According to epistemic two-dimensionalism, or simply twodimensionalism, linguistic expressions are associated with two intensions, one of which represents an expression's a priori implications. The author investigates the prospects of conceptual analysis on the basis of a twodimensionalist theory of meaning. He discusses a number of arguments for and against two-dimensional semantics and argues that properly construed, two-dimensionalism provides a potent and plausible account of meaning. Against the background of this account, the author then goes on to assess the value of conceptual analysis in philosophical practice, outlining ist goals, ist promises, but also ist limitations.

This book takes you to the "classical academy of shamanism," Siberian tribal spirituality that gave birth to the expression "shamanism." For the first time, in this volume Znamenski has rendered in readable English more than one hundred books and articles that describe all aspects of Siberian shamanism: ideology, ritual, mythology, spiritual pantheon, and paraphernalia. It will prove valuable to anthropologists, historians of religion, psychologists and practitioners of shamanism.

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.

One of the liveliest debates in contemporary philosophy concerns the notions of grounding and metaphysical explanation. Many consider these notions to be of prime importance for metaphysics and the philosophy of explanation, or even for philosophy in general, and lament that they had been neglected for far too long. Although the current debate about grounding is of recent origin, its central ideas have a long and rich history in Western philosophy, going back at least to the works of Plato and Aristotle. Bernard Bolzano's theory of grounding, developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, is a peak in the history of these ideas. On Bolzano's account, grounding lies at the heart of a broad conception of explanation encompassing both causal and non-causal cases. Not only does his theory exceed most earlier theories in scope, depth, and rigour, it also anticipates a range of ideas that take a prominent place in the contemporary debate. But despite the richness and modernity of his theory, it is known only by a comparatively small circle of philosophers predominantly consisting of Bolzano scholars. Bolzano's Philosophy of Grounding is meant to make Bolzano's ideas on grounding accessible to a broader audience. The book gathers translations of Bolzano's most important writings on these issues, including material that has hitherto not been available in English. Additionally, it contains a survey article on Bolzano's conception and nine research papers critically assessing elements of the theory and/or exploring its broad range of applications in Bolzano's philosophy and beyond.

This first comparative study of philosophers and literary theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin examines the relationship between the experience of the modern world and the forms that we use to make sense of that experience. Analyzing their views on art, habit, tradition, and language, this comparative study results in a radical reconsideration of received views about thinkers as well as in a reconsideration of the modernity that Bakhtin and Benjamin lived in and that we continue to inhabit now.

The papers in this volume are in honor of Bowman L. Clarke. Bowman Clarke earned degrees from Millsaps College, the University of Mississippi, and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, including the PhD in philosophy from Emory in 1961. He spent most of his academic career, a total of twenty-nine years, as a member of the Philosophy Department of the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, from which he retired in 1990. He also served as Head of the Department for several years. He has held many positions of distinction in professional societies, including President of the Georgia Philosophical Society, President of the Society for the Philosophy of Religion, and President of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He also served as Editor-in Chief of the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion from 1975-1989. Professor Clarke is the author of Language and Natural Theology (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1966) as well as numerous articles in professional journals. He has made major contributions in the areas of the philosophy of religion, the study of the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and the development of the calculus of individuals. ix J. F. Harris (ed. ), Logic, God and Metaphysics, ix. (c) 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Introduction The title for this volume, Logic, God, and Metaphysics, was chosen very carefully and deliberately. The papers in this volume are directed at the issues and problems which lie in the domain of the juncture of these three different areas of philosophical inquiry."

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.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the foremost French philosophers of the 20th century; a mystic, activist, and writer whose profound work continues to intrigue and inspire today. Mirror of Obedience collects together Weil's poetry and autobiographical writings translated into English for the first time. It offers a rare glimpse into a more personal and introspective Weil than we usually encounter. She was writing and re-working her poems until the end of her life and in a letter from London to her parents, dated 22 January 1943, she expressed the wish for her verses to appear together in print in chronological order, a wish which this volume honours. Weil was a thinker who wrote with discipline and spareness and cherished the poetic form for its power to compress language and distill meaning. In these poems and literary writings, we see her own efforts to craft poems as essential expressions of thought, bringing into view another aspect of Weil’s quest for beauty and truth.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As Russell said, "The word matter is, in philosophy, the name of a problem," and our scientific investigations and philosophical inquiries show that it becomes more and more complex and interesting as we study it. This book seeks to show how ideas of matter have developed from Democritus to Heisenberg. The problem of matter may well be insoluble but at least we can begin to appreciate the mystery of what is so often taken to be the mundane "stuff" of common sense.

This is the first English translation of Causalite' et Lois de La Nature, and is an important contribution to the theory of causation. Max Kistler reconstructs a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes, and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. This book will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics, and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of causation and law play a prominent role. Contents1. What is a Causal Relation? 2. Laws of Nature and Universal Generalisations 3. Applicability Conditions and the Concept of "Strict Law" 4. Consequences 5. The Nomological Theory of Causation and Causal Responsibility 6. Efficacious Properties and the Instantiation of Laws 7. Causal Responsibility and its Applications Conclusion.

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.

What fundamental account of the world is implicit in physical theory? Physics straightforwardly postulates quarks and electrons, but what of the more intangible elements, such as laws of nature, universals, causation and the direction of time? Do they have a place in the physical structure of the world?
Tim Maudlin argues that the ontology derived from physics takes a form quite different from those most commonly defended by philosophers. Physics postulates irreducible fundamental laws, eschews universals, does not require a fundamental notion of causation, and makes room for the passage of time. In a series of linked essays The Metaphysics Within Physics outlines an approach to metaphysics opposed to the Humean reductionism that motivates much analytical metaphysics.

If we want to be autonomous, what do we want? The author shows that contemporary value-neutral and metaphysically economical conceptions of autonomy, such as that of Harry Frankfurt, face a serious problem. Drawing on Plato, Augustine, and Kant, this book provides a sketch of how "ancient" and "modern" can be reconciled to solve it. But at what expense? It turns out that the dominant modern ideal of autonomy cannot do without a costly metaphysics if it is to be coherent.

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.

The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention. It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law; Muhammad's heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship; and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain quite permeable. Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of "orthodoxy" and "heterodoxy," challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large.

Arguing for the thematic and structural unity in Heideggers thought from Being and Time right through to the later writings, this book focuses on the summons to authenticity; labeling the move as the key to identifying recurring patterns and themes in Heideggers protracted confrontation with modernity. Heidegger's thinking in the decades following the publication of Being and Time is often deemed irreconcilable with that work. Critics contrast the notion of resoluteness. in Being and Time with Heideggers post-war account of releasement in an attempt to establish a discrepancy between the allegedly voluntarist humanism of his early work and the supposedly anti-humanist thinking of his later work. By contrast, Mahon O Brien argues for the structural and thematic coherence of Heidegger's movement from authenticity to the search for an authentic free relation to the world as captured by the term releasement. By demonstrating the structural and thematic unity of Heidegger s thought in its entirety, O Brien paves the way for a more measured and philosophically grounded understanding of the issues at stake in the Heidegger controversy.

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.

This book constitutes the first treatment of C. S. Peirce's unique concept of habit. Habit animated the pragmatists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who picked up the baton from classical scholars, principally Aristotle. Most prominent among the pragmatists thereafter is Charles Sanders Peirce. In our vernacular, habit connotes a pattern of conduct. Nonetheless, Peirce's concept transcends application to mere regularity or to human conduct; it extends into natural and social phenomena, making cohesive inner and outer worlds. Chapters in this anthology define and amplify Peircean habit; as such, they highlight the dialectic between doubt and belief. Doubt destabilizes habit, leaving open the possibility for new beliefs in the form of habit-change; and without habit-change, the regularity would fall short of habit - conforming to automatic/mechanistic systems. This treatment of habit showcases how, through human agency, innovative regularities of behavior and thought advance the process of making the unconscious conscious. The latter materializes when affordances (invariant habits of physical phenomena) form the basis for modifications in action schemas and modes of reasoning. Further, the book charts how indexical signs in language and action are pivotal in establishing attentional patterns; and how these habits accommodate novel orientations within event templates. It is intended for those interested in Peirce's metaphysic or semiotic, including both senior scholars and students of philosophy and religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as mathematics, and the natural sciences.

Franz Brentano is recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work, first published in English in 1988, besides being an important contribution to metaphysics in its own right, has considerable historical importance through its influence on Husserl's views on internal time consciousness. The work is preceded by a long introduction by Stephan K?rner in collaboration with Brentano's literary executor.