TOWARDS AN INTERPRETATION OF THE PHENOMENA OF DEMON POSSESSED/DEMONIZED CHRISTIANS

In the pre-modern world people generally believed in the supernatural. Individuals and culture as a whole believed in the existence of God (or gods), angels, and demons. The visible world owed its existence and meaning to a spiritual realm beyond the senses. However, such worldviews began to die with the coming of Enlightenment of 17th and 18th centuries. The age of reason, scientific thinking, and human autonomy that characterized the Enlightenment brought to being the so-called natural religion. The result was the disappearance of immanent God (Deism) and the rejection of the socalled “excluded middle” – the unseen world of spirits, and the supernatural. Such attitude may well be summarized in Rudolf Bultmann’ famous statement: “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discovers, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament worlds of spirits and miracles.”

MODAL LOGIC BETWEEN TRADITIONNAL (ARISTOTLE, IBN SINA) AND CONTEMPORARY APPROACH

Aristotle founded the science of logic in order to control language source of fallacies and sophistry. He built his syllogistic on two basic principles: non-contradiction and the excluded middle. He distinguished between different types of statements: declarative and non-declarative, only the first type was used in syllogism’s theory, because it is a tool of demonstrative science. He divided them, declarative statement, into two categories: Assertorics, and modals (necessary, possible, contingent, impossible) which he encountered difficulties in his logical analysis, because it is out of frame two valued according to the two principles, such as propositions that occur in the future whose cannot be determined now. This kind of statement was also treated by the Muslims logicians, especially Ibn Sīnā who expanded the modal concept to other field like Temporal modalities (always, sometimes, never), but he could not get out the Aristotelian context. The concept expended in contemporary logic system to include other sort of modality like: epistemological, deontic, tense … This resulted the emergence of contemporary logical systems, (epistemic logic, deontic logic, tense logic), whose approach differs from the traditional one. The propose of the article is to show the difference between the approaches Keywords: Logic; Modality; Epistemological; Deontic, Temporal; Truth; False.

The false dichotomy: a refutation of the Neandertal indistinguishability claim

In the debate about the demise of the Neandertal, several scholars have claimed that humanity’s nearest relatives were indistinguishable archaeologically, and thus behaviorally and cognitively, from contemporaneous Homo sapiens. They suggest that to hold otherwise is to characterize Neandertals as inferior to H. sapiens, a false dichotomy that excludes the possibility that the two human types simply differed in ways visible to natural selection, including their cognition. Support of the Neandertal indistinguishability claim requires ignoring the cranial differences between the two human types, which have implications for cognition and behavior. Further, support of the claim requires minimizing asymmetries in the quantity and degree of behavioral differences as attested by the archaeological record. The present paper reviews the evidence for cognitive and archaeological differences between the two human types in support of the excluded middle position.

Reconsidering Kant’s Rejection of Indirect Arguments in Transcendental Philosophy

Immanuel Kant states that indirect arguments are not suitable for the purposes of transcendental philosophy. If he is correct, this affects contemporary versions of transcendental arguments which are often used as an indirect refutation of scepticism. I discuss two reasons for Kant’s rejection of indirect arguments. Firstly, Kant argues that we are prone to misapply the law of excluded middle in philosophical contexts. Secondly, Kant points out that indirect arguments lack some explanatory power. They can show that something is true but they do not provide insight into why something is true. Using mathematical proofs as examples, I show that this is because indirect arguments are non-constructive. From a Kantian point of view, transcendental arguments need to be constructive in some way. In the last part of the paper, I briefly examine a comment made by P. F. Strawson. In my view, this comment also points toward a connection between transcendental and constructive reasoning.

The Open Future, Classical Style

In this chapter, the author defends his view against the core complaint that it invalidates what has been called “Will Excluded Middle” (either it will be that p or it will be that ~p), and an associated principle that has recently been called “Scopelessness”. According to scopelessness, will is “scopeless” with respect to negation; there is no semantic distinction between ~Willp and Will~p. In this chapter, it is argued that the data that seems to support scopelessness is adequately explained by the thesis that will is “neg-raising predicate”. In normal contexts, “No one should do that” certainly pragmatically implies “Everyone shouldn’t do that”—but the former sentence does not semantically entail the latter; this is, in part, to say that should is a neg-raiser. In general, the author defends the crucial scope distinction between ~Willp and Will~p, and responds to several objections to this view.

The Will/Would Connection

In this chapter, the author introduces a crucial comparison between his approach to the future directed will and certain more familiar approaches to the counterfactual would. In particular, the author draws an analogy between his view, which denies “Will Excluded Middle” (WEM), and certain views about counterfactuals that deny what has been called “Conditional Excluded Middle” (CEM). He argues that if CEM is no semantic truth—and many have argued that it is not—then neither is WEM. The author extends his claim that will is a neg-raiser to the counterfactual would. Overall, it emerges that the author’s view on will parallels closely David Lewis’ view about the counterfactual would. Semantically, both views are on a par—although metaphysically, it may be that counterfactuals plausibly need “grounds” in a way that future-tense truths do not. This is, however, a separate matter; the semantic claims stand or fall together.

Negation of Conditionals in Natural Language and Thought

External negation of conditionals occurs in sentences beginning with ‘It is not true that if’ or similar phrases, and it is not rare in natural language. A conditional may also be denied by another with the same antecedent and opposite consequent. Most often, when the denied conditional is implicative, the denying one is concessive, and vice versa. Here I argue that, in natural language pragmatics, ‘If $A$, $\sim B$’ entails ‘$\sim$(if $A, B$)’, but ‘$\sim$(if $A, B$)’ does not entail ‘If $A$, $\sim B$’. ‘If $A, B$’ and ‘If $A$, $\sim B$’ deny each other, but are contraries, not contradictories. Truth conditions that are relevant in human reasoning and discourse often depend not only on semantic but also on pragmatic factors. Examples are provided showing that sentences having the forms ‘$\sim$(if $A, B$)’ and ‘If $A$, $\sim B$’ may have different pragmatic truth conditions. The principle of Conditional Excluded Middle, therefore, does not apply to natural language use of conditionals. Three squares of opposition provide a representation the aforementioned relations.

A Tale of Excluding the Middle

he paper discusses a number of interconnected points concerning negation, truth, validity and the liar paradox. In particular, it discusses an argument for the dialetheic nature of the liar sentence which draws on Dummett’s teleological account of truth. Though one way of formulating this fails, a different way succeeds. The paper then discusses the role of the Principle of Excluded Middle in the argument, and of the thought that truth in a model should be a model of truth.

Eight Laws of Logic for the Forensic Construction Expert

Forensic experts’ primary and additional professional education does not include such a subject as logic. At the same time, knowledge of logic is crucial at all stages of the examination process. Filling this gap, the authors of this article reveal the content of the fundamental laws of logic and demonstrate their role in the cognitive activity of knowledgeable persons who implement their specialized (primarily construction and technical) knowledge in court proceedings. This paper deals successively with such laws of logic as the law of identity, the law of contradiction, the law of the excluded middle, the law of sufficient reason, the law of double negation, Clavius’s law, the law of contraposition, and laws of division (the dichotomy of logic) concerning various investigative and forensic situations. The projection of these laws of logic on the intellectual operations performed by experts will allow, from the authors’ point of view, to give the process of forensic examinations greater clarity and consistency, which, ultimately, should ensure an increase in its efficiency and quality of results. Logically verified approaches to work will also reduce time and financial costs.

The Mathematical Antinomies Resolved

This chapter identifies two lines of resolution in the mathematical antinomies, which lines, it argues, correspond to two traditional ways of attempting to generate counter-examples to the law of excluded middle. One line involves positing an instance of category clash, the other the suggestion that ‘the world’ is a non-referring singular term. The upshot, in either case, is that the thesis and antithesis are not contradictories but merely contraries (and both are false). The chapter criticizes, and then charitably reformulates, Kant’s indirect argument for Transcendental Idealism. It considers why Kant did not seek to resolve the antinomies by arguing that thesis or antithesis are nonsense. Also discussed are: reductio proofs in philosophy (and Kant’s attitude toward them, which is argued to be more sympathetic than is often supposed), regresses ad infinitum and ad indefinitum; the cosmological syllogism; the sceptical representation; the Lambert analogy, the indifferentists; and the comparison with Zeno.