Smith, A.D. - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations

Husserl would wish to be remembered for one thing: the discovery of transcendental phenomenology as the one true path of philosophy. In fact, for many of us the unforgettable achievement of Husserl is to be found in the detailed analyses at which he toiled throughout his life - analyses of a profundity rarely seen. Husserl himself did not, however, regard many of his findings as definitive. He repeatedly speaks of how difficult it is properly to carry out detailed phenomenological work, and his manuscripts clearly testify to a constant reworking of his accounts of a range of phenomena that, to judge by his published works, one might think he had ‘settled’.

Habermas, J. - Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band 1: Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung

Im Vorwort zur »Logik der Sozialwissenschaften« habe ich, vor etwas mehr als einem Jahrzehnt, eine Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns in Aussicht gestellt. Unterdessen hat das methodologische Interesse, das ich damals mit einer »sprachtheoretischen Grundlegung der Sozialwissenschaften« verbunden hatte, einem substantiellen Interesse Platz gemacht. Die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns ist keine Metatheorie, sondern Anfang einer Gesselschaftstheorie, die sich bemüht, ihre kritischen Maßstäbe auszuweisen.

Pappas, N. - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Plato and the Republic

When describing his ideal city in the Republic, Plato permits himself a wistful tone, almost a nostalgia for the future he envisions. Without reducing that nostalgia to a purely biographical fact about Plato, we may still recognize in his hope for a perfect city something of his sense of loss for the Athens that had flourished until his early childhood.

Fogelin, R.J. - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Berkeley and the Principles of Human Knowledge

George Berkeley (1685–1753) was born and educated in Ireland. At the age of twenty-four he began a remarkable period in which he published his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709) and then the two works on which his philosophical reputation rests: A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). He also published a book on physical theory, De Motu (1721), a work that illustrates his lifelong interest in scientific issues.

Stroud, Barry - The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour

It is always difficult to know where to begin in philosophy. No doubt it is best to begin at the beginning, but a major part of philosophy as I understand it is the attempt to find out where that is:

What I am calling the quest for reality has been part of Western philosophy since before Socrates was born.

Tooley, Michael - Time, Tense, and Causation

The view of time according to which the past and the present are real, but the future is not, is a very natural one. But it is also open to important objections, both philosophical and scientific. Can those objections be answered? I shall attempt to show that they can be, and that, in addition, there are in fact very good reasons for accepting this approach to the nature of time.

Woods, Michael (Wiggins, David, ed.) - Conditionals

Conditional statements appear to involve a form of sentence composition, but one that is non-truth-functional (that is, the truth-value of the conditional sentence appears not always to be determined by the truth-values of its parts). However, whether these appearances are correct is, for a number of reasons, rather hard to determine. One thing that gives rise to doubts about the truth-functionality of conditional statements is that it seems so easy to construct sentences which have no natural use but which would have to be counted as expressing truths if conditionals are understood truth-functionally.

Le Poidevin, Robin & MacBeath, Murray (eds.) - The Philosophy of Time

Consider three fundamental beliefs we have about the world (so fundamental that we would rarely, if ever, articulate them): that change is going on constantly, that changes are caused, and that there are constraints on what changes are possible. If we then ask: but are these beliefs true? and: how is it possible for them to be true, if they are? we have summarized many of the central concerns of metaphysics, the philosophical study of what there is.

Earman, J. (ed.) - Inference, Explanation, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science

The Meno presents, and then rejects, an argument against the possibility of knowledge. The argument is given by Meno in response to Socrates' proposal to search for what it is that is virtue (...).

Urbach, Peter - Francis Bacon's Philosophy of Science: An Account and a Reappraisal

Francis Bacon was born on 22 January 1561, or 1560 by a convention of the time which reckoned 25 March as the start of the civil year. He died on Easter morning, 1626, having achieved fame and distinction in politics, the law, letters, and philosophy.

Jackson, Frank - Mind, Method and Conditionals: Selected Essays

The circumstances in which it is natural to assert the ordinary indicative conditional ‘If P then Q’ are those in which it is natural to assert ‘Either not P, or P and Q’, and conversely. For instance, the circumstances in which it is natural to assert ‘If it rains, the match will be cancelled’ are precisely those in which it is natural to assert ‘Either it won’t rain, or it will and the match will be cancelled’.

Blackburn, Simon - Essays in Quasi-Realism

In many of these essays the main protagonist is a figure I christened the 'quasirealist'. Two routes led to this persona. One is familiar to every student of moral philosophy. There everyone learns of philosophers who take a 'nondescriptive' or non-representational view of our commitments, seeing them instead as serving some other function, such as expressing attitude, endorsing prescriptions, or, in general, putting pressure on choice and action.

Van Cleve, James - Problems from Kant

"The most important and difficult function of philosophy," wrote Sir William Hamilton, is "to determine the shares to which the knowing subject and the object known may pretend in the total act of cognition." This question looms as the great snowy mountain referred to above: how much of the world owes its existence its character to the activity of human (or other) minds, and how much would be just as it is even in the absence of minds? On this question, philosophies run the gamut from pure idealisms that ascribe everything to the knowing subject to pure realisms that ascribe everything to the object known.

Casati, R. & Varzi, A.C. - Holes and Other Superficialities

We talk about holes, we count them, we describe and measure them. We explain other people's or even animals' behavior by attributing intentions and other attitudes whose content includes reference to—or representations of—holes. People and animals do certain things because they believe they have come across a hole, because they want to dig a hole, to pass through a hole, to jump over a hole, to get out of a hole, or to hide inside one. Holes are something about which we commonly reason, and—like other particulars such as tables, stones, drops of oil—they seem to be indispensable in accounting for certain causal interactions.

Lewis, David - Philosophical Papers Volume II

In the last dozen years or so, our understanding of modality has been much improved by means of possible-world semantics: the project of analyzing modal language by systematically specifying the conditions under which a modal sentence is true at a possible world. I hope to do the same for counterfactual conditionals.

Strawson, Peter F. - Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics

Metaphysics has been often revisionary, and less often descriptive. Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure. The productions of revisionary metaphysics remain permanently interesting, and not only as key episodes in the history of thought.

Salmon, Wesley C. - Causality and Explanation

To most people the suggestion that there is a close connection between causality and explanation would come as no surprise. Even if these two concepts do not go precisely hand in hand, their domains have major areas of convergence. In many cases to explain a fact is to identify its cause. Yet, as general concepts, causality and explanation are far from clear.

van Fraassen, Bas - Laws and Symmetry

When philosophers discuss laws of nature, they speak in terms of universality and necessity. Science too knows the terminology of laws, both in title ('Ohm's law', 'the law of conservation of energy'), and in generic classifications ('laws of motion', 'conservation laws'). Scientists, however, do not speak of law in terms of universality and necessity, but in terms of symmetry, transformations, and invariance.

Vision, Gerald - Problems of Vision: Rethinking the Causal Theory of Perception

The topic of perception has never drifted far from philosophical consciousness, but it turned obsessive with the seventeenth- eighteenth-century ascendancy, first, of epistemology and then, more particularly, of idea empiricism. It is difficult to find a prominent philosopher of that period who did not have much to say about the nature of perception or its objects. Even Spinoza, who held sensory information in lower esteem than virtually all his contemporaries did, shows inordinate concern for explaining the senses.

White, Peter A. - Psychological Metaphysics

Consider the whole multifarious conglomerate of beliefs, judgements, concepts, and so on, cultural, sub-cultural, personal, stable or transient, that make up a person's understanding of the world and all that is in it. Could this bewildering diversity have any overall organisation, giving a place to every element within it? It could and does: it is an organisation that can be comprehended by elucidating its most fundamental components, for those are the things, more than anything else, that determine the pattern into which all of the elements in the organisation fall.

Woolhouse, Roger S. - A History of Western Philosophy: 5: The Empiricists

This book belongs to a series devoted to the history of philosophy from earliest to latest times, and the 'empiricists' referred to in its title do not include all those who have been so called. Like its companion The Rationalists, its period is bounded by an earlier volume on the Renaissance and later ones on philosophy since 1750.

Kripke, Saul - Naming and Necessity

Originally I had intended to revise or augment Naming and Necessity extensively. Considerable time has elapsed, and I have come to realize that any extensive revision or expansion would delay the appearance of a separate, less expensive edition of Naming and Necessity indefinitely.

Quine, Willard Van Orman - From A Logical Point of View

Several of these essays have been printed whole in journals; others are in varying degrees new. Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytical statement. The other is the notion of ontological commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals.

(...)

Furthermore, the rules of inference by existential generalization and universal instantiation, in the anomalous form in which they have to do with singular terms,¹² are reduced to the status of derivable rules and thus eliminated from the theoretical foundations of logic.