Le Poidevin, Robin (ed.) - Questions of Time and Tense

One of the central and most rapidly developing debates in contemporary metaphysics concerns the status of our ordinary division of time into past, present, and future. On one side of the debate stand the tensed theorists, who take seriously our intuitive conception of time, expressed metaphorically (or perhaps not so metaphorically) by the picture of time 'flowing'. On the other side stand the tenseless theorists, who deny the reality of temporal passage, and take our intuitive conception simply to reflect our perspective on time rather than the nature of time itself.

Solomon, Robert C. - Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of life

Twenty years ago, when I was wrestling with the rather impenetrable prose of the German idealist G.W.F. Hegel, I tried to capture his grand vision of the human cosmos, which he summarized in his first and greatest book, Die Phenomenologie des Geistes, as "Spirit" (Geist). The result of that wrestling match was the fattest book I have written (or will ever write), a 600 page tome entitled In the Spirit of Hegel. It was a gigantic departure from my former views and temperament, which I would still summarize as "existentialist."

Solomon, Robert C. - Living with Nietzsche: What the Great “Immoralist” has to Teach Us

How can we go on living with Nietzsche? The mere mention of his name evokes a ferocious emotional reaction, not only in the university (where he threatens to become a cliché), but on the street, in movies both comic and somber (Blazing Saddles, The Doors), in board- and dorm rooms as well as seminar rooms. If "Nietzsche" has come to signify the pop-postmodern pretensions of a superficial education, Nietzsche is also associated with an adolescent fascination with the dark, the deep, the forbidden. He serves as an excuse to talk about—if not to practice—the immoral, the blasphemous, the sacrilegious. He is an unabashed elitist, writing for "the few," contemptuous of "the herd" (everyone else). And here, of course, lies the problem.

Solomon, Robert C. - The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life

The history of philosophy has many ironies. One of them, surely, is Bertrand Russell's self-congratulatory observation about the origins of "analytic" philosophy. Against Hegel, who incorporated virtually every facet of concrete human experience into his philosophy, Russell, following Frege and Moore, "rebelled." Misinterpreting German idealism, which he took (wrongly) to be the conviction that the world is made up of ideas and not of good, solid matter, Russell made his comment "the world which had been thin and logical . . . became rich and varied" in his own philosophy.¹ So began a hundred-year "analytic" movement that would render philosophy thin and logical indeed.²

Solomon, Robert C. - In Defense of Sentimentality

"What's Wrong with Sentimentality?" The title of Mark Jefferson's article¹ already indicates a great deal not only about the gist of his essay but also about a century-old prejudice that has been devastating to ethics and literature alike. According to that prejudice, it goes without saying that there is something wrong with sentimentality, even if it is difficult to put one's finger on it.

Solomon, Robert C. - A History of Western Philosophy: 7: Continental Philosophy since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self

Strolling in solitude through the lush forests of St Germain during the early adolescence of the modern age, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a miraculous discovery. It was his self. This self was not, as his more scholastic predecessor Descartes had thought, that thin merely logical self, a pure formality that presented itself indubitably whenever he reflected: 'I think, therefore I am.' Nor was his the frustrated, sceptical search that led his friend Hume to declare, paradoxically, that 'whenever I took inside myself, there is no self to be found'. What Rousseau discovered in the woods of France was a self so rich and substantial, so filled with good feelings and half-articulated good thoughts, so expansive, natural, and at peace with the universe, that he recognized it immediately as something much more than his singular self. It was rather the Self as such, the soul of humanity.

Cottingham, John (ed.) - Descartes

Descartes is one of those very few philosophers whose ideas changed the shape of the subject. Whether for good or ill is at first hard to say. His reputation is a strangely ambivalent one: on the one hand, the revered 'father of modern philosophy'; on the other hand, the reviled source of such dangerous errors that the label 'Cartesian',¹ by the end of the twentieth century, has for many philosophers become almost a term of abuse.²

Ingram, David & Simon-Ingram, Julia (eds.) - Critical Theory: The Essential Readings

The selections that open this anthology deal with the relationship between philosophy and critical theory as seen by Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Separated by twenty-five years, these essays also reflect the different philosophical temperaments of their authors.

Stalnaker, Robert C. - Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought

This collection includes papers, published over a period of more than twenty-five years, on intentionality in speech and thought.

Kane, Robert (ed.) - The Oxford handbook of free will

The problem of free will and necessity (or determinism) is “perhaps the most voluminously debated of all philosophical problems,” according to a recent history of philosophy.¹ This situation has not changed at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of a new millennium. Indeed, debates about free will have become more voluminous in the past century, especially in the latter half of it—so much so that it has become difficult to keep up with the latest developments. This handbook was compiled as a remedy in the form of a sourcebook or guide to current work on free will and related subjects for those who wish to keep up with the latest research.

Steward, Helen - The Ontology of Mind: Events, Processes, and States

Few philosophers now believe in the existence of a substantial soul. The mind has lost its status as a special kind of persisting object in the ontological frameworks presupposed by contemporary philosophical debates. But it has not lost its place as a central concept in those debates; on the contrary, it is a concept which organizes the very discipline. A whole field is known as 'Philosophy of Mind'.

Chisholm, Roderick M. (ed.) - Realism and the Background of Phenomenology

Writing on Meinong in 1904, Bertrand Russell formulated a set of theses which might be taken to define "realism," in one of its most significant philosophical senses. Russell's theses were these: "that every presentation and every belief must have an object other than itself and, except in certain cases where mental existents happen to be concerned, extra-mental; that what is commonly called perception has as its object an existential proposition, into which enters as a constituent that whose existence is concerned, and not the idea of this existent; that truth and falsehood apply not to beliefs, but to their objects; and that the object of a thought, even when this object does not exist, has a Being which is in no way dependent upon its being an object of thought."¹ These theses, taken with Franz Brentano's doctrine of "intentionality" -- his description of what it is for a presentation or belief to have an object -- will help us to understand the development of twentieth-century realism and the background of phenomenology.

Copleston, Frederick - Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism

IT is the view of many British philosophers that philosophy consists mainly, if not entirely, of "linguistic analysis." And the main purpose of this essay is to explain what is implied by this conception of philosophy. Afterwards I propose to make a few remarks about the origin and development of this idea of the function and scope of philosophy.¹

Critchley, Simon - Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. If you think that you are in love with wisdom, then philosophy is presumably the subject to study. But what is the wisdom that philosophy teaches? For Socrates, and for nearly all ancient philosophers that came after him, the wisdom that philosophy teaches concerns what it might mean to lead a good human life. It was axiomatic for much ancient philosophy that a good human life would also be a happy one.

Adorno, Theodor W. - Gesammelte Schriften (die ersten 19 Bände)

Vom Standpunkt einer reinen Immanenzphilosophie aus soll in dieser Arbeit Husserls Theorie des Dinges an sich, so wie sie in den »Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie« entwickelt ist, geprüft werden; der Rekurs auf das »unmittelbar Gegebene« ist der positive Ausgangsgrund aller hier gebotenen Kritik. Wenngleich die Wirkung, die heute in weiten Kreisen die Phänomenologie übt, solchem Ausgang entgegenzusein scheint, zeugen doch Husserls frühere Arbeiten, zumal die »Logischen Untersuchungen«, dafür, daß Husserl die Phänomenologie, die er ursprünglich als »deskriptive Psychologie« bezeichnete, selbst einmal in verwandtem Sinne verstanden wissen wollte, wie sie hier verstanden und den Ausführungen der »Ideen« als kritisches Gegenbild kontrastiert wird.

Alford, C. Fred - Science and the Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas

SCIENCE IN the work of Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas is worthy of consideration for several reasons. First, it is an interesting topic in its own right. Second, their different concepts of science seem to act as lenses through which they view nature and humanity's relationship to it. Humanity's relationship to nature has always played a central role in critical theory. Considering Marcuse's and Habermas' views of science helps in understanding how and why the concept of nature is so central to this tradition. Their works also suggest why certain environmental problems are apparently so intractable. Third, this focus upon their views of science illuminates and clarifies their theories of knowledge.

Bernstein, Richard J. - Beyond objectivism and relativism: science, hermeneutics, and praxis

THERE is an uneasiness that has spread throughout intellectual and cultural life. It affects almost every discipline and every aspect of our lives. This uneasiness is expressed by the opposition between objectivism and relativism, but there are a variety of other contrasts that indicate the same underlying anxiety: rationality versus irrationality, objectivity versus subjectivity, realism versus antirealism. Contemporary thinking has moved between these and other, related extremes. Even the attempts that some have made to break out of this framework of thinking have all too frequently been assimilated to these standard oppositions.

Apel, Karl-Otto - Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective

Johann Gustav Droysen's Grundrisse der Historik appeared in manuscript form in 1858. (It first appeared as a book in 1868.) Here, Droysen writes: "According to the object and nature of human thought there are three possible scientific methods: the speculative (formulated in philosophy and theology), the mathematical or physical, and the historical. Their respective essences are to know, to explain, and to understand."¹

Merleau-Ponty, Morice - Basic Writings (Thomas Baldwin, ed.)

Merleau-Ponty’s father died while he was still a small child and, along with his brother and sister, he was brought up in Paris by his widowed mother, to whom he remained very close.

Kim, Jaegwon - Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation

Current debates on the mind-body problem can be traced back to the late 1950s and early 1960s. To be more precise, arguably the mind-body problem as we now know it had its origin in two classic papers published one year apart: "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical'" by Herbert Feigl in 1958 and "Sensations and Brain Processes" by J. J. C. Smart the following year.¹

Strawson, Peter F. - Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties

The term "naturalism" is elastic in its use. The fact that it has been applied to the work of philosophers having as little in common as Hume and Spinoza is enough to suggest that there is a distinction to be drawn between varieties of naturalism. In later chapters, I shall myself draw a distinction between two main varieties, within which there are subvarieties. Of the two main varieties, one might be called strict or reductive naturalism (or, perhaps, hard naturalism). The other might be called catholic or liberal naturalism (or, perhaps, soft naturalism).

Strawson, Peter F. - The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

This book originated in lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason given in alternate years from 1959 onwards in the University of Oxford. As any Kantian scholar who may read it will quickly detect, it is by no means a work of historical-philosophical scholarship. I have not been assiduous in studying the writings of Kant’s lesser predecessors, his own minor works or the very numerous commentaries which two succeeding centuries have produced. I have written for those students of the Critique who, like myself, have read and re-read the work with a commingled sense of great insights and great mystification.

Moser, Paul K. and Trout, J.D. (eds.) - Contemporary Materialism: A Reader

Materialism, of the kind accepted by many philosophers and scientists, is a general view about what actually exists. Put bluntly, the view is just this: Everything that actually exists is material, or physical. This general view originated with western philosophy itself, among the pre-Socratic philosophers in ancient Greece. Many philosophers and scientists now use the terms “material” and “physical” interchangeably; we shall follow suit.

Knowles, David - The Evolution of Medieval Thought

Philosophy has been defined as the study of ultimate reality and of the general causes and principles of things, with a particular reference to the human being, and to the principles and ends of human conduct. More briefly, we may prefer to consider it as a criticism and elucidation of assumptions and ways of thought that are the common property of mankind. However we define or regard it, there will be general agreement that, for men of what may still be called the Mediterranean tradition of civilization, philosophy as we know it took its rise in ancient Greece, and rose swiftly to maturity in Asia Minor, Magna Graecia, and, finally, in Athens.

Lehrer, Keith - Theory of Knowledge

ALL AGREE THAT KNOWLEDGE is valuable, but agreement about knowledge tends to end there. Philosophers disagree about what knowledge is, about how you get it, and even about whether there is any to be gotten. The question "What is knowledge?" will be the primary subject of this chapter and of this book.

Strawson, Galen - The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume

One response to the claim that Hume believes in causal power is that it is obviously true and completely uncontroversial. 'Of course he does. The fact that he does is a principal consequence of his central doctrine of "natural belief"¹ --his doctrine about the sorts of things we can't help believing in "common" or everyday life, irrespective of our philosophical conclusions. He has no doubt that we can't help believing in causal power, just as we can't help believing in truly external physical objects.'

Batterman, Robert W. - The Devil in the Details: Asymptotic Reasoning in Explanation, Reduction, and Emergence

Methodological philosophy of science concerns itself, among other things, with issues about the nature of scientific theories, of scientific explanation, and of intertheoretic reduction. Philosophers of science frequently have attempted to identify and "rationally reconstruct" distinct types of reasoning employed by scientists as they go about their business. Philosophical questions often asked in these contexts include: What counts as an explanation? When does one theory replace or reduce another? What, for that matter, is a theory? All too often, however, these reconstructions end up being quite far removed from the actual science being done.

Azzouni, Jody - Deflating Existential Consequence: A Case for Nominalism

Philosophy—at least that tradition of it I choose to work within—has at best an uneasy relationship with ontology. Carnap, notoriously, denied that genuine ontological questions (and purported optional answers to these questions) are meaningful, and this viewpoint is one that continues to be a live possibility (or at least a serious temptation) for contemporary philosophers. On the other hand, Quine's criterion for what a discourse is committed to is widely (and uncritically) adopted despite an official disagreement over what it amounts to, and whether a coherent version of it is even available.¹

Stroud, Barry - Hume

David Hume is generally considered to be a purely negative philosopher—the arch sceptic whose primary aim and achievement was to reduce the theories of his empiricist predecessors to the absurdity that was implicitly contained in them all along. This view, part of which started in Hume’s own day, was strongly encouraged by nineteenth-century historians of philosophy who saw all intellectual changes as necessary stages in a predetermined process of the unfolding of something called History or the Absolute.

Noonan, Harold W. - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hume on Knowledge

David Hume, the last of the so-called 'three great British empiricists'-the others being Locke (1632-1704) and Berkeley (1685-1753)-was born on 26 April 1711, in Edinburgh, seven years after the death of Locke and when Berkeley was a young man of 26. His father was Joseph Home of Ninewells, a small landholding in Berwick-on-Tweed (David adopted the spelling 'Hume' when he left Scotland in 1734 to avoid mispronunciation by the English). His family were quite prosperous gentry and strict Presbyterians.

Lowe, Jonathan E. - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Locke on Human Understanding

John Locke lived during a particularly turbulent period of English history and was personally associated with some of its most dramatic episodes, despite possessing a rather quiet and retiring character. He was born in Somerset in 1632, the son of a small landowner and attorney, also named John (1606-61), and his wife Agnes (1597-1654). In spite of these relatively humble beginnings, he received an excellent education, first at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford. These advantages were made possible through connections which his father had with people richer and more influential than himself.

Gardner, Sebastian - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason

In the Preface to the Critique Kant observes that, although metaphysics is meant to be ‘the Queen of all the sciences’ (Aviii), reason in metaphysics ‘is perpetually being brought to a stand’ (Bxiv). Ever and again ‘we have to retrace our steps’ (Bxiv). The degree and quality of disagreement in metaphysics makes it a ‘battle-ground’, a site of ‘mock-combats’ in which ‘no participant has ever yet succeeded in gaining even so much as an inch of territory’ (Bxv). The result is that in the sphere of metaphysics we vacillate between dogmatism, skepticism and indifference.

Savile, Anthony - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Leibniz and the Monadology

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born into an academic family in Leipzig in 1646, just before the end of the Thirty Years War. His father was Professor of Moral Philosophy there and his mother the daughter of a local Professor of Law. Descartes had died in 1650 before Leibniz was 4, and he was younger by 12 years than Spinoza and by 14 than Locke. By the time he was 20, he had precociously completed his own legal studies and written a doctoral thesis on the subject of hard cases at law (De casibus perplexis in jure).