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.

The aim of this book is to analyse historical problems related to the use of mathematics in physics as well as to the use of physics in mathematics and to investigate "Mathematical Physics" as precisely the new discipline which is concerned with this dialectical link itself. So the main question is: "When and why did the tension between mathematics and physics, explicitly practised at least since Galileo, evolve into such a new scientific theory? "

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The authors explain the various ways in which this science allowed an advanced mathematical modelling in physics on the one hand, and the invention of new mathematical ideas on the other hand. Of course this problem is related to the links between institutions, universities, schools for engineers, and industries, and so it has social implications as well.

The link by which physical ideas had influenced the world of mathematics was not new in the 19th century, but it came to a kind of maturity at that time. Recently, much historical research has been done into mathematics and physics and their relation in this period. The purpose of the Symposium and this book is to gather and re-evaluate the current thinking on this subject. It brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and gives much-needed insight in the subject of mathematical physics from a historical point of view.

What if modern reason empowers us only at the cost of impoverishing thought? What if an ancient practice of philosophy could be rediscovered as a way of living? In a rural retreat in northern England, nine philosophers held regular meetings to discuss the nature of philosophy as a way of life. Posing a formidable challenge to the dominance of objective reasoning, they sought to build together a conception and practice of reasoning that is deeply engaged with the meaning of life, with dialogue, and with self-transformation. Here, as spokesman for this group, Philip Goodchild offers his readers insight into these symposium. Eschewing convention, these essays offer profound meditations on the meaning of life, reason, inwardness, virtue, love, and God. Echoing Plato, Kierkegaard, and Weil, this bold yet imperfect struggle for authenticity performs philosophy as a spiritual exercise, effects a new critique of pure reason, and changes what it means to think today. Like Socrates himself, this book offers a challenge to all.

In The Rise of Neoliberal Philosophy: Human Capital, Profitable Knowledge, and the Love of Wisdom, Brandon Absher argues that the neoliberal transformation of higher education has resulted in a paradigm shift in philosophy in the United States, leading to the rise of neoliberal philosophy. Neoliberal philosophy seeks to attract investment by demonstrating that it can produce optimal return. Further, philosophers in the neoliberal paradigm internalize and reproduce the values of the prevailing social order in their work, reorienting philosophical desire toward the production of attractive commodities. The aim of philosophy in the neoliberal university, Absher shows, has become the production of human capital and profitable knowledge.

Philosophers have long agreed that moral responsibility might not only have a freedom condition, but also an epistemic condition. Moral responsibility and knowledge interact, but the question is exactly how. Ignorance might constitute an excuse, but the question is exactly when. Surprisingly enough, the epistemic condition has only recently attracted the attention of scholars. This volume sets the agenda. Sixteen new essays address the following central questions: Does the epistemic condition require akrasia? Why does blameless ignorance excuse? Does moral ignorance sustained by one's culture excuse? Does the epistemic condition involve knowledge of the wrongness or wrongmaking features of one's action? Is the epistemic condition an independent condition, or is it derivative from one's quality of will or intentions? Is the epistemic condition sensitive to degrees of difficulty? Are there different kinds of moral responsibility and thus multiple epistemic conditions? Is the epistemic condition revisionary? What is the basic structure of the epistemic condition?

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and how we understand them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading.

Investigation of the Percept is a short (eight verses and a three page autocommentary) work that focuses on issues of perception and epistemology. Its author, Dignaga, was one of the most influential figures in the Indian Buddhist epistemological tradition, and his ideas had a profound and wide-ranging impact in India, Tibet, and China. The work inspired more than twenty commentaries throughout East Asia and three in Tibet, the most recent in 2014. This book is the first of its kind in Buddhist studies: a comprehensive history of a text and its commentarial tradition. The volume editors translate the root text and commentary, along with Indian and Tibetan commentaries, providing detailed analyses of the commentarial innovations of each author, as well as critically edited versions of all texts and extant Sanskrit fragments of passages. The team-based approach made it possible to study and translate a corpus of treatises in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese and to employ the methods of critical philology and cross-cultural philosophy to provide readers with a rich collection of studies and translations, along with detailed philosophical analyses that open up the intriguing implications of Dignaga's thought and demonstrate the diversity of commentarial approaches to his text. This rich text has inspired some of the greatest minds in India and Tibet. It explores some of the key issues of Buddhist epistemology: the relationship between minds and their percepts, the problems of idealism and realism, and error and misperception.

This volume answers questions that lead to a clearer picture of third-person self- knowledge, the self-interpretation it embeds, and its narrative structure. Bringing together current research on third-person self-knowledge and self-interpretation, the book focuses on third-person self-knowledge, and the role that narrative and interpretation play in acquiring it. It regards the third-personal epistemic approach to oneself as a problem worthy of investigation in its own right, and makes clear the relation between third-person self-knowledge, self-interpretation, and narrative capacities. In recent years, the idea that each person is in a privileged position to acquire knowledge about her own mental states has come under attack. A growing body of empirical research has cast doubt upon the existence of what philosophers call 'first person self-knowledge', i.e., knowledge about our mental states that is often thought to be immediate, transparent, and authoritative. This line of thought has led some philosophers to claim that what seems to be 'first-person self-knowledge' is really just 'third-person self-knowledge,' i.e., knowledge about our mental states that is inferential, opaque, and fallible. This book discusses challenges for first-person knowledge and explores the true nature of third-person knowledge.

Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl maintain that a realist turn-namely, one in which the natural order is the basis for individual rights-is needed to bring about a proper understanding and defense of liberty. They argue that the critical character of individual rights results from their being tethered to metaphysical realism. After reprising their explanation and defense of natural rights, Rasmussen and Den Uyl explain metaphysical realism and defend it against neo-pragmatist objections. They show it to be a formidable and preferable alternative to epistemic constructivism and crucial for a suitable understanding of ideal theory.

The essays in this volume, first presented at an international conference held at the University of Urbino, Italy, in 2011, explore the different senses of realism, arguing both for and against its distinctive theses and considering these senses from a historical point of view. The first sense is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists does so, and has the properties it has, independently of whether it is the object of a person's thought or perception. The second sense of realism is epistemological, wherein realism claims that, in some cases, it is possible to know the world as it exists in and of itself. A third sense, which has become known as ontological realism, states that universals exist as well as individuals. The essays collected here make new contributions to these fundamental philosophical issues, which have largely defined western analytic philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to the present day.

This volume contains contributions to the "systematic study of knowledge." They suggest both an extension and a new path for classical epistemology. The topics in the second volume are the following: variants of skepticism; knowledge of the first, second, and third person; practical knowledge and the structure of action; knowledge and the problem of dualism; and disjunctivism concerning experience and perception.

Richard Pettigrew offers an extended investigation into a particular way of justifying the rational principles that govern our credences (or degrees of belief). The main principles that he justifies are the central tenets of Bayesian epistemology, though many other related principles are discussed along the way. These are: Probabilism, the claims that credences should obey the laws of probability; the Principal Principle, which says how credences in hypotheses about the objective chances should relate to credences in other propositions; the Principle of Indifference, which says that, in the absence of evidence, we should distribute our credences equally over all possibilities we entertain; and Conditionalization, the Bayesian account of how we should plan to respond when we receive new evidence. Ultimately, then, this book is a study in the foundations of Bayesianism. To justify these principles, Pettigrew looks to decision theory. He treats an agent's credences as if they were a choice she makes between different options, gives an account of the purely epistemic utility enjoyed by different sets of credences, and then appeals to the principles of decision theory to show that, when epistemic utility is measured in this way, the credences that violate the principles listed above are ruled out as irrational. The account of epistemic utility set out here is the veritist's: the sole fundamental source of epistemic utility for credences is their accuracy. Thus, Pettigrew conducts an investigation in the version of epistemic utility theory known as accuracy-first epistemology. The book can also be read as an extended reply on behalf of the veritist to the evidentialist's objection that veritism cannot account for certain evidential principles of credal rationality, such as the Principal Principle, the Principle of Indifference, and Conditionalization.

There is a tendency in current philosophical thought to treat sensory experiences as a peculiar species of propositional attitude. Alan Millar argues against this view. While allowing that experiences may in some sense bear propositional content, he presents a view of sensory experiences as a species of psychological state. He applies the resulting analytical framework to a discussion of justified belief, dealing, firstly, with how beliefs may derive justification from other beliefs, and secondly, with how current sensory experiences may contribute to the justification of a person's beliefs. A key theme in his general approach is that justified belief results from the competent exercise of conceptual capacities, some of which involve an ability to respond appropriately to current experience. In working out this approach the author develops a view of concepts and their mastery, explores the role of groundless beliefs drawing on suggestions of Wittgenstein, illuminates aspects of the thought of Locke, Hume, Quine, and Goldman, and finally offers a response to a sophisticated variety of scepticism.

This text offers a series of critical commentaries on, and forced encounters between, different thinkers. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical enquiry is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and the mapping out of the contours for a speculative and pragmatic production of subjectivity.

How was the hypothetical character of theories of experiencethought about throughout the history of science? The essays cover periods from the middle ages to the 19th and 20th centuries. It is fascinating to see how natural scientists and philosophers were increasingly forced to realize that a natural science without hypotheses is not possible.

Despite the fact that over the last twenty years philosophies of the event have become more prevalent, their overall relation to the ontological paradigm remains largely unthought. This collection explores ways in which events destabilize this paradigm, producing powerful tremors that shake Being to its core. "Being Shaken" considers the personal, ethical, theological, aesthetic, and political dimensions of such disquietude, offering a multifaceted approach to the relation of ontology and the event.

This volume brings together a group of philosophically oriented logicians and logic-minded philosophers, mainly from Asia, to address a variety of logical and philosophical topics, such as modal logic and related directions (e.g. temporal logic, epistemic logic, deontic logic, logic of conditionals, and modal proof theory), theory of truth, paradoxes, intentionality, and social networks. New approaches are also proposed, such as extended modal logic with planarity of graphs, extended branching time temporal logic with conditional operators, and a relational treatment of language and logical systems, to name but a few.Given the variety of topics and issues discussed here, the book will appeal to readers from a broad range of disciplines, from mathematical/philosophical logic, computing science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence, to linguistics, game theory and beyond.

Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publicaton which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: *traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of scepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc; *new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; *foundational questions in decision-theory; *confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; *topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; *topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; and *work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony and the ethics of belief. Anyone wanting to understand the latest developments at the leading edge of the discipline can start here.

David Malet Armstrong (8 July 1926-13 May 2014) has been one of the most influential contemporary metaphysicians working in the analytic tradition and surely the greatest 20th century Australian philosopher. His main merit is to have reestablished metaphysics as a respectable branch of philosophy placing it at the centre of the philosophical debate, and giving it the status of an authoritative and competent interlocutor of both rational and empirical sciences. By means of a rigorously argumentative approach and a sharp prose, Armstrong has built a whole metaphysical system, that is, a comprehensive and unified picture of the fundamental structure of the world. The various chapters of the book address the key issues concerning Armstrong' view about the problem of universals, the nature of states of affairs, the ontological ground of possibility, nomic necessity, and dispositions, the truthmaker theory, and the theory of mind. This volume aims to celebrate Armstrong's memory bringing new understanding, and hopefully stimulating more work, on his philosophy, with the conviction that it constitutes an invaluable heritage for contemporary research in metaphysics.

"That's a crazy book " Albert Einstein said in the early 1950s, when asked his impression of Alfred Korzybski's 1933 work "Science and Sanity." More than a decade later, Richard Feynman found Korzybski's notion of "time-binding" crucial for answering the question "What is science?."

Feynman didn't know that it was Alfred Korzybski who had coined the term "time-binding" in his first, 1921, book "Manhood of Humanity" to label what he considered the defining characteristic of humans: the potential of each generation to start where the former leaves off and thus to accumulate useful knowledge at an ever-accelerating rate. In the exact sciences and technology, time-binding seems to work reasonably well. In the rest of human life, not so much. Korzybski, a patriotic Polish nobleman and an engineer who had lived under Tsarist tyranny and had seen the horrors of World War I on the Eastern Front before coming to the United States, realized the results of the disparity between rapid but narrow scientific-technological advancement and broader but snail-paced ethical-social development: a seemingly endless cycle of crises, revolutions and wars. Seeking a way out, he studied a broad range of disciplines from physics to psychiatry-fields that others felt had little to do with each other-and discovered factors of sanity in physico-mathematical methods. Comparing the ways of thinking that scientists and mathematicians exemplify when working at their best and the ways of thinking that they and other people unsanely or insanely tend to use the rest of the time, Korzybski linked science and sanity in a new world outlook with an accompanying methodology (labeled 'general semantics')-simple enough to teach children.

Traces of Korzybski's pioneering work can be found today in a variety of fields such as cognitive science, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, communication, media ecology, medicine, organizational development, philosophical counseling and philosophy, etc. In spite of this, Korzybski's radically interdisciplinary work remains relatively unassimilated into standard academic fields and hard to accurately fit into familiar popular categories. Thus, Korzybski, who originated the saying "The map is not the territory," remains a relatively neglected and misunderstood figure, shrouded in controversy: some people have considered him a genius while others have called him a crank. Drawing on an array of sources including Korzybski's personal correspondence, notes, scrapbooks, and both published and unpublished writings, as well as personal discussions and interviews with some of Korzybski's closest co-workers, Bruce I. Kodish situates Korzybski's contributions in the context of his times and provides surprising insights into his work as a whole. Kodish's clear prose provides a compellingly readable narrative of Korzybski's very busy, sometimes too busy, exciting and exhausting life while making accessible some of the most complex areas of Korzybski's thought. For years to come, this outstanding biography will remain the standard work on Alfred Korzybski's extraordinarily adventurous and significant life and work.

In this volume the philosophy of perception and observation is discussed by leading philosophers with implications in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology, and in philosophy of science. In the last years the philosophy of perception underwent substantial changes and new views appeared: the intentionality of perception has been contested by relational theories of perception (direct realism), a richer view of perceptual content has emerged, new theories of intentionality have been defended against naturalistic theories of representation (e. g. phenomenal intentionality). These theoretical changes reflect also new insights coming from psychological theories of perception. These changes have substantial consequences for the epistemic role of perception and for its role in scientific observation. In the present volume, leading philosophers of perception discuss these new views and show their implications in the philosophy of mind, in epistemology and in philosophy of science. A special focus is laid on Franz Brentano and Ludwig Wittgenstein. A reference volume for all scholars and students of the history, psychology and philosophy of perception, and cognitive science.

In this book, the author provides an account of three central ideas in the philosophy of action: trying to act, acting or doing, and one's action causing further consequences. In all three cases, novel theories of these phenomena are offered: trying to act is not a particular mental or physical act but can be explained using conditionals; that action is not the same as causing something to happen; and in the case of a special but important subset of actions, for example the opening of a window, the action is identical to the event of the window's opening. A result of this last account is that it places actions out in the world, sometimes far removed in time and space from the actor's body. The world is full of action; actions do not just exist in the many little islands of space and time that all of our bodies inhabit. In the final chapter, Ruben describes and discusses a skeptical challenge to the idea that we can ever know whether or not someone else has acted, rather than just passive events having happened to that person.

Across his relatively short and eccentric authorial career, Soren Kierkegaard develops a unique, and provocative, account of what it is to become, to be, and to lose a self, backed up by a rich phenomenology of self-experience. Yet Kierkegaard has been almost totally absent from the burgeoning analytic philosophical literature on self-constitution and personal identity. How, then, does Kierkegaard's work appear when viewed in light of current debates about self and identity-and what does Kierkegaard have to teach philosophers grappling with these problems today? The Naked Self explores Kierkegaard's understanding of selfhood by situating his work in relation to central problems in contemporary philosophy of personal identity: the role of memory in selfhood, the relationship between the notional and actual subjects of memory and anticipation, the phenomenology of diachronic self-experience, affective alienation from our past and future, psychological continuity, practical and narrative approaches to identity, and the intelligibility of posthumous survival. By bringing his thought into dialogue with major living and recent philosophers of identity (such as Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, Bernard Williams, J. David Velleman, Marya Schechtman, Mark Johnston, and others), Stokes reveals Kierkegaard as a philosopher with a significant-if challenging-contribution to make to philosophy of self and identity.

Knowledge of facts is essential for the management of life. Most studies of the subject examine how we go about trying to obtain it; they describe the processes and proceedings of rational inquiry. The present work steps back from this to inquire into the limits and limitations of such processes and to identify the assets and the limitabilities of what they are able to supply for us. It examines how knowledge of facts is secured and consolidated as such, and what the resulting information can and cannot provide. It argues that the unavoidable incompleteness of our factual information also endows it with an element of incorrectness. By looking also at the negative side of human inquiry the book's perspective clarifies the nature of our grip on the facts that constitute our view of the reality of things.

We daily classify actions by their morality and their voluntariness, and beliefs by their rationality. But in light of persistent skepticism about morality, free will, and (to a lesser extent) epistemology, we must ask what justifies us in making these various claims. This book defends a sophisticated version of pragmatism, resting on a novel account of strategy-based (as opposed to act-based) cooperative rationality. It will show that we can give a genuinely pragmatist account of morality and epistemology, while denying that truth is mere usefulness and maintaining the connection between truth and objectivity. The sophisticated pragmatist approach is shown to be particularly fruitful in that we can justify a range of important practices, including our practices of moral and epistemic evaluation, as well as our practice of making judgments regarding free will and moral responsibility.