Philosophers often have tried to either reduce "disagreeable" objects or concepts to (more) acceptable objects or concepts. Reduction is regarded attractive by those who subscribe to an ideal of ontological parsimony. But the topic is not just restricted to traditional metaphysics or ontology. In the philosophy of mathematics, abstraction principles, such as Hume's principle, have been suggested to support a reconstruction of mathematics by logical means only. In the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science, the logical analysis of language has long been regarded to be the dominating paradigm, and liberalized projects of logical reconstruction remain to be driving forces of modern philosophy. This volume collects contributions comprising all those topics, including articles by Alexander Bird, Jaakko Hintikka, James Ladyman, Rohit Parikh, Gerhard Schurz, Peter Simons, Crispin Wright and Edward N. Zalta.

The investigation of the mind has been one of the major concerns of our philosophical tradition and it still is a dominant subject in modern philosophy as well as in science. Many philosophers in the scientific tradition want to solve the "puzzles of the mind". But many philosophers in the very same tradition do regard these puzzles as puzzles of the brain. So, whilst the former think of the mental as something of its own kind, the latter deny that philosophy of mind has to do with anything else but the brain. And then there are those who think that reduction is the way to go: maybe the mental is brain-dependent and hence reducible to the physical, in some way. This volume collects contributions comprising all those points of view, including articles by William Bechtel, Jerry Fodor, Jaegwon Kim, Joelle Proust and Patrick Suppes.