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 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.

This unique collection of articles on emotion by Wittgensteinian philosophers provides a fresh perspective on the questions framing the current philosophical and scientific debates about emotions and offers significant insights into the role of emotions for understanding interpersonal relations and the relation between emotion and ethics.

In this festschrift for the eminent philosopher Hilary Putnam, a team of distinguished philosophers write on a broad range of topics and thus reflect the remarkably fertile and provocative research of Putnam himself. The volume is not merely a celebration of a man, but also a report on the state of philosophy in a number of significant areas. The essays fall naturally into three groups: a central core on the theme of conventionality and content in the philosophy of mind, language, and science, and two smaller sections on the relationship of ethics and language, and on the philosophy of logic and aesthetics.

In this provocative book, Michael Tye presents his unique account of the metaphysical foundations of psychological discourse. In place of token identity theory or eliminative materialism, he advocates a generalisation of the adverbial approach to sensory experience, the 'operator theory'. He applies this to the analysis of prepositional attitudes, arguing that mental statements cannot involve reference to mental events or objects and that therefore causal statements about the mental cannot be regarded as asserting relations between events. This adverbial theory has the virtue of being both simple and systematic and is an important contribution to the philosophy of mind.

The assumption of materialism (in its many forms) Howard Robinson believes is false. In his book he presents a very forceful critique of the modern forms that materialism has taken. In telling discussions of the theory of supervenience put forward by Davidson and Peacocke, the central state materialism attributable to Smart, Armstrong and others, Putnam's functionalism, and Rorty's disappearance theory, he shows that, whatever their local inconsistencies, these forms of materialism all overlook or quite inadequately explain elementary and unimpeachable intuitions about our own mental experiences. Robinson concludes with a consideration of the alternative views of the matter of which the mind is held to consist. These arguments will either serve to crystallise for the most part inchoate opposition to materialism among a number of philosophers, and will challenge its proponents to find a more secure defence for the basis of their view.

Metaphysics is usually taken to be that part of analytical philosophy which offers an account of the most basic and persuasive concepts we use, an inventory and analysis of such fundamental structural features of our world as existence, substance, change and quality. But there is a revisionary as well as a descriptive metaphysics. Some philosophers and theologians have sought to reach beyond these familiar conceptual categories and to extend the scope of human understanding and language. What sort of an intellectual enterprise would that be, and what sort of facts, truths or understanding could it yield? Professor MacKinnon devotes this book to a study of these questions - the nature and possibility of a revisionary metaphysics.

The attention of philosophers. linguists and literary theorists has been converging on the diverse and intriguing phenomena of analogy of meaning: the different though related meanings of the same word, running from simple equivocation to paronymy, metaphor and figurative language. So far, however, their attempts at explanation have been piecemeal and inconclusive and no new and comprehensive theory of analogy has emerged. This is what James Ross offers here. In the first full treatment of the subject since the fifteenth century, he argues that analogy is a systematic and universal feature of natural languages, with identifiable and law-like characteristics which explain how the meanings of words in a sentence are interdependent. Throughout he contrasts his with classical and medieval views

The ancient semantic paradoxes were thought to undermine the rationalist metaphysics of Plato, and their modern relatives have been used by Russell and others to administer some severe logical and epistemological shocks. These are not just tricks or puzzles, but are intimately connected with some of the liveliest and most basic philosophical disputes about logical form, universals, reference and predication. Dr Cargile offers here an original and sustained treatment of this range of issues, and in fact presents an unfashionable defence of a platonistic ontology. He argues that the paradoxes arise not from mistakes in classical assumptions about truth or from an ontology that includes propositions and properties, but from mistakes in describing what propositions and properties are conveyed by particular linguistic expressions. The book should interest, and may well surprise, philosophers and others concerned with semantics and the foundations of logic.

Actions that go 'beyond the call of duty' are a common though not commonplace part of everyday life - in heroism, self-sacrifice, mercy, volunteering, or simply in small deeds of generosity and consideration. Almost universally they enjoy a high and often unique esteem and significance, and are regarded as, somehow, peculiarly good. Yet it is not easy to explain how - for if duty exhausts the moral life there is no scope to praise supererogatory acts, and if the consequentialist is right there are no grounds for awarding them a special status. However, despite the distinctiveness of supererogation and the difficulty of accounting for it, philosophers have paid surprisingly little attention to the concept, and until now no thorough and systematic treatment of it has been proposed. This is what David Heyd offers in this book. His study will stimulate philosophers to recognise the importance of this rather neglected topic, and to take a fresh critical look at their theories in the light of its singular importance.

This is a collection of eleven original essays in analytical philosophy by British and American philosophers, centring on the connection between mind and language. Two themes predominate: how it is that thoughts and sentences can represent the world; and what having a thought - a belief, for instance - involves. Developing from these themes are the questions: what does having a belief require of the believer, and of the way he or she relates to the environment? In particular, does having a belief require speaking a language? The volume concludes the informal series stemming from the meetings sponsored by the Thyssen Foundation. It will interest analytical philosophers, students doing courses in philosophy of mind within the analytical tradition and philosophically interested researchers in cognitive psychology.

An in-depth history of the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy, from a leading philosopher of language This is the second of five volumes of a definitive history of analytic philosophy from the invention of modern logic in 1879 to the end of the twentieth century. Scott Soames, a leading philosopher of language and historian of analytic philosophy, provides the fullest and most detailed account of the analytic tradition yet published, one that is unmatched in its chronological range, topics covered, and depth of treatment. Focusing on the major milestones and distinguishing them from detours, Soames gives a seminal account of where the analytic tradition has been and where it appears to be heading. Volume 2 provides an intensive account of the new vision in analytical philosophy initiated by Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, its assimilation by the Vienna Circle of Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, and the subsequent flowering of logical empiricism. With this "linguistic turn," philosophical analysis became philosophy itself, and the discipline's stated aim was transformed from advancing philosophical theories to formalizing, systematizing, and unifying science. In addition to exploring the successes and failures of philosophers who pursued this vision, the book describes how the philosophically minded logicians Kurt Godel, Alfred Tarski, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing discovered the scope and limits of logic and developed the mathematical theory of computation that ushered in the digital era. The book's account of this pivotal period closes with a searching examination of the struggle to preserve ethical normativity in a scientific age.

In this book, T. L. Short corrects widespread misconceptions of Peirce's theory of signs and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary analytic philosophy of language, mind and science. Peirce's theory of mind, naturalistic but nonreductive, bears on debates of Fodor and Millikan, among others. His theory of inquiry avoids foundationalism and subjectivism, while his account of reference anticipated views of Kripke and Putnam. Peirce's realism falls between 'internal' and 'metaphysical' realism and is more satisfactory than either. His pragmatism is not verificationism; rather, it identifies meaning with potential growth of knowledge. Short distinguishes Peirce's mature theory of signs from his better-known but paradoxical early theory. He develops the mature theory systematically on the basis of Peirce's phenomenological categories and concept of final causation. The latter is distinguished from recent and similar views, such as Brandon's, and is shown to be grounded in forms of explanation adopted in modern science.

This book is an exploration of philosophical questions about infinity. Graham Oppy examines how the infinite lurks everywhere, both in science and in our ordinary thoughts about the world. He also analyses the many puzzles and paradoxes that follow in the train of the infinite. Even simple notions, such as counting, adding and maximising present serious difficulties. Other topics examined include the nature of space and time, infinities in physical science, infinities in theories of probability and decision, the nature of part/whole relations, mathematical theories of the infinite, and infinite regression and principles of sufficient reason.

This revised and considerably expanded 2nd edition brings together a wide range of topics, including modal, tense, conditional, intuitionist, many-valued, paraconsistent, relevant, and fuzzy logics. Part 1, on propositional logic, is the old Introduction, but contains much new material. Part 2 is entirely new, and covers quantification and identity for all the logics in Part 1. The material is unified by the underlying theme of world semantics. All of the topics are explained clearly using devices such as tableau proofs, and their relation to current philosophical issues and debates are discussed. Students with a basic understanding of classical logic will find this book an invaluable introduction to an area that has become of central importance in both logic and philosophy. It will also interest people working in mathematics and computer science who wish to know about the area.

Analytic philosophy is roughly a hundred years old, and it is now the dominant force within Western philosophy. Interest in its historical development is increasing, but there has hitherto been no sustained attempt to elucidate what it currently amounts to, and how it differs from so-called 'continental' philosophy. In this rich and wide-ranging book, Hans Johann Glock argues that analytic philosophy is a loose movement held together both by ties of influence and by various 'family resemblances'. He considers the pros and cons of various definitions of analytic philosophy, and tackles the methodological, historiographical and philosophical issues raised by such definitions. Finally, he explores the wider intellectual and cultural implications of the notorious divide between analytic and continental philosophy. His book is an invaluable guide for anyone seeking to understand analytic philosophy and how it is practised.

This book is a major contribution to the history of analytic philosophy in general and of logical positivism in particular. It provides the first detailed and comprehensive study of Rudolf Carnap, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century philosophy. The focus of the book is Carnap's first major work: Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World). It reveals tensions within the context of German epistemology and philosophy of science in the early twentieth century. Alan Richardson argues that Carnap's move to philosophy of science in the 1930s was largely an attempt to dissolve the tension in his early epistemology. This book fills a significant gap in the literature on the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It will be of particular importance to historians of analytic philosophy, philosophers of science, and historians of science.

Many philosophers have shown sympathy to the thought that reality is fundamentally positive. Julio De Rizzo formulates this idea precisely by means of the notion of grounding, and examines how the resulting thesis fares with respect to three much discussed classes of negative truths, namely that of negative predications, that of negative causal reports, and that of negative existential truths. By shedding light on the issues advocates of the thesis have to deal with, this work shows the positivist account to be a tenable position in metaphysics.

In an important departure from theories of causation, David Owens proposes that coincidences have no causes, and that a cause is something which ensures that its effects are no coincidence. In Causes and Coincidences, he elucidates the idea of a coincidence as an event which can be analysed into constituent events, the nomological antecedents of which are independent of each other. He also suggests that causal facts can be analysed in terms of non-causal facts, including relations of necessity. Thus, causation is defined in terms of coincidence, and coincidence without reference to causation. David Owens challenges the ideas associated with Hume, Davidson and Lewis, constructing a theory which distinguishes nomological necessity and sufficiency from their logical counterparts. He is able to offer novel solutions to the major problems of causation, including the direction of causation, the logical form of causal statements, the distinction betwen causal connections and logical connections, and the relationship between psychological and physical causation.

This 2007 book examines the possibilities for the rehabilitation of Hegelian thought within analytic philosophy. From its inception, the analytic tradition has in general accepted Bertrand Russell's hostile dismissal of the idealists, based on the claim that their metaphysical views were irretrievably corrupted by the faulty logic that informed them. These assumptions are challenged by the work of such analytic philosophers as John McDowell and Robert Brandom, who, while contributing to core areas of the analytic movement, nevertheless have found in Hegel sophisticated ideas that are able to address problems which still haunt the analytic tradition after a hundred years. Paul Redding traces the consequences of the displacement of the logic presupposed by Kant and Hegel by modern post-Fregean logic, and examines the developments within twentieth-century analytic philosophy which have made possible an analytic re-engagement with a previously dismissed philosophical tradition.

This book presents an account of normative practical reasons and the way in which they contribute to the rationality of action. Rather than simply 'counting in favour of' actions, normative reasons play two logically distinct roles: requiring action and justifying action. The distinction between these two roles explains why some reasons do not seem relevant to the rational status of an action unless the agent cares about them, while other reasons retain all their force regardless of the agent's attitude. It also explains why the class of rationally permissible action is wide enough to contain not only all morally required action, but also much selfish and immoral action. The book will appeal to a range of readers interested in practical reason in particular, and moral theory more generally.

Supervenience is one of the 'hot discoveries' of analytic philosophy, and this collection of essays on the topic represents an examination of it and its application to major areas of philosophy. The interest in supervenience has much to do with the flexibility of the concept. To say that x supervenes on y indicates a degree of dependence without committing one to the view that x can be reduced to y. Thus supervenience is a relationship that has the potential of replacing the traditional notion of dependence, while performing at least part of the function reductive relationships were supposed to fulfil. Moreover, since it is a topic-neutral concept, supervenience has a wide range of applicability.

This book is an important contribution to the philosophy of art that bridges the disciplines of philosophy and art. It engages with a long-standing debate about what it is that bestows the designation 'art' on an artwork. Tiffany Sutton shows how the history of art should influence the classification of visual art. She considers the various theories that have been put forward to define the nature of the artwork and then offers her own set of classificatory norms. Amongst the critical questions that are addressed in the process are: how important is patronage in the contemporary visual arts, and what lends conceptual art its specific aura?

• Provides the fullest formulation of a comprehensive physicalist view to date DEGREES
• Evaluates the empirical standing of physicalism in unprecedented detail
• Self-contained and thesis-driven discussions, accessible to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, make it an ideal seminar text A Physicalist Manifesto is the fullest yet of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so forumlated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posterior epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue in inprecedented detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.

Epistemology has for a long time focused on the concept of knowledge and tried to answer questions such as whether knowledge is possible and how much of it there is. Often missing from this inquiry, however, is a discussion on the value of knowledge. In The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology properly conceived cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He also questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in epistemology, namely that knowledge is always more valuable than the value of its subparts. Taking Platos' Meno as a starting point of his discussion, Kvanvig tackles the different arguments about the value of knowledge and comes to the conclusion that knowledge is less valuable than generally assumed. Clearly written and well argued, this 2003 book will appeal to students and professionals in epistemology.

This book argues that thinking is bounded by neither the brain nor the skin of an organism. Cognitive systems function through integration of neural and bodily functions with the functions of representational vehicles. The integrationist position offers a fresh contribution to the emerging embodied and embedded approach to the study of mind.