, or future, or have tenses derived from these three; the B-series is a series of positions in time, as they are related to one another by relations “earlier than” and “later than,” and relations derived from these. Because the reality of time would require the reality of the A-series, and the A-series involves incoherence, it follows that time is unreal. McTaggarts attack on the A-series has been the part of his proof to have attracted most attention among philosophers. Michael Dummett thought that it was an implicit adherence to this last principle that lay behind McTaggarts attack on the A-series.

Facts, Knowledge and Belief

Some philosophers assume that if our topic is time and the nature of time, we will be talking off the subject so long as we discuss language. These philosophers do not necessarily eschew the use of such expressions as ‘tensed’ and ‘tenseless’, however. I pointed out earlier on that since tense is first and foremost a feature of language, an application of such an adjective as ‘tensed’ to time looks to be more or less metaphorical; certainly, applications of this sort will stand in need of explanation. And philosophers who professedly want to ‘get away from’ the merely linguistic, while using prima facie linguistic terminology, owe us that explanation.