The author argues that is not obvious what it means for our beliefs and assertions to be "truth-directed," and that we need to weaken our ordinary notion of a belief if we are to deal with radical scepticism without surrendering to idealism. Topics examined also include whether there could be alien conceptual schemes and what might happen to us if we abandoned genuine belief in place of mere pragmatic acceptance. A radically new "ecological" model of knowledge is defended.

To what extent can we doubt certainties? How are certainties expressed in words? Which language games convey certainty? To answer these questions we have to recall the method Wittgenstein used in his investigations. When we look at language games and forms of life as inseparable phenomena, do forms of life then provide any certainty? On the other hand, do we automatically relapse into relativism once we doubt certainties? Which formal structures underlie certainty and doubt? The book is intended to answer these questions.

This book offers a Wittgensteinian study of concept possession and of the nature of conceptual investigation in philosophy. It is both an ideal advanced introduction to Wittgenstein's philosophy and an original treatment of some of its most crucial yet least developed regions. The book is written as a Socratic dialogue, which frames the discussion within a backward glance to Plato's Theory of Forms. In so doing it makes a bold claim as to Wittgenstein's place in Western philosophy.

This book provides a step by step illumination of the intricacy, "logic," and importance of one of Nietzsche's richest and most complex works. In a clear and accessible manner the author explains the interconnectedness of "The Gay Sciences" seemingly unrelated sections. Throughout she provides critical commentary, background information, and translation corrections.

The cyberworld fast rolling in and impacting every aspect of human living on the globe today presents an enormous challenge to humankind. It is taken up by the media following current events through to all kinds of natural- and social-scientific discourses. Digitized technoscience develops at a breakneck pace in all areas accompanied by sociological analysis. What is missing is a philosophical response genuinely posing the basic ontological question: What is a digital being's peculiar mode of being? The present study offers a digital ontology that analyzes the dissolution of beings into bit-strings, driven by mathematized science. The mathematization of knowledge reaches back to Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, and continues with Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz. Western knowledge from its inception has always been driven by an unbridled will to efficient-causal power over all kinds of movement and change. This historical trajectory culminates in the universal Turing machine that enables efficient, automated, algorithmic control over the movement of digital beings through the cyberworld. The book fills in the ontological foundations underpinning this brave new cyberworld and interrogates them, especially by questioning the millennia-old conception of 1D-linear time. An alternative ontology of movement arises, based on a radically alternative conception of 3D-time.

Flashes of lightning, resounding thunder, gloomy fog, brilliant sunshine...these are the life manifestations of the skies. The concrete visceral experiences that living under those skies stir within us are the ground for individual impulses, emotions, sentiments that in their interaction generate their own ever-changing clouds. While our intellect concentrates on the discovery of our cosmic position, on the architecture of the universe, our imagination is informed by the gloomy vapors, the glimmers of fleeting light, and the glory of the skies. Reconnoitering from the soil of human life and striving towards the infinite, the elan of imagination gets caught up in the clouds of the skies. There in that dimness, sensory receptivity, dispositions, emotions, passionate strivings, yearnings, elevations gather and propagate. From the "Passions of the Skies" spring innermost intuitions that nourish literature and the arts. "

This work investigates crucial aspects of Kant's epistemology and ethics in relation to Kierkegaard's thinking. The challenge is taken up of developing a systematic reconstruction of Kant's and Kierkegaard's position. Kant forms a matrix for the interpretation of Kierkegaard, and considerable space is devoted to the exposition of Kant at those various points at which contact with Kierkegaard's thought is to be demonstrated. The burden of the argument is that Kierkegaard in his account of the stages is much closer to Kant than the texts initially reveal. It is possible, then, to arrive at a proper grasp of Kierkegaard's final position by seeing just how radically the stage of Christian faith (Religiousness B) departs from Kant.

This book consists of a series of chapters on Carnap's ideal of explication as an alternative to the naturalistic conceptions of science, setting it in its historical context, discussing specific cases of explications, and entiching the on-going debate on conceptual engineering and naturalism in analytic philosophy.

Pluralist democratic systems, according to Philipe Braud, do not do what they claim to do, but rather, serve to channel, diffuse, or reconcile society's conflicts. As one reviewer of the original French edition notes, the book can be seen as part of a long tradition in European political thought that "sees democracy as a front for capitalism." Braud asserts that pluralist democracy is credible only because of the complete failure of communism. There is no government by the people; "the rule of law" is a tautology. What fundamental changes occur happen because of the forces of economics, culture, and labor, and in response to political direction. The efficacy of democracy comes from its ability to manage social emotions, specifically by addressing anguish with promises of security and identity: by meeting the need to be wooed and seduced by constant personalization of politics, offering the illusion of choice; by transposing the frustrations of gender, age, and class inequalities into the political domain; by providing pleasure in the game of politics; and by promising greed, power, and its prerequisites. Pluralist democracies know best how to manage these emotions, and how to use them without suffocating them. A powerful and disturbing vision of pluralist democracy that will be of great interest to students and scholars of contemporary political thought.

It is usually assumed that Wittgenstein's philosophical development is determined either by one dramatic or one subtle change of mind. This book challenges the one-change view. Wittgenstein had many changes of mind and they are so substantial that he can be understood as holding several different philosophies in the late twenties and early thirties. Early in 1929, Wittgenstein envisages a complementary (phenomenological) symbolism in order to carry out the Tractarian task of giving the limits of language and thought. The symbolism failed and he then developed a comprehensive notion of 'grammar' that, he hoped, would fulfill the task. This notion of 'grammar' leads in 1930-1 to the calculus conception of language, which is still defended in the Big Typescript (1932-3). As a complementary tool of the calculus conception, Wittgenstein invents the genetic method, which aims at dissolving philosophical puzzles by the understanding of how they come about. After the Big Typescript, Wittgenstein assimilates an anthropological perspective and puts the genetic method at the center of the stage of his philosophy. The use of the genetic method (associated with an anthropological perspective) develops gradually, taking various forms of application: in the Blue Book, in the versions of the Brown Book (1934-6), and in the Philosophical Investigations.

"Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections" is the first book length collection of essays exploring the relations between the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson. With contributions by established international scholars from cultural studies, philosophy and theology, "Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson" examines the articulation between their concepts, methods and modes of doing philosophy and how their thought relates to different disciplines. Organized thematically, each essay examines the section themes in the context of the contrasts, differences and conjunctions--the rhizomatic connections--between their shared concepts. "Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson" will make a significant impact upon and contribution to the scholarship on these philosophers, challenging many of the preconceptions, the "images of thought," through which they are all too often read and interpreted.

It is widely held in contemporary moral philosophy that moral agency must be explained in terms of some more basic account of human nature. This book presents a fundamental challenge to this view. Specifically, it argues that sympathy, understood as an immediate and unthinking response to another's suffering, plays a constitutive role in our conception of what it is to be human, and specifically in that conception of human life on which anything we might call a moral life depends.

Hermeneutic philosophies of social science offer an approach to the philosophy of social science foregrounding the human subject and including attention to history as well as a methodological reflection on the notion of reflection, including the intrusions of distortions and prejudice. Hermeneutic philosophies of social science offer an explicit orientation to and concern with the subject of the human and social sciences. Hermeneutic philosophies of the social science represented in the present collection of essays draw inspiration from Gadamer's work as well as from Paul Ricoeur in addition to Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault among others. Special attention is given to Wilhelm Dilthey in addition to the broader phenomenological traditions of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger as well as the history of philosophy in Plato and Descartes. The volume is indispensible reading for students and scholars interested in epistemology, philosophy of science, social social studies of knowledge as well as social studies of technology.

This volume brings together distinguished Wittgenstein scholars and renowned philosophers of language in order to examine what Wittgenstein has to say about language and to assess its significance for contemporary philosophy.

The question of what characterizes feelings of being alive is a puzzling and controversial one. Are we dealing with a unique affective phenomenon or can it be integrated into existing classifications of emotions and moods? What might be the natural basis for such feelings? What could be considered their specifically human dimension? These issues are addressed by researchers from various disciplines, including philosophy of mind and emotions, psychology, and history of art. This volume contains original papers on the topic of feelings of being alive by Fiorella Battaglia, Eva-Maria Engelen, Joerg Fingerhut, Thomas Fuchs, Alice Holzhey-Kunz, Matthias Jung, Tanja Klemm, Riccardo Manzotti, Sabine Marienberg, Matthew Ratcliffe, Arbogast Schmitt, Jan Slaby, and Achim Stephan.

Kant, in the Critique of pure reason, only dedicates a few pages to the principle of Anticipations of Perception and only a few critical studies are outspokenly dedicated to this issue in recent critical literature. But if one considers the history of post-Kantian philosophy, one can immediately perceive the great importance of the new definition of the relationship between reality and negation, which Kant's principle proposes. Critical philosophy is here radically opposed to the pre-critical metaphysical tradition: "Reality" no longer appears as absolutely positive being, which excludes all negativity from itself, and "negation" is not reduced to being a simple removal, the mere absence of being. Instead, reality and negation behave as an equally positive something in respect to one another such that negation is itself a reality that is actively opposed to another reality. Such a definition of the relation between reality and negation became indispensible for post-Kantian Philosophy and represents a central aspect of Kantian-inspired philosophy in respect to Leibnizian metaphysics. The present work therefore departs from the hypothesis that the essential philosophical importance of the Anticipations of Perception can only be fully measured by exploring its impact in the Post-Kantian debate.

Colin Wilson revitalised existentialism with a completely new approach to the philosophy. The six volumes of his 'Outsider' series created an existentialism that is not paralysed by its own nihilism. This book, first published in 1966, is a clear summary of the ideas of the 'Outsider' cycle, and also develops them to a new stage. Wilson's 'new existentialism' sees philosophy as an intellectual adventure that aims at a real command and control of human existence, and this book is its clearest exponent.

Meaning Diminished examines the complex relationship between semantic analysis and metaphysical inquiry. Kenneth A. Taylor argues that we should expect linguistic and conceptual analysis of natural language to yield far less metaphysical insight into what there is - and the nature of what there is - than many philosophers have imagined. Taking a strong stand against the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy, Taylor contends that philosophers as diverse as Kant, with his Transcendental Idealism, Frege, with his aspirational Platonism, Carnap with his distinction between internal and external questions, and Strawson, with his descriptive metaphysics, have placed too much confidence in the ability of linguistic and conceptual analysis to achieve deep insight into matters of ultimate metaphysics. He urges philosophers who seek such insight to turn away from the interrogation of language and concepts and back to the more direct interrogation of reality itself. In doing so, he maps out the way forward toward a metaphysically modest semantics, in which semantics carries less weighty metaphysical burdens, and toward a revisionary and naturalistic metaphysics, untethered to the a priori analysis of ordinary language.

The human body is not simply a physical, anatomical, or physiological object; in an important sense we are our bodies. In this collection, Sartre scholars and others engage with the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's brilliant but neglected descriptions of our experience of human bodies. The authors bring a wide variety of perspectives to bear on Sartre's thinking about the body, and, alongside in-depth scholarly historical and critical investigations, bring him into dialogue with feminists, sociologists, psychologists and historians, addressing such questions as: Why have philosophers found it so difficult to conceptualize the relationship between consciousness and the body? Do men and women experience their own bodies in fundamentally different ways? What is pain? What is sexual desire? What is it like to live as a racially marked body in a racist society? How do society and culture shape our bodies, and can we re-shape them?

While the relationship between Kant and other major figures in early analytic philosophy, such as Russell, G. E. Moore, and Rudolf Carnap, has been the subject of full length studies, no such work yet exists on the relationship between Kant and Frege. The Origins of Analytic Philosophy Kant and Frege addresses this gap in our understanding of the origins of early analytic philosophy. Its concern is to chart the nature and significance of Frege's break with Kant over the question of whether arithmetic is a synthetic a priori or an analytic a priori science. In rejecting Kant's claim that arithmetic is an a priori synthetic science, Frege returns to a conception of the scope and power of pure reason that shows important similarities to the philosophical outlook of Kant's great predecessor and philosophical opponent Gottfried Leibniz.Delbert Reed shows how, in his attempts to establish the foundations of arithmetic on analytic principles, Frege developed many of the tools, concerns and problems that would dominate the development of analytic philosophy in the 20th century.

This Dictionary offers points of entry into Derrida's complex and extensive works.
This Dictionary offers points of entry into Derrida's complex and extensive works.
From 'aporia' to 'yes', the Dictionary suggests ways into Derrida that show what is at stake in his work.
Demonstrates that Derrida is not just about philosophy, but also about politics and pop music.
Explains why deconstruction matters, and how Derrida can change the way you think.
The A-Z entries are framed by essays on the inherent interdisciplinarity of Derrida's work and on Derrida's relationship to a range of other thinkers.

Does scepticism threaten our common sense picture of the world? Does it really undermine our deep-rooted certainties? Answers to these questions are offered through a comparative study of the epistemological work of two key figures in the history of analytic philosophy, G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein.