Introduces metaethics in a refreshing, question-driven way that explains the main topics and problems for the beginning student. The first edition has established itself as one of the best introductions to the topic for the beginner and offers a better guide than more advanced books. The second edition benefits from a reordering of the chapters to make the flow of discussion easier and includes new material on evolution and ethics, debunking arguments and 'thick' and 'thin' moral concepts. Includes helpful features such as chapter summaries, study questions, further reading and a glossary.

In recent years many influential philosophers have advocated that philosophy is an a priori science. Yet very few epistemology textbooks discuss a priori knowledge at any length, focusing instead on empirical knowledge and empirical justification. As a priori knowledge has moved centre stage, the literature remains either too technical or too out of date to make up a reasonable component of an undergraduate course. Edwin Mares book aims to rectify this. This book seeks to make accessible to students the standard topics and current debates within a priori knowledge, including necessity and certainty, rationalism, empiricism and analyticity, Quine's attack on the a priori, Kantianism, Aristotelianism, mathematical knowledge, moral knowledge, logical knowledge and philosophical knowledge.

The book analyses the work of R.G. Collingwood and Romantic thinkers, taking an interdisciplinary approach to mythology The book traces the changing relationship between history and myth and argues for new methodological approaches The book brings forward the broader perspective of idealism, where history is viewed as a form of knowledge, to bear upon a discussion of the nature of myths

Epistemology has traditionally been motivated by a desire to respond to skeptical challenges. The skeptic presents an argument for the view that knowledge is impossible, and the theorist of knowledge is called upon to explain why we should think, contrary to the skeptic, that it is genuinely possible to gain knowledge. Traditional theories of knowledge offer responses to the skeptic which fail to draw on the resources of the sciences. This is no simple oversight; there are principled reasons why such resources are thought to be unavailable to the theorist of knowledge. This book takes a different approach. After arguing that appeals to science are not illegitimate in responding to skepticism, this book shows how the sciences offer an illuminating perspective on traditional questions about the nature and possibility of knowledge. This book serves as an introduction to a scientifically informed approach to the theory of knowledge. This book is a vital resource for students and scholars interested in epistemology and its connections to recent development in cognitive science.

Including two new essays, this remarkable volume is an updated edition of Davidson's classic Essays on Actions and Events (1980). A superb work on the nature of human action, it features influential discussions of numerous topics. These include the freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory.

In the history of philosophical thought, few themes loom as large as skepticism. Skepticism has been the most visible and important part of debates about knowledge. Skepticism at its most basic questions our cognitive achievements, challenges our ability to obtain reliable knowledge; casting doubt on our attempts to seek and understand the truth about everything from ethics, to other minds, religious belief, and even the underlying structure of matter and reality. Since Descartes, the defense of knowledge against skepticism has been one of the primary tasks not just of epistemology but philosophy itself.
The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism features twenty-six newly commissioned chapters by top figures in the field. Part One contains articles explaining important kinds of skeptical reasoning. Part Two focuses on responses to skeptical arguments. Part Three concentrates on important contemporary issues revolving around skepticism. As the first volume of its kind, the articles make significant contributions to the debate on skepticism.

This title, first published in 1975, contains two complimentary studies by Paul Q. Hirst: the first based on Claude Bernard's theory of scientific knowledge, and the second concerning Emile Durkheim's attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for a scientific sociology in The Rules of Sociological Method. The author's primary concern is to answer the question: is Durkheim's theory of knowledge logically consistent and philosophically viable? His principal conclusion is that the epistemology developed in the Rules is an impossible one and that its inherent contradictions are proof that sociology as it is commonly understood can never be a scientific discipline.

This is a work in Kantian conceptual geography. It explores issues in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics in particular by appealing to theses drawn from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Those issues include the nature of the subjective, objective, and empirical; potential scopes of the subjective; what can (and cannot) be said about a subject-independent reality; analyticity, syntheticity, apriority, and aposteriority; constitutive principles, acquisitive principles, and empirical claims; meaning, indeterminacy, and incommensurability; logically possible versus subjectively empirical worlds; and the nature of empirical truth. Part One introduces two theses drawn from the Critique. The first, Empirical Dualism, concerns the subjective, objective, and empirical. The second, Subjective Principlism, concerns principles that might bear on the empirical. Part Two examines work of influential analytic philosophers to reveal how conceptually expansive the territory formed by Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism is. Part Three defends that territory by defending Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism themselves. Part Four discloses two new lands within the territory that have so far remained uncharted. The first is a Kantian account of meaning, which is shown to be superior to other accounts of meaning in the analytic literature. The second are Kantian thoughts on truth, which illuminate the nature of empirical truth itself. Finally Part Five shows how engaging in Kantian conceptual geography enriches epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics generally.

The revival of ancient Greek scepticism in the 16th and 17th centuries was of the greatest importance in changing the intellectual climate in which modern science developed, and in developing the attitude that we now call "The scientific outlook." Many streams of thought came together contributing to various facets of this crucial development. One of the most fascinating of these is that of "constructive scepticism," the history of one of whose forms is traced in this study by Prof. Van Leeuwen. The sceptical crisis that arose during the Renaissance and Refor mation challenged the fundamental principles of the many areas of man's intellectual world, in philosophy, theology, humane and moral studies, and the sciences. The devastating weapons of classical scep ticism were employed to undermine man's confidence in his ability to discover truth in any area whatsoever by use of the human faculties of the senses and reason. These sceptics indicated that there was no area in which human beings could gain any certain knowledge, and that the effort to do so was fruitless, vain, presumptuous, and perhaps even blasphemous. StaI'ting with the writings of Hen ric us Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) and Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), a thoroughly destructive sceptical movement developed, attacking both the old and the new science, philosophy and theology, and insisting that true and certain knowledge can only be gained by Revelation."

It is widely believed that people have privileged and authoritative access to their own thoughts, and many theories have been proposed to explain this supposed fact. The Opacity of Mind challenges the consensus view and subjects the theories in question to critical scrutiny, while showing that they are not protected against the findings of cognitive science by belonging to a separate "explanatory space." The book argues that our access to our own thoughts is almost always interpretive, grounded in perceptual awareness of our own circumstances and behavior, together with our own sensory imagery (including inner speech). In fact our access to our own thoughts is no different in principle from our access to the thoughts of other people, utilizing the conceptual and inferential resources of the same "mindreading" faculty, and relying on many of the same sources of evidence. Peter Carruthers proposes and defends the Interpretive Sensory-Access (ISA) theory of self-knowledge. This is supported through comprehensive examination of many different types of evidence from across cognitive science, integrating a diverse set of findings into a single well-articulated theory. One outcome is that there are hardly any kinds of conscious thought. Another is that there is no such thing as conscious agency.
Written with Carruthers' usual clarity and directness, this book will be essential reading for philosophers interested in self-knowledge, consciousness, and related areas of philosophy. It will also be of vital interest to cognitive scientists, since it casts the existing data in a new theoretical light. Moreover, the ISA theory makes many new predictions while also suggesting constraints and controls that should be placed on future experimental investigations of self-knowledge.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work argues that correspondence theories of truth fail because the relation which holds between a true thought and a fact is that of identity, not correspondence. Facts are not complexes of worldly entities which make thoughts true they are merely true thoughts. According to Julian Dodd, the resulting "modest identity theory", while not defining truth, correctly diagnoses the failure of correspondence theories, and thereby prepares the ground for a defensible deflation of the concept of truth.

The aim of this book is to acquire a better understanding of the question 'who am I?' By means of the concepts of self-knowledge and self-deception questions about the self are studied. The light in which its topic is seen is the light of love, the light in which other people really become visible and so oneself in one's relation to them.

With renewed attention to German idealism in general and to Fichte in particular, this timely collection of new papers will be of interest to anyone concerned with transcendental philosophy, German idealism, modern German philosophy and transcendental arguments.

How does perceptual experience make us knowledgeable about the world? In this book Nadja El Kassar argues that an informed answer requires a novel theory of perception: perceptual experience involves conceptual capacities and consists in a relation between a perceiver and the world. Contemporary theories of perception disagree about the role of content and conceptual capacities in perceptual experience. In her analysis El Kassar scrutinizes the arguments of conceptualist and relationist theories, thereby exposing their limitations for explaining the epistemic role of perceptual experience. Against this background she develops her novel theory of epistemically significant perception. Her theory improves on current accounts by encompassing both the epistemic role of perceptual experiences and its perceptual character. Central claims of her theory receive additional support from work in vision science, making this book an original contribution to the philosophy of perception.

Areas covered in this text include: tense and tenselessness; periods and instants; the measurement of time; and time, change and causation. The author attempts to show how considerations in the philosophy of logic and language are needed to settle many of the issues here. For example, the debate about tenselessness turns out to hinge on whether a genuinely tense-free language is conceivable; and the possibility of time without change is grounded in what makes duration-statements have the sense they do.

This is the first book that addresses the issue of research notes for writing history of science in a comprehensive manner. Its case studies range from the early modern period to present and cover a broad range of different disciplines. The contributions are based on papers presented at the workshop entitled "Reworking the Bench: Laboratory Notebooks in the History of Science," held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin or written after the workshop.

This book is about Austrian philosophy leading up to the philosophy of Rudolf Haller. It emerged from a philosophy conference held at the University of Arizona by Keith Lehrer with the support of the University of Arizona and Austrian Cultural Institute. We are grateful to the University of Arizona and the Austrian Cultural Institute for their support, to Linda Radzik for her editorial assistance, to Rudolf Haller for his advice and illuminating autobiographical essay and to Ann Hickman for preparing the camera-ready typescript. The papers herein are ones preseJ,lted at the conference. The idea that motivated holding the conference was to clarify the conception of Austrian Philosophy and the role of Rudolf Haller therein. Prof Rudolf Haller of Karl-Franzens University of Graz has had a profound influence on modern philosophy, which, modest man that he is, probably amazes him. He has made fine contributions to many areas of philosophy, to aesthetics, to philosophy of language and the theOl)' of knowledge. His seven books and more than two hundred articles testify to his accomplishments. But there is something else which he did which was the reason for the conference on Austrian Philosophy in his honor. He presented us, as Barry Smith explains, with a unified conception of Austrian Philosophy.

This study is a systematic investigation into the metaphysical foundations of identity over time. David Oderberg elaborates and evaluates the most common theory about the persistence of objects through time and change, namely the classical theory of spatio-temporal continuity. He shows how the theory requires an ontology of temporal parts, according to which objects are made up of temporally extended segments or stages.;This ontology is criticized as unwarranted by modern space-time physics, and as internally incoherent. The author argues that identity over time should be seen as a primitive or unanalyzable phenomenon, and that the so-called puzzle cases and paradoxes of identity can be dealt with without recourse to such an ontology.

Knowledge representation is perhaps the most central problem confronting artificial intelligence. Expert systems need knowledge of their domain of expertise in order to function properly. Computer vlslOn systems need to know characteristics of what they are "seeing" in order to be able to fully interpret scenes. Natural language systems are invaluably aided by knowledge of the subject of the natural language discourse and knowledge of the participants in the discourse. Knowledge can guide learning systems towards better understanding and can aid problem solving systems in creating plans to solve various problems. Applications such as intelligent tutoring. computer-aided VLSI design. game playing. automatic programming. medical reasoning. diagnosis in various domains. and speech recogOltlOn. to name a few. are all currently experimenting with knowledge-based approaches. The problem of knowledge representation breaks down into several subsidiary problems including what knowledge to represent in a particular application. how to extract or create that knowledge. how to represent the knowledge efficiently and effectively. how to implement the knowledge representation scheme chosen. how to modify the knowledge in the face of a changing world. how to reason with the knowledge. and how tc use the knowledge appropriately in the creation of the application solution. This volume contains an elaboration of many of these basic issues from a variety of perspectives.

Leibniz said with a mixture of admiration and inspiration that the Duchess Sophie of Hannover always wanted to know the reason why behind the reason why. And that is just how rationality works: it wants to leave no loose ends to understanding, seeking to enable us to understand things through to the bitter end. In the twelve chapters that make up Satisfying Reason, Rescher develops and defends the following perspective: That rationality is a cardinal virtue in cognitive matters. That this is not something simple and cut-and-dried: in the pursuit of truth through the development of knowledge we face obstacles -- sometimes even insuperable ones. All that we can do is the best we can, realizing that even our very best may still be imperfect. Nevertheless, the venture is far from hopeless. While absolutes are unattainable in the cognitive venture, some solutions are situationally optimal, being comparatively the best that can be managed under the circumstances. That reason itself enables us to come to terms with this state of affairs, urging us to accept the best we can do as good enough. Satisfying Reason is an explanation of the presuppositions and methods of rational enquiry, an original exercise in metaknowledge, developing a systematic body of knowledge about the scope and limits of knowledge itself.

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part IV: Applications The parts, and chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality.

The first comprehensive philosophical introduction and assessment to the problem of self-control, an increasingly popular topic in philosophy Self-control is one of the most fascinating problems in philosophy, studied in core subjects such as free will and ethics, yet there is no book available explaining in clear language what it is Plenty of examples from psychology and philosophy including self-deception in mental disorder, addiction and everyday examples such as loss of willpower and even mind-wandering Includes helpful additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and glossary Very strong author team led by Neil Levy, well-known for his work on addiction, consciousness and free will.

Philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman is one of the most innovative and influential critical thinkers writing today. This book is the first English-language study of his writing on images. An image is a form of representation, but what are the philosophical frameworks supporting it? The book considers how Didi-Huberman takes up this question repeatedly over the course of his career. Placing his project in relation to major historical and intellectual contexts, it shows not only how he modifies dominant disciplinary traditions, but also how the study of images is central to a new way of thinking about poststructuralist-inspired art history. -- .

Relativism, the position that things are for each as they seem to each, was first formulated in Western philosophy by Protagoras, the 5th century BC Greek orator and teacher. Mi-Kyoung Lee focuses on the challenge to the possibility of expert knowledge posed by Protagoras, together with responses by the three most important philosophers of the next generation, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. In his book Truth, Protagoras made vivid use of two provocative but imperfectly spelled out ideas: first, that we are all "measures" of the truth and that we are each already capable of determining how things are for ourselves, since the senses are our best and most credible guides to the truth; second, given that things appear differently to different people, there is no basis on which to decide that one appearance is true rather than the other. Plato developed these ideas into a more fully worked-out theory, which he then subjected to refutation in the Theaetetus. Aristotle argued that Protagoras' ideas lead to skepticism in Metaphysics Book G, a chapter which reflects awareness of Plato's reaction in the Theaetetus. And finally Democritus incorporated modified Protagorean ideas and arguments into his theory of knowledge and perception.
There have been many important recent studies of these thinkers in isolation. However, there has been no attempt to tell a single, coherent story about how Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle responded to Protagoras' striking claim, and to its perceived implications about knowledge, perception, and truth. By studying these four figures in relation to each other, we arrive at a better understanding of an important chapter in the development of Greek epistemology.