This book examines John Locke's claims about the nature and workings of language. Walter Ott proposes an interpretation of Locke's thesis in which words signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, and argues that rather than employing such notions as sense or reference, Locke relies on an ancient tradition that understands signification as reliable indication. He then uses this interpretation to explain crucial areas of Locke's metaphysics and epistemology, including essence, abstraction, knowledge and mental representation. His discussion challenges many of the orthodox readings of Locke, and will be of interest to historians of philosophy and philosophers of language alike.

Moral Repair examines the ethics and moral psychology of responses to wrongdoing. Explaining the emotional bonds and normative expectations that keep human beings responsive to moral standards and responsible to each other, Margaret Urban Walker uses realistic examples of both personal betrayal and political violence to analyze how moral bonds are damaged by serious wrongs and what must be done to repair the damage. Focusing on victims of wrong, their right to validation, and their sense of justice, Walker presents a unified and detailed philosophical account of hope, trust, resentment, forgiveness, and making amends - the emotions and practices that sustain moral relations. Moral Repair joins a multidisciplinary literature concerned with transitional and restorative justice, reparations, and restoring individual dignity and mutual trust in the wake of serious wrongs.

Moral Repair examines the ethics and moral psychology of responses to wrongdoing. Explaining the emotional bonds and normative expectations that keep human beings responsive to moral standards and responsible to each other, Margaret Urban Walker uses realistic examples of both personal betrayal and political violence to analyze how moral bonds are damaged by serious wrongs and what must be done to repair the damage. Focusing on victims of wrong, their right to validation, and their sense of justice, Walker presents a unified and detailed philosophical account of hope, trust, resentment, forgiveness, and making amends - the emotions and practices that sustain moral relations. Moral Repair joins a multidisciplinary literature concerned with transitional and restorative justice, reparations, and restoring individual dignity and mutual trust in the wake of serious wrongs.

Graham Oppy examines contemporary arguments for and against the existence of God. He shows that none of these arguments are persuasive enough to change the minds of those participants on the question of the existence of God. His conclusion is supported by detailed analyses of contemporary arguments, as well as by the development of a theory about the purpose of arguments, and the criteria that should be used in judging whether or not an argument is successful. Oppy discusses the work of a wide array of philosophers, including Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant and Hume, and more recently, Plantinga, Dembski, White, Dawkins, Bergman, Gale, and Pruss.

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.

Tyler Burge presents a collection of his seminal essays on Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), who has a strong claim to be seen as the founder of modern analytic philosophy, and whose work remains at the centre of philosophical debate today. Truth, Thought, Reason gathers some of Burge's most influential work from the last twenty-five years, and also features important new material, including a substantial introduction and postscripts to four of the ten papers. It will be an essential resource for any historian of modern philosophy, and for anyone working on philosophy of language, epistemology, or philosophical logic.

Over the last fifteen years, Michael Smith has written a series of seminal essays about the nature of belief and desire, the status of normative judgment, and the relevance of the views we take on both these topics to the accounts we give of our nature as free and responsible agents. This long awaited collection comprises some of the most influential of Smith's essays. Among the topics covered are: the Humean theory of motivating reasons, the nature of normative reasons, Williams and Korsgaard on internal and external reasons, the nature of self-control, weakness of will, compulsion, freedom, responsibility, the analysis of our rational capacities, moral realism, the dispositional theory of value, the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative, the error theory, rationalist treatments of moral judgment, the practicality requirement on moral judgment and non-cognivist. This collection will be of interest to students in philosophy and psychology.

This book presents a new 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.

Widely regarded as one of the foremost figures in contemporary philosophy of religion, Linda Zagzebski has written a new book that will be seen as a major contribution to ethical theory and theological ethics. At the core of the book lies a new form of virtue theory based on the emotions. Quite distinct from deontological, consequentialist and teleological virtue theories, this one has a particular theological, indeed Christian, foundation. The new theory helps to resolve philosophical problems and puzzles of various kinds: the dispute between cognitivism and non-cognitivism in moral psychology, the claims and counterclaims of realism and anti-realism in the metaphysics of value, and paradoxes of perfect goodness in natural theology, including the problem of evil. As with Zagzebski's previous Cambridge book Virtues of the Mind, this new book will be sought out eagerly by a broad swathe of professionals and graduate students in philosophy and religious studies.

Truths are determined not by what we believe, but by the way the world is. Or so realists about truth believe. Philosophers call such theories correspondence theories of truth. Truthmaking theory, which now has many adherents among contemporary philosophers, is a recent development of a realist theory of truth, and in this book, first published in 2004, D. M. Armstrong offers the first full-length study of this theory. He examines its applications to different sorts of truth, including contingent truths, modal truths, truths about the past and the future, and mathematical truths. In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion he makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. His book marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy.

W. V. Quine (1908–2000) was quite simply the most distinguished analytic philosopher of the later half of the twentieth century. His celebrated attack on the analytic/synthetic tradition heralded a major shift away from the views of language descended from logical positivism. His most important book, Word and Object, introduced the concept of indeterminacy of radical translation, a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others. Quine is also famous for the view that epistemology should be naturalized, that is conducted in a scientific spirit with the object of investigating the relationship between the inputs of experience and the outputs of belief. The eleven essays in this volume cover all the central topics of Quine's philosophy: the underdetermination of physical theory, analycity, naturalism, propositional attitudes, behaviorism, reference and ontology, positivism, holism and logic.

W. V. Quine (1908–2000) was quite simply the most distinguished analytic philosopher of the later half of the twentieth century. His celebrated attack on the analytic/synthetic tradition heralded a major shift away from the views of language descended from logical positivism. His most important book, Word and Object, introduced the concept of indeterminacy of radical translation, a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others. Quine is also famous for the view that epistemology should be naturalized, that is conducted in a scientific spirit with the object of investigating the relationship between the inputs of experience and the outputs of belief. The eleven essays in this volume cover all the central topics of Quine's philosophy: the underdetermination of physical theory, analycity, naturalism, propositional attitudes, behaviorism, reference and ontology, positivism, holism and logic.

William S. Robinson has for many years written insightfully about the mind-body problem. In Understanding Phenomenal Consciousness he focuses on sensory experience (e.g., pain, afterimages) and perception qualities such as colours, sounds and odours to present a dualistic view of the mind, called Qualitative Event Realism, that goes against the dominant materialist views. This theory is relevant to the development of a science of consciousness which is now being pursued not only by philosophers but by researchers in psychology and the brain sciences. This provocative book will interest students and professionals who work in the philosophy of mind and will also have cross-disciplinary appeal in cognitive psychology and the brain sciences.

This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, Davidson, Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities.

This book examines John Locke’s claims about the nature and workings of language. Walter Ott proposes a new interpretation of Locke’s thesis that words signify ideas in the mind of the speaker, and argues that rather than employing such notions as sense or reference, Locke relies on an ancient tradition that understands signification as reliable indication. He then uses this interpretation to explain crucial areas of Locke’s metaphysics and epistemology, including essence, abstraction, knowledge, and mental representation. His discussion, which is the first book-length treatment of its topic, challenges many of the current orthodox readings of Locke, and will be of interest to historians of philosophy and philosophers of language alike.

This work is the fullest treatment 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 a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience. According to Melnyk, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. In the two concluding chapters he asserts in unprecedented detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in an exceptionally clear style, this book will appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.

Jonathan Kvanvig argues that epistemology cannot ignore the question of the value of knowledge. He questions one of the most fundamental assumptions in epistemology--that knowledge is always more valuable than the value of its parts. Using Plato's Meno as a starting point, Kvanvig tackles the different arguments about the value of knowledge and comes to the conclusion that it is less valuable than generally assumed. The book will appeal to students and professional philosophers in epistemology.

"In this book, Frederic Schick extends and applies the decision theory he proposed in two previous Cambridge books: Understanding Action (1991) and Making Choices (1997). He shows how the way we see situations affects the choices we make, and he develops a logic of thought responsive to how things are seen. The book considers many questions of choosing and some familiar human predicaments. Why do people in choice experiments act so often against expectations? How might they and the experimenters be looking at different problems in them? Why do people cooperate so often where the textbook logic excludes that? How can there be weakness of will - and must it always be faulted? Does how we see things affect what they mean, and what are people reporting who say that their lives have no meaning for them? These very different questions turn out to have some closely related answers. There are vivid discussions here of cases drawn from many sources. The book will interest all who study how we choose and act, whether they are philosophers, psychologists, or economists - or any combination." Frederic Schick is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University.

Jane Heal argues that central to our ability to arrive at views about others' thoughts is not knowledge of some theory of the mind but rather an ability to imagine alternative worlds and how things appear from another person's point of view. She then applies this view to questions of how we represent others' thoughts, the shape of psychological concepts, the nature of rationality and the possibility of first person authority. This book is of interest to students and professionals in philosophy of mind and language.

In this important book, Jurgen Habermas takes up certain fundamental questions of philosophy. While much of his recent work has been concerned with issues of morality and law, in this new work Habermas returns to the traditional philosophical questions of truth, objectivity and reality which were at the centre of his earlier classic book "Knowledge and Human Interests."
In this new work Habermas returns to the traditional philosophical questions of truth, objectivity and reality.
Habermas pursues these questions from the perspective of his own formal pragmatic theory which is based on an analysis of speech acts and language use.
He asks: How can the idea that our world exists independently of our attempts to describe it be reconciled with the insight that we can never reach reality without the mediation of language?
Addresses the limits of philosophy and reassesses the relation between theory and practice from a 'post-Marxist' perspective.

There is an important family of semantic notions that are applied to thoughts and to the conceptual constituents of thoughts--as when one says that the thought that the Universe is expanding is true. Christopher Hill presents a theory of the content of such notions. That theory is largely deflationary in spirit. It represents a broad range of semantic notions free from substantive metaphysical and empirical presuppositions. He also explains the relationship of mirroring or semantic correspondence linking thoughts to reality.

This book provides the only detailed, systematic reconsideration of the neglected nineteenth-century positivist Auguste Comte currently available. Apart from offering an accurate account of what Comte actually wrote, the book argues that Comte's positivism has never had greater contemporary relevance than now. Providing a lucid exposition of Comte and informed by considerable new scholarship on his work, this book will be valuable to philosophers, especially philosophers of science, a wide range of intellectual historians, and to historians of science and psychology.

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.

Alessandra Tanesini demonstrates that feminist thought has a lot to offer to the study of Wittgenstein's philosophical work, and that -at the same time-that work can inspire feminist reflection in new directions.

In "Wittgenstein: A Feminist Interpretation, "Tanesini offers a highly original interpretation of several themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy. She argues that when we look at his work through feminist eyes we discover that he is not primarily concerned with providing solutions to technical problems in the philosophy of mind, mathematics, and language. Instead, his remarks on these topics are intended to offer insights about human finitude, the loneliness of the modern autonomous self, and our relations to other human beings. Thus, the modern conception of the individual emerges as the critical target of Wittgenstein's philosophical work, both early and late.

This conception has also been one of the dominant concerns of contemporary feminist philosophy. In this book, Wittgenstein's insights are deployed to further feminist debates on issues such as identity, difference, the masculine character of the modern self.