Coincidence Puzzles

This chapter presents and discusses a general schema that subsumes a variety of puzzles having to do with the modal behaviour of material objects, some new and some familiar. These puzzles involve ‘Robustness’ premises according to which certain objects of a given kind are counterfactually robust in certain respects; ‘Non-coincidence’ premises according to which distinct objects of that kind are incapable of coinciding, and ‘Non-distinctness’ premises that rule out the scenarios in which actually distinct objects could have been identical; these jointly entail an absurd conclusion.

The ironic syllogism: A rhetorical use of unmarked questions

Rhetorical questions are an important feature of Israelite rhetoric as exemplified in the Hebrew Bible. This paper builds on scholarship regarding rhetorical questions and irony to reevaluate one form of unmarked question. Previous scholarship called it an alarmed or surprised rhetorical question, characterized by the speaker’s heightened emotional state and linked by a vav to a previous thought to which it lies in opposition. This paper argues that the construction is better understood as a rhetorical strategy, whereby the speaker takes the opinion or suggested course of action of the interlocutor and restates it as the conclusion to a syllogism, after providing premises that make the conclusion absurd. This construction is called an ironic syllogism, as the absurd conclusion is a pseudo-quote said ironically. The pseudo-quote could still be considered an unmarked conducive question since it expects a negative reply from the addressee.

Lawful Humean explanations are not circular

A long-standing charge of circularity against regularity accounts of laws has recently seen a surge of renewed interest. The difficulty is that we appeal to laws to explain their worldly instances, but if these laws are descriptions of regularities in the instances then they are explained by those very instances. By the transitivity of explanation, we reach an absurd conclusion: instances of the laws explain themselves. While drawing a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations merely modifies the challenge rather than resolving it, I argue that it does point us towards an attractive solution. According to Humeanism, the most prominent form of the regularity view, laws capture information about important patterns in the phenomena. By invoking laws in scientific explanations, Humeans are showing how a given explanandum is subsumed into a more general pattern. Doing so both undermines a principle of transitivity that plays a crucial role in the circularity argument and draws out a central feature of the Humean approach to scientific explanation.

Pisarz i jego język. Przypadek Iva Andricia

A complex biography of Ivo Andrić (1892–1975) was shaped in a wide net of identity references: ethnocultural, religious, political, and linguistic. He was born to a Croatian Catholic family in Bosnia, he was a convinced supporter of Yugoslavism and a writer of the language defined as Croato-Serbian / Serbo-Croatian diasystem. In the period of his links with the cultural environment of Zagreb (1912–1919), he was writing according to the Croatian standard, later basically, in Serbian, but using environmental and stylistic diversity of the diasystem in order to stress its cognitive and artistic potential. Currently, when four national language standards are developing on the basis of the diasystem: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, reading Andrić in accordance with post-Yugoslav linguistic ideas, that is with the awareness and conviction about the „break-up” of the Serbo-Croatian language, would necessarily lead to an absurd conclusion that the writer created his works using the content of various languages. Literary heritage of the great writer of Serbo-Croatian language, which remains a sociocultural fact, has been used not only by Serbian culture and language, but also by global culture – thanks to translations of the works of this Nobel laureate into numerous world languages.

Wishful Thinking in Moral Theorizing: Comment on Enoch

David Enoch recently defended the idea that there are valid inferences of the form ‘it would be good if p, therefore, p’. I argue that Enoch's proposal allows us to infer the absurd conclusion that ours is the best of all possible worlds.

Fair Use, Fair Dealing: will they survive?

A previous article by this author discussed an emerging phenomenon on the Internet. That is, how the law, by denying copyright protection to certain kinds of digital works, may have restricted access to such works instead of liberating them, as was initially intended by the judiciary. This absurd conclusion has resulted from owners whose works are no longer protected by copyright law, who have resorted to restrictive contractual provisions on-line to control access and use of their works. And in turn, owners of such content are still able to generate revenue by charging a subscription fee for the right to gain access to the information contained therein. The result is particularly troubling to end users of digital content. If copyright law is no longer applicable, then what of the Fair Use/Fair Dealing defences available to users of these works? Does this mean that these defences are not applicable either? Are users of such content completely at the mercy of the owners’ terms and conditions of use as dictated by click-on agreements and Rules of Use posted on Web sites? This article discusses the application of Fair Dealing and Fair Use to Internet-based works, by examining the legislative and judicial responses to the ambiguities in their intellectual property protection which new technologies create.

The Line of Thought in Gal. 2. 14b–21

Twenty-five years have now passed since R. Bultmann published his brief but stimulating study ‘Zur Auslegung von Galater 2, 15–18’ in the Ernst WolfFestschrift.According to Bultmannv.17abis neither a rhetorical question nor an objection deriving from Paul's opponents; rather, it is an absurdity formulated by Paul himself and designed to function ‘in seiner gegen den Standpunkt des Petrus gerichteten Argumentation’. This absurdity would then be rejected by means of the μή γένοıτο ofv. 17c. In Bultmann's opinionv.17abis a conditional period contrary to fact; the illative particle άρα is to be preferred to the interrogative άρα. The expression χρıστς άμαρτιαςδıάκονος may be paraphrased as follows: Christ is a minister ‘derer, die (immer noch, wie bisher) in ihren Sünden stecken; er hat sie nicht von der Sünde befreit’. It is to such an absurd conclusion, affirms Paul, that the opponents' goal of re-establishing the abrogated Law must lead. These and further aspects of Bultmann's article have been dealt with – critically in some instances – by several authors and so there is no need for us to discuss them again here.