Beyond Necessity

When I utter ‘I am happy’ to myself while alone and having been silent for some while, do I mean that the content of my statement could hav...

Discussions of linguistic reference rarely define what reference is. An example is the SEP article here , which as far as I can see does no...

What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? Wittgenstein ( Philosophical Remarks , §64). ‘I have a pain’ is a sign of a completely different kind...

A while ago I discussed the Bunuel film where different actresses play the same character, and I discussed later how we try to identif...

Beyond Necessity is 10 years old today ! The first post was remarkably accurate. “But this being London, the plumber will not be there.” ...

Hume, Treatise Book I Part iii, section 2 (my emphasis): We readily suppose an object may continue individually the same, though several...

According to Fred Sommers ( The Logic of Natural Language , chapter 3) in traditional formal logic (TFL) as opposed to modern predicate log...

14:51 And there followed him [Jesus] a certain young man (νεανίσκος) , having a linen cloth (σινδόνα) cast about his naked body; and the ...

Successful reference: You must not only hit something; you must hit the right thing. And what makes a thing the right thing is the intenti...

Bill Vallicella argues here that a pronoun inherits its referent from the noun of which it is the antecedent. I say ‘John left the party ...

The Maverick Philosopher agrees that the Quran contains tokens of 'Moses' (or its Arabic equivalent). He is still not sure whethe...

Prior ("Oratio obliqua", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , Supp. Vol. 37 (1963) 115-26, reprinted in Papers in Logic and...

Lydia McGrew appears to suggest here  that when the Quran says something like ‘Noah built an ark’, it is not saying just that the referent ...

A Happy New Year to my readers. Here is Prince Buster . Enjoy yourself it's later than you think. Enjoy yourself, while you’re still ...

Ed Feser has an interesting post about Christians, Muslims, and the reference of “God” .   Nearly 300 comments, including some very bad phil...

In a post today , Maverick Bill talks about fictional and incomplete objects again, which reminds me of an idea that originally occurred to ...

IN his latest post on ‘pure ficta’, Arizona Bill wheels out what looks like an argument from revelation. If Ed denies that there are me...

Arizona Bill has some more ideas about modes of being here , so we can pick up where we left off last year (see modes of being of hobbits )....

“Mr. Mill is exactly the writer to please people of this description. His arguments are stated with the utmost affectation of precision; hi...

Attentive readers of this blog will know that I have been working on a book about Wikipedia for the past year. As part of the background re...