PHILOSOPHY PATHWAYS Issue 205

III. 'Can There be a Foundationalist or a Coherentist Account of Predication?' by Marlon De Vera

This issue of the Philosophical Pathways journal starts with papers which are concerned with the metaphysical commitments of political philosophies, before moving to a paper which concerns a non-political metaphysical question. There is an objection that some readers might have to this description, which I shall mention later. First I shall say something about each individual paper [...]

This article derives its conceptual impetus from Lindsay Kelland's incisive discussion of rape in an article entitled: "Conceptually situating the harm of rape: An analysis of objectification published" in the South African Journal of Philosophy. In this article, Kelland advances the contention that "what takes place in an encounter of sexual objectification can be thought of as establishing an implicit threat which permeates the lived experience of being a woman under patriarchy because of the prevalence, meaning and place of sexual objectification in hegemonic patriarchal ideology." Having thoroughly scrutinized this article, I strongly identify with Kelland on the harm associated with the objectification of the female body by the male other and I argue that even the idea of Africana womanism, which represents the interest of African women in Africa and in diasporic spaces, will have to do a lot more to challenge this position as it tends to mask the real challenges African women face in their everyday association with patriarchy [...]

In this paper I contribute to answering the question, is the philosopher John Rawls committed to the possibility of human beings who are not social beings? The answer depends on what exactly is meant by 'not social beings.' Perhaps it also depends on which of Rawls's texts one focuses on. I argue that in order to defend proposals made in his classic book A Theory of Justice, Rawls needs to take on a certain commitment, and it makes sense to describe this as a commitment to non-social human beings. An argument has already been made for a similar conclusion (Sandel 1984: 86-87), an argument which has been contested (Edwin Baker 1985: 900), but my argument below is quite different [...]

III. 'CAN THERE BE A FOUNDATIONALIST OR A COHERENTIST ACCOUNT OF PREDICATION?' BY MARLON DE VERA

The problem of characterizing the relation between an object and an attribute in predication is inseparable from two fundamental problems -- the problem of how an object is appropriately described by a predicate, and the problem of how one predicate can apply to more than one distinct object at the same time. One response to these two problems which has been defended by philosophers is the One Over Many Argument. However, the One Over Many Argument leads to a problem of infinite regress, which is usually referred to as the Chinese Boxes Absurdity. In an attempt to respond to the Chinese Boxes Absurdity, this paper draws a parallel between the problem of predication and how it relates objects and attributes, on the one hand, and the problem of the epistemic justification of empirical beliefs, on the other hand, and explores the possibility of employing either a foundationalist or a coherentist account of predication to terminate the problem of infinite regress [...]

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