Presumption is a remarkably versatile and pervasively useful resource. Firmly grounded in the law of evidence from its origins in classical antiquity, it made its way in the days of medieval scholasticism into the theory and practice of disputation and debate. Subsequently, it extended its reach to play an increasingly significant role in the philosophical theory of knowledge. It has thus come to represent a region where lawyers, debaters, and philosophers can all find some common around. In Presumption and the Practices of Tentative Cognition, which was originally published in 2006, Nicholas Rescher endeavors to show that the process of presumption plays a role of virtually indispensable utility in matters of rational inquiry and communication. The origins of presumption may lie in law, but its importance is reinforced by its service to the theory of information management and philosophy.

Possibility offers a new analysis of the metaphysical concepts of possibility and necessity, one that does not rely on any sort of 'possible worlds'. The analysis proceeds from an account of the notion of a physical object and from the positing of properties and relations. It is motivated by considerations about how we actually speak of and think of objects. Michael Jubien discusses several closely related topics, including different purported varieties of possible worlds, the doctrine of 'essentialism', natural kind terms, and alleged examples of necessity a posteriori. The book also offers a new theory of the functioning of proper names, both actual and fictional, and the discussion of natural kind terms and necessity a posteriori depends in part on this theory.

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.

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.

What is it to understand another person? A popular view in philosophy of mind, cognitive science and various other disciplines is that interpersonal understanding is a matter ofemploying a 'commonsense' or 'folk' psychology, consisting primarily of an ability to attribute internal propositional attitudes on the basis of behavioural observations. The emphasis of recent debates has been on which mechanisms enable us to do this, how they arise during development and how they might have evolved, rather than on whether we actually do it at all. Ratcliffe disputes the shared premise on which these debates rest. He argues that 'folk psychology', as generally described, is a theoretically motivated, simplistic and misleading abstraction from social life, which is wrongly asserted to be 'commonsense' or 'what the folk think'. Drawing on phenomenology, neuroscience and development psychology, he offers an alternative account of interpersonal understanding. This account emphasizes a distinctive kind of bodily relatedness between people and the extent to which interpersonal interactions are regulated by shared social environments.

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.

First published in 1973, Rules and Meanings is an anthology of works that form part of Mary Douglas' struggle to devise an anthropological modernism conducive to her opposition to reputedly modernizing trends in contemporary society. The collection contains works by Wittgenstein, Schutz, Husserl, Hertz and other continentals. The underlying themes of the anthology are the construction of meaning, the force of hidden background assumptions, tacit conventions and the power of spatial organization to reinforce words. The work serves to complement the philosophers' work on everyday language with the anthropologists' theory of everyday knowledge.

If you take for granted the widespread assumption of our culture that matter constitutes the totality of reality, this book will challenge that assumption. The pervasive materialist or physicalist presupposition of so much thinking is not scientifically established but is a basic article of naturalistic faith. Professor Hick argues that the widely held belief that consciousness is identical with or a by-product of the functioning of the brain is unsustainable. There is non-physical as well as physical reality. It is entirely possible that there is a divine realm transcending the material universe but encountered in religious experience. He looks carefully at the epistemological implications of this. But Hick also challenges many traditional religious beliefs. He distinguishes between religion as human institutions, which have done as much harm as good in the world, and religion as the inner spiritual response to the Transcendent. Whereas institutional religion has divided humanity, spiritual or mystical experience can unite people of every part of the world.

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?

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

Nathan Salmon presents a selection of his essays from the early 1980s to 2006, on a set of closely connected topics central to analytic philosophy. The book is divided into four thematic sections. The first contains six essays on the theme of direct reference, and associated issues regarding names and descriptions, demonstratives and reflexivity. The four essays in the second section, under the heading of apriority, concern particular consequences of Millianism with respect to the semantic-epistemological status of certain special kinds of sentences. The five essays in the third section develop Salmon's project of reconciling Millianism with a host of problems posed by locutions of propositional attitude, especially by attributions of belief. The volume concludes with four essays about the distinction between meaning and use, or more generally, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics.

In the early twentieth century, an apparently obscure philosophical debate took place between F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell. The outcome was momentous: the demise of British Idealism and the rise of analytic philosophy. Stewart Candlish examines afresh this formative period in twentieth-cenutry thought and comes to some surprising conclusions.

This is the first collection of papers devoted to Ludwig Wittgenstein's cryptic but brilliant "On Certainty." This work, Wittgenstein's last, extends the thinking of his earlier, better known writings, and in so doing, makes the most important contribution to epistemology since Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"--a claim the essays in this volume help to demonstrate. The essays have been grouped under four headings, reflecting current approaches to the work: the Framework, Transcendental, Epistemic, and Therapeutic readings.

Presumption is a remarkably versatile and pervasively useful resource. Firmly grounded in the law of evidence from its origins in classical antiquity, it made its way in the days of medieval scholasticism into the theory and practice of disputation and debate. Subsequently, it extended its reach to play an increasingly significant role in the philosophical theory of knowledge. It has thus come to represent a region where lawyers, debaters, and philosophers can all find some common ground. In Presumption and the Practices of Tentative Cognition, Nicholas Rescher endeavors to show that the process of presumption plays a role of virtually indispensable utility in matters of rational inquiry and communication. The origins of presumption may lie in law, but its future is assured by its service to the theory of information management and the philosophy of science.

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

A Theory of Argument is an advanced textbook intended for students in philosophy, communications studies and linguistics who have completed at least one course in argumentation theory, information logic, critical thinking or formal logic. Containing nearly 400 exercises, Mark Vorobej develops a novel approach to argument interpretation and evaluation. One of the key themes of the book is that we cannot succeed in distinguishing good argument from bad arguments until we learn to listen carefully to others. Part I develops a relativistic account of argument cogency that allows for rational disagreement. Part II offers a comprehensive and rigorous account of argument diagramming. Hybrid arguments are contrasted with linked and convergent arguments, and a novel technique is introduced for graphically recording disagreements with authorial claims.

Over the past one and a half decades, the scope of experimental philosophy (x-phi) has expanded significantly. Experimental research programmes now cover almost all areas of philosophy, including epistemology, the philosophy of language, action theory, and the free will debate, to name just a few. This volume introduces the reader to these new developments in an accessible and systematic way. It explains how x-phi differs from traditional views of philosophy, investigates in depth how it uses empirical evidence to support philosophical conclusions of various kinds, and introduces the reader to both the most widely discussed experimental studies and the latest advancements in the field. As a critical study, it also examines the various criticisms that x-phi has received over the years and seeks, tentatively, to adjudicate them.

This radical reading of Wittgenstein's third and last masterpiece, On Certainty, has major implications for philosophy. It elucidates Wittgenstein's ultimate thoughts on the nature of our basic beliefs and his demystification of skepticism. Our basic certainties are shown to be nonepistemic, nonpropositional attitudes that, as such, have no verbal occurrence but manifest themselves exclusively in our actions. This fundamental certainty is a belief-in, a primitive confidence or ur-trust whose practical nature bridges the hitherto unresolved catagorial gap between belief and action.

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.

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.

How do we think about what we plan to do? One dominant answer is that we select the best possible option available. However, a growing number of philosophers would offer a different answer: since we are not equipped to maximize we often choose the next best alternative, one that is no more than satisfactory. This strategy choice is called satisficing (a term coined by the economist Herb Simon). This new collection of essays explores both these accounts of practical reason, examining the consequences for adopting one or the other for moral theory in general and the theory of practical rationality in particular. It aims to address a constituency larger than contemporary moral philosophers and bring these questions to the attention of those interested in the applications of decision theory in economics, psychology and political science.

This book is conceived as an introductory text into the theory of syntactic and semantic information, and information flow. Syntactic information theory is concerned with the information contained in the very fact that some signal has a non-random structure. Semantic information theory is concerned with the meaning or information content of messages and the like. The theory of information flow is concerned with deriving some piece of information from another. The main part will take us to situation semantics as a foundation of modern approaches in information theory. We give a brief overview of the background theory and then explain the concepts of information, information architecture and information flow from that perspective.

Philosophy took a "linguistic turn" in the twentieth century that was marked by the focus on theories of meaning, reference, description, predication and truth. Starting with the roots of the analytic tradition in Frege, Meinong and Bradley, this book follows its development in Russell and Wittgenstein and the writings of major philosophers of the analytic tradition and of various lesser, but well known and widely discussed, contemporary figures. In dealing with basic issues that have preoccupied analytic philosophers in the past century, the author notes how analytic philosophy is sometimes transformed from its original concern with careful and precise formulations of classical issues into the dismissal of such issues and the resultant spinning of intricate verbal webs, often signaling the rebirth of idealism in the guises of "contextualism" and "anti-realism." The book thus examines the change that came to dominate the analytic tradition by a shift of focus from the world, as what words are about, to a preoccupation with language itself.