The problem of truth and the liar paradox is one of the most extensive problems of philosophy. The liar paradox can be avoided by assuming a so-called theory of partial truth instead of a classical theory of truth. Theories of partial truth, however, cannot solve the so-called strengthened liar paradox, which is the problem that many semantic statements about the so-called strengthened liar cannot be true in a theory of partial truth. If such semantic statements were true in the theory, another paradox would emerge. To proponents of contextual accounts, which assume that the concept of truth is context-dependent, the strengthened liar paradox is the core of the liar problem. This book provides an overview of current contextual approaches to the strengthened liar paradox. For this purpose, the author investigates formal theories of truth that result from formal reconstructions of such contextual approaches.

Willard Van Orman Quine's work revolutionized the fields of epistemology, semantics and ontology. At the heart of his philosophy are several interconnected doctrines: his rejection of conventionalism and of the linguistic doctrine of logical and mathematical truth, his rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation and his thesis of the inscrutability of reference. In this book Edward Becker sets out to interpret and explain these doctrines. He offers detailed analyses of the relevant texts, discusses Quine's views on meaning, reference and knowledge, and shows how Quine's views developed over the years. He also proposes a new version of the linguistic doctrine of logical truth, and a new way of rehabilitating analyticity. His rich exploration of Quine's thought will interest all those seeking to understand and evaluate the work of one of the most important philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Walter Benjamin's work represents one of the most radical and controversial responses to the problems of 20th century culture and society. This new interpretation analyzes some of the central enigmatic features of his writing, arguing that they result from the co-presence of religious skepticism and the desire for a religious foundation of social life. Margarete Kohlenbach focuses on the structure of self-reference as an expression of Benjamin's skeptical religiosity and examines its significance in his writing on language, literature and the cinema, as well as history, politics and modern technology.

This anthology focuses on the extraordinary contributions Wittgenstein made to several areas in the philosophy of psychology - contributions that extend to psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology. To bring them a richly-deserved attention from across the language barrier, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock has translated papers by eminent French Wittgensteinians. They here join ranks with more familiar renowned specialists on Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology. While revealing differences in approach and interests, this coming together of some of the best minds on the subject discloses a surprising degree of consensus, and gives us the clearest picture yet of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of psychology.

Exploring the ethical dimension of Wittgenstein's thought, Iczkovits challenges the view that Wittgenstein had a vision of language and subsequently a vision of ethics, showing how the two are integrated in his philosophical method, and allowing us to reframe traditional problems in moral philosophy considered as external to questions of meaning.

Interest in the age-old problems of universals and individuation has received a new impetus from the current revival of ontology in the analytic tradition, the development of theories of individual properties (and the related application of mereological calculi to the analysis of predication), and the particular problems posed by relational predication and the nature of particulars. The essays explore aspects of the history of the issues and attempt to deal with the issues and with challenges to the distinctions that give rise to them. They continue the debates stemming from the revival of metaphysics rooted in Freges realism, the Austrian tradition of Brentano-Husserl-Meinong, and the early 20th century revolt against idealism embodied in writings of Moore and Russell and culminating in Wittgensteins Tractatus.

This book is a defence of the philosophy of common sense broadly in the spirit of Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore. It breaks new ground by drawing on the work of Aristotle, contemporary evolutionary biology and psychology, and historical studies on the origins of early modern philosophy. Part One offers new answers to the questions: What counts as a common sense belief? Why should common sense beliefs be considered default positions? And why is it that philosophers so frequently end up denying what we all know to be true? Part Two defends common sense beliefs from specific challenges from prominent philosophers on topics from metaphysics to ethics.

What is judgement?

This question has exercised generations of philosophers. Early analytic philosophers such as Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein as well as phenomenologists such as Brentano, Husserl and Reinach changed how philosophers think about this question. The papers in this book explore and assess their contributions and help us to retrace their steps. In doing so we will get a clearer picture of judgement and the related notion of truth.

This book aids in the rehabilitation of the wrongfully deprecated work of William Parry, and is the only full-length investigation into Parry-type propositional logics. A central tenet of the monograph is that the sheer diversity of the contexts in which the mereological analogy emerges - its effervescence with respect to fields ranging from metaphysics to computer programming - provides compelling evidence that the study of logics of analytic implication can be instrumental in identifying connections between topics that would otherwise remain hidden. More concretely, the book identifies and discusses a host of cases in which analytic implication can play an important role in revealing distinct problems to be facets of a larger, cross-disciplinary problem. It introduces an element of constancy and cohesion that has previously been absent in a regrettably fractured field, shoring up those who are sympathetic to the worth of mereological analogy. Moreover, it generates new interest in the field by illustrating a wide range of interesting features present in such logics - and highlighting these features to appeal to researchers in many fields.

This book brings together a selection of essays by one of the pre-eminent scholars of informal logic. Following an approach that is empirical but not psychological; dialectical but not dialogical, and focused on interpretation without neglecting evaluation, Maurice Finocchiaro defines concepts such as reasoning, argument, argument analysis, critical reasoning, methodological reflection, judgment, critical thinking, and informal logic. He defends ideas about the rarity of fallacies but frequently of fallacious reasoning; the asymmetry of positive and negative in argumentation, interpretation and evaluation and the role of critical thinking in science, among other topics. Containing extended critiques of the views of many contemporary scholars, he also integrates into the discussion Arnauld's Post-Royal Logic, Gramsci's theory of intellectuals, and case studies from the history of science, particularly the work of Galileo, Newton, Huygens, and Lavoisier.

This book collects 13 papers that explore Wittgenstein's philosophy throughout the different stages of his career. The author writes from the viewpoint of critical rationalism. The tone of his analysis is friendly and appreciative yet critical. Of these papers, seven are on the background to the philosophy of Wittgenstein. Five papers examine different aspects of it: one on the philosophy of young Wittgenstein, one on his transitional period, and the final three on the philosophy of mature Wittgenstein, chiefly his Philosophical Investigations. The last of these papers, which serves as the concluding chapter, concerns the analytical school of philosophy that grew chiefly under its influence. Wittgenstein's posthumous Philosophical Investigations ignores formal languages while retaining the view of metaphysics as meaningless -- declaring that all languages are metaphysics-free. It was very popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Now it is passe. Wittgenstein had hoped to dissolve all philosophical disputes, yet he generated a new kind of dispute. His claim to have improved the philosophy of life is awkward just because he prevented philosophical discussion from the ability to achieve that: he cut the branch on which he was sitting. This, according to the author, is the most serious critique of Wittgenstein.

This collection of fourteen original essays addresses the seminal contribution of Franz Brentano and his heirs, to philosophy of language. Despite the great interest provoked by the Brentanian tradition and its multiple connections with early analytic philosophy, precious little is known about the Brentanian contribution to philosophy of language. The aim of this new collection is to fill this gap by providing the reader with a more thorough understanding of the legacy of Brentano and his school, in their pursuit of a unique research programme according to which the analysis of meaning is inseparable from philosophical inquiries into what goes on in the mind and what there is in the world. In three parts, the volume first reconstructs Brentano's pathbreaking thoughts on meaning and grammatical illusions, exploring their strong connections with the Austro-German tradition and analytic philosophy. It then addresses the multifaceted debates on the objectivity of meaning in the Brentano School and its aftermath (Meinong, Husserl, Ingarden, Twardowski and the Lvov-Warsaw School). Finally, part three explores Brentano's wider legacy, namely: Husserl's theory of modification and typicality, Buhler's theory of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions, and Wittgenstein's thoughts on guidance and rule-following. The result is a unique collection of essays which shows the significance, originality and timely character of the Brentanian philosophy of language.

This book centers on two dominant trends within contemporary epistemology: first, the dissatisfaction with the project of analyzing knowledge in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions and, second, the surging popularity of virtue-theoretic approaches to knowledge. Church argues that the Gettier Problem, the primary reason for abandoning the reductive analysis project, cannot viably be solved, and that prominent approaches to virtue epistemology fail to solve the Gettier Problem precisely along the lines his diagnosis predicts. Such an outcome motivates Church to explore a better way forward: non-reductive virtue epistemology. In so doing, he makes room for virtue epistemologies that are not only able to endure what he sees as inevitable developments in 21st-century epistemology, but also able to contribute positively to debates and discussions across the discipline and beyond.

Featuring contributions from leading figures such as Noam Chomsky, Don Ross, Andrew Brook and Patricia Kitcher, this book traces the philosophical roots behind contemporary understandings of cognition, forming both a convincing case for the centrality of philosophy to the history of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, as well as a revealing insight into the way in which ideas have developed, influenced and ultimately moulded our modern view of the mind

This book presents and discusses the varying and seminal role which colour plays in the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Having once said that "Colours spur us to philosophize", the theme of colour was one to which Wittgenstein returned constantly throughout his career. Ranging from his Notebooks, 1914-1916 and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the posthumously published Remarks on Colours and On Certainty, this book explores how both his view of philosophical problems generally and his view on colours specifically changed considerably over time. Paying particular attention to his so-called intermediary period, it takes a case-based approach to the presentation of colour in texts from this period, from Some Remarks on Logical Form and Philosophical Remarks to his Big Typescript.

What is the meaning of the word grace'? Can Wittgenstein's maxim that the meaning of a word is its usage help explicate the claims that Christians have made about grace? When Christians use the word, they reference within language the point of contact between humanity and the divine. Terrance W. Klein suggests that grace is not an occult object but rather an insight, a moment when we perceive God to be active on our behalf. Klein examines the biblical evidence that grace begins as a recognition of God's favour, before considering Augustine as the theologian who champions history rather than nature as the place of encounter with grace. Aquinas' work on grace is also explored, retrieving the saint's thought on three seminal concepts: nature, form, and the striving intellect. Overall, Klein suggests that grace is the perception of a form, an awareness that the human person is being addressed by the world itself.

Analytic philosophy - arguably the most important philosophical movement in the 20th century - has gained a new historical self-consciousness, particularly about it's own origins. The period between 1880 and 1930 saw the most important work of its founding figures (Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein) take root and flourish. The fifteen previously-unpublished essays in this collection explore different facets of this period, with an emphasis on the vital intellectual relationship between Frege and the early Wittgenstein.

This edited volume focuses on the work of Professor Larisa Maksimova, providing a comprehensive account of her outstanding contributions to different branches of non-classical logic. The book covers themes ranging from rigorous implication, relevance and algebraic logic, to interpolation, definability and recognizability in superintuitionistic and modal logics. It features both her scientific autobiography and original contributions from experts in the field of non-classical logics. Professor Larisa Maksimova's influential work involved combining methods of algebraic and relational semantics. Readers will be able to trace both influences on her work, and the ways in which her work has influenced other logicians. In the historical part of this book, it is possible to trace important milestones in Maksimova's career. Early on, she developed an algebraic semantics for relevance logics and relational semantics for the logic of entailment. Later, Maksimova discovered that among the continuum of superintuitionisitc logics there are exactly three pretabular logics. She went on to obtain results on the decidability of tabularity and local tabularity problems for superintuitionistic logics and for extensions of S4. Further investigations by Maksimova were aimed at the study of fundamental properties of logical systems (different versions of interpolation and definability, disjunction property, etc.) in big classes of logics, and on decidability and recognizability of such properties. To this end she determined a powerful combination of algebraic and semantic methods, which essentially determine the modern state of investigations in the area, as can be seen in the later chapters of this book authored by leading experts in non-classical logics. These original contributions bring the reader up to date on the very latest work in this field.

ThisInstitute's Yearbook for the most part, documents its recent activities and provides a forum for the discussion of exact philosophy, logical and empirical investigations, and analysis of language. This volume holds a collection of papers on various aspects of the work of Rudolf Carnap by an international group of distinguished scholars. "

This book is an investigation into the descriptive task of moral philosophy. Nora Hamalainen explores the challenge of providing rich and accurate pictures of the moral conditions, values, virtues, and norms under which people live and have lived, along with relevant knowledge about the human animal and human nature. While modern moral philosophy has focused its energies on normative and metaethical theory, the task of describing, uncovering, and inquiring into moral frameworks and moral practices has mainly been left to social scientists and historians. Nora Hamalainen argues that this division of labour has detrimental consequences for moral philosophy and that a reorientation toward descriptive work is needed in moral philosophy. She traces resources for a descriptive philosophical ethics in the work of four prominent philosophers of the twentieth century: John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor, while also calling on thinkers inspired by them.

Today, quantum field theory (QFT) the mathematical and conceptual framework for contemporary elementary particle physics is the best starting point for analysing the fundamental building blocks of the material world. QFT if taken seriously in its metaphysical implications yields a picture of the world that is at variance with central classical conceptions. The core of Kuhlmann s investigation consists in the analysis of various ontological interpretations of QFT, e.g. substance ontologies as well as a process-ontological approach. Eventually, Kuhlmann proposes a dispositional trope ontology, according to which particularized properties and not things are the most basic entities, in terms of which all other entities are to be analysed, e.g as bundles of properties. This book was chosen for the 2009 ontos-Award for research on analytical ontology and metaphysics by the German Society for Analytical Philosophy."

When this book was originally published in 2006, Epistemetrics was not as yet a scholarly discipline. With regard to scientific information there was the discipline of scientometrics, represented by a journal of that very name. Science, however, had a monopoly on knowledge. Although it is one of our most important cognitive resources, it is not our only one. While scientometrics is a centerpiece of epistemetrics, it is not the whole of it. Nicholas Rescher's endeavor to quantify knowledge is not only of interest in itself, but is also instructive in bringing into sharper relief the nature of and the explanatory rationale for the limits that unavoidably confront our efforts to advance the frontiers of knowledge. In particular, his book demonstrates the limitations of human knowledge and will be of great value to scholars working in this area.

This book has two objectives: to be a contribution to the understanding of Frege's theory of truth - especially a defence of his notorious critique of the correspondence theory - and to be an introduction to the practice of interpreting philosophical texts.