By Robert Hanna

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. Classical Analytic Philosophy

II.1 What Classical Analytic Philosophy Is: Two Basic Theses

II.2 What Classical Analytic Philosophy Officially Isn’t: Its Conflicted Anti-Kantianism

II.3 Classical Analytic Philosophy Characterized in Simple, Subtler, and Subtlest Ways

II.4 Three Kinds of Analysis: Decompositional, Transformative, and Conceptual

II.5 Frege, The First Founding Father of Classical Analytic Philosophy

II.6 Frege’s Project of (Transformative or Reductive) Analysis

II.7 Frege’s Dead End

II.8 Frege’s Semantics of Sense and Reference, aka Meaning

II.9 Some Biggish Problems For Frege’s Semantics

II.10 Husserl, Logic, and Logical Psychologism, aka LP

II.11 What LP is, and its Three Cardinal Sins

…

An edgy essay by Robert Hanna

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You can also download and read or share a complete .pdf of this essay HERE.

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The Fallacy of Inevitability: From Chattel Slavery to Digital Technology

Sadly, moral thinking and sociopolitical thinking are rife with fallacies. Here’s the general form of a particularly pernicious one that I’ll call The Fallacy of Inevitability:

(i) X is a very large social institution (in terms of the number of people who are members of that institution), X is very profitable for an elite group of powerful people, X has been in existence for a very long time (let’s say, anywhere from 50 years to hundreds or even thousands of years), and X is very…

By Robert Hanna

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. Refuting the Dignity-Skeptic and Debunking a Dignity-Debunking Argument

III. The Metaphysics of Human Dignity

III.1 What Human Dignity Is

III.2 Real Persons and Minded Animals

III.3 A Metaphysical Definition of Real Personhood

IV. Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory

IV.0 How Nonideal Can a World Be?

V. Some Hard Cases For Broadly Kantian Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory

VI. Enacting Human Dignity and The Mind-Body Politic

VII. Conclusion

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This installment contains section IV.0.

But you can also download or read a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.

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IV. Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory

A conflict of duties would be a relation between them…

By Robert Hanna

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[I] was then making plans for a work that might perhaps have the title, “The Limits of Sense and Reason.” I planned to have it consist of two parts, a theoretical and a practical. The first part would have two sections, (1) general phenomenology and (2) metaphysics, but this only with regard to its method. (Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772 [C 10: 129])

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A guest authored edgy essay by Siddiq Khan

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APP EDITOR’S NOTE:

Siddiq Khan was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1990. He currently pursues his vocation as a nurseryman, mycologist, complex systems designer, poet, essayist, soil microbiologist, and project co-ordinator, on a large rural estate in the south of Spain. Fundamentally hostile to all established ideologies, he might describe himself as a philosophical apatheist with a strong inclination towards epistemological anarchism, if he were not so averse to describing himself at all.

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Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

The riddle, we may conclude, was originally a sacred game, and as such it cut clean across any possible distinction between play and seriousness. It was both at…

By Robert Hanna

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. Refuting the Dignity-Skeptic and Debunking a Dignity-Debunking Argument

III. The Metaphysics of Human Dignity

III.1 What Human Dignity Is

III.2 Real Persons and Minded Animals

III.3 A Metaphysical Definition of Real Personhood

IV. Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory

V. Some Hard Cases For Broadly Kantian Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory

VI. Enacting Human Dignity and The Mind-Body Politic

VII. Conclusion

This installment contains section III.3.

But you can also download or read a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.

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My metaphysical analysis of real personhood substantively borrows from two different sources: (i) Harry Frankfurt’s hierarchical-desire theory…

By Robert Hanna

***

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. Classical Analytic Philosophy

II.1 What Classical Analytic Philosophy Is: Two Basic Theses

II.2 What Classical Analytic Philosophy Officially Isn’t: Its Conflicted Anti-Kantianism

II.3 Classical Analytic Philosophy Characterized in Simple, Subtler, and Subtlest Ways

II.4 Three Kinds of Analysis: Decompositional, Transformative, and Conceptual

II.5 Frege, The First Founding Father of Classical Analytic Philosophy

II.6 Frege’s Project of (Transformative or Reductive) Analysis

II.7 Frege’s Dead End

II.8 Frege’s Semantics of Sense and Reference, aka Meaning

II.9 Some Biggish Problems For Frege’s Semantics

II.10 Husserl, Logic, and Logical Psychologism, aka LP

II.11 What LP is, and its Three Cardinal Sins

…

By Robert Hanna

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You can also download and read or share a complete .pdf version of this essay HERE.

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Gun Crazy: A Moral Argument For Gun Abolitionism

I. Two Original Sins: Slavery and Gun Crazy

Framed in Biblical terms, the birth of the United States of America in 1776 was attended by two original sins. The first original sin was what John C. Calhoun later infamously called the “peculiar institution” of slavery in the USA.[i] Here, in turn, are some things that Calhoun said about slavery:

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now…