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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > Analytical & linguistic philosophy
This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest
developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of
pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it
aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape
the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich
feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s,
with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating
specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography.
Despite the predominance of this literature, there remain
considerable disagreements and precious little agreement on many
key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography (as Langton
argues) constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it
objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative
enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the
best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over
these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock
of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and
political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further
aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to
pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist
pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography,
trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively
feminist pornography.
Divine Agency and Divine Action, Volume I lays the groundwork for a
constructive contribution to the contemporary debate regarding
divine action. Noted scholar, William J. Abraham argues that the
concept of divine action is not a closed concept-like knowledge-but
an open concept with a variety of context-dependent meanings. The
volume charts the history of debate about divine action among key
Anglophone philosophers of religion, and observes that they were
largely committed to this erroneous understanding of divine action
as a closed concept. After developing an argument that divine
action should be understood as an open, fluid concept, Abraham
engages the work of William Alston, Process metaphysics, quantum
physics, analytic Thomist philosophy of religion, and the theology
of Kathryn Tanner. Abraham argues that divine action as an open
concept must be shaped by distinctly theological considerations,
and thus all future work on divine action among philosophers of
religion must change to accord with this vision. Only deep
engagement with the Christian theological tradition will remedy the
problems ailing contemporary discourse on divine action.
Our conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use
to navigate the world. In The Construction of Logical Space Agustin
Rayo defends the idea that one's conception of logical space is
shaped by one's acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements:
statements like 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of
H2O', or 'for the number of the dinosaurs to be zero just is for
there to be no dinosaurs'. The resulting picture is used to
articulate a conception of metaphysical possibility that does not
depend on a reduction of the modal to the non-modal, and to develop
a trivialist philosophy of mathematics, according to which the
truths of pure mathematics have trivial truth-conditions.
Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and
present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes
of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making
something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a
comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in
foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not
merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the
foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so
requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible
worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and
the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from
attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of
various operators. Throughout, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne
contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of
thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental
monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter.
Such propositions, they argue, are the semantic values of sentences
(relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and,
unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.
This book is collection of published and unpublished essays on the
philosophy of religion by Howard Wettstein, who is a widely
respected analytic philosopher. Over the past twenty years,
Wettstein has attempted to reconcile his faith with his philosophy,
and he brings his personal investment in this mission to the essays
collected here. Influenced by the work of George Santayana,
Wittgenstein, and A.J. Heschel, Wettstein grapples with central
issues in the philosophy of religion such as the relationship of
religious practice to religious belief, what is at stake in the
debate between atheists and theists, and the place of doctrine in
religion. His discussions draw from Jewish texts as well as
Christianity, Islam, and classical philosophy. The challenge
Wettstein undertakes throughout the volume is to maintain a
philosophical naturalism while pursuing an encounter with God and
traditional religion. In the Introduction to this volume, Wettstein
elucidates the uniting themes among the collected essays.
Cheryl Misak presents a history of the great American philosophical
tradition of pragmatism, from its inception in the Metaphysical
Club of the 1870s to the present day. She identifies two dominant
lines of thought in the tradition: the first begins with Charles S.
Peirce and Chauncey Wright and continues through to Lewis, Quine,
and Sellars; the other begins with William James and continues
through to Dewey and Rorty. This ambitious new account identifies
the connections between traditional American pragmatism and
twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy, and links pragmatism
to major positions in the recent history of philosophy, such as
logical empiricism. Misak argues that the most defensible version
of pragmatism must be seen and recovered as an important part of
the analytic tradition.
Now in a new edition, this volume updates Davidson's exceptional
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his
enormously influential philosophy of language. The original volume
remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy,
with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of
mind, and epistemology. Addressing a central question--what it is
for words to mean what they do--and featuring a previously
uncollected, additional essay, this work will appeal to a wide
audience of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists.
Are there such things as merely possible people, who would have
lived if our ancestors had acted differently? Are there future
people, who have not yet been conceived? Questions like those raise
deep issues about both the nature of being and its logical
relations with contingency and change. In Modal Logic as
Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson argues for positive answers to
those questions on the basis of an integrated approach to the
issues, applying the technical resources of modal logic to provide
structural cores for metaphysical theories. He rejects the search
for a metaphysically neutral logic as futile. The book contains
detailed historical discussion of how the metaphysical issues
emerged in the twentieth century development of quantified modal
logic, through the work of such figures as Rudolf Carnap, Ruth
Barcan Marcus, Arthur Prior, and Saul Kripke. It proposes
higher-order modal logic as a new setting in which to resolve such
metaphysical questions scientifically, by the construction of
systematic logical theories embodying rival answers and their
comparison by normal scientific standards. Williamson provides both
a rigorous introduction to the technical background needed to
understand metaphysical questions in quantified modal logic and an
extended argument for controversial, provocative answers to them.
He gives original, precise treatments of topics including the
relation between logic and metaphysics, the methodology of theory
choice in philosophy, the nature of possible worlds and their role
in semantics, plural quantification compared to quantification into
predicate position, communication across metaphysical disagreement,
and problems for truthmaker theory.
As the foundation of our rationality, logic has traditionally been
considered fixed, stable and constant. This conception of the
discipline has been challenged recently by the plurality of logics
and in this book, Pavel Arazim extends the debate to offer a new
view of logic as dynamic and without a definite, specific shape.
The Problem of Plurality of Logics examines the origins of our
standard view of logic alongside Kant's theories, the holistic
view, the issue of logic's pragmatic significance and Robert
Brandom's logical expressivism. Arazim then draws on
proof-theoretical approaches to present a convincing argument for a
dynamic version of logical inferentialism, which opens space for a
new freedom to modify our own logic. He explores the scope,
possibilities and limits of this freedom in order to highlight the
future paths logic could take, as a motivation for further
research. Marking a departure from logical monism and also from the
recent doctrine of logical pluralism in its various forms, this
book addresses current debates concerning the expressive role of
logic and contributes to a lively area of discussion in analytic
philosophy.
Throughout his career, Keith Hossack has made outstanding
contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and the
philosophy of mathematics. This collection of previously
unpublished papers begins with a focus on Hossack's conception of
the nature of knowledge, his metaphysics of facts and his account
of the relations between knowledge, agents and facts. Attention
moves to Hossack's philosophy of mind and the nature of
consciousness, before turning to the notion of necessity and its
interaction with a priori knowledge. Hossack's views on the nature
of proof, logical truth, conditionals and generality are discussed
in depth. In the final chapters, questions about the identity of
mathematical objects and our knowledge of them take centre stage,
together with questions about the necessity and generality of
mathematical and logical truths. Knowledge, Number and Reality
represents some of the most vibrant discussions taking place in
analytic philosophy today.
For centuries, philosophers have addressed the ontological question
of whether God exists. Most recently, philosophers have begun to
explore the axiological question of what value impact, if any,
God's existence has (or would have) on our world. This book brings
together four prestigious philosophers, Michael Almeida, Travis
Dumsday, Perry Hendricks and Graham Oppy, to present different
views on the axiological question about God. Each contributor
expresses a position on axiology, which is then met with responses
from the remaining contributors. This structure makes for genuine
discussion and developed exploration of the key issues at stake,
and shows that the axiological question is more complicated than it
first appears. Chapters explore a range of relevant issues,
including the relationship between Judeo-Christian theism and
non-naturalist alternatives such as pantheism, polytheism, and
animism/panpsychism. Further chapters consider the attitudes and
emotions of atheists within the theism conversation, and develop
and evaluate the best arguments for doxastic pro-theism and
doxastic anti-theism. Of interest to those working on philosophy of
religion, theism and ethics, this book presents lively accounts of
an important topic in an exciting and collaborative way, offered by
renowned experts in this area.
This edited volume examines the relationship between collective
intentionality and inferential theories of meaning. The book
consists of three main sections. The first part contains essays
demonstrating how researchers working on inferentialism and
collective intentionality can learn from one another. The essays in
the second part examine the dimensions along which philosophical
and empirical research on human reasoning and collective
intentionality can benefit from more cross-pollination. The final
part consists of essays that offer a closer examination of themes
from inferentialism and collective intentionality that arise in the
work of Wilfrid Sellars. Groups, Norms and Practices provides a
template for continuing an interdisciplinary program in philosophy
and the sciences that aims to deepen our understanding of human
rationality, language use, and sociality.
During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the French
philosopher Henri Bergson became an international celebrity,
profoundly influencing contemporary intellectual and artistic
currents. While Bergsonism was fashionable, L. Susan Stebbing,
Bertrand Russell, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap launched
different critical attacks against some of Bergson's views. This
book examines this series of critical responses to Bergsonism early
in the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic criticisms of
Bergsonism were influenced by William James, who saw Bergson as an
'anti-intellectualist' ally of American Pragmatism, and Max
Scheler, who saw him as a prophet of Lebensphilosophie. Some of the
main analytic objections to Bergson are answered in the work of
Karin Costelloe-Stephen. Analytic anti-Bergsonism accompanied the
earlier refutations of idealism by Russell and Moore, and later
influenced the Vienna Circle's critique of metaphysics. It
eventually contributed to the formation of the view that 'analytic'
philosophy is divided from its 'continental' counterpart.
Bernard Lonergan (1904-84) is acknowledged as one of the most
significant philosopher-theologians of the 20th century. Lonergan,
Meaning and Method in many ways complements Andrew Beards' previous
book on Lonergan, Insight and Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2010). Andrew
Beards applies Lonergan's thought and brings it into critical
dialogue and discussion with other contemporary philosophical
interlocutors, principally from the analytical tradition. He also
introduces themes and arguments from the continental tradition, as
well as offering interpretative analysis of some central notions in
Lonergan's thought that are of interest to all who wish to
understand the importance of Lonergan's work for philosophy and
Christian theology. Three of the chapters focus upon areas of
fruitful exchange and debate between Lonergan's thought and the
work of three major figures in current analytical philosophy: Nancy
Cartwright, Timothy Williamson and Scott Soames. The discussion
also ranges across such topics as meaning theory, metaphilosophy,
epistemology, philosophy of science and aesthetics.
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