Hindess, Barry - Philosophy and Methodology in the Social Sciences

The first six chapters of this book provide a systematic critique of epistemological and philosophical interventions in the social sciences and of prescriptive methodology in general. The first chapter examines the methodological doctrines of Max Weber and his definition of sociology a science of social action. I argue that Weber's definition of sociology is based on an essentially religious, metaphysical conception of man, that his methodology is relativistic and irrationalist, and that his concept of scientific objectivity is a façade for an underlying notion of verisimilitude, of plausibility and subjective conviction. The next two chapters deal directly with phenomenology and phenomenological sociology.

Groff, Ruth - Critical Realism, Post-positivism and the Possibility of Knowledge

The problem at the heart of this book is the recent resurgence of relativism. In the wake of the well-deserved breakdown of positivism, it no longer seems possible to rationally assess competing knowledge claims. In the social sciences in particular, the fashionable post-positivist view is that any belief can be valid, depending upon one's perspective; that truth is simply a term of praise (or, alternately, a display of power); and that there is in fact no such thing as a reality that does not belong in quotation marks.

Armstrong, David Malet - A world of states of affairs

The hypothesis of this work is that the world, all that there is, is a world of states of affairs. Others, Wittgenstein in particular, have said that the world is a world of facts and not a world of things. These theses are substantially the same, though differently expressed.

The general structure of states of affairs will be argued to be this. A state of affairs exists if and only if a particular (at a later point to be dubbed a thin particular) has a property or, instead, a relation holds between two or more particulars. Each state of affairs, and each constituent of each state of affairs, meaning by their constituents the particulars, properties, relations and, in the case of higher-order states of affairs, lower-order states of affairs, is a contingent existent. The properties and the relations are universals, not particulars. The relations are all external relations.

DeRose, Keith & Warfield, Ted A. (eds.) - Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader

For almost anything you might think you know, there are powerful skeptical arguments that threaten to establish that you know no such thing. Take, for instance, your belief that you have hands.

Lang, Karen C. (transl &. introd.) - Four Illusions: Candrakīrti’s Advice for Travelers on the Bodhisattva Path

Stories of Gautama Buddha’s life say that he left behind his home and family in search of an answer to the question of why people suffer. Neither his experience of sensual pleasures as a rich man’s son nor his experience of harsh austerities as a homeless wanderer brought relief. After he found the answer to his question, he chose the active life of teaching over a quiet life of meditative silence. When asked to teach, he responded with compassionate concern for the well-being of others.¹

Reichenbach, Hans - Atom and Cosmos: The World of Modern Physics

The account of modern physics given in this book is an outgrowth of lectures which the author broadcast in Berlin during the winter of 1929-30. These addresses had the aim of presenting physical knowledge to nonphysicists; and since these non-specialists showed great interest in problems of physics, the author felt himself justified in satisfying the numerous requests for a written version of the lectures.

Dennett, Daniel C. - Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness

Can we ever really know what is going on in someone else's mind? Can a woman ever know what it is like to be a man? What experiences does a baby have during childbirth? What experiences, if any, does a fetus have in its mother's womb? And what of nonhuman minds? What do horses think about? Why aren't vultures nauseated by the rotting carcasses they eat? When a fish has a hook sticking through its lip, does it hurt the fish as much as it would hurt you, if you had a hook sticking through your lip? Can spiders think, or are they just tiny robots, mindlessly making their elegant webs? For that matter, why couldn't a robot--if it was fancy enough--be conscious?

Losee, John - Theories of Scientific Progress: An Introduction

There is nearly unanimous agreement that science is a progressive discipline. However, the nature of this progress has been, and continues to be, a matter of dispute.

Bradley, Raymond - The Nature of All Being: A Study of Wittgenstein’s Modal Atomism

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell are commonly referred to as "logical atomists". True, the term was not Wittgenstein's; it was Russell who coined it.

Hersh, Reuben - What Is Mathematics, Really?

This section has two purposes. It's a worked exercise in Pólya's heuristic (see Chapter 11).

At the same time, it's an inquiry into mathematical existence. By guided induction and intelligent guessing, you'll count the parts of a 4-dimensional cube. Then you'll be asked, "Does your work make sense? What kind of sense does it make?"

You're familiar with two-dimensional cubes (squares) and three-dimensional cubes. Is there a four-dimensional cube?

Ryle, Gilbert - The Concept of Mind

This book offers what may with reservations be described as a theory of the mind. But it does not give new information about minds. We possess already a wealth of information about minds, information which is neither derived from, nor upset by, the arguments of philosophers. The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge which we already possess.

Politis, Vasilis - Routledge Philosophy Guide Book to Aristotle and the Metaphysics

The work that we have here under the title ‘the Metaphysics’ (ta meta ta phusika) is a series of fourteen books, all or most of which were written by Aristotle (384–322 BC). They belong to his latest period of work. Therefore the Metaphysics belongs to what Aristotle wrote after founding (in 335 BC) his own school of philosophy in Athens: the Lyceum or Peripatos. This means that, even if we take into account that the Metaphysics must have been written over an extended period of time, Aristotle must have produced the work some years after leaving the Academy, Plato’s school in Athens; for he became a pupil of Plato (427–347 BC) at the age of seventeen, and he remained in Plato’s school, first as a pupil and later as a relatively independent researcher, for some twenty years. But he left the Academy after Plato died.

Scruton, Roger - The Aesthetics of Music

Like colours, sounds are presented to a single privileged sense-modality. You can hear them, but you cannot see them, touch them, taste them, or smell them. They are objects of hearing in something like the way that colours are objects of sight, and they are missing from the world of deaf people just as colours are missing from the world of the blind.

Collins, John & Hall, Ned & Paul L.A. (eds.) - Causation and Counterfactuals

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts¹ are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e—the cause and its effect—both occur, but: Had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation.

Russell, Bertrand (Mumford, Stephen, ed.) - Russell on Metaphysics: Selections From the Writings of Bertrand Russell

This book is a collection, along with a commentary, of the most significant writings on metaphysics by Bertrand Russell. Unlike the other books published in this series so far, the heading under which Russell’s writings are selected is one that may not be fully understood in advance by some readers. Russell discussed many things, including politics, religion and ethics. He was, however, one of the greatest analytic philosophers of the twentieth century and this book includes some of the writings for which he deserves this status. Some of the ideas Russell discusses here may be difficult, therefore. But Russell thought that in almost all areas of philosophy, clarity and simplicity was possible and that even very difficult ideas could be stripped down to their easily grasped essentials. He successfully demonstrates this in these papers. Thus, someone completely new to metaphysics ought nevertheless be able to understand what is said. Indeed, this collection would provide a fine introduction to the subject or to analytic philosophy in general. Though it is not a student textbook nor a research monograph, it is the work of a prominent and important philosopher engaged in metaphysical study. Perhaps there is no better introduction to metaphysics than such a thing. Further, this book might be an informative introduction to analytic philosophy and its history. Some of the papers contain the metaphysical development that underpinned the transition from British idealism to contemporary British philosophy.

Russell, Bertrand - A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz: With an Appendix of Leading Passages

The philosophy of Leibniz, though never presented to the world as a systematic whole, was nevertheless, as a careful examination shows, an unusually complete and coherent system. As the method of studying his views must be largely dependent upon his method of presenting them, it seems essential to say something, however brief, as to his character and circumstances, and as to the ways of estimating how far any given work represents his true opinions.

Russell, B. - A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day

In all history, nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece. Much of what makes civilization had already existed for thousands of years in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, and had spread thence to neighbouring countries. But certain elements had been lacking until the Greeks supplied them. What they achieved in art and literature is familiar to everybody, but what they did in the purely intellectual realm is even more exceptional.

Achinstein, Peter - The Book of Evidence

Once there was a dean at my university who was a scientist with high intelligence but low boiling point. One day at a faculty meeting, after I said something that displeased him, he replied, "Peter, you have never made a contribution of interest to scientists." Naturally, my first thought was to take offense. But trying to maintain a generous spirit, and believing that a highly intelligent dean offers personal insults only in private, I decided what he really meant was not the singular "you" but the plural one. "You philosophers of science," he meant, "have nothing to offer us scientists."

Hankinson, R.James - Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

Why do things happen? What makes an event occur at a particular time? What are the ultimate constituents of things? How does the structure of some organism account for or determine its function? Are the constituents of the universe there for some purpose? What is meant by chance and coincidence? Are there such things as natural laws? How are people responsible for what they do?

Although these questions vary in sophistication and scope, they are united by the fact that they are demands for explanation. They are questions that call for an elucidation of the structure of the world, for an account that will render its apparently arcane and random processes amenable to prediction and control. They are the fundamental questions in the sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as in metaphysics and ethics.

Saw, Ruth Lydia - Leibniz

Dr. Ruth Saw's book on the philosophy of Leibniz is one of a series of philosophical works which are appearing in a similar form.

Chalmers, David J. - The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter? We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness.

Searle, John R. - Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World

From the time of the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century until the early decades of the twentieth, it was possible for an educated person to believe that he or she could come to know and understand the important things about how the universe works. From the Copernican Revolution, through Newtonian mechanics, the theory of electromagnetism, and Darwin's theory of evolution, the universe made a kind of sense, had a kind of intelligibility, and was becoming ever more accessible through the steadily increasing growth of knowledge and understanding.

Searle, John R. - The Rediscovery of the Mind

The famous mind-body problem, the source of so much controversy over the past two millennia, has a simple solution. This solution has been available to any educated person since serious work began on the brain nearly a century ago, and, in a sense, we all know it to be true. Here it is: Mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain. To distinguish this view from the many others in the field, I call it "biological naturalism."

Landesman, Charles (ed.) - The Problem of Universals

If one were to list the sorts of things that philosophers have characteristically disagreed about, one would find disagreements not only over the solutions to antecedently formulated problems but also over the very terms in which the problems are stated. Often, the very existence of a problem which has moved one generation of philosophers is doubted by the next. The problem of universals is no exception to this philosophical ambivalence. It is and has been a paradigm case of a metaphysical problem; yet in our time there has been a great deal of skepticism over the very possibility of metaphysics. Reasons that many philosophers have found persuasive have been offered to show that metaphysical speculation is either trival or fruitless or meaningless. In offering a collection of essays on the problem of universals, one has an obligation to justify the claim that there is such a problem.

Bennett, Jonathan - Events and Their Names

According to good dictionaries, an "event" is "anything that happens; an incident or occurrence." So weddings and explosions are events, as are attacks of nostalgia, quarrels, avalanches, fights, fires, traffic jams, reconciliations, slumps, elections, strolls, births, deaths. Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events, and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this presumed common nature. They have wanted to know: What marks events off from other categories of existent--how do we tell the dancer from the dance? How do events relate to space and time? What is needed for two events to be parts of a single larger or fuller event? What is needed for a single event to have smaller or more abstract parts? Could we tell the whole truth about the universe without using the concept of an event? How does that concept figure in causal statements? What determines whether a pair of event descriptions could fit a single event?

Shand, John - Philosophy and philosophers: An introduction to Western philosophy

The past is not a story; only in retrospect under an interpretation does it unfold as history like a fictional tale in a book. Consequently, in reporting what happened in the past we lack one of the characteristics of a story: a definite beginning. However, in Greece a short time after 600 BC certain changes were taking place in human thought that seemed to have no precedent; and it is on these changes in the way human beings began to think about the world and themselves that the most fundamental aspects of today’s Western civilization—its science, ethics, politics, and philosophy—are founded. There were events of significance before this time; but 600 BC onwards marks alterations in human thought sufficient to describe it as a beginning.

Wainwright, William J. (ed.) - The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion

The expression "philosophy of religion" did not come into general use until the nineteenth century, when it was employed to refer to the articulation and criticism of humanity's religious consciousness and its cultural expressions in thought, language, feeling, and practice. Historically, philosophical reflection on religious themes had two foci: first, God or Brahman or Nirvana or whatever else the object of religious thought, attitudes, feelings, and practice was believed to be, and, second, the human religious subject, that is, the thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and practices themselves.

Frances, Bryan - Scepticism Comes Alive

When Jo was a teenager, she learned that a huge meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs. She learned this theory in the usual way, hearing it from her parents, teachers, and books. Now pretend that at the time she was told the meteor story as a child, say at the age of 8, the scientific community was sharply divided on the issue of what caused the demise of the dinosaurs. Although most scientists accepted the meteor hypothesis, many others subscribed to the idea that their death was caused by some enormous solar flare. A significant number of other scientists thought that it wasn't a solar flare or a meteor, but a particularly nasty series of supervolcanoes. These latter two classes of dissenters had decent evidence: evidence concerning the sun and supervolcanoes that the meteor advocates took seriously. Both the solar flare theorists and the supervolcano theorists were highly respected professors, highly respected by the meteor theorists and at the top of their profession. Whole book series, conferences, and Ph.D. dissertations were devoted to these competing hypotheses. Suppose, further, that upon going to her university, Jo found out about the rival and highly respected hypotheses. She didn't understand all the reasons why they were so well respected and endorsed, but she was well aware that they were well respected and frequently endorsed by the experts, even the best among them. Even so, she kept her meteor belief.

Cartwright, Nancy - How the Laws of Physics Lie

Philosophers distinguish phenomenological from theoretical laws. Phenomenological laws are about appearances; theoretical ones are about the reality behind the appearances. The distinction is rooted in epistemology. Phenomenological laws are about things which we can at least in principle observe directly, whereas theoretical laws can be known only by indirect inference. Normally for philosophers 'phenomenological' and 'theoretical' mark the distinction between the observable and the unobservable.

Physicists also use the terms 'theoretical' and 'phenomenological'. But their usage makes a different distinction. Physicists contrast 'phenomenological' with 'fundamental'.

Shoemaker, Sydney - Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity

What we mean when we assert something to be the case cannot be different from what we know when we know that thing to be the case. If we have knowledge of things of a certain kind, and know them in a certain way, and if it is a consequence of some assertion or theory about the nature of those things that they cannot be known, or cannot be known in the ways in which we do in fact know them, then that assertion or theory must be mistaken. An important way of investigating philosophically the nature (essence, concept) of a particular kind of things is by considering how things of that sort are, or can be, known.