Writing

What is it for an act of judgment to be determinate — to settle a question, rather than merely land on one side of it? Frege locates the answer in content; the rejectivists (Smiley, Rumfitt, Price) distribute it across two primitive forces; Brandom grounds it in normative practice. I argue that these accounts share an assumption of act-extrinsic determinacy: each explains the exclusion of the opposite by something outside the act of judging. Against this, the dissertation develops an account of belief — judgment — on which exclusionary structure belongs to the act’s own self-conscious form.

An early Fregean fragment claims that rejecting a thought and accepting its opposite are one and the same. Frege’s later doctrine secures the identity only by reduction; Smiley, Rumfitt, Price, and Brandom recover successively stronger relations between rejection and asserted negation — equivalence, interderivability, dual description of one utterance, identity of deontic position — without explaining the identity itself. This paper argues that judgment is the determination of an issue whose opposed resolutions are already intelligible in understanding a thought: accepting p and rejecting ¬p are two descriptions of one answer — the first through what is affirmed, the second through what is ruled out.

Were the Cynics philosophers, or just street theater? Against Ansgar Allen’s reading of them as unprincipled countercultural practice — no doctrine, no telos — this essay argues that the anecdotes, read patiently, show the Dogs to be tamer, funnier, and more principled than advertised: an articulable ethics of simple contentment, with reasons behind the shamelessness. Allen, it suggests, projects modern lowercase-‘c’ cynicism back onto the ancients.