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.

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother s unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible. This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing D and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today. Barthes s life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped D as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes s life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.

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.

Kant's Revolutionary Theory of Modality is a comprehensive study of Immanuel Kant's views on modal notions of possibility, actuality or existence, and necessity. Abaci locates Kant's views on these notions in their broader historical context, establishes their continuity and transformation across Kant's precritical and critical texts, and determines their role in the substance as well as the development of Kant's philosophical project. He makes two overarching claims. First, Kant's precritical views on modality, which appear in the context of his attempts to revise the ontological argument and are critical of the tradition only from within its prevailing paradigm of modality, develop into a revolutionary theory of modality in his critical period, radicalizing his critique of the ontotheological and rationalist metaphysical tradition. While the traditional paradigm construes modal notions as fundamental ontological predicates, expressing different modes or ways of being of things, Kant's theory consists in redefining them as subjective and relational features of our discursivity, expressing different modes in which our conceptual representations of objects are related to our cognitive faculty. Second, this revolutionary theory of modality is not only a crucial component of Kant's critical epistemology and his radical critique of rationalist metaphysics, but it is in fact directly constitutive of the critical turn itself, as Kant originally formulates the latter in terms of a shift from an ontological to an epistemological approach to the question of possibility. Thus, tracing the development of Kant's understanding of modality comes to fruition in an alternative reading of Kant's overall philosophical development.

Following his opposition to the establishment of a theatre in Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often considered an enemy of the stage. Yet he was fascinated by drama: he was a keen theatre-goer, his earliest writings were operas and comedies, his admiration for Italian lyric theatre ran through his career, he wrote one of the most successful operas of the day, Le Devin du village, and with his Pygmalion, he invented a new theatrical genre, the Scene lyrique ('melodrama'). Through multi-faceted analyses of Rousseau's theatrical and musical works, authors re-evaluate his practical and theoretical involvement with and influence on the dramatic arts, as well as his presence in modern theatre histories. New readings of the Lettre a d'Alembert highlight its political underpinnings, positioning it as an act of resistance to external bourgeois domination of Geneva's cultural sphere, and demonstrate the work's influence on theatrical reform after Rousseau's death. Fresh analyses of his theory of voice, developed in the Essai sur l'origine des langues, highlight the unique prestige of Italian opera for Rousseau. His ambition to rethink the nature and function of stage works, seen in Le Devin du village and then, more radically, in Pygmalion, give rise to several different discussions in the volume, as do his complex relations with Gluck. Together, contributors shed new light on the writer's relationship to the stage, and argue for a more nuanced approach to his theatrical and operatic works, theories and legacy.

The book contributes to the refutation of the separation of philosophy in the 20th century into analytic and continental. It is shown that Edmund Husserl was seriously concerned with issues of so-called analytic philosophy, that there are strict parallelisms between Husserl's treatment of philosophical subjects and those of authors in the analytic tradition, and that Husserl had a strong influence on Rudolf Carnap's 'Aufbau'.

Christopher Hookway presents a series of essays on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1913), the 'founder of pragmatism' and one of the most important and original American philosophers. Peirce made significant contributions to the development of formal logic and to the study of the normative standards we should follow in carrying out inquiries and enhancing our knowledge in science and mathematics. In The Pragmatic Maxim, Hookway explores Peirce's writings on truth, science, and the nature of meaning, which have become steadily more influential over recent decades. He demonstrates how Peirce's ideas can contribute to and inform philosophical understanding in debates that continue today. The first seven chapters explore the framework of Peirce's thought, especially his fallibilism and his rejection of scepticism, and his contributions to the pragmatist understanding of truth and reality. Like Frege and Husserl, among others, Peirce rejected psychologism and used phenomenological foundations to defend the system of categories. The final three chapters are concerned with 'the pragmatic maxim', a rule for clarifying the contents of concepts and ideas. Hookway explores the different strategies Peirce employed to demonstrate the correctness of the maxim, and thus of pragmatism. As well as studying and evaluating Peirce's views, The Pragmatic Maxim discusses the relations between the views of Peirce and other pragmatist philosophers such as William James, C. I. Lewis, and Richard Rorty.

While many of the phenomenological currents in philosophy allegedly utilize a peculiar method, the type under consideration here is characterized by Franz Brentano s ambition to make philosophy scientific by adopting no other method but that of natural science. Brentano became particularly influential in teaching his students (such as Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl) his descriptive psychology, which is concerned with mind as intentionally directed at objects. As Brentano and his students continued in their investigations in descriptive psychology, another side of Austrian phenomenology, namely object theory, became more and more prominent. The philosophical orientation under consideration in this collection of essays is accordingly a two-sided discipline, concerned with both mind and objects, and applicable to various areas of philosophy such as epistemology, philosophy of language, value theory, and ontology."

In three comprehensive volumes, Logic of the Future presents a full panorama of Charles S. Peirce's most important late writings. Among the most influential American thinkers, Peirce took his existential graphs to be a significant contribution to human thought. The manuscripts from 1895-1913, with many of them being published here for the first time, testify to the richness and open-endedness of his theory of logic and its applications. They also invite us to reconsider our ordinary conceptions of reasoning as well as the conventional stories concerning the evolution of modern logic. This first volume of Logic of the Future is on the historical development, theory and application of Peirce's graphical method and diagrammatic reasoning. It also illustrates the abundant further developments and applications Peirce envisaged existential graphs to have on the analysis of mathematics, language, meaning and mind.

Some philosophers think physical explanations stand on their own: what happens, happens because things have the properties they do. Others think that any such explanation is incomplete: what happens in the physical world must be partly due to the laws of nature. Causation and Laws of Nature inEarly Modern Philosophy examines the debate between these views from Descartes to Hume.
Ott argues that the competing models of causation in the period grow out of the scholastic notion of power. On this Aristotelian view, the connection between cause and effect is logically necessary. Causes are 'intrinsically directed' at what they produce. But when the Aristotelian view is faced with the challenge of mechanism, the core notion of a power splits into two distinct models, each of which persists throughout the early modern period. It is only when seen in this light that the key arguments of the period can reveal their true virtues and flaws.
To make his case, Ott explores such central topics as intentionality, the varieties of necessity, and the nature of relations. Arguing for controversial readings of many of the canonical figures, the book also focuses on lesser-known writers such as Pierre-Sylvain Regis, Nicolas Malebranche, and Robert Boyle.

With "The Relevance of Philosophy to Life," eminent American philosopher John Lachs reminds us that philosophy is not merely a remote subject of academic research and discourse, but an ever-changing field which can help us navigate through some of the chaos of late twentieth-century living. It provides a clear-eyed look at important philosophical issues--the primacy of values, rationality and irrationality, society and its discontents, life and death, and the traits of human nature--as related to the human condition in the modern world.

The primary goal of this volume is to describe the contemporary state of affairs in Western psychotherapy, and to do so in a Whiteheadian spirit: with genuine openness to the relative ways in which creativity, beauty, truth, and peace manifest themselves in various cultural traditions. This Whiteheadian Dialogue explores afresh an important cross-elucidatory path: what have we, and what can be learned from a dialogue with Eastern worldviews? In order to generate meaningful contrasts between these different systems of thought, all the papers address common core issues. On one hand, how does the given system understand the interaction of the individual, society, and nature (or cosmos)? On the other hand, what is the paradigm of all pathology and what is its typical or curative pattern?

This volume opens up stimulating new perspectives on a broad variety of Barcan Marcus's concerns ranging from the systematic foundation and interpretation of quantified modal logic, nature of extensionality, necessity of identity, direct reference theory for proper names, notions of essentialism, second-order modal logic, modal metaphysics, properties and classes, substitutional and objectual quantification, actualism, the Barcan formula, possibilia and possible-world semantics to epistemic and deontic modalities, non-language-centered theories of belief, accounts of rationality, consistency of a moral code, moral dilemmas, and much more. The contributions demonstrate that Barcan Marcus's original and clear ideas have had a formative influence on the direction in which certain themes central to today's philosophical debate have developed. Furthermore, the volume includes an illuminating intellectual autobiography from Barcan Marcus herself as well as an informal interview containing her unfiltered, frank answers. The book brings together contributions by Ruth Barcan Marcus, Timothy Williamson, Dagfinn Follesdal, Joelle Proust, Pascal Engel, Edgar Morscher, Erik J. Olsson, and Michael Frauchiger.

Rachel Cohon offers an original interpretation of the moral philosophy of David Hume, focusing on two areas. Firstly, his metaethics. Cohon reinterprets Hume's claim that moral distinctions are not derived from reason and explains why he makes it. She finds that Hume did not actually hold three "Humean" claims: 1) that beliefs alone cannot move us to act, 2) that evaluative propositions cannot be validly inferred from purely factual propositions, or 3) that moral judgments lack truth value. According to Hume, human beings discern moral virtues and vices by means of feeling or emotion in a way rather like sensing; but this also gives the moral judge a truth-apt idea of a virtue or vice as a felt property. Secondly, Cohon examines the artificial virtues. Hume says that although many virtues are refinements of natural human tendencies, others (such as honesty) are constructed by social convention to make cooperation possible; and some of these generate paradoxes. She argues that Hume sees these traits as prosthetic virtues that compensate for deficiencies in human nature. However, their true status clashes with our common-sense conception of a virtue, and so has been concealed, giving rise to the paradoxes.

The volume takes on the much-needed task of describing and explaining the nature of the relations and interactions between mind, language and action in defining mentality. Papers by renowned philosophers unravel what is increasingly acknowledged to be the enacted nature of the mind, memory and language-acquisition, whilst also calling attention to Wittgenstein's contribution. The volume offers unprecedented insight, clarity, scope, and currency.

Clinical and philosophical perspectives on key issues and debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Verificationism has been a hallmark of logical empiricism. According to this principle, a sentence is insignificant in a certain sense if its truth value cannot be determined. Although logical empiricists strove for decades to develop an adequate principle of verification, they failed to resolve its problems. This led to a general abandonment of the verificationist project in the early 1960s. In the last 50 years, this view has received tremendously bad press. Today it is mostly regarded as an outdated historical concept. Theories that have evolved since the abandonment of verificationism can, however, help overcome some of its key problems. More specifically, an adequate criterion of significance can be derived from a combination of modern theories of justification and belief revision, along with a formal semantics for counterfactuals. In view of these potential improvements, the abandonment of verificationism appears premature. Half a century following its decline, it might be about time to revisit this disreputable view. The author argues in favor of a weak form of verificationism. This approach could be referred to as minimal verificationism, as it involves a weakening of traditional verificationist principles in various respects while maintaining their core idea.

Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. As student of Rudolph Carnap's and Hans Reichenbach's, he went on to become not only a major figure in North American analytic philosophy, who made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, and physics but also to the disciplines of logic, number theory, and computer science. He passed away on March 13, 2016. The present volume is a memorial to his extraordinary intellectual contributions, honoring his contributions as a philosopher, a thinker, and a public intellectual. It features essays by an international team of leading philosophers, covering all aspects of Hilary Putnam's philosophy from his work in ethics and the history of philosophy to his contributions to the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Each essay is an original contribution. "Hilary Putnam is one of the most distinguished philosophers of the modern era, and just speaking personally, one of the smartest and most impressive thinkers I have ever been privileged to know-as a good friend for 70 years. The fine essays collected here are a fitting tribute to a most remarkable figure." Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "In Engaging Putnam excellent philosophers engage the writings and ideas of Hilary Putnam, one of the most productive and influential philosophers of the last century. Putnam stands out because of the combination of brilliance and a firm grasp of reality he brought to a very broad range of issues: the logic and the philosophy of mathematics, free-will, skepticism, realism, internalism and externalism and a lot more. Along with this he offered penetrating insights about other great philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. All great philosophers make us think. With many, we try to figure out the strange things they say. With Putnam, we are made to think about clearly explained examples and arguments that get to the heart of the issues he confronts. This book is a wonderful contribution to the continuation of Putnam-inspired thinking." John Perry, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University

This volume is the first collection of articles dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts on colour, focusing in particular on his so-called Remarks on Colour, a piece of writing that has received comparably little attention from Wittgenstein scholars. The book provides the reader with the state of the art in research on Wittgenstein's thoughts on colour and brings out some of the intricate relations between the Remarks on Colour and other works by Wittgenstein. The articles in the book discuss why Wittgenstein wrote so intensively about colour during the last years of his life, what significance these remarks have for understanding his philosophical work in general, as well as the upshot of his thoughts on colour. Contributors to the volume are Andrew Lugg, Joachim Schulte, Gabriele Mras, Richard Heinrich, Herbert Hrachovec, Barry Stroud, Martin Kusch, Frederik Gierlinger and Gary Kemp.

Political philosophy in the English-speaking world has been dominated for more than two decades by various versions of liberal theory, which holds that political inquiry should proceed without reference to religious view. Although a number of philosophers have contested this stance, no one has succeeded in dislodging liberalism from its position of dominance

The most interesting challenges to liberalism have come from those outside of the discipline of philosophy. Sociologists, legal scholars, and religious ethicists have attacked liberalism's embodiment in practice, arguing that liberal practice -- particularly in the United States -- has produced a culture which trivializes religion. This culture, they argue, is at odds with the beliefs and practices of large numbers of citizens.

In the past, disciplinary barriers have limited scholarly exchange among philosophical liberals and their theological, sociological and legal critics. Religion and Contemporary Liberalism makes an important step towards increased dialogue among these scholars. A collection of original papers by philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and legal theorists, this volume will spark considerable debate in philosophy -- debate which will be significant for all of those concerned with the place of religion within a liberal society.

Although the importance of Francisco Suarez has been, for some time already, generally recognized even outside the circles of historians of scholasticism, the wider context of his thought - i.e., the rich and diverse Renaissance and Baroque scholasticism - remains largely unexplored. This book is an attempt to contribute to the quest of putting Suarez's metaphysics (a mere fragment of the whole of his intellectual legacy) into context, historical and systematic. Being the fruit of an international conference held in Prague in October 2008, it puts together a systematically ordered selection of papers devoted to general and specific topics of Suarezian metaphysics, with special respect to its sources and further impact. Part One explores in the first place the notion of being and the nature of metaphysics in general; Part Two then deals with more specific metaphysical topics such as the problem of universals, causality, relations, and God. The book will be of value not just to Suarez-scholars, but to anyone interested in the history of ideas in general and in the the intricacies of metaphysical thought at the verge of modernity in particular.

In the famous Correspondence with Clarke, which took place during the last year of Leibniz s life, Leibniz advanced several arguments purporting to refute the absolute theory of space and time that was held by Newton and his followers. The main aim of this book is to reassess Leibniz s attack on the Newtonian theory in so far as he relied on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. The theological side of the controversy is not ignored but isolated and discussed in the last three chapters, which deal with problems connected with the notions of omnipotence and omniscience."

Analytic philosophy has leveled many challenges to Kant's ascription of necessary properties and relations to objects in his Critique of Pure Reason. Some of these challenges can be answered, it is argued here, largely in terms of techniques belonging to analytic philosophy itself, in particular, to its philosophy of language. This Kantian response is the primary objective of this book. It takes the form of a compromise between the real existence of the objects that we can intuit and that get our knowledge started - dubbed initiators - and the ideality of the necessary properties and relations that Kant ascribes to our sensible representations of initiators, which he entitles appearances. Whereas the real existence of initiators is independent of us and our senses, the necessity of these properties and relations of appearances is due to their origins in the mind. The Kantian compromise between real existence and ideal necessity is formulated in terms of David Kaplan's interpretation of de re necessity in his article, "Quantifying In" - his response to Quine's concern that a commitment to such a necessity leads to an acceptance of an unwanted traditional Aristotelian essentialism. In addition, the book first abstracts and then departs from its interpretation of Kant to provide a realistic account of the relation between existence and de re necessity.

William James (1842-1910) was one of the most original and influential American thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a professor at Harvard University he published many works that had a wide-ranging impact on both psychology and philosophy. His "Principles of Psychology" was the most important English-language work on the mind since Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding." His "Varieties of Religious Experience "practically inaugurated the field of psychology of religion, and it also remains a major inspiration for philosophy of religion. Perhaps most importantly, James publicized the movement of pragmatism and supplied much of its powerful momentum.
This book covers the primary topics for which James is still closely studied: the nature of experience; the functions of the mind; the criteria for knowledge; the definition of "truth"; the ethical life; and the religious life. His notable terms, still resonating in their respective fields, are all here, from the "stream of consciousness" and "pure experience" to the "will to believe," the "cash-value of truth," and the distinction between the religiously "healthy soul" and the "sick soul."
This volume's eighteen selections receive the bulk of the attention and citation from scholars, provide excellent coverage of core topics, and have a broad appeal across many academic disciplines. This well-organized compilation of James's important writings offers an exciting and fascinating tour for both the casual reader and the dedicated student interested in philosophy, psychology, religious studies, American studies, or any related field.