The Things We Do and Why We Do Them argues against the common assumption that there is one thing called 'action' which all reason-giving explanations of action are geared towards. Sandis shows why all theories concerned with identifying the nature of our 'real' reasons for action fail from the outset.

In this excellent book Sebastien Gandon focuses mainly on Russell's two major texts, Principa Mathematica and Principle of Mathematics , meticulously unpicking the details of these texts and bringing a new interpretation of both the mathematical and the philosophical content. Winner of The Bertrand Russell Society Book Award 2013.

This book has two objectives: to be a contribution to the understanding of Frege's theory of truth - especially a defence of his notorious critique of the correspondence theory - and to be an introduction to the practice of interpreting philosophical texts.

Exploring the ethical dimension of Wittgenstein's thought, Iczkovits challenges the view that Wittgenstein had a vision of language and subsequently a vision of ethics, showing how the two are integrated in his philosophical method, and allowing us to reframe traditional problems in moral philosophy considered as external to questions of meaning.

This historically-informed critical assessment of Dummett's account of abstract objects, examines in detail some of the Fregean presuppositions of Dummett's account whilst also engaging with phenomenological approaches and recent work on the problem of abstract entities.

The book consists of a series of chapters on Carnap's ideal of explication as an alternative to the naturalistic conceptions of science, setting it in its historical context, discussing specific cases of explications, and enriching the on-going debate on conceptual engineering and naturalism in analytic philosophy.

The first book in English to offer a systematic survey of Bolzano's philosophical logic and theory of knowledge, it offers a reconstruction of Bolzano's views on a series of key issues: the analysis of meaning, generality, analyticity, logical consequence, mathematical demonstration and knowledge by virtue of meaning.

This book offers a defense against non-classical approaches to the paradoxes. The author argues that, despite appearances, the paradoxes give no reason at all to reject classical logic. In fact, he believes classical solutions fare better than non-classical ones with respect to key tests like Curry's Paradox, a Liar-like paradox that dialetheists are forced to solve in a way totally disjoint from their solution to the Liar. Graham Priest's In Contradiction was the first major work that advocated the use of non-classical approaches. Since then, these views have moved into the philosophical mainstream. Much of this movement is fueled by a widespread sense that these logically heterodox solutions get to the real nub of the issue. They lack the ad hoc feel of many other solutions to the paradoxes. The author believes that it's long past time for a response to these attacks against classical orthodoxy. He presents a non-logically-revisionary solution to the paradoxes. This title offers a literal way of cashing out the disquotation metaphor. While the details of the view are novel, the idea has a pre-history in the relevant literature. The author examines objections in detail. He rejects each in turn and concludes by comparing the virtues of his logically orthodox approach with those of the paraconsistent and paracomplete competition.

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the twentieth century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. Relativism and Monadic Truth aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. Throughout, Herman Cappelen and John Hawthorne contrast relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, they argue, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

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.

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.

This book is a defence of the philosophy of common sense in the spirit of Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore, drawing on the work of Aristotle, evolutionary biology and psychology, and historical studies on the origins of early modern philosophy. It defines and explores common sense beliefs, and defends them from challenges from prominent philosophers.

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.

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.

Scientific concepts, laws, theories and models are representations but are uniquely different. This book explores each within an original, philosophical framework rooted in the Kantian tradition. Through a revisionist historical approach, it shows how this tradition helps us rethink contemporary issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science.

This book is a Wittgensteinian study of concept possession and conceptual investigation in philosophy. It offers advanced introduction to Wittgenstein's philosophy and original treatment of its most crucial regions. Written as a Socratic dialogue, with a glance to Plato, it makes a bold claim about Wittgenstein's place in Western philosophy.

This book argues that it is not obvious what we means by saying our beliefs and assertions are 'truth-directed'. Do we weaken our notion of a belief if we deal with radical scepticism without surrendering to idealism? This book defends a radically new 'ecological' model of knowledge, examining what might happen if we abandoned genuine belief.

Does the self - a unified, separate, persisting thinker/owner/agent - exist? Drawing on Western philosophy, neurology and Theravadin Buddhism, this book argues that the self is an illusion created by a tier of non-illusory consciousness and a tier of desire-driven thought and emotion, and that separateness underpins the self's illusory status.

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.

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.

Walter Benjamin's work represents one of the most radical and controversial responses to the problems of twentieth-century culture and society. This new interpretation analyzes some of the central enigmatic features of his writing, arguing that they result from the co-presence of religious scepticism and the desire for a religious foundation of social life. Margarete Kohlenbach focuses on the structure of self-reference as an expression of Benjamin's sceptical religiosity and examines its significance in his writing on language, literature and the cinema, as well as history, politics and modern technology.