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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > Analytical & linguistic philosophy
Since the 1930s, philosophy has been divided into two camps: the analytic tradition which prevails in the Anglophone world and the continental tradition which holds sway over the European continent. A Parting of the Ways looks at the origins of this split through the lens of one defining episode: the disputation in Davos, Switerzland, in 1929, between the two most eminent German philosophers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. This watershed debate was attended by Rudolf Carnap, a representative of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Michael Friedman shows how philosophical differences interacted with political events. Both Carnap and Heidegger viewed their philosophical efforts as tied to their radical social outlooks, with Carnap on the left and Heidegger on the right, while Cassirer was in the conciliatory classical tradition of liberal republicanism. The rise of Hitler led to the emigration from Europpe of most leading philosophers, including Carnap and Cassirer, leaving Heidegger alone on the continent
This book attempts to reconcile the analytic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein with those issues that consumed his personal life and which lay outside the confines of analytic philosophy: his "religious disposition," his ascetic lifestyle, and his concern with the mystical. Sontag reveals the influence of the mystical on Wittgenstein's life and philosophy, his respect for Augustine, Kierkegaard, and William James, and the profound effect of Tolstoy's religious writings on the development of his philosophy.
During the period covered by this volume, Bertrand Russell first
retired from and then resumed his philosophical career. In 1927 he
published two philosophy books, The Analysis of Matter and An
Outline of Philosophy. His next book in academic philosophy, An
Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, was not published until 1940.
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.
Quine's set theory, New Foundations, has often been treated as an anomaly in the history and philosophy of set theory. In this book, Sean Morris shows that it is in fact well-motivated, emerging in a natural way from the early development of set theory. Morris introduces and explores the notion of set theory as explication: the view that there is no single correct axiomatization of set theory, but rather that the various axiomatizations all serve to explicate the notion of set and are judged largely according to pragmatic criteria. Morris also brings out the important interplay between New Foundations, Quine's philosophy of set theory, and his philosophy more generally. We see that his early technical work in logic foreshadows his later famed naturalism, with his philosophy of set theory playing a crucial role in his primary philosophical project of clarifying our conceptual scheme and specifically its logical and mathematical components.
The Ethics of Refugee Repatriation considers when bodies such as the UN, government agencies and NGOs ought to help refugees to return home. Drawing on original interviews with 172 refugees before and after repatriation, Mollie Gerver describes six moral puzzles arising in repatriation. She resolves each puzzle using the methods of analytical philosophy. In drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, the book gives the reader a deeper understanding of the particular ethical challenges arising from the process of refugee assistance, and provides aid workers and policymakers with the tools to formulate more ethical repatriation policies.
Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History explores the ways interpretation (of key figures, factions, texts, etc.) shaped the analytic tradition, from Frege to Dummet. It offers readers 17 chapters, written especially for this volume by an international cast of leading scholars. Some chapters are devoted to large, thematic issues like the relationship between analytic philosophy and other philosophical traditions such as British Idealism and phenomenology, while other chapters are tied to more fine-grained topics or to individual philosophers, like Moore and Russell on philosophical method or the history of interpretations of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Throughout, the focus is on interpretations that are crucial to the origin, development, and persistence of the analytic tradition. The result is a more fully formed and philosophically satisfying portrait of analytic philosophy.
Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History explores the ways interpretation (of key figures, factions, texts, etc.) shaped the analytic tradition, from Frege to Dummet. It offers readers 17 chapters, written especially for this volume by an international cast of leading scholars. Some chapters are devoted to large, thematic issues like the relationship between analytic philosophy and other philosophical traditions such as British Idealism and phenomenology, while other chapters are tied to more fine-grained topics or to individual philosophers, like Moore and Russell on philosophical method or the history of interpretations of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Throughout, the focus is on interpretations that are crucial to the origin, development, and persistence of the analytic tradition. The result is a more fully formed and philosophically satisfying portrait of analytic philosophy.
This book examines the significance of Whitehead's first year of lectures at Harvard, recently published in the first volume of The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead.In these newly commissioned essays, leading Whitehead scholars ask a range of important questions: Do these lectures challenge or confirm previous understandings of Whitehead's published works? What is revealed about the development of Whitehead's thought in the crucial period after London but before the publication of Science and the Modern World? What should we make of concepts and terms that were introduced in these lectures but were never incorporated into subsequent publications? The lectures published in The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924-1925: Philosophical Presuppositions of Science represent Whitehead's first American lectures in philosophy after a long career in England as a mathematician and throw new light on the development of his philosophy.Also included in this volume is the text of Whitehead's first lecture at Harvard, recently gifted to the Critical Edition of Whitehead, allowing for a clearer understanding of Whitehead's plans and goals for his first course of lectures in philosophy than has previously been possible. Brian G. Henning, Founding Executive Editor of the Critical Edition of Whitehead, is Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.
An imaginative and exciting position of themes from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, this book helps readers find their way around the "forest of remarks" that make up this classic. Chapters on language, mind, color, number, God, value, and philosophy develop a major theme: that there are various kinds of language use -- a variety philosophy needs to look at but tends to overlook.
Can literary fictions convey significant philosophical views, understood in terms of propositional knowledge? This study addresses the philosophical value of literature by examining how literary works impart philosophy truth and knowledge and to what extent the works should be approached as communications of their authors. Beginning with theories of fiction, it examines the case against the prevailing 'pretence' and 'make-believe' theories of fiction hostile to propositional theories of literary truth. Tackling further arguments against the cognitive function and value of literature, this study illustrates how literary works can contribute to knowledge by making assertions and suggestions and by providing hypotheses for the reader to assess. Through clear analysis of the concept of the author, the role of the authorial intention and the different approaches to the 'meaning' of a literary work, this study provides an historical survey to the cognitivist-anti-cognitivist dispute, introducing contemporary trends in the discussion before presenting a novel approach to recognizing the cognitive function of literature. An important contribution to philosophical studies of literature and knowledge.
A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls presents a comprehensive overview of the historical development of all major aspects of analytic philosophy, the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition in the twentieth century. * Features coverage of all the major subject areas and figures in analytic philosophy - including Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Gottlob Frege, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Putnam, and many others * Contains explanatory background material to help make clear technical philosophical concepts * Includes listings of suggested further readings * Written in a clear, direct style that presupposes little previous knowledge of philosophy
In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineering - are vague. Smith argues, on the basis of a detailed account of the defining features of vagueness, that an accurate theory of vagueness must involve the idea that truth comes in degrees. The core idea of degrees of truth is that while some sentences are true and some are false, others possess intermediate truth values: they are truer than the false sentences, but not as true as the true ones. Degree-theoretic treatments of vagueness have been proposed in the past, but all have encountered significant objections. In light of these, Smith develops a new type of degree theory. Its innovations include a definition of logical consequence that allows the derivation of a classical consequence relation from the degree-theoretic semantics, a unified account of degrees of truth and subjective probabilities, and the incorporation of semantic indeterminacy - the view that vague statements need not have unique meanings - into the degree-theoretic framework. As well as being essential reading for those working on vagueness, Smith's book provides an excellent entry-point for newcomers to the era - both from elsewhere in philosophy, and from computer science, logic and engineering. It contains a thorough introduction to existing theories of vagueness and to the requisite logical background.
This book provides both an introduction to the philosophy of scientific modeling and a contribution to the discussion and clarification of two recent philosophical conceptions of models: artifactualism and fictionalism. These can be viewed as different stances concerning the standard representationalist account of scientific models. By better understanding these two alternative views, readers will gain a deeper insight into what a model is as well as how models function in different sciences. Fictionalism has been a traditional epistemological stance related to antirealist construals of laws and theories, such as instrumentalism and inferentialism. By contrast, the more recent fictional view of models holds that scientific models must be conceived of as the same kind of entities as literary characters and places. This approach is essentially an answer to the ontological question concerning the nature of models, which in principle is not incompatible with a representationalist account of the function of models. The artifactual view of models is an approach according to which scientific models are epistemic artifacts, whose main function is not to represent the phenomena but rather to provide epistemic access to them. It can be conceived of as a non-representationalist and pragmatic account of modeling, which does not intend to focus on the ontology of models but rather on the ways they are built and used for different purposes. The different essays address questions such as the artifactual view of idealization, the use of information theory to elucidate the concepts of abstraction and idealization, the deidealization of models, the nature of scientific fictions, the structural account of representation and the ontological status of structures, the role of surrogative reasoning with models, and the use of models for explaining and predicting physical phenomena.
First published in 2000. This is Volume III of six in the International Library of Philosophy looking at the area of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Anglo-American Philosophy. Written in 1952, it focuses on Bertrand Russell's Construction of the External World, which covers a wide variety of topics, attempts to answer many of the problems traditionally associated with philosophy.
Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory proposes an account of humility that relies on the most radical Christian sayings about humility, especially those found in Augustine and the early monastic tradition. It argues that this was the view of humility that put Christian moral thought into decisive conflict with the best Greco-Roman moral thought. This radical Christian account of humility has been forgotten amidst contemporary efforts to clarify and retrieve the virtue of humility for secular life. Kent Dunnington shows how humility was repurposed during the early-modern era-particularly in the thought of Hobbes, Hume, and Kant-to better serve the economic and social needs of the emerging modern state. This repurposed humility insisted on a role for proper pride alongside humility, as a necessary constituent of self-esteem and a necessary motive of consistent moral action over time. Contemporary philosophical accounts of humility continue this emphasis on proper pride as a counterbalance to humility. By contrast, radical Christian humility proscribes pride altogether. Dunnington demonstrates how such a radical view need not give rise to vices of humility such as servility and pusillanimity, nor need such a view fall prey to feminist critiques of humility. But the view of humility set forth makes little sense abstracted from a specific set of doctrinal commitments peculiar to Christianity. This study argues that this is a strength rather than a weakness of the account since it displays how Christianity matters for the shape of the moral life.
In this book Michael Potter offers a fresh and compelling portrait of the birth of modern analytic philosophy, viewed through the lens of a detailed study of the work of the four philosophers who contributed most to shaping it: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Ramsey. It covers the remarkable period of discovery that began with the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift in 1879 and ended with Ramsey's death in 1930. Potter-one of the most influential scholars of this period in philosophy-presents a deep but accessible account of the break with absolute idealism and neo-Kantianism, and the emergence of approaches that exploited the newly discovered methods in logic. Like his subjects, Potter focusses principally on philosophical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics, but he also discusses epistemology, meta-ethics, and the philosophy of language. The book is an essential starting point for any student attempting to understand the work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey, as well as their interactions and their larger intellectual milieux. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to cast light on current philosophical problems through a better understanding of their origins.
Logical Atomism is a philosophy that sought to account for the world in all its various aspects by relating it to the structure of the language in which we articulate information. In The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, Bertrand Russell, with input from his young student Ludwig Wittgenstein, developed the concept and argues for a reformed language based on pure logic. Despite Russell’s own future doubts surrounding the concept, this founding and definitive work in analytical philosophy by one of the world’s most significant philosophers is a remarkable attempt to establish a novel way of thinking.
This volume is a concise introduction to the thought of Gottlob Frege, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The chapters follow Frege's thought in chronological sequence, from the nature of logic, proof and language in" Concept Scripts I and II," to "The Foundations of Arithmetic, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic," and finally" Logical Investigations." Written by Anthony Kenny, a leading figure in contemporary philosophy, this volume guides the reader through an accessible explanation and assessment of Frege's radical and lasting contributions to our understanding of language, meaning, and the foundations of arithmetic.
Saul Kripke has been a major influence on analytic philosophy and allied fields for a half-century and more. His early masterpiece, "Naming and Necessity," reversed the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent. Although much of his work remains unpublished, several major essays have now appeared in print, most recently in his long-awaited collection "Philosophical Troubles."In this book Kripke's long-time colleague, the logician and philosopher John P. Burgess, offers a thorough and self-contained guide to all of Kripke's published books and his most important philosophical papers, old and new. It also provides an authoritative but non-technical account of Kripke's influential contributions to the study of modal logic and logical paradoxes. Although Kripke has been anything but a system-builder, Burgess expertly uncovers the connections between different parts of his oeuvre. Kripke is shown grappling, often in opposition to existing traditions, with mysteries surrounding the nature of necessity, rule-following, and the conscious mind, as well as with intricate and intriguing puzzles about identity, belief and self-reference. Clearly contextualizing the full range of Kripke's work, Burgess outlines, summarizes and surveys the issues raised by each of the philosopher's major publications. "Kripke" will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of analytic philosophy's greatest living thinkers.
An innovative reassessment of philosopher P. F. Strawson's influential "Freedom and Resentment" P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper "Freedom and Resentment" is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. In Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals, Pamela Hieronymi closely reexamines Strawson's paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood. Line by line, Hieronymi carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson's ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between "reactive" and "objective" responses to the actions and attitudes of others, Hieronymi turns to his central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. Hieronymi finds the two common interpretations of this argument, "the simple Humean interpretation" and "the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation," both deficient. Drawing on Strawson's wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, Hieronymi concludes that his argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson's "social naturalism." In the final chapter, she defends this naturalistic picture against objections. Rigorous, concise, and insightful, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals sheds new light on Strawson's thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics. The book also features the complete text of Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment."
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