Why believe? What kinds of things do people believe in? How have they come to believe them? And how does what they believe - or disbelieve - shape their lives and the meaning the world has for them? For Graham Ward, who is one of the mostinnovative writers on contemporary religion, these questions are more than just academic. They go to the heart not only of who but of what we are as human beings. Over the last thirty years, our understandings of mind and consciousness have changed in important ways through exciting new developments in neuroscience. The author addresses this quantum shift by exploring the biology of believing. He offers sustained reflection on perception, cognition, time, emotional intelligence, knowledge and sensation. Though the 'truth' of belief remains under increasing attack, in a thoroughly secularised context, Ward boldly argues that secularity is itself a form of believing. Pointing to the places where prayer and dreams intersect, this book offers a remarkable journey through philosophy, theology and culture, thereby revealing the true nature of the human condition.

The new field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy will be the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field. It will feature papers by philosophers, papers by psychologists, and papers co-authored by people in both disciplines. The series heralds the emergence of a truly interdisciplinary field in which people from different disciplines are working together to address a shared set of questions.
The inaugural volume is roughly structured into four sections. The first three papers focus on recent developments in moral psychology, a topic that has seen lively debate and a great deal of progress over the last decade. The second section highlights three contributions that bring new methods to moral psychology: formal modeling and special populations. The third section brings together four papers that adopt an experimental philosophy approach to novel topics, including intuitive dualism, generics, joint action, and happiness. And the last two papers provide critical and historical context to the development of experimental philosophy.

Proposes that philosophy is the proper cure for neurosis. John Russon's Human Experience draws on central concepts of contemporary European philosophy to develop a novel analysis of the human psyche. Beginning with a study of the nature of perception, embodiment, and memory, Russon investigates the formation of personality through family and social experience. He focuses on the importance of the feedback we receive from others regarding our fundamental worth as persons, and on the way this interpersonal process embeds meaning into our most basic bodily practices: eating, sleeping, sex, and so on. Russon concludes with an original interpretation of neurosis as the habits of bodily practice developed in family interactions that have become the foundation for developed interpersonal life, and proposes a theory of psychological therapy as the development of philosophical insight that responds to these neurotic compulsions.

This book offers a new interpretation of Hermann von Helmholtz's work on the epistemology of geometry. A detailed analysis of the philosophical arguments of Helmholtz's Erhaltung der Kraft shows that he took physical theories to be constrained by a regulative ideal. They must render nature "completely comprehensible", which implies that all physical magnitudes must be relations among empirically given phenomena. This conviction eventually forced Helmholtz to explain how geometry itself could be so construed. Hyder shows how Helmholtz answered this question by drawing on the theory of magnitudes developed in his research on the colour-space. He argues against the dominant interpretation of Helmholtz's work by suggesting that for the latter, it is less the inductive character of geometry that makes it empirical, and rather the regulative requirement that the system of natural science be empirically closed.

This book offers a novel perspective on abduction. It starts by discussing the major theories of abduction, focusing on the hybrid nature of abduction as both inference and intuition. It reports on the Peircean theory of abduction and discusses the more recent Magnani concept of animal abduction, connecting them to the work of medieval philosophers. Building on Magnani's manipulative abduction, the accompanying classification of abduction, and the hybrid concept of abduction as both inference and intuition, the book examines the problem of visual perception together with the related concepts of misrepresentation and semantic information. It presents the author's views on caricature and the caricature model of science, and then extends the scope of discussion by introducing some standard issues in the philosophy of science. By discussing the concept of ad hoc hypothesis generation as enthymeme resolution, it demonstrates how ubiquitous the problem of abduction is in all the different individual scientific disciplines. This comprehensive text provides philosophers, logicians and cognitive scientists with a historical, unified and authoritative perspective on abduction.

This book addresses the contemporary disillusion with truth, manifest in sceptical relativism. Contending that all contemporary theories of truth are too narrow, it argues for a novel conception of truth, by showing how error is implicated in the actions of all living things; and by analyzing uses of 'true' in non-linguistic contexts.

This book explores the two major elements of Hintikka's model of inquiry: underlying game theoretical motivations and the central role of questioning. The chapters build on the Hintikkan tradition extending Hintikka's model and present a wide variety of approaches to the philosophy of inquiry from different directions, ranging from erotetic logic to Lakatosian philosophy, from socio-epistemologic approaches to strategic reasoning and mathematical practice. Hintikka's theory of inquiry is a well-known example of a dynamic epistemic procedure. In an interrogative inquiry, the inquirer is given a theory and a question. He then tries to answer the question based on the theory by posing questions to nature or an oracle. The initial formulation of this procedure by Hintikka is rather broad and informal. This volume introduces a carefully selected responses to the issues discussed by Hintikka. The articles in the volume were contributed by various authors associated with a research project on Hintikka's interrogative theory of inquiry conducted in the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST) of Paris, including those who visited to share their insight.

Sceptics raise doubts about our ability to have knowledge generally, and naturalists use scientific discoveries to question common-sense thinking about the world, language, and the mind. This book replies to these contentions, using a transcendental argument to show that everyday thought constitutes an interlocking system of concepts presupposed by all types of reasoning, including empirical science. Thus sceptics cannot question ordinary belief, or science challenge everyday thinking, without undermining their own legitimacy. In addition to replying to arguments by scientific naturalists in a number of areas, the book presents common-sense thought in detail about reality and the mind. It also considers the circumstances under which religious belief is justified. The result is a contemporary defense of our over-all conceptual scheme giving everyday thought a central place but also accommodating scientific and other forms of thinking.

The Passion of Infinity generates a historical narrative surrounding the concept of the irrational as a threat which rational culture has made a series of attempts to understand and relieve. It begins with a reading of Sophocles' Oedipus as the paradigmatic figure of a reason that, having transgressed its mortal limit, becomes catastrophically reversed. It then moves through Aristotle's ethics, psychology and theory of tragedy, which redefine reason's collapses in moral-psychological rather than religious terms. By changing the way in which the irrational is conceived, and the nature of its relation to reason, Aristotle eliminates the concept of an irrationality which reason cannot in principle dissolve. The book culminates in an extensive reading of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, who, in a critical retrieval of both Greek tragedy and Aristotle, prescribe their apparently pathological age a paradoxical task: develop a finite form of subjectivity willing to undergo an unthinkable thought - allow the transcendence of a god to enter into the mind as well as the marrow, to make a tragic appearance in which a limit to the immanence of human reason can again be established.

The present book continues Rescher's longstanding practice of publishing groups of philosophical essays that originated in occasional lecture and conference presentations. Notwithstanding their topical diversity they exhibit a uniformity of method in a common attempt to view historically significant philosophical issues in the light of modern perspectives opened up through conceptual clarification.

Once before, as it now is again, pragmatism was a transformative, world-wide intellectual movement that championed a new paradigm of how we should think and act in order to meet the challenges of the modern sciences, frame inclusive and democratic public policy, and teach ethical habits of inclusive, meaning-filled, growth-fostering daily living. During pragmatism's time of eclipse after World War II, Richard J. Bernstein and a few other stubborn visionaries struggled to keep its embers alive while successfully steering philosophy out of its "linguistic turn." In "The Pragmatic Turn," Bernstein reflects on the lessons classical pragmatism can still teach us, criticizes the ideas of some leading contemporary thinkers, and calls younger scholars to join him in working on key philosophical issues of the present and the future.
"Richard J. Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy: Rekindling Pragmatism's Fire" is the response of twelve younger critics - some fresh voices, some already well-known - and Bernstein's response to each of them. It is a lively, accessible, inter-generational conversation that exemplifies pragmatism's spirit, including discussions of classical pragmatists like Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Locke, and contemporary pragmatists like Putnam, Rorty, Brandom, and Habermas.

Underdetermination. An Essay on Evidence and the Limits of Natural Knowledge is a wide-ranging study of the thesis that scientific theories are systematically "underdetermined" by the data they account for. This much-debated thesis is a thorn in the side of scientific realists and methodologists of science alike and of late has been vigorously attacked. After analyzing the epistemological and ontological aspects of the controversy in detail, and reviewing pertinent logical facts and selected scientific cases, Bonk carefully examines the merits of arguments for and against the thesis. Along the way, he investigates methodological proposals and recent theories of confirmation, which promise to discriminate among observationally equivalent theories on evidential grounds. He explores sympathetically but critically W.V.Quine and H. Putnama (TM)s arguments for the thesis, the relationship between indeterminacy and underdetermination, and possibilities for a conventionalist solution.

Janaway provides a detailed and critical account of Schopenhauer's central philosophical achievement: his account of the self and its relation to the world of objects. The author's approach to this theme is historical, yet is designed to show the philosophical interest of such an approach. He explores in unusual depth Schopenhauer's often ambivalent relation to Kant, and highlights the influence of Schopenhauer's view of self and world on Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, as well as tracing the many points of contact between Schopenhauer's thought and current philosophical debates about the self.

This classic book by Theodor W. Adorno anticipates many of the themes that have since become common in contemporary philosophy: the critique of foundationalism, the illusions of idealism and the end of epistemology. It also foreshadows many of the key ideas that were developed by Adorno in his most important philosophical works, including Negative Dialectics. Against Epistemology is based on a manuscript Adorno originally wrote in Oxford in 1934-37 during his first years in exile and subsequently reworked in Frankfurt in 1955-56. The text was written as a critique of Husserl's phenomenology, but the critique of phenomenology is used as the occasion for a much broader critique of epistemology. Adorno described this as a 'metacritique' which blends together the analysis of Husserl's phenomenology as the most advanced instance of the decay of bourgeois idealism with an immanent critique of the tensions and contradictions internal to Husserl's thought. The result is a powerful text which remains one of the most devastating critiques of Husserl's work ever written and which heralded many of the ideas that have become commonplace in contemporary philosophy.

Pauliina Remes and Juha Sihvola In the course of history, philosophers have given an impressive variety of answers to the question, "What is self?" Some of them have even argued that there is no such thing at all. This volume explores the various ways in which selfhood was approached and conceptualised in antiquity. How did the ancients understand what it is that I am, fundamentally, as an acting and affected subject, interpreting the world around me, being distinct from others like and unlike me? The authors hi- light the attempts in ancient philosophical sources to grasp the evasive character of the specifically human presence in the world. They also describe how the ancient philosophers understood human agents as capable of causing changes and being affected in and by the world. Attention will be paid to the various ways in which the ancients conceived of human beings as subjects of reasoning and action, as well as responsible individuals in the moral sphere and in their relations to other people. The themes of persistence, identity, self-examination and self-improvement recur in many of these essays. The articles of the collection combine systematic and historical approaches to ancient sources that range from Socrates to Plotinus and Augustine.

This book presents a philosophical approach to probability and probabilistic thinking, considering the underpinnings of probabilistic reasoning and modeling, which effectively underlie everything in data science. The ultimate goal is to call into question many standard tenets and lay the philosophical and probabilistic groundwork and infrastructure for statistical modeling. It is the first book devoted to the philosophy of data aimed at working scientists and calls for a new consideration in the practice of probability and statistics to eliminate what has been referred to as the "Cult of Statistical Significance." The book explains the philosophy of these ideas and not the mathematics, though there are a handful of mathematical examples. The topics are logically laid out, starting with basic philosophy as related to probability, statistics, and science, and stepping through the key probabilistic ideas and concepts, and ending with statistical models. Its jargon-free approach asserts that standard methods, such as out-of-the-box regression, cannot help in discovering cause. This new way of looking at uncertainty ties together disparate fields - probability, physics, biology, the "soft" sciences, computer science - because each aims at discovering cause (of effects). It broadens the understanding beyond frequentist and Bayesian methods to propose a Third Way of modeling.

This comprehensive Handbook offers a leading-edge yet accessible guide to the most important facets of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophical system, the last true system of German philosophy. Written by a diverse, international and interdisciplinary group of eminent and up-and-coming scholars, each of the 28 chapters in this Handbook includes an authoritative exposition of different viewpoints as well as arguing for a particular thesis. Authors also put Schopenhauer's ideas into historical context and connect them when possible to contemporary philosophy. Key features: Structured in six parts, addressing the development of Schopenhauer's system, his epistemology and metaphysics, aesthetics and philosophy of art, ethical and political thought, philosophy of religion and legacy in Britain, France, and the US. Special coverage of Schopenhauer's treatment of Judaism, Christianity, Vedic thought and Buddhism Attention to the relevance of Schopenhauer for contemporary metaphysics, metaethics and ethics in particular. The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook is an essential resource for scholars as well as advanced students of nineteenth-century philosophy. Researchers and graduate students in musicology, comparative literature, religious studies, English, French, history, and political science will find this guide to be a rigorous and refreshing Handbook to support their own explorations of Schopenhauer's thought.

This volume covers a wide range of topics that fall under the 'philosophy of quantifiers', a philosophy that spans across multiple areas such as logic, metaphysics, epistemology and even the history of philosophy. It discusses the import of quantifier variance in the model theory of mathematics. It advances an argument for the uniqueness of quantifier meaning in terms of Evert Beth's notion of implicit definition and clarifies the oldest explicit formulation of quantifier variance: the one proposed by Rudolf Carnap. The volume further examines what it means that a quantifier can have multiple meanings and addresses how existential vagueness can induce vagueness in our modal notions. Finally, the book explores the role played by quantifiers with respect to various kinds of semantic paradoxes, the logicality issue, ontological commitment, and the behavior of quantifiers in intensional contexts.

Through original speculations on the surprisingly complementary concepts of simultaneity and delay, and new interpretations of the great philosophers of time, this book proposes an innovative theory of staggered time. In the early 20th Century, Bergson and Husserl (following Einstein) made Simultaneity-what it means for events to occur at the same time-a central motif in philosophy.In the late 20th Century, Derrida and Deleuze instead emphasized Delay-events staggered over distant times.This struggle between convergent and staggered time also plays out in 20th Century aesthetics (especially music), politics, and the sciences. Despite their importance in the history of philosophy, this is the first book to comprehensively examine the concepts of simultaneity and delay.By putting simultaneity and delay into a dialectical relation, this book argues that time in general is organized by elastic rhythms. Lampert's concepts describe the time-structures of such diverse phenomena as atonal music, political decision-making, neuronal delays, leaps of memory and the boredom of waiting; and simultaneities and delays in everyday experience and behaviour.

"Complexity" has been part of the academic discourse for a decade or two. Texts on Complexity fall mainly in two categories: fairly technical and mathematical on the one hand, and fairly broad, vague and general on the other. Paul Cilliers' book Complexity and Postmodernism. Understanding Complex Systems (Routledge 1998) constituted an attempt to bridge this divide by reflecting more rigorously on the philosophical implications of complexity, and by making it accessible to the social sciences. This edited volume is a continuation of this project, with specific reference to the ethical implications of acknowledging complexity. These issues are pertinent to our understanding of organisations and institutions and could contribute significantly to the development of a richer understanding of ethics in business and would be a useful tool for teachers, researchers and post-graduate students with ethical concerns in disciplines ranging from Philosophy, Applied Ethics, Sociology, Organisational Studies, Political Science, Anthropology and Cultural Studies. The central theme which binds all the contributions together is: the inevitability of normative and ethical issues when dealing with complex phenomena. The book should thus be useful in the development of Business Ethics on two levels: in the first place on the level of developing a strong theoretical foundation, in the second place in providing specific examples of this theory in action in the real world.

Widely used in philosophy courses, this succinct study explores the problem of determining the relation between the body and mind. In that philosophy seeks to elucidate man's place and action in nature, Campbell asserts that our assessment of the body-mind problem affects our perspectives on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the natural sciences. After discussing how the body-mind problem developed, Campbell sets forth four incompatible propositions that serve as the framework for evaluating different philosophical approaches to the problem. Among competing perspectives, he examines dualism, behaviorist theories, the causal theory of mind, and central-state epiphenomenalism. This second edition includes a chapter on functionalism and an expanded bibliography.

The book offers a reflection on the nature, scope, and limits of knowledge that have been at the focus of the author's work over decades. The essays collected in this volume expound and extend these efforts in exploring the outer fringes of understanding: the outer boundaries of conceivability, the limits of cognition, and the ramifications of ineffability and paradox. They join in exploring the lay of the land at the boundaries of knowledge. The first chapters address basic facts regarding the conceptualization of knowledge. This is followed by a study on how to deal with problems relating to the affirmation and considerations of truth. The final chapters scrutinize the limits of demonstration and the inherent impossibility of realizing an ideal systematization of our knowledge of totalities. The book affords novel perspectives regarding the thought of a widely appreciated philosopher. It is an original work aimed for readers interested in the theory of knowledge and philosophy of cognition.

We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.

Formal methods are changing how epistemology is being studied and understood. A Critical Introduction to Formal Epistemology introduces the types of formal theories being used and explains how they are shaping the subject. Beginning with the basics of probability and Bayesianism, it shows how representing degrees of belief using probabilities informs central debates in epistemology. As well as discussing induction, the paradox of confirmation and the main challenges to Bayesianism, this comprehensive overview covers objective chance, peer disagreement, the concept of full belief, and the traditional problems of justification and knowledge. Subjecting each position to a critical analysis, it explains the main issues in formal epistemology, and the motivations and drawbacks of each position. Written in an accessible language and supported study questions, guides to further reading and a glossary, positions are placed in an historic context to give a sense of the development of the field. As the first introductory textbook on formal epistemology, A Critical Introduction to Formal Epistemology is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of contemporary epistemology.