Department of Philosophy

Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

How Requests Give Reasons: The Epistemic Account versus Schaber's Value Account

Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a life depends solely on the prudential value of each moment of that life. This is a general account of momentary well-being that can capture different features of well-being that standard atomistic accounts fail to capture, thus allowing for the possibility of an atomism that is compatible with a variety of well-being theories. Contrary to many criticisms leveled against momentary well-being, this well-being atomism captures all of the important features of well-being.

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (PPR)

A new well-being atomism

Perhaps the most pressing challenge for singularism—the predominant view that definite plurals like ‘the students’ singularly refer to a collective entity, such as a mereological sum or set—is that it threatens paradox. Indeed, this serves as a primary motivation for pluralism—the opposing view that definite plurals refer to multiple individuals simultaneously through the primitive relation of plural reference. Groups represent one domain in which this threat is immediate. After all, groups resemble sets in having a kind of membership-relation and iterating: we can have groups of groups, groups of groups of groups, etc. Yet there cannot be a group of all non-self-membered groups. In response, we develop a potentialist theory of groups according to which we always can, but do not have to, form a group from any sum. Modalizing group-formation makes it a species of potential, as opposed to actual or completed, infinity. This allows for a consistent, plausible, and empirically adequate treatment of natural language plurals, one which is motivated by the iterative nature of syntactic and semantic processes more generally .

Linguistics and Philosophy

Groups, sets, and paradox

In this paper, we outline and critically evaluate Thomas Hofweber’s solution to a semantic puzzle he calls Frege’s Other Puzzle. After sketching the Puzzle and two traditional responses to it—the Substantival Strategy and the Adjectival Strategy—we outline Hofweber’s proposed version of Adjectivalism. We argue that two key components—the syntactic and semantic components—of Hofweber’s analysis both suffer from serious empirical difficulties. Ultimately, this suggests that an altogether different solution to Frege’s Other Puzzle is required.

Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science

Hofweber’s Nominalist Naturalism

Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between the notations acceptable for computation, the usual idealizations involved in theories of computability, flowing from Alan Turing’s monumental work, and de re propositional attitudes toward numbers and other mathematical objects. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

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Philosophies

Computability, Notation, and de re Knowledge of Numbers

Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie

The Practical Syllogism and Practical Cognition in Aristotle

Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we instead argue that number words, like many related expressions, are polymorphic, having multiple uses whose meanings are systematically related via type shifting.

Philosophia Mathematica

Resolving Frege's Other Puzzle

Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics: Proceedings of the 41st International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium

Link’s Revenge: A Case Study in Natural Language Mereology

Semantics and the Ontology of Number

It is currently fashionable to take Putnamian model-theoretic worries seriously for mathematics, but not for discussions of ordinary physical objects and the sciences. However, I will argue that (under certain mild assumptions) merely securing determinate reference to physical possibility suffices to rule out the kind of nonstandard interpretations of our number talk Putnam invokes. So, anyone who accepts determinate reference to physical possibility should not reject determinate reference to the natural numbers on Putnamian model-theoretic grounds. © 2021 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.