The importance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the history of philosophy is matched only by its difficulty. In particular, readers are often frustrated by how difficult it is to extract Kant's arguments from his dense prose. This book reconstructs, using the tools of propositional logic, the central arguments of the Critique. In all, the book reconstructs thirty-six of Kant's arguments spanning the Transcendental Aesthetic, Transcendental Analytic, and Transcendental Dialectic. For each argument, they begin with a quote from Kant's text followed by a synopsis that explains the argument informally. Finally, each synopsis is followed by a formal reconstruction of the argument. The synopses offer examples, metaphors, historical background, and objections/responses to aid the reader in appreciating Kant's arguments. Even though many readers who approach Kant for the first time have a good philosophical vocabulary, few will understand Kant's unique lexicon. In addition to formally reconstructing Kant's arguments, the book also includes a glossary that defines the technical terms that Kant uses in his arguments. Finally, since this book is directed largely at students, Bryan Hall enlisted two of his own students to ensure that the book is maximally student friendly. In contrast to most pedagogical philosophical literature, the content of this book has been tailored by students for students.

In recent decades, the analysis of causal relations has become a topic of central importance in analytic philosophy. More recently, dispositional properties have also become objects of intense study. Both of these phenomena appear to be intimately related to counterfactual conditionals and other modal phenomena such as objective chance, but little work has been done to directly relate them. Dispositions and Causes contains ten essays by scholars working in both metaphysics and in philosophy of science, examining the relation between dispositional and causal concepts.
Particular issues discussed include the possibility of reducing dispositions to causes, and vice versa; the possibility of a nominalist theory of causal powers; the attempt to reduce all metaphysical necessity to dispositional properties; the relationship between dispositions, causes, and laws of nature; the role of causal capacities in explaining the success of scientific inquiry; the grounding of dispositions and causes in objective chances; and the type of causal power required for free agency.
The introductory chapter contains a detailed overview of recent work in the area, providing a helpful entry to the literature for non-specialists.

First published in 1962, Bodily Sensations argues that bodily sensations are nothing but impressions that physical happenings are taking place in the body, impressions that may correspond or fail to correspond to physical reality. In the case of such sensations as pains, these impressions are accompanied by certain attitudes to the impressions. He argues, that is to say that bodily sensations are a sub-species of sense-impression, standing to perception of our own bodily state (or in some cases to touch) as visual impressions stand to the sense of sight. He examines, and tries to refute, all plausible alternative accounts of the nature of bodily sensations. He prefaces his argument by an account of tactual and bodily perception. Here he argues that, with the exception of heat and cold, the qualities discerned by these senses are all reducible to spatial and temporal properties of material objects. Combined with his own conclusions on bodily sensations, this allows him to draw up a short and exhaustive list of the so-called "secondary" qualities of physical objects. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy.

First published in 1927, The Nature of Deity forms a sequel to Personality and Reality. The premise of this book is the conclusion of the prequel: that there exists a Supreme Self or Deity. In pursuing this argument, the author uses logic and broad facts that prove the existence of a Supreme Self. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, religion, literature and science.

Modal realism says that non-actual possible worlds and individuals are as real as the actual world and individuals. Takashi Yagisawa defends modal realism of a variety different from David Lewis's theory. The notion of reality is left primitive and sharply distinguished from that of existence, which is proposed as a relation between a thing and a domain. Worlds are postulated as modal indices for truth on a par with times, which are temporal indices for truth. Ordinary individual objects are conceived as being extended in spatial, temporal, and modal dimensions, and their transworld identity is explicated by the closest-continuer theory. Impossible worlds and individuals are postulated and used to provide accounts of propositions, belief sentences, and fictional discourse.

Gauge theories have provided our most successful representations of the fundamental forces of nature. How, though, do such representations work? Interpretations of gauge theory aim to answer this question. Through understanding how a gauge theory's representations work, we are able to say what kind of world our gauge theories reveal to us.
A gauge theory's representations are mathematical structures. These may be transformed among themselves while certain features remain the same. Do the representations related by such a gauge transformation merely offer alternative ways of representing the very same situation? If so, then gauge symmetry is a purely formal property since it reflects no corresponding symmetry in nature.
Gauging What's Real describes the representations provided by gauge theories in both classical and quantum physics. Richard Healey defends the thesis that gauge transformations are purely formal symmetries of almost all the classes of representations provided by each of our theories of fundamental forces. He argues that evidence for classical gauge theories of forces (other than gravity) gives us reason to believe that loops rather than points are the locations of fundamental properties. In addition to exploring the prospects of extending this conclusion to the quantum gauge theories of the Standard Model of elementary particle physics, Healey assesses the difficulties faced by attempts to base such ontological conclusions on the success of these theories.

Critical Theory is an interdisciplinary framework of analysis that was founded by a group of intellectuals working at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. While the Institute itself was established in 1923, the program of 'critical theory' was not formalized until 1937 when Max Horkheimer, the Director of the Institute at that time, dubbed it as such in his essay, "Traditional and Critical Theory." The Institute is frequently referred to simply as 'The Frankfurt School'. Its significance cannot be underestimated. To this day there have been three generations of Frankfurt School academics, but 'critical theory' refers to something broader than just the work of the Institute for Social Research. Critical theory now indicates a theoretical approach that is studied all over the world. However, the main interests and goals of the founding Institute still remain integral. Foremost among these interests is the primary focus on the individual human being as the locus for social change. Over the years many debates have ensued as to how the individual can achieve social change. While these debates took Critical Theory in diverse directions, Soren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth century Danish religious thinker who emphasizes the individual's self-imposed obligation to society at large, played a major role. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard's impact on the development of Critical Theory has received scant study. I aim to fill this scholarly lacuna. My intention is to expose the complexity not only of Kierkegaard but of the Frankfurt School and their cohort. Kierkegaard's relationship to Critical Theory suffered from the misappropriation of his works by philosophers and theologians associated with National Socialism. This caused the Critical Theorists to view the content of Kierkegaard's philosophy itself as fascistic. Ultimately, I will highlight the ways in which Kierkegaard has been redeemed for a multiculture activist ethics today, working vigorously in spirit with the fundamental aims of the Frankfurt School.

The American University Publications In From its inception Philosophy has continued the direction stated in the sub-title of the initial volume that of probing new directions in philosophy. As the series has developed these probings of new directions have taken the two fold direction of exploring the relationships between the disparate traditions of twentieth century philosophy and with developing new insights into the foundations of some enduring philosophic problems. This present volume continues both of these directions. The interaction between twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy which was an implicit theme of our first and third volumes and the explicit subject of our second volume is here continued in a series of studies on major figures and topics in each tradition. In the context of these interpretative studies, Professor Durfee returns again and again to the question of the relationships between the will and the reason, and explores the conflicting goals of creativity and objectivity in formulating a philosophic position. In so doing he raises the issue as his title suggests - of the foundations of philosophy itself. He seriously challenges the belief common to both pheomenology and analytic philosophy that philosophizing can be a presuppositionless activity, objectively persued independent of the personal (and, perhaps, arbitrary) commitments of the philosopher. This issue, critical as it is to all forms of philosophy, is surely a worthy one for a series such as ours."

Simon Evnine examines various epistemic aspects of what it is to be a person. Persons are defined as finite beings that have beliefs, including second-order beliefs about their own and others' beliefs, and are agents, capable of making long-term plans. It is argued that for any being meeting these conditions, a number of epistemic consequences obtain. First, all such beings must have certain logical concepts and be able to use them in certain ways. Secondly, there are at least two principles governing belief that it is rational for persons to satisfy and are such that nothing can be a person at all unless it satisfies them to a large extent. These principles are that one believe the conjunction of one's beliefs and that one treat one's future beliefs as, by and large, better than one's current beliefs. Thirdly, persons both occupy epistemic points of view on the world and show up within those views. This makes it impossible for them to be completely objective about their own beliefs. Ideals of rationality that require such objectivity, while not necessarily wrong, are intrinsically problematic for persons. This "aspectual dualism" is characteristic of treatments of persons in the Kantian tradition. In sum, these epistemic consequences support a traditional view of the nature of persons, one in opposition to much recent theorizing.

The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick explores the deep affinity between two seemingly quite different thinkers, in their attempts to address the need for salvation in (and from) an era of accelerated mechanization, in which humans' capacity for destroying or subjugating the living has attained a planetary scale. The philosopher and the science fiction writer come together to meet the contradictory imperatives of a realist outlook-a task which, arguably, philosophy and science fiction could only ever adequately undertake in collaboration. Their respective approaches meet in a focus on the ambiguous status of fictionalizing, or fabulation, as simultaneously one of mechanization's most devastating tools, and the possibility of its undoing. When they are read together, the complexities and paradoxes thrown up by this ambiguity, with which both Bergson and Dick struggle on their own, open up new ways to navigate ideas of mechanism and mysticism, immanence and transcendence, and the possibility and meaning of salvation. The result is at once an original reading of both thinkers, a new critical theory of the socio-cultural, political and ethical function of fictionalizing, and a case study in the strange affinity, at times the uncanny similarity, between philosophy and science fiction.

The coursebook presents Plato and Aristotle as the two most significant and groundbreaking thinkers of European thought from the era of classical Greek philosophy. The author provides prefatory orientation in the labyrinth of their complex thought and sketches their metaphysics, problems of knowledge and ethics. He departs from the fact that both thinkers are similar in striving to overcome problems of their period by localizing the human being into a hierarchical order of beings, which obliges in questions of the possibility of knowledge as well as of the right conduct.

This title was first published in 2001. Idealism, Metaphysics and Community examines the place of idealism in contemporary philosophy, and its relation to problems of metaphysics, political thought, and the study of the history of philosophy. Following an extensive introduction by the editor, and drawing on the work of the Canadian idealist, Leslie Armour, the book is divided into three main parts: Part 1 focuses on F.H.Bradley; Part 2 examines metaphysical issues and idealism, such as the realism/anti-realism debate, the relation of classical and idealist metaphysics, rational psychology, time and eternity, and the divine; Part 3 draws on idealism to address contemporary concerns in ethical theory, political philosophy, social philosophy and culture and the history of philosophy. Presenting new insights into the work of classical and contemporary authors, this book provides a better understanding of classical idealism and addresses important areas of contemporary philosophical, social and political concern.

Originally published in 1973. This final collection of thought by founder of the New School for Social Research in New York, Horace M. Kallen, touches on topics from language to death and from freedom to value. The author's treatise explores his understanding of logic and existence.

This book, based on ethnographic research in Romania, traces the ontological red lines that form a world in which xenophobic landscapes are possible. The last couple hundred years in Romania's history have been marked by change of political regimes, but this manuscript pays equal attention to an important continuity in Romania's ontological world: its understanding of the landscape, and the relationship between Romanian people and their land. From political discourses to children's books, to literature, and explanations found for everyday events, the book follows the ways in which the landscape of Romania has been understood as a sentient being imbued with willpower and ability to act on the world. The sentience specific to Romania's landscape is characterized by xenophobia-a fear and distrust of ethno-religious others-that has been historically interpreted by Romanians as manifesting through acts of violence enacted by the landscape towards various groups of humans understood as dangerous to the country's unity. The novelty of this book lies in the fact that it is an in-depth analysis of an ontological world in which sentient landscapes are de-romanticized and presented in their uncomfortable complexity. The concept of sentient xenophobic mountains can add a great deal to the current literature on the ontological turn and ontological multiplicities, by questioning binaries like colonized/colonizer, indigenous/colonial, sentient landscape/industrial superpower. Romania's history makes it a good case study for this exercise, as the country has been at the margins of empires, both desired because of its natural resources and rejected because of the perceived inferiority of its people, both racialized and racist, both neoliberal and imagining absolute sovereignty.