Stroud, Barry - Understanding Human Knowledge: Philosophical Essays

Scepticism in recent and current philosophy represents a certain threat or challenge in the theory of knowledge. What is that threat? How serious is it? How, if at all, can it be met? What are the consequences if it cannot be met?

Moore, A.W. - Points of View

Is it ever possible to think about the world with complete detachment?

I shall argue in Chapter Four that it is. Before that, I want to use this chapter to clarify the question, Chapter Two to consider its importance, and Chapter Three to dispel a certain illusion associated with it.

Reck, Erich H. (ed.) - From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein is, no doubt, one of the most original and independent philosophers of the twentieth century. Yet even he developed his ideas not in complete isolation, but as influenced by, or in response to, other thinkers. His relation to Bertrand Russell, his early teacher and mentor in Cambridge, has been documented in detail.¹

Floyd, Juliet & Shieh, Sanford (Eds.) - Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth Century Philosophy

Among contemporary philosophers there is a growing interest in recounting the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. The essays in this volume are meant to be contributions, from a variety of perspectives, to this growing historical consciousness. But they are intended to be more than that. Our decision to group together these particular contributions has been determined by our own conception of present difficulties facing a historical perspective on philosophy of the last hundred years. We intend the present volume to provoke discussion of the underlying outlooks and sensibilities that may—and do—inform current work on the history of recent philosophy.

Rice, Hugh - God and Goodness

My main aim in this book is rather a modest one; it is to argue that a belief in God is reasonable. It is modest in the sense that I shall not argue that it is unreasonable not to believe in God. I shall not argue that there is something wrong with someone who does not believe in God; rather, more defensively, I shall argue that there is nothing wrong with someone who does—that such a belief is intellectually respectable. My aim is also limited. Naturally I shall not be arguing that any old belief in God is reasonable; but nor will I be arguing for the reasonableness of a belief as detailed as, say, that expressed in the Apostles' creed. What I shall be arguing for is the reasonableness of a belief in God conceived in an abstract way, but a belief which, nonetheless, corresponds to the central core of many people's beliefs; something that can be understood in fairly simple terms, whose exposition does not involve the invocation of mystery. Not, indeed, something immune from doubt; but something, at least, whose content is sufficiently clear for one to know what one is doubting; and something that it is natural for an ordinary, reasonable person to believe.

Fogelin, Robert J. - Philosophical Interpretations

The essays that make up this volume - with only a few exceptions - offer readings of philosophical texts that depart, sometimes radically, from standard readings. Yet the principles of interpretation that underlie these essays are not themselves radical. Nothing is deconstructed. Nowhere have I argued that a philosopher's words should not be taken at face value. My principle of interpretation is just the reverse of this: granting the possibility of inadvertent slips, misleading modes of expression, and the like, I hold that there is a very strong presumption in favor of the claims that philosophers meant to say precisely what they did say and that what they did say means precisely what it seems to mean.

DeLancey, Craig - Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about the Mind and Artificial Intelligence

There probably is no scientifically appropriate class of things referred to by our term emotion. Such disparate phenomena—fear, guilt, shame, melancholy, and so on—are grouped under this term that it is dubious that they share anything but a family resemblance. But particular emotions are another matter altogether. There is good reason to believe that different sciences can make quite compelling sense of a more fine-grained differentiation of affects. My task in this book is to reveal some of the important and neglected lessons of some of the emotions for the philosophy and sciences of mind, and this task can be accomplished with just a working characterization of a few of these. More important, there is a compelling theory of some emotions that has far-reaching implications for the philosophy and sciences of mind. This is the affect program theory. Using a version of this theory as a guide to what phenomena we will be concerned with and to the nature of these phenomena will allow us to avoid fundamental confusions and to provide richer results.

Cassam, Quassim - Self and World

A remarkable feature of many philosophical accounts of the nature of self-consciousness has been their commitment to the idea that the self is, in some important sense, systematically elusive.¹ The supposedly elusive self is the thinking, experiencing self, and the perspective from which this self has seemed so elusive is that of introspective self-awareness.

Dupré, John - Human Nature and the Limits of Science

While working on this book I happened to turn on the third instalment of a television series on human hormones. The official topic of this episode was Love. In between images of chemical clouds bubbling out of glands and diffusing through the body, the programme traced the effects of hormones on sexual differentiation in utero and in puberty. Distinguished scientists reported the exciting and sometimes surprising results of our recent ability to measure the levels of hormones in bodies, and correlations between these levels and the emotional states of the subjects were noted. As different behavioural tendencies were shown to develop in males and females, evolutionists informed us about the functions these might have served for our Stone Age ancestors. Reaching the official topic of love, we were taught to distinguish its various phases—infatuation, obsession, companionship—and their hormonal correlates. Magnetic Resonance Imaging of obsessed lovers revealed similarities between their brain activities and those of the mentally disturbed, providing, apparently, scientific evidence that love is indeed a form of madness. Later, we learned that whether male voles remained faithful to their partners or indulged in untrammelled promiscuity depended on the presence of specific hormones, and we were invited to speculate as to whether similar mechanisms might operate in humans. And so on. Although much of this work was admitted to be at a somewhat speculative stage, the scientists involved expressed no reservations about the possibility that love might turn out to be caused by, or just to be—such ontological subtleties were not addressed—a sequence of hormonal surges; nor did members of the public asked to comment on some of these scientific claims, though some expressed the view that the topic of love should be left to poets, and that these scientific facts were better left unknown.

This programme illustrates the hold on our culture of what I call scientism, an exaggerated and often distorted conception of what science can be expected to do or explain for us.

Christensen, David - Putting Logic in its Place: Formal Constraints on Rational Belief

If there is one respect in which humans differ most fundamentally from the other animals, perhaps it is our superior ability to reason about, and understand, the world. The main product of our reasoning, and medium of our understanding, is, of course, also our chief representation of the world—our system of beliefs.

Stern, David G. - Wittgenstein on Mind and Language

This book is an exposition of Wittgenstein's early conception of the nature of representation and how his later revision and criticism of that work led to a radically different way of looking at mind and language. Most interpretations of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy focus on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [hereafter called Tractatus], written during World War I and published shortly afterward, the Philosophical Investigations, written and rewritten during the last twenty years of Wittgenstein's life and published shortly after his death in 1951, and the literature that has grown up around these books. In contrast, my reading of his philosophy of mind and language begins from the initial articulation of his thoughts in his first drafts, conversations, and lectures and the process of revision that led to the published works.

Kaminsky, Jack - Language and Ontology

In all pure calculi which are designed to form the structure of a formalized language serving scientific needs the assumption is made that some minimum number of marks will be used to signify "negation," "existential quantification," "class membership," "or," "if ... then ---," "and," and perhaps "is identical to."

Lopes, Dominic McIver - Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures

Mounted upon the wall behind the woman in Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance is another painting, one whose subject is the Last Judgement (Fig. 1). The theme of judgement is repeated in the balance which the woman uses to weigh her goods. By juxtaposing moral and commercial evaluation, Vermeer draws our thoughts to evaluation in general and so to the evaluation of pictures in particular. Pictures are worth owning, some more than others. They sometimes make good decorations, adorning palaces, dentists' offices, and counting-houses. Some are displayed in public or private as badges of social status or group membership. Some impart lessons, as does the painting depicted in Woman Holding a Balance, or supply evidence for historical and scientific hypotheses, such as the claim that painters of Vermeer's time used the camera obscura. Very often, pictures are also objects of aesthetic evaluation. This book concerns the aesthetic evaluation of pictures, viewed in relation to other evaluations of them.

Kosso, Peter - Appearance and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics

Bohr's assessment of the task and the abilities of physics can be put bluntly in terms of appearance and reality. It is wrong, he claims, to think that physics allows us to know the reality of nature. Physics can tell us only how nature appears.

The distinction is important, since appearance, the human account of things, is unavoidably influenced by our own perspective and preconceptions.

Burgess, John P. & Rosen, Gideon - A Subject With No Object: Strategies for Nominalistic Interpretation of Mathematics

Finally, after years of waiting, it is your turn to put a question to the Oracle of Philosophy. So you humbly approach and ask the question that has been consuming you for as long as you can remember: 'Tell me, O Oracle, what there is. What sorts of things exist?'

To this the Oracle responds: 'What? You want the whole list? Look, I haven't got all day. But I will tell you this: everything there is is concrete; nothing there is is abstract. Now go away and don't bother me.'

Foster, John - The Nature of Perception

What is the nature of perception—the sensory perception of items in the physical world by human subjects?

By tradition, there are three general theories. First, there is direct realism. This accepts a realist view of the physical world: it takes the physical world (the world of physical space and material objects) to be something whose existence is logically independent of the human mind, and something which is, in its basic character, metaphysically fundamental. And, within this realist framework, it takes our perceptual access to the physical world to be direct.

Laudan, Larry - Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence

This is a book about a few key problems in the philosophy of science. To explain why it has the structure that it does, I need to say something very briefly about my odyssey in philosophy. I came of age philosophically toward the end of the heyday of logical empiricism. My early views grew out of a conviction that the positivists had mistaken ideas both about the agenda for philosophy and about the solutions to certain prominent problems. For instance, the axiomatic reformulation of scientific theories, the premium put on getting at the precise structure of scientific explanation, and the multiplication of formal theories of empirical support all struck me then, as they strike me now, as misplaced emphases.

Field, Hartry - Truth and the Absence of Fact

In the early 1930s there was prevalent, among scientifically minded philosophers, the view that semantic notions such as the notions of truth and denotation were illegitimate: that they could or should not be incorporated into a scientific conception of the world. But when Tarski's work on truth became known, all this changed.

Caird, G.B. (Hurst, L.D., ed.) - New Testament Theology

New Testament theology is a historical discipline. It is not to be confused with either dogmatics or apologetics: for its purpose is neither to provide scriptural authority for modern doctrinal beliefs nor to make those beliefs appear reasonable and defensible to the unconvinced inquirer. Its purpose is descriptive.²

Coady, C.A.J. - Testimony: A Philosophical Study

It will be useful to begin by distinguishing between negative and positive epistemology. Negative epistemology is concerned with theoretical problems posed by the challenge of radical or philosophical scepticism in its various forms; positive epistemology takes it that the challenge of scepticism is somehow overcome, or sidetracked, and proceeds to investigate the structure (or absence of structure) to be found in human knowledge or in that body of belief which can, scepticism aside, lay reasonable claim to that title.

Chihara, Charles S. - Constructibility and Mathematical Existence

The first part of this work begins with an introductory chapter in which a fundamental problem of philosophy of mathematics is presented. Several outstanding attempts to deal with this problem are discussed in this opening chapter.

Marcus, Ruth Barcan - Modalities: Philosophical Essays

The source of this paper was published in Synthese, XIII, 4 (December 1961): 303-322.

Carruthers, Peter - Consciousness: Essays from a Higher-Order Perspective

This book is a collection of essays about consciousness (focusing mostly on a particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness and its implications), together with surrounding issues. Amongst the latter are included the nature of reductive explanation in general; the nature of conscious thought and the plausibility of some form of eliminativism about conscious thought (while retaining realism about phenomenal consciousness); the appropriateness of sympathy for creatures whose mental states aren't phenomenally conscious ones; and the psychological continuities and similarities that exist between minds that lack phenomenally conscious mental states and minds that possess them.

Fuller, Steve - Social Epistemology

The fundamental question of the field of study I call social epistemology is: How should the pursuit of knowledge be organized, given that under normal circumstances knowledge is pursued by many human beings, each working on a more or less well-defined body of knowledge and each equipped with roughly the same imperfect cognitive capacities, albeit with varying degrees of access to one another's activities?