Stephen Schiffer presents a groundbreaking account of meaning and belief, and shows how it can illuminate a range of crucial problems regarding language, mind, knowledge, and ontology. He introduces the new doctrine of 'pleonastic propositions' to explain what the things we mean and believe
are. He discusses the relation between semantic and psychological facts, on the one hand, and physical facts, on the other; vagueness and indeterminacy; moral truth; conditionals; and the role of propositional content in information acquisition and explanation. This radical new treatment of meaning
will command the attention of everyone who works on fundamental questions about language, and will attract much interest from other areas of philosophy.

This text develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. Currie and Ravenscroft offer a lucid exploration of the subject for readers in philosophy, psychology and aesthetics.

Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome argues that the eighteenth-century French author Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) developed a novel, comprehensive account of Roman history that framed his new political science and grounded his political teachings. Rome's legacy in early-modern thought turns on the work of Montesquieu, and through Rome Montesquieu articulated the strengths and weaknesses of the modern state-the moderation that can distinguish it and sources of extremism that must haunt it. This book is the first to unify Montesquieu's Roman thoughts; it is the first to reconstruct the Rome that was one of his most powerful legacies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Montesquieu and the Spirit of Rome restores Rome to its proper place at the peak of Montesquieu's thought and Montesquieu's thought to its proper place in the history of classical study. It treats Montesquieu as what he claimed to be-a jurist, a poet, a historian, and a political writer of the first rank, and it revives his hard-nosed defence of moderation.

Why does the world look to us as it does? Generally speaking, this question has received two types of answers in the cognitive sciences in the past fifty or so years. According to the first, the world looks to us the way it does because we construct it to look as it does. According to the second, the world looks as it does primarily because of how the world is. In The Innocent Eye, Nico Orlandi defends a position that aligns with this second, world-centered tradition, but that also respects some of the insights of constructivism. Orlandi develops an embedded understanding of visual processing according to which, while visual percepts are representational states, the states and structures that precede the production of percepts are not representations. If we study the environmental contingencies in which vision occurs, and we properly distinguish functional states and features of the visual apparatus from representational states and features, we obtain an empirically more plausible, world-centered account. Orlandi shows that this account accords well with models of vision in perceptual psychology - such as Natural Scene Statistics and Bayesian approaches to perception - and outlines some of the ways in which it differs from recent 'enactive' approaches to vision. The main difference is that, although the embedded account recognizes the importance of movement for perception, it does not appeal to action to uncover the richness of visual stimulation. The upshot is that constructive models of vision ascribe mental representations too liberally, ultimately misunderstanding the notion. Orlandi offers a proposal for what mental representations are that, following insights from Brentano, James and a number of contemporary cognitive scientists, appeals to the notions of de-coupleability and absence to distinguish representations from mere tracking states.

In Self, Value, and Narrative, Anthony Rudd defends a series of interrelated claims about the nature of the self. He argues that the self is not simply a given entity, but a being that constitutes or shapes itself. But it can only do this non-arbitrarily if it has a sense of the good by which it can be guided as it chooses to endorse some of its desires or dispositions and repudiate others. This means that there is an essentially ethical or evaluative dimension to selfhood, and one which has an essentially teleological character. Such self-constitution takes place in narrative terms, through one's telling-and, more importantly, living-one's own story. Versions of some or all of these ideas have been developed by various influential writers (including Frankfurt, Korsgaard, MacIntyre, Ricoeur, and Taylor) but Rudd develops these ideas in a way that is importantly different from others familiar in the literature. He takes his main inspiration from Kierkegaard's account of the self, and argues (controversially) that this account belongs in the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian tradition of teleological thinking. Through close engagement with much contemporary philosophical work, Rudd presents a convincing case for an ancient and currently unfashionable view: that the polarities and tensions that are constitutive of selfhood can only be reconciled through an orientation of the self as a whole to an objective Good.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Our life is what our thoughts make it The extraordinary writings of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180), the only Roman emperor to have also been a stoic philosopher, have for centuries been praised for their wisdom, insight and guidance by leaders and great thinkers alike. Never intended for publication, Meditations are the personal notes born from a man who studied his unique position of power as emperor while trying to uphold inner balance in the chaotic world around him. Boldly challenging many of our biggest questions, Aurelius wrestles with the divided self, considering the complexities of human nature, rationality and moral virtue, affirming its place as one of the most timeless, significant works of philosophy to date.

Within the contemporary philosophical debates over the nature of perception, the question of whether perception has content in the first place recently has become a focus of discussion. The most common view is that it does, but a number of philosophers have questioned this claim. The issue immediately raises a number of related questions. What does it mean to say that perception has content? Does perception have more than one kind of content? Does perceptual content derive from the content of beliefs or judgments? Should perceptual content be understood in terms of accuracy conditions? Is naive realism compatible with holding that perception has content? This volume brings together philosophers representing many different perspectives to address these and other central questions in the philosophy of perception.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? In The Practical Origins of Ideas Matthieu Queloz presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, this book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having.

David Icke has been writing books for decades warning that current events were coming. He has faced ridicule and abuse for saying that the end of human freedom was being planned, how, and by whom.

David Icke’s The Biggest Secret, first published in 1998, has been called the "Rosetta Stone" of the conspiracy movement for the way it exposes how the pieces fit and the nature of the force behind human control.

The Trap is the "Rosetta Stone" of illusory reality and opens the door to freedom in its greatest sense.

Read this book and the "world" will never look the same again. The veil of illusion shall be swept aside and the amazing truth this has kept from us shall set you free.

At the intersection between psychoanalysis (Freudian and Lacanian) and philosophy, this book is a glimpse into the life of patients, into desire and love, and into the fate of the relationship between men and women.

The philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi (c. 870-c. 950 CE) is a key Arabic intermediary figure. He knew Aristotle, and in particular Aristotle's logic, through Greek Neoplatonist interpretations translated into Arabic via Syriac and possibly Persian. For example, he revised a general description of Aristotle's logic by the 6th century Paul the Persian, and further influenced famous later philosophers and theologians writing in Arabic in the 11th to 12th centuries: Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, Avempace and Averroes. Averroes' reports on Farabi were subsequently transmitted to the West in Latin translation. This book is an abridgement of Aristotle's Prior Analytics, rather than a commentary on successive passages. In it Farabi discusses Aristotle's invention, the syllogism, and aims to codify the deductively valid arguments in all disciplines. He describes Aristotle's categorical syllogisms in detail; these are syllogisms with premises such as 'Every A is a B' and 'No A is a B'. He adds a discussion of how categorical syllogisms can codify arguments by induction from known examples or by analogy, and also some kinds of theological argument from perceived facts to conclusions lying beyond perception. He also describes post-Aristotelian hypothetical syllogisms, which draw conclusions from premises such as 'If P then Q' and 'Either P or Q'. His treatment of categorical syllogisms is one of the first to recognise logically productive pairs of premises by using 'conditions of productivity', a device that had appeared in the Greek Philoponus in 6th century Alexandria.