Bertrand Russell was a central figure in the rise of analytic philosophy, and there are few works in the genre whose influence is comparable to The Principles of Mathematics (1903), a book that established him as a major force in British philosophy. Logic as Universal Science takes a fresh look at the context of The Principles. This, it is argued, involves an extended argument against Kant's transcendental idealism and his conception of mathematics as a synthetic a priori science grounded in pure intuition. Philosophically, Russell's logicism substitutes pure logic for pure intuitions as the true source of mathematical knowledge. In this way, logic turns out to be a universal science and very far from Kant's general logic, which is a concise and dry science, delivering nothing but a purely formal criterion for knowledge. The picture of logic emerging from this opposition is investigated in detail for its content and consequences.

This book presents both a historical overview of the absorption of Heidegger's thought into English-language philosophical schools as well as a philosophical discussion of his thought provided by contemporary scholars. The text describes the ways in which a philosophical methodology and worldview seemingly so inhospitable to Anglophone academia has managed to find an unlikely home. This volume is roughly divided into two types of contributions: discussions of Heidegger's reception in the English-speaking world, and outstanding examples of English-language Heidegger scholarship. The first type includes both historiographical accounts of the encounters between Heidegger's thought and the Anglo-American world, as well as their philosophical expositions and critiques. The second group of chapters reveal the latest contemporary scholarship by contemporary Heideggerians writing in English. It is moreover the first volume to bring together thinkers from both genealogies of Anglo-American Heideggerianism appealing to students and researchers working in both of these camps.

Beauty and the End of Art shows how a resurgence of interest in beauty and a sense of ending in Western art are challenging us to rethink art, beauty and their relationship. By arguing that Wittgenstein's later work and contemporary theory of perception offer just what we need for a unified approach to art and beauty, Sonia Sedivy provides new answers to these contemporary challenges. These new accounts also provide support for the Wittgensteinian realism and theory of perception that make them possible. Wittgenstein's subtle form of realism explains artworks in terms of norm governed practices that have their own varied constitutive norms and values. Wittgensteinian realism also suggests that diverse beauties become available and compelling in different cultural eras and bring a shared 'higher-order' value into view. With this framework in place, Sedivy argues that perception is a form of engagement with the world that draws on our conceptual capacities. This approach explains how perceptual experience and the perceptible presence of the world are of value, helping to account for the diversity of beauties that are available in different historical contexts and why the many faces of beauty allow us to experience the value of the world's perceptible presence. Carefully examining contemporary debates about art, aesthetics and perception, Beauty and the End of Art presents an original approach. Insights from such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Arthur Danto, Alexander Nehamas, Elaine Scarry and Dave Hickey are woven together to reveal how they make good sense if we bring contemporary theory of perception and Wittgensteinian realism into the conversation.

This book investigates the phenomenological ways that dance choreographing and dance performance exemplify both Truth and meaning-making within Native American epistemology, from an analytic philosophical perspective. Given that within Native American communities dance is regarded both as an integral cultural conduit and "a doorway to a powerful wisdom," Shay Welch argues that dance and dancing can both create and communicate knowledge. She explains that dance-as a form of oral, narrative storytelling-has the power to communicate knowledge of beliefs and histories, and that dance is a form of embodied narrative storytelling. Welch provides analytic clarity on how this happens, what conditions are required for it to succeed, and how dance can satisfy the relational and ethical facets of Native epistemology.

At certain moments in his political essays, Kant conceives of socio-historical emancipation as a process of working ourselves out of pathological legacies, suggesting that emancipation would involve a process of working through our affective attachments to entrenched, regressive social arrangements. Jackson shows how Freud s analyses of melancholia, mania and the work of mourning can contribute to an understanding of key dimensions of such pathological social fixations, as well as the possibility of working through the past. This book argues that bringing Freud s provocative analyses of loss to bear on particular philosophical treatments of history leads to a more coherent, psychoanalytically informed understanding of history. Although Freud does not himself integrate these themes into a theory of socio-political emancipation, his thinking nonetheless can be read as contributing to such a theory. To develop this idea the book draws on thinkers such as Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler. The book engages students and scholars of contemporary continental philosophy by arguing for connections between psychoanalysis, philosophy, and critical theory.

"Philosophy and the Neurosciences" is the first systematic integration of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science with neuroscience research. As philosophers have come to focus more and more on the relationship between mind and brain, they have had to take greater account of theory and research in the neurosciences. Likewise, as neuroscientists have learned more about cognitive structures and functions, their investigations have expanded and merged with traditional questions from the philosophy of mind.

By introducing key themes in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and the fundamental concepts of neuroscience, this text provides philosophers with the necessary background to engage the neurosciences and offers neuroscientists an introduction to the relevant tools of philosophical analysis. Study questions, figures, and references to further reading are provided in each chapter to enhance the reader's understanding of how philosophy and the neurosciences are related in their exploration of the human mind.

This book gives a unique historical and interpretive analysis of a widely pervasive mode of thought that it describes as the legacy of positivism. Viewing Auguste Comte as a pivotal figure, it charts the historical origins of his positivism and follows its later development through John Stuart Mill and Emile Littre. It shows how epistemological shifts in positivism influenced parallel developments in the human and legal sciences, and thereby treats legal positivism and positivism as it is understood in the human sciences within a common framework.

The scope and method of logic as we know it today eminently reflect the ground-breaking developments of set theory and the logical foundations of mathematics at the turn of the 20th century. Unfortunately, little effort has been made to understand the idiosyncrasies of the philosophical context that led to these tremendous innovations in the 19thcentury beyond what is found in the works of mathematicians such as Frege, Hilbert, and Russell. This constitutes a monumental gap in our understanding of the central influences that shaped 19th-century thought, from Kant to Russell, and that helped to create the conditions in which analytic philosophy could emerge. The aim of Logic from Kant to Russell is to document the development of logic in the works of 19th-century philosophers. It contains thirteen original essays written by authors from a broad range of backgrounds-intellectual historians, historians of idealism, philosophers of science, and historians of logic and analytic philosophy. These essays question the standard narratives of analytic philosophy's past and address concerns that are relevant to the contemporary philosophical study of language, mind, and cognition. The book covers a broad range of influential thinkers in 19th-century philosophy and analytic philosophy, including Kant, Bolzano, Hegel, Herbart, Lotze, the British Algebraists and Idealists, Moore, Russell, the Neo-Kantians, and Frege.

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of two distinct philosophical schools in Europe: analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The history of 20th-century philosophy is often written as an account of the development of one or both of these schools, as well as their overt or covert mutual hostility. What is often left out of this history, however, is the relationship between the two European schools and a third significant philosophical event: the birth and development of pragmatism, the indigenous philosophical movement of the United States. Through a careful analysis of seminal figures and central texts, this book explores the mutual intellectual influences, convergences, and differences between these three revolutionary philosophical traditions. The essays in this volume aim to show the central role that pragmatism played in the development of philosophical thought at the turn of the twentieth century, widen our understanding of a seminal point in the history of philosophy, and shed light on the ways in which these three schools of thought continue to shape the theoretical agenda of contemporary philosophy.

This book explores Hegel's theory of modality (actuality, possibility, necessity, contingency) through extremely close textual analysis of the "Actuality" chapter of Hegel's Science of Logic. The "Actuality" chapter is the equivalence of Aristotle's momentous Metaphysics book 9. Because of this, Hegel's chapter deserves the same thorough investigation into its complex insights and argumentation. This book situates Hegel's insights about possibility and necessity within historical and contemporary debates about metaphysics, while analyzing some of the most controversial themes of Hegel's theory, such as the question of the ontological status of unactualized possibilities, the relationship between contradiction and possibility, and the claim that necessity leads to freedom. This book also contributes to an ongoing philosophical inquiry into the nature of dialectics by articulating Hegel's "Actuality" chapter as a coherent argument divided into twenty-seven premises.

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases. This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: only if philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence are data about non-philosophers' intuitions of any interest to us. Our alleged reliance on the intuitive makes many philosophers who don't work on meta-philosophy concerned about their own discipline: they are unsure what intuitions are and whether they can carry the evidential weight we allegedly assign to them. The goal of this book is to argue that this concern is unwarranted since the claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively (or even a little bit) on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

In recent decades, the analysis of causal relations has become a topic of central importance in analytic philosophy. More recently, dispositional properties have also become objects of intense study. Both of these phenomena appear to be intimately related to counterfactual conditionals and other modal phenomena such as objective chance, but little work has been done to directly relate them. Dispositions and Causes contains ten essays by scholars working in both metaphysics and in philosophy of science, examining the relation between dispositional and causal concepts.
Particular issues discussed include the possibility of reducing dispositions to causes, and vice versa; the possibility of a nominalist theory of causal powers; the attempt to reduce all metaphysical necessity to dispositional properties; the relationship between dispositions, causes, and laws of nature; the role of causal capacities in explaining the success of scientific inquiry; the grounding of dispositions and causes in objective chances; and the type of causal power required for free agency.
The introductory chapter contains a detailed overview of recent work in the area, providing a helpful entry to the literature for non-specialists.

This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often disparately pursued, Levinas's account of "ethics as first philosophy" affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises and showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity. In metaethics, the volume shows how Levinas's moral phenomenology relates to recent work on the normativity of rationality and intentionality, and how it can illuminate a wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect, conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, dependence, gratitude and guilt. The volume also tests Levinas's innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological identity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the metaphysical significance and sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally, the volume connects Levinas's second-person standpoint with analogous developments in moral philosophy.

Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest among analytic philosophers in the topic of life's meaning. What is striking about this surge of work is that nearly all of it is by naturalists theorizing from non-theistic starting points. This book answers the need for a theistic philosophical perspective on the meaning of life. Bringing together some of the leading thinkers in analytic philosophy of religion and theology, God and Meaning touches on important issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and biblical theology that intersect with life's meaning. In particular: What does the question "What is the meaning of life?" mean? How can we know if life has meaning and what that meaning is? Might God enhance life's meaningfulness in some ways but detract from it in others? Is the most meaningful life one of perfect happiness? What is the relationship between eternity and life's meaning? How does the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes illumine the topic? Should we hope that a kind of transcendent meaning exists? Presenting a state-of-the-art assessment of current philosophical positions on these and many other questions, God and Meaning is an invaluable resource for all students and scholars of the philosophy of religion.

The metaphor of contagion pervades critical discourse across the humanities, the medical sciences, and the social sciences. It appears in such terms as 'social contagion' in psychology, 'financial contagion' in economics, 'viral marketing' in business, and even 'cultural contagion' in anthropology. In the twenty-first century, contagion, or 'thought contagion' has become a byword for creativity and a fundamental process by which knowledge and ideas are communicated and taken up, and resonates with Andre Siegfried's observation that 'there is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas'. In "Contagious Metaphor," Peta Mitchell offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor "as" contagion, "Contagious Metaphor" suggests a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood.

Jan Wolenski and Sandra Lapointe Polish philosophy goes back to the 13th century, when Witelo, famous for his works in optics and the metaphysics of light, lived and worked in Silesia. Yet, Poland's academic life only really began after the University of Cracow was founded in 1364 - its development was interrupted by the sudden death of King Kazimierz III, but it was re-established in 1400. The main currents of classical scholastic thought like Thomism, Scottism or Ockhamism had been late - about a century - to come to Poland and they had a considerable impact on the budding Polish philosophical scene. The controversy between the via antiqua and the via moderna was hotly 1 debated. Intellectuals deliberated on the issues of concilliarism (whether the C- mon Council has priority over the Pope) and curialism (whether the Bishop of Rome has priority over the Common Council). On the whole, the situation had at least two remarkable features. Firstly, Polish philosophy was pluralistic, and remained so, since its very beginning. But it was also eclectic, which might explain why it aimed to a large extent at achieving a compromise between rival views. Secondly, given the shortcomings of the political system of the time as well as external pr- sure by an increasingly hegemonic Germany, thinkers were very much interested in political matters. Poland was a stronghold of political thought (mostly inclined towards concilliarism) and Polish political thought distinguished itself in Europe J."

Philosophy of religion in the Anglo-American tradition experienced a 'rebirth' following the 1955 publication of New Essays in Philosophical Theology (eds. Antony Flew and Alisdair MacIntyre). Fifty years later, this volume of New Essays offers a sampling of the best work in what is now a very active field, written by some of its most prominent members. A substantial introduction sketches the developments of the last half-century, while also describing the 'ethics of belief' debate in epistemology and showing how it connects to explicitly religious concerns and to the topics of the individual contributions. These topics include: the relationship between God and the natural laws; the metaphysics of bodily resurrection; the role of appeal to 'mystery' in the religious life; the justification of both theistic belief generally and more specific doctrinal beliefs; and the social-political aspects of religious faith and practice.

Fred Stoutland was a major figure in the philosophy of action and philosophy of language. This collection brings together essays on truth, language, action and mind and thus provides an important summary of many key themes in Stoutland's own work, as well as offering valuable perspectives on key issues in contemporary philosophy.

This book, first published in 1987, investigates what distinguishes the part of human behaviour that is action (praxis) from the part that is not. The distinction was clearly drawn by Socrates, and developed by Aristotle and the medievals, but key elements of their work became obscured in modern philosophy, and were not fully recovered when, under Wittgenstein's influence, the theory of action was revived in analytical philosophy. This study aims to recover those elements, and to analyse them in terms of a defensible semantics on Fregean lines. Among its conclusions: that actions are bodily or mental events that are causally explained by their doers' propositional attitudes, especially by their choices or fully specific intentions; that choice cannot be reduced to desire and belief, and hence that the traditional concept of will as intellectual appetite must be revived.

In the safety of his manuscripts, Ludwig Wittgenstein was free to endlessly revise, rework and reframe his philosophical thoughts. Thus his published work yields a glimpse of just a small portion of Wittgenstein's philosophical thought-the portion that eventually appeared in print. Yet for Wittgenstein, philosophy was an on-going activity, a process. Only in his dialog with the philosophical community and in his private moments does Wittgenstein's philosophical practice fully come to light. Those public and private occasions are collected here. In Private Occasions, co-editor Alfred Nordmann presents Wittgenstein's diaries from the 1930s to an English audience for the first time. They are accompanied by Wittgenstein's letters to and from friend Ludwig Hansel. Together, they reveal a great deal about Wittgenstein, who himself says "The movement of thought in my philosophizing should be discernible also in the history of my mind." In Public Occasions, James Klagge collects Wittgenstein's papers and speeches, some newly published, from a number of forums, including his lectures at Cambridge and his involvement with the Cambridge Moral Science Club. Much of Wittgenstein's philosophical work came through, or in the form of, dialogs, making these public encounters particularly valuable. The result of this collaboration, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, is a thorough look at the philosophy of one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers that goes beyond a mere study of his published work.

Cook exposes how Wittgenstein's philosophical views have been misunderstood, including the failure to recognize the reductionist character of Wittgenstein's work. He also shows how both Wittgenstein's defenders and detractors have failed to recognize the merits of linguistic philosophy when it is freed from the influence of Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore.

This book assesses the respective prospects of two competing methodological approaches to the study of meaning and communication, as well truth and inference, each figuring prominently within the analytic tradition of philosophy of language. The first, 'logistical' approach is characterized by the employment of de-compositional logical analysis designed to resolve various theoretically problematic semantic and logical puzzles. The representative proponents of this approach are the three great early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein). The second, 'phenomenological' approach, by contrast, instead advocates careful inspection and detailed description of our actual linguistic practices, along with general features of the ordinary circumstances, and lived experiences, in which they are situated. The aim of such description is then to dissolve the aforementioned puzzles by showing them to derive from key misunderstandings of these practices and circumstances. The principle proponent here is the later Wittgenstein. Expanding upon the work of the later Wittgenstein, this book argues that considerations regarding the nature of following a rule, and deriving from the impossibility of private languages, decisively recommend the phenomenological over the logistical methodology, in particular because these considerations demand that we identify linguistic meanings with the disciplined uses of words within public, and proto-typically social, linguistic practices.

From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelboeck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelboeck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle-an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick-and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Goedel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.

In late nineteenth-century German academic circles, the term verstehen (literally, understanding, or comprehension) came to be associated with the view that social phenomena must be understood from the point of view of the social actor. Advocates of this approach were opposed by positivists who stressed the unity of method between the social and natural sciences and an external, experimental, and quantitative knowledge. Although modified over time, the dispute between positivists and antipositivists--nowadays called naturalists and antinaturalists--has persisted and still defines many debates in the field of philosophy of social sciences. In this volume, Michael Martin offers a critical appraisal of verstehen as a method of verification and discovery as well as a necessary condition for understanding. In its strongest forms, verstehen entails subjectively reliving the experience of the social actor or at least rethinking his or her thoughts, while in its weaker forms it only involves reconstructing the rationale for acting. Martin's opening chapter offers a reconsideration of the debate between the classical verstehen theorists--Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, R.G. Collingwood--and the positivists. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with positivist critiques of verstehen as a method of social scientific verification and understanding. In the subsequent chapters Martin considers contemporary varieties of the verstehen position and argues that they like the classical positions, they conflict with the pluralistic nature of social science. Chapter 4 discusses Peter Winch's and William Dray's variants of verstehen, while chapters 5 through 9 consider recent theorists--Karl Popper, Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz--whose work can be characterized in verstehenist terms: In his conclusion Martin defines the limitations of the classical and recent verstehen positions and proposes a methodological pluralism in which verstehen is justified pragmatically in terms of the purposes and contexts of inquiry. This volume is the only comprehensive and sustained critique of verstehen theory currently available. It will be of interest to sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, and anthropologists.

This popular selection of Wittgenstein's key writings has now been updated to include new material relevant to recent debates about the philosopher.
Follows the evolution of Wittgenstein's philosophical thought from the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" through to the "Philosophical Investigations."
Excerpts are arranged by topic and introduce readers to all the central concerns of Wittgenstein's philosophy.
Now includes a new chapter on 'Sense, Nonsense and Philosophy' incorporating material relevant to recent debates about Wittgenstein.