Presented as a Vorlesung in the German philosophical tradition, this book presents the most detailed account of Nelson's method of argument analysis, celebrated by many luminaries such as Karl Popper. It was written in 1921 in opposition to the relativistic, subjectivistic and nihilistic tendencies of Nelson's time. The book contains an exposition of a method that is a further development of Kant's transcendental dialectics, followed by an application to the critical analysis of arguments by many famous thinkers, including Bentham, Mill, Poincare, Leibniz, Hegel, Einstein, Bergson, Rickert, Simmel, Brentano, Stammler, Jellinek, Dingler, and Meinong. The book presents a general theory of philosophical argumentation as seen from the viewpoint of the typical fallacies committed by anybody arguing philosophically, whether professional philosophers or philosophical laypeople. Although the nature of philosophy and philosophical argumentation is one of the most recurrent objects of reflection for philosophers, this book represents the first attempt at a general theory of philosophical fallacy. According to Nelson, it is in the shape of false dilemmas that errors in reasoning always emerge, and false dilemmas are always the result of the same mechanism--the unwitting replacement of one concept for another.

The commonly held view that Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion is fideistic loses plausibility when contrasted with recent scholarship on Wittgenstein's corpus and biography. This book reevaluates the place of Wittgenstein in the philosophy of religion and charts a path forward for the subfield by advancing three themes.

This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation of Heidegger's late work. This period of Heidegger's philosophy remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism - namely the position according to which some contradictions are true - and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an entity is neither incoherent nor logically trivial. The author achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory, into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make sense of Heidegger's concept of nothingness, the author introduces an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic.

This is the first volume dedicated to a direct exploration of Wittgenstein and Plato. It is a compilation of essays by thirteen authors of diverse geographical provenance, orientation and philosophical interest.
The volume offers the most complete and detailed view to date on Wittgenstein and Plato, without being tied to any unilateral guidelines from either a critical or philosophical perspective. The authors are scholars of Wittgenstein, but also of Plato and Greek philosophy. The book is a sort of game of mirrors: Plato in the mirror of Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein in the mirror of Plato. All essays always seek to combine philosophical interest and philological attention, although, in some essays one interest prevails over the other.
Despite the preponderance of scholars of Wittgenstein, the volume seeks to be not only a book on Wittgenstein and Plato, but also, simultaneously, on Plato and Wittgenstein.

In this brief and accessible introduction, Russell guides the reader through his famous 1910 distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description" and introduces important theories of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Kant, Hegel and others. He lays the foundation for philosophical inquiry for general readers and scholars.There are sixteen chapters: Appearance and Reality, The Existence of Matter, The Nature of Matter, Idealism, Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description, On Induction, On Our Knowledge Of General Principles, How A Priori Knowledge Is Possible, The World of Universals, On Our Knowledge of Universals, On Intuitive Knowledge, Truth and Falsehood, Knowledge, Error, and Probable Opinion, The Limits of Philosophical Knowledge, The Value of Philosophy. Russell also provides a short supplementary reading list.

This book presents Heidegger as a thinker of revolution. Understanding revolution as an occurrence whereby the previously unforeseeable comes to appear as inevitable, the temporal character of such an event is explored through Heidegger's discussion of temporality and historicity. Beginning with his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger is shown to have undertaken a radical rethinking of time in terms of human action, understood as involving both doing and making and as implicated in an interplay of the opportune moment (kairos) and temporal continuity (chronos). Developing this theme through his key writings of the early 1930s, the book shows how Heidegger's analyses of truth and freedom led to an increasingly dialectical account of time and action culminating in his phenomenology of the - artistic and political - 'work'. A context is thus given for Heidegger's political engagement in 1933. While diagnosing the moral failure of this engagement, the book defends Heidegger's account of the time of human action and shows it to foreshadow his later thought of a 'new beginning'.

A collection of essays which explores the significance of Wittgenstein for the Philosophy of Religion. Explorations of central notions in Wittgenstein's later philosophy are brought to bear on the clash between belief and atheism; understanding religious experience; language and ritual; evil and theodicies; miracles; and the possibility of a Christian philosophy.

This collection is an attempt by a diverse range of authors to reignite interest in C.I. Lewis's work within the pragmatist and analytic traditions. Although pragmatism has enjoyed a renewed popularity in the past thirty years, some influential pragmatists have been overlooked. C. I. Lewis is arguably the most important of overlooked pragmatists and was highly influential within his own time period. The volume assembles a wide range of perspectives on the strengths and weaknesses of Lewis's contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, semantics, philosophy of science, and ethics.

Although pain is one of the most fundamental and unique experiences we undergo in everyday life, it also constitutes one of the most enigmatic and frustrating subjects for many scientists. This book provides a detailed analysis of why this issue is grounded in the nature of pain itself. It also offers a philosophically driven solution of how we may still approach pain in a theoretically compelling and practically useful manner. Two main theses are defended: (i) Pain seems inscrutable because there exists no property that is commonly shared by all types of pain and that is at the same time particular to pain, setting it apart from other bodily sensations. This applies irrespective of whether we consider the psychological dimensions, neural networks, causal relations or biological functions of pain. Consequently, it is impossible to refer to ideal far-reaching and ideal distinct generalizations on the matter of pain. (ii) Despite this challenge, by focusing on the resemblance relations that hold across pains, we can generate scientific progress in explaining, predicting and treating pain. In doing so, the book aims to provide a clear conceptual basis for interdisciplinary communication and a useful heuristic for future research.

This is an exciting new collection of essays exploring the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari's work in contemporary aesthetics and political theory.Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have arguably gone further than anyone in contemporary philosophy in affirming a philosophy of creation, one that both establishes and encourages a clear ethical imperative: to create the new.In this remarkable undertaking, these two thinkers have created a fresh engagement of thought with the world. This important collection of essays attempts to explore and extend the creative rupture that Deleuze and Guattari produce in the "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" project.The essays in this volume, all by leading thinkers and theorists, extend Deleuze and Guattari's project by offering creative experiments in constructing new communities - of ideas and objects, experiences and collectives - that cohere around the interaction of philosophy, the arts and the political realm. "Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New" produces new perspectives on Deleuze and Guattari's work by emphasising its relevance to the contemporary intersection of aesthetics and political theory, thereby exploring a pressing contemporary problem: the production of the new.

This book approaches post-truth and relativism in a multidisciplinary fashion. Researchers from astrophysics, philosophy, psychology, media studies, religious studies, anthropology, social epistemology and sociology discuss and analyse the impact of relativism and post-truth both within the academy and in society at large. The motivation for this multidisciplinary approach is that relativism and post-truth are multifaceted phenomena with complex histories that have played out differently in different areas of society and different academic disciplines. There is hence a multitude of ways in which to use and understand the concepts and the phenomena to which they refer, and a multitude of critiques and defenses as well. No single volume can capture the ongoing discussions in different areas in all their complexity, but the different chapters of the book can function as exemplifications of the ramifications these phenomena have had.

This book is an autobiographical meditation on the way in which the world's population has been transformed into a society of refugees and emigres seeking -indeed, demanding- an alternative way of political belonging. Focusing on the interregnum we have precariously occupied since the end of World War II-and especially after 9/11- it constitutes a series of genealogical chapters that trace the author's journey from his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany to the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In doing so, it explores his search for an intellectual vocation adequate to the dislocating epiphany he experienced in bearing witness to these traumatising events. Having subsequently lost faith in the logic of belonging perpetuated by the nation-state, Spanos charts how he began to look in the rubble of that zero zone for an alternative way of belonging: one in which the old binary -whose imperative was based on the violence of the Friend/enemy opposition- was replaced by a paradoxical loving strife that enriched rather than negated the potential of each side. The chapters in this book trace this errant vocational itinerary, from the author's early undergraduate engagement with Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Cornel West, moving from that disclosive occasion in the zero zone to this present moment.

Ranging from Antiquity to contemporary analytic philosophy, it provides a concise but thorough analysis of the arguments developed by some of the most outstanding philosophers of all times. Besides the aesthetics of music proper, the volume touches upon metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of language, psychology, anthropology, and scientific developments that have influenced the philosophical explanations of music. Starting from the very origins of philosophy in Western thought (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle) the book talks about what music is according to Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, the Romantics, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Susanne Langer, Bloch, Adorno, and many others. Recent developments within the analytic tradition are illustrated with particular attention to the ontology of the musical artwork and to the problem of music and emotions. A fascinating idea which recurs throughout the book is that philosophers allow for a sort of a secret kinship between music and philosophy, as means to reveal complementary aspects of truth.

This book contests the general view that natural selection constitutes the explanatory core of evolutionary biology. It invites the reader to consider an alternative view which favors a more complete and multidimensional interpretation. It is common to present the 1930-1960 period as characterized by the rise of the Modern Synthesis, an event structured around two main explanatory commitments: (1) Gradual evolution is explained by small genetic changes (variations) oriented by natural selection, a process leading to adaptation; (2) Evolutionary trends and speciational events are macroevolutionary phenomena that can be accounted for solely in terms of the extension of processes and mechanisms occurring at the previous microevolutionary level. On this view, natural selection holds a central explanatory role in evolutionary theory - one that presumably reaches back to Charles Darwin's Origin of Species - a view also accompanied by the belief that the field of evolutionary biology is organized around a profound divide: theories relying on strong selective factors and those appealing only to weak ones. If one reads the new analyses presented in this volume by biologists, historians and philosophers, this divide seems to be collapsing at a rapid pace, opening an era dedicated to the search for a new paradigm for the development of evolutionary biology. Contrary to popular belief, scholars' position on natural selection is not in itself a significant discriminatory factor between most evolutionists. In fact, the intellectual space is quite limited, if not non-existent, between, on the one hand, "Darwinists", who play down the central role of natural selection in evolutionary explanations, and, on the other hand, "non-Darwinists", who use it in a list of other evolutionary mechanisms. The "mechanism-centered" approach to evolutionary biology is too incomplete to fully make sense of its development. In this book the labels created under the traditional historiography - "Darwinian Revolution", "Eclipse of Darwinism", "Modern Synthesis", "Post-Synthetic Developments" - are thus re-evaluated. This book will not only appeal to researchers working in evolutionary biology, but also to historians and philosophers."

(Mis)readings of Marx In Continental Philosophy reflects on the way major European philosophers related to the work of Karl Marx. It brings together leading and emerging critical theorists to address the readings of Marx offered by Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Negri, Badiou, Agamben, Ranciere, Latour and Zizek.

Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (3) Process Physics [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence.

This book offers a concise and accessible introduction to his work and thought, ideal for students coming to his philosophy for the first time. John Searle is one of the most important and influential analytic philosophers working today. He has made significant contributions to the fields of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. This concise and accessible book provides a critical review of Searle's philosophical themes. While Searle began his career as a philosopher of language, this book proceeds thematically, starting with a review of Searle's general ontological commitments. His conception of the mental is then located within that general framework. A theory of intentionality sets the stage for Searle's accounts of action, rationality, freedom, language, and social reality. Searle weaves together this broad array of topics by means of a set of theoretical and methodological assumptions. Part of the task of this book is to articulate some of those unifying tendencies, while locating Searle within the history of analytic philosophy. In addition to comparing Searle's views to those of his interlocutors, the book also attempts to identify changes in those views, as articulated over the course of Searle's career. "The Continuum Contemporary American Thinkers" series offers concise and accessible introductions to the most important and influential thinkers at work in philosophy today. Designed specifically to meet the needs of students and readers encountering these thinkers for the first time, these informative books provide a coherent overview and analysis of each thinker's vital contribution to the field of philosophy. The series is the ideal companion to the study of these most inspiring and challenging of thinkers.

What is power? Where does it come from and who is in possession of it? How should we think about power and authority in a post-secular society in which traditional boundaries between individual and collective faith and secular governments and institutions are becoming increasingly blurred? The way which we conceive of power in the twenty-first century will effectively determine how we approach issues such as market reform and environmental disaster. Placing the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault into critical conjunction with the apostle Paul, Foucault/Paul re-evaluates the way in which power operates within society and underpins our ethical and political actions.

Descartes s concern with the proper method of belief formation is evident in the titles of his works e.g., "The Search after Truth," "The Rules for the Direction of the Mind" and "The Discourse on Method of rightly conducting one s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences." It is most apparent, however, in his famous discussions, both in the "Meditations" and in the "Principles," of one particularly noteworthy source of our doxastic errors namely, the misuse of one s will. What is not widely recognized, let alone appreciated and understood, is the relationship between his concern with belief formation and his concern with virtue. In fact, few seem to realize that Descartes regards doxastic errors as "moral" errors and as "sins" both because such errors are intrinsically vicious and because they entail notably deleterious social consequences.

"Reforming the Art of Living" seeks to rectify this rather common oversight in two ways. First, it aims to elucidate the nature of Descartes s account of virtuous belief formation. Second, it aims both (i) to illuminate the social significance of Descartes s philosophical program as it relates to the understanding and practice not of science, but of religion and (ii) to develop a kind of Leibnizian critique of this aspect of his program. More specifically, it aims to show that Descartes s project is dangerous, insofar as it is subversive not only of traditional Christianity but also of other traditional forms of religion, both in theory and in practice."

what makes a property intrinsic? What exactly does the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction rest upon, and how can we reasonably justify this distinction? These questions bear great importance on central debates in such diverse philosophical fields as ethics (What is the nature of intrinsic value?), philosophy of mind (Does mental content supervene on internal bodily features?), epistemology (Can intrinsic duplicates differ in the justification of their beliefs?) and philosophy of science (Do the causal powers of an object depend on its extrinsic features?) - to only name a few. Given the central relevance of the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction to philosophical research, a collection of pertinent essays on the topic is an essential addition to the literature. It helps to identify more clearly the problems and arguments that are at stake. The anthology provides a comprehensive overview of central facets of the debates, including both crucial earlier and important new contributions by leading philosophers. As such it constitutes an indispensable component of any serious study of the topic.