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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > Analytical & linguistic philosophy
If you are from the West, it is likely that you normally assume that you are a subject who relates to objects and other subjects through actions that spring purely from your own intentions and will. Chinese philosophers, however, show how mistaken this conception of action is. Philosophy of action in Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the Western philosophical narrative. While the latter usually assumes we are discrete individual subjects with the ability to act or to effect change, Classical Chinese philosophers theorize that human life is embedded in endless networks of relationships with other entities, phenomena, and socio-material contexts. These relations are primary to the constitution of the person, and hence acting within an early Chinese context is interacting and co-acting along with others, human or nonhuman. This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers, one which attempts to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency-what Mercedes Valmisa calls "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin) As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires heightened self- and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response. These capacities allow the agent to "co-raise" courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems. Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to cope with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines. Valmisa exemplifies how to build meaningful philosophical theories without treating individual books or putative authors as locations of stable intellectual positions, opening brand-new topics in Chinese and comparative philosophy.
This book attempts to explicate and expand upon Frank Ramsey's notion of the realistic spirit. In so doing, it provides a systematic reading of his work, and demonstrates the extent of Ramsey's genius as evinced by both his responses to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the impact he had on Wittgenstein's later philosophical insights.
This book sets out to identify the nature and implications of a proper understanding of pluralism in a original and illuminating way. Isaiah Berlin believed that a recognition of pluralism is vital to a free, decent and civilised society. By looking below at the often neglected foundations of Berlin's celebrated account of moral pluralism, Lyons reveals the more philosophically profound aspects of his undogmatic and humanistic liberal vision. He achieves this by comparing Berlin's core ideas with those of several of his most distinguished philosophical contemporaries, an exercise which yields not only a deeper grasp of Berlin and several major twentieth-century thinkers, principally A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Bernard Williams and Quentin Skinner, but, more broadly, a keener appreciation of the power of history and philosophy to help us make sense of our predicament.
The growing interest in fragmentalism is one of the most exciting trends in philosophy of time and is gradually reshaping the contemporary debate. Providing an extensive interpretation of this view, Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo articulate a novel theory of the passage of time and argue that it is the most effective in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Iaquinto and Torrengo offer the first full-range application of fragmentalism to a number of metaphysical topics, including the open future, causation, the A-theoretic interpretation of special relativity and time travel. The resulting picture, they argue, conveys the potential of a radically new understanding of time.
In our everyday activities we use material objects in different shapes and forms to solve various practical problems. We may use a knife to tighten a screw, turn an old washing machine drum into a fireplace, use the edge of a kitchen countertop to open a bottle, or place a hammer on the puncture patch glued to a bike's inner tube to exert pressure on the patch until the glue dries. How should we identify these objects? What functions do they have? If we want to understand the role which material objects play in our everyday activities, we need to move away from universal identifications of objects. This is because universal identifications are not sensitive to contextual differences and cannot describe how each individual user connects to their surrounding objects in an infinite variety of contexts. Problem Solving Technologies provides a user-friendly understanding of technological objects. This book develops a framework to characterise and categorize technological objects at the level of users' subjective experiences.
How can humans learn to function most effectively in their individual and social lives and best approach important ethical and social concerns? "Developing Sanity in Human Affairs" answers this question through application of general semantics to the fields of education, counseling, communication, critical thinking, journalism, and ethics. General semantics, developed by Alfred Korzybski, is concerned with how humans can learn to evaluate and act more responsibly in conducting their individual and social lives. The chapters in this collection deal with these issues in education and counseling, social and cultural areas, critical thinking, communications, humanism, and ethics. Highlights include the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, which bridges past and present work in general semantics and applications to important current problems in media and other areas of communication. Traditional and revisionist perspectives on foundations in general semantics are presented, as are dialogues on critical thinking and general semantics.
This book is an extension of the discussions presented in Blaira (TM)s 1990 book Language and Representation in Information Retrieval, which was selected as the "Best Information Science Book of the Year" by the American Society for Information Science (ASIS). That work stated that the Philosophy of Language had the best theory for understanding meaning in language, and within the Philosophy of Language, the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was found to be most perceptive. The success of that book provided an incentive to look more deeply into Wittgensteina (TM)s philosophy of language, and how it can help us to understand how to represent the intellectual content of information. This is what the current title does, and by using this theory it creates a firm foundation for future Information Retrieval research. The work consists of four related parts. Firstly, a brief overview of Wittgensteina (TM)s philosophy of language and its relevance to information systems. Secondly, a detailed explanation of Wittgensteina (TM)s late philosophy of language and mind. Thirdly, an extended discussion of the relevance of his philosophy to understanding some of the problems inherent in information systems, especially those systems which rely on retrieval based on some representation of the intellectual content of that information. And, fourthly, a series of detailed footnotes which cite the sources of the numerous quotations and provide some discussion of the related issues that the text inspires.
This monograph is a detailed study, and systematic defence, of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT), first conceived by C.D. Broad. The book offers a coherent, logically perspicuous and ideologically lean formulation of GBT, defends it against the most notorious objections to be found in the extant philosophical literature, and shows how it can be derived from a more general theory, consistent with relativistic spacetime, on the pre-relativistic assumption of an absolute and total temporal order. The authors devise axiomatizations of GBT and its competitors which, against the backdrop of a shared quantified tense logic, significantly improves the prospects of their comparative assessment. Importantly, neither of these axiomatizations involves commitment to properties of presentness, pastness or futurity. The authors proceed to address, and defuse, a number of objections that have been marshaled against GBT, including the so-called epistemic objection according to which the theory invites skepticism about our temporal location. The challenge posed by relativistic physics is met head-on, by replacing claims about temporal variation by claims about variation across spacetime. The book aims to achieve the greatest possible rigor. The background logic is set out in detail, as are the principles governing the notions of precedence and temporal location. The authors likewise devise a novel spacetime logic suited for the articulation, and comparative assessment, of relativistic theories of time. The book comes with three technical appendices which include soundness and completeness proofs for the systems corresponding to GBT and its competitors, in both their pre-relativistic and relativistic forms. The book is primarily directed at researchers and graduate students working on the philosophy of time or temporal logic, but is of interest to metaphysicians and philosophical logicians more generally.
We spend our lives protecting an elusive self - but does the self
actually exist? Drawing on literature from Western philosophy,
neuroscience and Buddhism (interpreted), the author argues that
there is no self. The self - as unified owner and thinker of
thoughts - is an illusion created by two tiers. A tier of naturally
unified consciousness (notably absent in standard bundle-theory
accounts) merges with a tier of desire-driven thoughts and emotions
to yield the impression of a self. So while the self, if real,
would think up the thoughts, the thoughts, in reality, think up the
self.
This book remedies the absence in the history of analytic philosophy of a detailed examination of G. E. Moore's philosophical views as they developed between 1894 and 1902. This period saw the inauguration of analytic philosophy through the work of Moore and Bertrand Russell. Moore's early views are examined in detail through unpublished archival material, including surviving letters, diaries, notes of lectures attended, papers for Cambridge societies, and drafts of early work, in order to revise the established view that the origin of analytic philosophy at Cambridge was an abrupt split from F. H. Bradley's Absolute Idealism. Traditional accounts of this period have highlighted the anti-psychologism of Frege's logic but have not explored the impact of this movement more broadly. Anti-psychologism was a key feature of the work of Moore's teachers on the nature of the mind and its objects, in their interpretation of Kant, and in ethics. Moore's teachers G.F. Stout and James Ward were significant contributors to the late 19th century debates in mental science and the developing new science of psychology. Henry Sidgwick's criticisms of Kant and Bradley and his leading work in ethics were key influences on Moore. Moore's Trinity Fellowship Dissertations are essential historical evidence of the development of Moore's new theory of judgment, a theory whose defining role in the origins of analytic philosophy cannot be overstated. Moore's study of Kant in his dissertations ultimately formed the groundwork for his Principia Ethica (1903), which evolved from ideas that manifested in Moore's earliest Apostles' papers, developed through his dissertations, and were refined through his Elements of Ethics lectures (1898-99). This monumental work of early twentieth century ethics is thus shown to be the culmination of Moore's early philosophical development.
"Intention" is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.
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.
Analytic philosophy has been a dominant intellectual movement in the 20th century and a reflection of the cultural pre-eminence of scientism. In response to analytic philosophy's peculiar reticence (and inability) to discuss itself, this book provides its first comprehensive history and critique. The central element in the analytic conversation has been the Enlightenment Project: the appeal to an autonomous human reason, freed of any higher authority and channeling itself through science as its privileged tool. This centrality is demonstrated by systematically examining its presence and development in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, language, psychology, social science, ethics, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. This journey highlights the internal logical disintegration of that project. Post-modern relativism is its natural offspring and not a viable alternative. The Enlightenment Project's conception of physical science is defective; this defective conception of physical science renders the analytic conception of social science, philosophical psychology, and epistemology defective; and that defective conception of the human condition leads to defective conceptions of both moral and political philosophy, specifically the idea of social engineering or social technology. Throughout the book, an alternative conception of philosophy is presented as a way out of the abyss of analysis, an alternative that reconnects philosophy with the mainstream of Western civilization and initiates the process of providing a coherent cultural narrative. This book will be of particular interest to any sophisticated reader concerned about the lack of a coherent cultural narrative.
This book proposes a series of interconnected arguments against the view that interpersonal understanding involves the use of a 'folk' or 'commonsense' psychology. Ratcliffe suggests that folk psychology, construed as the attribution of internal mental states in order to predict and explain behaviour, is a theoretically motivated and misleading abstraction from social life. He draws on phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology to offer an alternative account that emphasizes patterned interactions between people in shared social situations.
The book contains a collection of chapters written by experts from the fields of philosophy, law, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence who pay tribute to Professor Risto Hilpinen's impressive work on the logic of induction, on deontic logic and epistemology, and on philosophy of science. In addition to an introduction by the editors, a section on Professor Hilpinen's positions, professional services and honors, as well as a complete bibliography of his writings, the editors, McNamara, Jones and Brown, have compiled a multidisciplinary global cross-section of academic contemporaries that provides insights and perspectives on Hilpinen's influence and legacy. The essays reflect central aspects of Risto Hilpinen's research interests, and offer further contributions to some of the philosophical fields for which he is best known: applied modal logic, including deontic logic (from the ancient Greek deon, pertaining to the concepts of duty and obligation), the semantics of normative language, the logic of action, and the theory of practical reasoning; the analysis of the concept of artifact; and the theory of semiotics in the tradition of Charles Peirce. The presence in the collection of several papers relating to deontic logic underlines Hilpinen's importance in that area, in which his publications have long been recognized as standard works. The book is an essential collection of ideas for all those who feel at home in a variety of formal disciplines, from propositional logic to the logic of artificial intelligence.
This book offers a new look at emergence in terms of a hierarchical emergent ontology. Emergence is recognised as a universal principle, as universal as the principle of evolution. This is achieved by setting out the ontological criteria of emergence and such criteria's various roles. The traditional dichotomies are overcome, e.g., the synchronic and diachronic perspectives are unified, allowing a single, universal principle of emergence to be applied across various fields of science. As exemplars of its practical utility in both explanation and prediction, this new approach is applied to three different scientific areas: cellular automata, quantum Hall effects, and the neural network of the mind. It proves that the resulting metaphysics of hierarchical emergent ontology plays a fundamental role in unifying science, an impossible task under classical reductionism.
Ontological commitment implies that each theory is supposed to specify the type of entities that form its components. Representatives of a theory share an ontological commitment in relation to the objects they refer to. There are theories that admit the existence of universals while others do not. As there are different ways of speaking about universals it is necessary to decide what a universal term corresponds to. It is essential to have a criterion that enables us to decide which kinds of objects are allowed as references for the terms used. In this volume two different approaches are discussed: first, in cases where only extensional languages are accepted; second, when intensional elements are required to determine the meaning such terms as "Sachverhalt", intentional statements or representations. The ontological commitment associated with extensional theories exclusively admits the existence of physical objects, whereas intensional theses additionally include universal and abstract entities. The study of ontological commitment enables us to measure the ontological economy of theories. This serves as a basis for the choice of theory. The authors of this volume discuss relevant issues of both models and provide new solutions.
Scientific concepts, laws, theories, models and thought experiments are representations but uniquely different. In "On Scientific Representation" each is given a full philosophical exploration within an original, coherent philosophical framework that is strongly rooted in the Kantian tradition (Kant, Hertz, Vaihinger, Cassirer). Through a revisionist historical approach, Boniolo shows how the Kantian tradition can help us renew and rethink contemporary issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science.
This is the first book to systematically study the weak systems of mereology. In its chapters, the author critically analyzes and explains core topics related to mereology, such as parthood without antisymmetry, non-existence of the zero element, and Lesniewski's notion of class and set. The book also delves into three theories of parthood: two concern the sum existence axioms, and the third contends with transitivity of parthood. This is the first systematic analysis of systems of mereology of its kind and is suitable for students, scholars, logicians, and mathematicians who wish to further their knowledge of mereology. Original polish publication "Podstawy teorii czesci" by The Nicolaus Copernicus University Press
Randy Ramal argues that philosophers have a hermeneutical responsibility to the intelligibility of everyday life. Furthermore, they need to go the hard way to fulfill it, which entails overcoming the temptation to turn philosophy into a normative discipline, while also appreciating the need to limit the philosopher's engagement with the world to explicating the coherent sense that everyday life has, and to recovering that sense when life's intelligibility is challenged by unwarranted skepticism. In On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary: Going the Bloody Hard Way, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead is central to Ramal's endeavor to demonstrate the need to separate the hermeneutical responsibility of philosophy from the normative aspects of responsibility. While showing the futility of labeling Whitehead as a purely disinterested philosopher who abandons the idea that ordinariness is relevant to good philosophical thinking, Ramal frames this discussion within a larger, in-depth engagement with a vast number of thinkers, philosophers, and literary figures whose works touch on the question of the ordinary. The latter include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the empiricists, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Anthony Flew, the Ideal-Language philosophers, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Cora Diamond, Peter Singer, Michel de Certeau, Stanley Rosen, Richard Dawkins, J.M. Coetzee, and David Foster Wallace.
This is the first of two volumes of the proceedings from the 30th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, August 2007. In addition to several new contributions to Wittgenstein research (by N. Garver, M. Kross, St. Majetschak, K. Neumer, V. Rodych, L. M. Valdes-Villanueva), this volume contains articles with a special focus on digital Wittgenstein research and Wittgenstein's role for the understanding of the digital turn (by L. Bazzocchi, A. Biletzki, J. de Mul, P. Keicher, D. Kohler, K. Mayr, D. G. Stern), as well as discussions - not necessarily from a Wittgensteinian perspective - about issues in the philosophy of information, including computational ontologies (by D. Apollon, G. Chaitin, F. Dretske, L. Floridi, Y. Okamoto, M. Pasin and E. Motta)."
This edited collection of eight original essays pursues the aim of bringing the spotlight back on Anton Marty. It does so by having leading figures in the contemporary debate confront themselves with Marty's most significative contributions, which span from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and ontology to meta-metaphysics and meta-philosophy. The book is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to themes in philosophy of language, which were at the centre of Marty's philosophical thinking throughout his life. The second part focuses on the problem of the objectivity and phenomenology of time and space, upon which Marty was working in the final years of his life. The final part turns to Marty's meta-metaphysical and meta-philosophical considerations. The intended audience of this book are primarily scholars and students interested in the relevant contemporary debates, as well as scholars working on the Austrian tradition. |
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