|
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.
In May 2010, philosophers, family and friends gathered at the
University of Notre Dame to celebrate the career and retirement of
Alvin Plantinga, widely recognized as one of the world's leading
figures in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of
religion. Plantinga has earned particular respect within the
community of Christian philosophers for the pivotal role that he
played in the recent renewal and development of philosophy of
religion and philosophical theology. Each of the essays in this
volume engages with some particular aspect of Plantinga's views on
metaphysics, epistemology, or philosophy of religion. Contributors
include Michael Bergman, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Richard
Otte, Peter VanInwagen, Thomas P. Flint, Eleonore Stump, Dean
Zimmerman and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The volume also includes
responses to each essay by Bas van Fraassen, Stephen Wykstra, David
VanderLaan, Robin Collins, Raymond VanArragon, E. J. Coffman,
Thomas Crisp, and Donald Smith.
Material objects persist through time and survive change. How do
they manage to do so? What are the underlying facts of persistence?
Do objects persist by being "wholly present" at all moments of time
at which they exist? Or do they persist by having distinct
"temporal segments" confined to the corresponding times? Are
objects three-dimensional entities extended in space, but not in
time? Or are they four-dimensional spacetime "worms"? These are
matters of intense debate, which is now driven by concerns about
two major issues in fundamental ontology: parthood and location. It
is in this context that broadly empirical considerations are
increasingly brought to bear on the debate about persistence.
Persistence and Spacetime pursues this empirically based approach
to the questions. Yuri Balashov begins by setting out major rival
views of persistence -- endurance, perdurance, and exdurance -- in
a spacetime framework and proceeds to investigate the implications
of Einstein's theory of relativity for the debate about
persistence. His overall conclusion -- that relativistic
considerations favour four-dimensionalism over three-dimensionalism
-- is hardly surprising. It is, however, anything but trivial.
Contrary to a common misconception, there is no straightforward
argument from relativity to four-dimensionalism. The issues
involved are complex, and the debate is closely entangled with a
number of other philosophical disputes, including those about the
nature and ontology of time, parts and wholes, material
constitution, causation and properties, and vagueness.
In this ground-breaking study, Jc Beall shows that the fundamental
"problem" of Christology is simple to see from the role that Christ
occupies: the Christ figure is to have the divine and essentially
limitless properties of the one and only God but Christ is equally
to have the human, essentially limit-imposing properties involved
in human nature, limits essentially involved in being human. The
role that Christ occupies thereby appears to demand a
contradiction: all of the limitlessness of God, and all of the
limits of humans. This book lays out Beall's contradictory account
of Jesus Christ - and thereby a contradictory Christian theology.
How ought you to evaluate your options if you're uncertain about
what's fundamentally valuable? A prominent response is Expected
Value Maximisation (EVM)-the view that under axiological
uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has
the greater expected value across axiologies. But the expected
value of an option depends on quantitative probability and value
facts, and in particular on value comparisons across axiologies. We
need to explain what it is for such facts to hold. Also, EVM is by
no means self-evident. We need an argument to defend that it's
true. This book introduces an axiomatic approach to answer these
worries. It provides an explication of what EVM means by use of
representation theorems: intertheoretic comparisons can be
understood in terms of facts about which options are better than
which, and mutatis mutandis for intratheoretic comparisons and
axiological probabilities. And it provides a systematic argument to
the effect that EVM is true: the theory can be vindicated through
simple axioms. The result is a formally cogent and philosophically
compelling extension of standard decision theory, and original take
on the problem of axiological or normative uncertainty.
The nature and reality of self is a subject of increasing
prominence among Western philosophers of mind and cognitive
scientists. It has also been central to Indian and Tibetan
philosophical traditions for over two thousand years. It is time to
bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary
debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its
kind. Leading philosophical scholars of the Indian and Tibetan
traditions join with leading Western philosophers of mind and
phenomenologists to explore issues about consciousness and selfhood
from these multiple perspectives. Self, No Self? is not a
collection of historical or comparative essays. It takes
problem-solving and conceptual and phenomenological analysis as
central to philosophy. The essays mobilize the argumentative
resources of diverse philosophical traditions to address issues
about the self in the context of contemporary philosophy and
cognitive science. Self, No Self? will be essential reading for
philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the nature of
the self and consciousness, and will offer a valuable way into the
subject for students.
Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, or Basic Laws of
Arithmetic, was intended to be his magnum opus, the book in which
he would finally establish his logicist philosophy of arithmetic.
But because of the disaster of Russell's Paradox, which undermined
Frege's proofs, the more mathematical parts of the book have rarely
been read. Richard G. Heck, Jr., aims to change that, and establish
it as a neglected masterpiece that must be placed at the center of
Frege's philosophy. Part I of Reading Frege's Grundgesetze develops
an interpretation of the philosophy of logic that informs
Grundgesetze, paying especially close attention to the difficult
sections of Frege's book in which he discusses his notorious 'Basic
Law V' and attempts to secure its status as a law of logic. Part II
examines the mathematical basis of Frege's logicism, explaining and
exploring Frege's formal arguments. Heck argues that Frege himself
knew that his proofs could be reconstructed so as to avoid
Russell's Paradox, and presents Frege's arguments in a way that
makes them available to a wide audience. He shows, by example, that
careful attention to the structure of Frege's arguments, to what he
proved, to how he proved it, and even to what he tried to prove but
could not, has much to teach us about Frege's philosophy.
|
You may like...
WW Vietnam
Michael Rand
Hardcover
R2,527
Discovery Miles 25 270
|