Philosophical Enquiries

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Open Access
Art and Pragmatism: James and Dewey on the Reconstructive Presuppositions of Experience
(2010) Crippen, Matthew
Dissertation by Matthew Crippen on the pragmatic construals by James and Dewey of how we experience works of art, supervised by EWC and defended in May of 2010, as submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy, Graduate Programme in Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Ontario.
Open Access
Filmmaking, Logic and the Historical Reconstruction of the World
(1995) Cameron, Evan Wm.
An assessment in historical context of how and what filmmakers, logicians and philosophers could have learned from one another about the rudiments of their crafts.
Open Access
Francis Bacon and the Pragmatic Theory of Forms
(1964) Cameron, Evan Wm.
A summary of Francis Bacon's ontology of nature followed by a pragmatic reading of his theory of 'Forms', concluding that Bacon construed the mark of a true form to be its usefulness (or, as he put it when insisting upon the necessity of usefulness to the very being of a form, 'These two directions, the one active and the other contemplative, are one and the same thing; and what in operation is most useful, that in knowledge is most true.').
Open Access
From Plato to Socrates: Wittgenstein's Journey on Collingwood's Map
(2003) Cameron, Evan Wm.
How can I learn and help others to learn to mean more precisely by saying, doing and making things? By attending to how Ludwig Wittgenstein and Robin Collingwood answered that question during the first half of the twentieth century. I show how the last of three answers given by Wittgenstein, and the journey that he undertook to arrive at it, exemplify the kind of answer that Collingwood had been advocating and exemplifying. I conclude by suggesting, however, that a fourth answer upon which they converged unwittingly points even further along the road to philosophical understanding than either of them was able to go, namely that if we are to answer such questions exactly, we must approach them not only historically but biographically.
Open Access
God, Kant and the Transcendental Object: an Investigation into the Kantian Critique of the Ontological Argument
(1965) Cameron, Evan Wm.
An address to the 4th International Kant Congress, Mainz, Germany, 8 April 1974 on the nature and consequences of Kant's remarks within his Critique of Pure Reason on the notions of 'God' and the 'Transcendental Object', a text of which was published later the same year within the proceedings of the Congress as pages 347-355 of the Akten des 4 International Kant Kongresses, Mainz 6 10 April 1974, Teil II.1 (Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1974).
Open Access
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Induction? Flip a Coin, Twice if Needed
(1980) Cameron, Evan Wm.
A simple solution to Hume's problem of induction, pragmatically construed.
Open Access
How to Measure an Ideology
(1984) Cameron, Evan Wm.
A primer on the rudiments of the tough task of theorizing for film 'theorists' unable to distinguish theories from ideologies.
Open Access
How to Pair the Real Numbers with the Integers - a Précis of the Proof
(2023-02-06) Cameron, Evan Wm.
Open Access
How to Pair the Real Numbers with the Integers: a Game of Kitchen Mathematics.pdf
(2023) Cameron, Evan Wm.;
Can one pair the real numbers with the integers? I believe so, believing as well that the proof follows so simply from the work of Abraham Robinson a half-century ago that neither he nor readers thereafter, minds on other matters, noticed. Had they done so, they would have realised that the pairing obliterates the conclusion and methods of Georg Cantor's 'proofs' to the contrary and therewith his insistence that sets are required for comprehending mathematics, for were there 'no more real numbers than integers', we should have no reason to suppose that there are uncountably many things of any kind within our world, numbers included, and hence no need for them. Within this essay, I prove the pairing, unpack the flaws in Cantor's 3rd 'proof' and sketch the 'religious' passion that drive him to ignore them.
Open Access
'In My Mind's Ear': Misconstruing Sounds as Sights – a Philosophical and Cinematical Caution
(1999) Cameron, Evan Wm.
The notion of 'imaging' music ought to perplex us philosophically, for 'to imagine' is a verb of visualisation. Hearing musical events may cause us to imagine things, and seeing things may cause us to think of hearing musical events, but to speak of visualising how we hear when hearing musically is to echo an innervating confusion. The primary space within which we encounter things is auditory/tactile rather than visual. To think accurately of music, and especially so when composing it, one must retrain oneself to think of it non-visually, avoiding the commonplace 'imaginings' of the formalisations of mathematical structures, for example, that so often reduce what we hear thereafter to mere exemplifications of them lacking any hope of musical fascination.
Open Access
Kant and Aesthetics: an Introduction
(1986) Cameron, Evan Wm.
A brief introduction to Kant's Third Critique as presented in November 1986 at the request of Professor Seth Feldman to the undergraduate students enrolled within his 'Introduction to Fine Arts' course of the Fine Arts Cultural Studies programme, required at the time of all first-year students entering the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, Toronto, Ontario.
Open Access
Kant and the Ontological Argument
(1965) Cameron, Evan Wm.
An essay reaffirming Kant's criticism of the ontological argument for the existence of God – a conjecture conceived in the 11th century by Anselm of Canterbury and defended in the mid-20th century by Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm.
Open Access
Kant at the La Ciotat Station: the Arrival of the Lumière's Train
(1981) Cameron, Evan Wm.
In 1787 Immanuel Kant published a second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. Within a new preface he reaffirmed an identity that his critics had failed to comprehend: we and God encounter things differently rather than different things. A century later Louis Lumière, by the first public screening of a movie, exemplified a comparable identity that a good many nonfilmmakers have ever since failed to comprehend: we see differently by means of movies the same things that stood before the camera as the film was exposed rather than different things. I sketch within this essay the consequences of those identities for logic and filmmaking, foremost among them that identity claims, carefully construed, are irrefutable, disposing of impotent counterarguments.
Open Access
KING KONG, Carroll and Currie: Misconstruing Monstrously How We See Things by Means of Movies
(1998) Cameron, Evan Wm.
Two confusions have vitiated recent philosophical discussions about filmmaking: the presumption of Nöel Carroll that discrimination entails essentialism and the presumption of both Carroll and Gregory Currie that we cannot be seeing what we commonly speak of seeing when seeing 'fictional things' things by means of movies, monsters like King Kong in particular, for our responses differ from what they would have been had we been in the presence of the things that we are encountering. Fortunately, neither of the confusions need bother us nor need we persist with the authors in misdescribing how we encounter things seen by means of movies.
Open Access
McLuhan's Method: the Mad Hatter at Tea with Austin and Wittgenstein
(1989) Cameron, Evan Wm.
What was McLuhan doing? How was he doing it? Was it important? Within this essay I try to answer those questions by linking what he said and did, and how he did it, with the ways and means of the seemingly dissimilar philosophical project of Austin and Wittgenstein.
Open Access
Michelson, Morley and Me: How We See, Hear and Hear Movies
(2002) Cameron, Evan Wm.
The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 was the watershed in our coming to understand how differently waves propagate. As such, it ought also to have been the watershed in our coming to understand how hearing differs from seeing and how differently we encounter the world and ourselves within it when listening rather than looking. After amplifying these remarks, I suggest in conclusion that philosophers seeking for the 'self' would have been well-advised to listen rather than look for it.
Open Access
'The Mind Hears': an Examination of Some Philosophical Perspectives on Musical Experience
(2000) Bicknell, Jeannette
Dissertation by Jeanette Bicknell on the scope and nature of the 'levels of understanding' that determine how we experience music, supervised by EWC and defended in May of 2000, as submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy, Graduate Programme in Philosophy, York University, Toronto, Ontario.
Open Access
Nelson Goodman's 'Theory of Symbols': an Exposition and Critique
(1985) Cameron, Evan Wm.
Notes in outline form for a presentation on 13 February 1985 to the 'Media, Mind and Society' seminar of David R. Olson, Co-Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology of the University of Toronto, on the 'Theory of Symbols' of Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art [1968] and Ways of Worldmaking [1978].
Open Access
On the Inductive Structure of Works of Art (Oral Examination Abstract)
(1970) Cameron, Evan Wm.
Extended abstract of the author's dissertation 'On the Inductive Structure of Works of Art', summarising its logical and artistic enquiries, as used by the members of the examining committee of the Graduate School of Boston University before whom it was defended in May of 1970.
Open Access
On the Inductive Structure of Works of Art (Part I)
(1970) Cameron, Evan Wm.
Part I (of two parts) of the dissertation of May 1970 within which author unpacks and defends the conjecture that works of art must be structured to be playable as inductive games if they are to be experienced powerfully – the core construal upon which his subsequent discussions of the nature, scope and limits of screenwriting were to rest. [Part I encompasses the Abstract and Preface of the thesis, and Chapter I with appendices – a formal excursion into pertinent aspects of probability theory and inductive logic.]