Japanese emphatic particles such as mo, wa, and sae are known to present exceedingly recalcitrant problems for grammarians. Since they are clearly concerned with connecting discourse presuppositions with the assertive content of the current utterance, their nature has to be pragmatic as well as semantic. Their syntactic, or rather morphological, behaviour also seems highly unmanageable since th...

Philosophy should begin in the middle of things. I distinguish two ways in which I think that philosophy should begin in the middle of things, and then I describe the two dominant approaches to analytic philosophy today: scientific pragmatism and conceptual analysis (or, more broadly, “a priorism”). After giving reasons for dissatisfaction with both of these dominant approaches, I set out my ow...

The problem of consciousness is examined in the article. It is argued that all the existing approaches to consciousness do not explain the role consciousness plays in human life. An attempt of revealing and describing the principles of the mind’s work is made. Experimental phenomena observed by the author and his followers, particularly, the tendency of previously non-realized ideas not to be r...

Anthropomorphism is a default strategy for making the unfamiliar familiar, but is it a uniform strategy? Do all dimensions of anthropomorphism “hang together”? We explored this question by involving adults (n = 99) in a speeded property-attribution task in which they decided, as quickly as possible, whether properties of two types— psychological and physiological—could be attributed to God. Par...

Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computati...

In the Pre-Qin time, pursuing “Dao” was the main task in the scholarship of most of the ancient Chinese philosophers, while the Ancient Greek philosophers considered pursuing “Truth” as their ultimate goal. While the “Dao” in ancient Chinese texts and the “Truth” in ancient Greek philosophic literature do share or cross-cover certain connotations, there are subtle and important differences betw...

This article will argue that the situation for female mathematicians in fiction has improved, but that there is still cause for concern. You may wonder why you should care about this at all since these fictional women are (by definition) not real and therefore unlikely to be dues paying members of the AWM! With this in mind, in addition to providing examples of female mathematicians in literatu...