In §19 of Word and Object Quine claims that mass terms ill-fit the dichotomy between singular terms and general terms. In so doing, Quine is able to demonstrate a serious problem regarding the criteria of identity of the class of objects/‘stuff’ to which mass terms refer. Nevertheless, Quine’s account that mass terms are, in predication, ambiguous between singular/general, and that they therefore ‘ill-fit’ this dichotomy, faces several issues, and his onto- grammatical paradigm is therefore inadequate or incomplete in at least (...) the following regards: (§2) Quine’s account of the childhood development conceptual scheme is problematically committed to Skinnerian behaviourism; (§3) mass terms are not the only type of nouns which are ambiguous between singular/general [and therefore Quine is incorrect to see this ambiguity as unique and significant]; (§4) Quine failed to distinguish, within the category of mass terms, between stuff nouns and non-stuff nouns; (§5) the artificial reduction of mass terms to singular terms belies a problematic commitment to an ontology based in first-order predicate logic and naturalized epistemology; (§6) Quine’s attachment to an object ontology gives rise to metaphysical inconsistencies, and (§7) there are merits to P.F. Strawson’s opposing theory of the singular/general division, of instantiation by feature-placing, alongside various other views which provide a solution to Quine’s problem of mass terms. (shrink)

Since Plato, western philosophy has had an uneasy relationship with the sea. The sea has always acted as the unspoken that threatens to breaks up the laborious definitions attained by philosophical achievements. Of all the thinkers who grapple with the maritime latency of philosophy and the openness inherent to thinking, Nietzsche is perhaps the most outspoken about the force of the sea for the birth of a new philosophy. Throughout his works, Nietzsche has consistently commended: “Aboard the ships, ye philosophers!” (...) Nowhere has Nietzsche pursued the philosophical potency of the maritime so forcefully as in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this essay, I aim to show how the sea is pivotal to the thinking of eternal recurrence and how Zarathustra comes to embody the maritime and becomes a khoratic site of hospitality and transfiguration – for the birth of new historical values and for the condition of possibility of the value of values. (shrink)

The paper explores the possibility of philosophical cooperation between Thomism and American pragmatism by resurrecting a largely forgotten debate between Wilmon Henry Sheldon and Jacques Maritain. The discussion focuses primarily on the problem of truth as it is discussed by Peirce and by some contemporary Thomists, including Maritain but also Milbank, Pickstock, Lonergan, Balthasar, Pieper, and Ulrich. The paper claims that, if we bring Peirce’s version of pragmatism into the picture, cooperation is not possible but likely to be fruitful for (...) both pragmatism and Thomism. (shrink)