Download or read book Analytical Solipsism written by William Lewis Todd and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers usually have been anxious to avoid solipsism. A large number of good and great philosophers have tried to refute it. Of course, these philosophers have not always had the same target in mind and, like everything else, solipsism over the centuries has become increasingly elusive and subtle. In this book I undertake to state the position in its most modern and what I take to be its most plausible form. At some points in the history of philosophy the solipsist has been one who denied the existence of everything except himself or even the existence of everything except his own present sensations. At other times, the solipsist instead of doubting these things has merely insisted that there could be no good reason for believing in the existence of anything beyond one's own present sensations. Roughly, this doubt is aimed at reasons rather than at things. A solipsist of this sort appears in Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith.
Download or read book Why Solipsism Matters written by Sami Pihlström and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solipsism is one of the philosophical thesis or ideas that has generally been regarded as highly implausible, or even crazy. The view that the world is “my world” in the sense that nothing exists independently of my mind, thought, and/or experience is, understandably, frowned up as a genuine philosophical position. For this reason, solipsism might be regarded as an example of a philosophical position that does not “matter” at all. It does not seem to play any role in our serious attempts to understand the world and ourselves. However, by arguing that solipsism does matter, after all, Why Solipsism Matters more generally demonstrates that philosophy, even when dealing with highly counterintuitive and “crazy” ideas, may matter in surprising, unexpected ways. It will be shown that the challenge of solipsism should make us rethink fundamental assumptions concerning subjectivity, objectivity, realism vs. idealism, relativism, as well as key topics such as ethical responsibility – that is, our ethical relations to other human beings – and death and mortality. Why Solipsism Matters is not only an historical review of the origins and development of the concept of solipsism and a exploration of some of its key philosophers (Kant and Wittgenstein to name but a few) but it develops an entirely new account of the idea. One which takes seriously the global, socially networked world in which we live in which the very real ramifications of solipsism - including narcissism - can be felt.
Download or read book Sexual Solipsism written by Rae Langton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-08 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rae Langton here draws together her ground-breaking and contentious work on pornography and objectification. She shows how women come to be objectified and she argues for the controversial feminist conclusions that pornography subordinates and silences women, and women have rights against pornography.
Download or read book Solipsism Physical Things and Personal Perceptual Space written by Safak Ural and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-09-30 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solipsism indicates an epistemological position that denies the existence of ‘others’ by asserting that the ‘self’ is the only thing that can be known to exist. For sophist philosophers, the belief that “we can not know anything, and even if we do so, we cannot communicate it” is central to this theory. However, until now there has been little academic scholarship that has tried to provide answers to the pressing issues raised by solipsism. In Solipsist Ontology: Physical Things and Personal Perceptual Space, Ural aims to redefine solipsism by analyzing and elaborating on traditional philosophical problems, such as empiricism and rationalism, as well as discussing problems of language, communication, and meaning. Ural reveals where solipsism has been previously ignored, pseudo-problems have arisen that disguise the sources of the problems with prejudices that concern the philosophical problems in question. Notably, many current, as well as traditional problems of ontology, epistemology, and language are bound up in discourses of solipsism. Ural argues that discarding solipsism as a philosophical discourse hinders new interpretations of traditional philosophical thought. This book offers a fresh perspective to solipsism by defining it in relation to concepts such as ‘physical things,’ ‘personal perceptual space’ and ‘identity.’ Importantly, Ural proposes that an understanding of ‘identity’ is not necessary in order to redefine solipsism. By building a logical system that fashions communication and solipsism as interrelated, it is possible to reject ‘identity’ as a useless concept and thus overcome the classic solipsist dilemma of “we are not able to communicate.” This original piece of research is an important and timely contribution to the field of philosophy that will be of great interest to teachers, researchers, and students.
Download or read book Solipsism Physical Things and Personal Perceptual Space written by Safak Ural and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solipsism indicates an epistemological position that denies the existence of ‘others’ by asserting that the ‘self’ is the only thing that can be known to exist. For sophist philosophers, the belief that “we can not know anything, and even if we do so, we cannot communicate it” is central to this theory. However, until now there has been little academic scholarship that has tried to provide answers to the pressing issues raised by solipsism. In Solipsist Ontology: Physical Things and Personal Perceptual Space, Ural aims to redefine solipsism by analyzing and elaborating on traditional philosophical problems, such as empiricism and rationalism, as well as discussing problems of language, communication, and meaning. Ural reveals where solipsism has been previously ignored, pseudo-problems have arisen that disguise the sources of the problems with prejudices that concern the philosophical problems in question. Notably, many current, as well as traditional problems of ontology, epistemology, and language are bound up in discourses of solipsism. Ural argues that discarding solipsism as a philosophical discourse hinders new interpretations of traditional philosophical thought. This book offers a fresh perspective to solipsism by defining it in relation to concepts such as ‘physical things,’ ‘personal perceptual space’ and ‘identity.’ Importantly, Ural proposes that an understanding of ‘identity’ is not necessary in order to redefine solipsism. By building a logical system that fashions communication and solipsism as interrelated, it is possible to reject ‘identity’ as a useless concept and thus overcome the classic solipsist dilemma of “we are not able to communicate.” This original piece of research is an important and timely contribution to the field of philosophy that will be of great interest to teachers, researchers, and students.
Download or read book Analytic Existentialism written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-09-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Existentialist philosophy has, at times, been exceptionally popular. This is because of its promise of possibility, both in doctrine and in style: Its doctrine promises that we can break free from the shackles of cognitive or social structures we are thrown into, and we can overcome our marred personal or collective history. Its style promises that philosophy can be exciting, moving, exhilarating, and funny. Analytic Existentialism brings together ten essays in which analytic philosophers engage with existentialism. The essays take up central existentialist themes, such as freedom, consciousness, and bad faith. Some bring existentialist ideas to bear on issues in contemporary analytic philosophy; some engage analytically with existentialist concerns; some employ the methods of analytic philosophy to interpret existentialist texts; and some articulate how existentialist insights speak to ongoing matters of concern outside of philosophy. All essays, taken together, make good on the existentialist promise for analytic philosophy: Even as analytic philosophers, we can embrace the thought that freedom is at the heart of our being. And even as analytic philosophers, we can write philosophical texts that capture the imagination. We trust that these essays can rekindle the excitement of philosophical thought.
Download or read book Late Soviet Britain written by Abby Innes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abby Innes argues that the Soviet revolution and British neoliberalism failed for many of the same theoretical and practical reasons. She shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions.
Download or read book Wittgenstein and Early Analytic Semantics written by James Connelly and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book assesses the respective prospects of two competing methodological approaches to the study of meaning and communication, as well truth and inference, each figuring prominently within the analytic tradition of philosophy of language. The first, ‘logistical’ approach is characterized by the employment of de-compositional logical analysis designed to resolve various theoretically problematic semantic and logical puzzles.The representative proponents of this approach are the three great early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein). The second, ‘phenomenological’ approach, by contrast, instead advocates careful inspection and detailed description of our actual linguistic practices, along with general features of the ordinary circumstances, and lived experiences, in which they are situated. The aim of such description is then to dissolve the aforementioned puzzles by showing them to derive from key misunderstandings of these practices and circumstances. The principle proponent here is the later Wittgenstein. Expanding upon the work of the later Wittgenstein, this book argues that considerations regarding the nature of following a rule, and deriving from the impossibility of private languages, decisively recommend the phenomenological over the logistical methodology, in particular because these considerations demand that we identify linguistic meanings with the disciplined uses of words within public, and proto-typically social, linguistic practices.
Download or read book The Analysis of Knowledge written by Ledger Wood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1940. Firstly, this book seeks to combine epistemology and the new developments of the time in psychology. It holds that no epistemology can be sound if it is psychologically defective, nor can a psychological analysis of knowledge be philosophically naïve. Secondly, it attempts to suggest a single structural pattern underlying every type of cognitive situation. Offering a significant reorientation to epistemological thought of its time, this work considers perception, sense and memory and examines the referential theory of knowledge. It is a lucid and precisely organised reading and analysis of knowledge.
Download or read book Analytic Philosophy of Clinical and Community Medicine written by Lucien Karhausen and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2023-05-28 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume is about philosophy of medicine and integrates philosophy of medicine as a chapter of philosophy of science. It is neither about bioethics, nor about the history of medicine, but it is comprehensive and encompasses the whole field of medicine including psychiatry. It is grounded on a first-order standpoint, and it strives to stay close to clinical or community medicine: it bestows an epistemological bottom-up account. It is not a review of the literature, and it is not intended to frame the debates, or to analyse and compare the various and substantial number of viewpoints although some authors’ account may form the basis of the book when they fit into the development of its philosophical view of medicine.
Download or read book The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879 1930 written by Michael Potter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Michael Potter offers a fresh and compelling portrait of the birth of modern analytic philosophy, viewed through the lens of a detailed study of the work of the four philosophers who contributed most to shaping it: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Ramsey. It covers the remarkable period of discovery that began with the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift in 1879 and ended with Ramsey's death in 1930. Potter—one of the most influential scholars of this period in philosophy—presents a deep but accessible account of the break with absolute idealism and neo-Kantianism, and the emergence of approaches that exploited the newly discovered methods in logic. Like his subjects, Potter focusses principally on philosophical logic, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics, but he also discusses epistemology, meta-ethics, and the philosophy of language. The book is an essential starting point for any student attempting to understand the work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Ramsey, as well as their interactions and their larger intellectual milieux. It will also be of interest to anyone who wants to cast light on current philosophical problems through a better understanding of their origins.
Download or read book Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis written by Gibson Burrell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors argue in this book that social theory can usefully be conceived in terms of four broad paradigms, based upon different sets of meta-theoretical assumptions with regard to the nature of social science and the nature of society. The four paradigms - Functionalist, Interpretive, Radical Humanist and Radical Structuralist - derive from quite distinct intellectual traditions, and present four mutually exclusive views of the social work. Each stands in its own right, and generates its own distinctive approach to the analysis of social life. The authors provide extensive reviews of the four paradigms, tracing the evolution and inter-relationships between the various sociological schools of thought within each. They then proceed to relate theories of organisation to this wider background. This book covers a great range of intellectual territory. It makes a number of important contributions to our understanding of sociology and organisational analysis, and will prove an invaluable guide to theorists, researchers and students in a variety of social science disciplines. It stands as a discourse in social theory, drawing upon the general area of organisation studies - industrial sociology, organisation theory, organisational psychology, and industrial relations - as a means of illustrating more general sociological themes. In addition to reviewing and evaluating existing work, it provides a framework for appraising future developments in the area of organisational analysis, and suggests the form which some of these developments are likely to take.
Download or read book Post Analytic Tractatus written by Barry Stocker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Analytic Tractatus establishes Wittgenstein's early work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an invaluable source for exploring current debate on analytic philosophy in its origins, history, limits and relations with European philosophy. Drawing together new work from the leading figures in interpretation of the Tractatus - Conant and Diamond - with work by respected Wittgenstein commentators such as Kremer and Hutto, together with a reprint of a relevant and striking text by Brouwer, this timely collection offers a valuable resource for exploring the Tractatus' connections to approaches other than logical positivism, mathematical logic and formal semantics. Examining links with the work of Leibniz, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, James, Heidegger and others, the contributors consider key themes in twentieth-century philosophy including symbols and expression, language and metaphysics, objects and signs, logical form, structure and syntax, limits of philosophical discourse, Idealism and transcendental arguments, distinguishing sense and nonsense, showing and saying in communication, mysticism and transcendence in experience, ethical and aesthetic value, the worlds of solipsism and religion, philosophy as an activity and as a system. Particularly timely in establishing the Tractatus as a source for comparable debates across Continental and Analytic philosophy, this collection will prove of value to scholars of twentieth-century philosophy, Wittgenstein, and Post-Analytic philosophy.
Download or read book Body Mind and Method written by Donald F. Gustafson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simple seeing. Plain talking. Language in use and persons in action. These are among the themes of Virgil Aldrich's writings, from the 1930's onward. Throughout these years, he has been an explorer of conceptual geography: not as a foreign visitor studying an alien land, but close up 'in the language in which we live, move, and have our being'. This is his work. It is clear to those who know him best that he also has fun at it. Yet, in the terms of his oft-cited distinction, it is equally clear that he is to be counted not among the funsters of philosophy, but among its most committed workers. Funsters are those who attempt to do epistemology, metaphysics, or analysis by appealing to examples which are purely imaginary, totally fictional, as unrealistic as you like, 'completely unheard of'. Such imaginative wilfullness takes philosophers away from, not nearer to, 'the rough ground' (Wittgenstein) where our concepts have their origin and working place. In the funsters' imagined, 'barely possible' (but actually impossible) world, simple seeing becomes transformed into the sensing of sense-data; plain talk is rejected as imprecise, vague, and misleading; and per sons in action show up as ensouled physical objects in motion. Then the fly is in the bottle, buzzing out its tedious tunes: the problem of perception of the external world; the problem of meaning and what it is; the mind-body problem. Image-mongering has got the best of image-management.
Download or read book Reason and Analysis written by Brand Blanshard and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Volume II in a series of seventeen on Metaphysics. Originally published in 1962, The Muirhead Library of Philosophy was designed as a contribution to the History of Modern Philosophy under the heads: first of Different Schools of Thought-Sensationalist, Realist, Idealist, Intuitivist; secondly of different Subjects-Psychology, Ethics, Political Philosophy and Theology.
Download or read book CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON written by Steven James Bartlett and published by Studies in Theory and Behavior. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. It inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the massive work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new Critique focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ conflict with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge. This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful. The Critique of Impure Reason proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness. The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of possible meaning are determined. Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, metalogical projection. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning. Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the Critique of Impure Reason develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems. CONTENTS AT A GLANCE Preface Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Acknowledgments Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call Introduction A note to the reader A note on conventions PART I WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN 1 Philosophical-psychological prelude 2 Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic 3 Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference 4 The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality PART II THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy 5 Reference, identity, and identification 6 Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference 7 Possibility theory 8 Presupposition logic, reference, and identification 9 Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference 10 Framework relativity 11 The metalogic of meaning 12 The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness 13 Projection 14 Horizons 15 De-projection 16 Self-validation 17 Rationality: Rules of admissibility PART III PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science 18 Ontology and the metalogic of reference 19 Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics 20 The conceptually unreachable: “The far side” 21 The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism 22 The projections of time, space, and space-time 23 The projections of causality, determinism, and free will 24 Projections of the self and of solipsism 25 Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields 26 Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference 27 Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference 28 Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory PART IV HORIZONS 29 Beyond belief 30 Critique of Impure Reason: Its results in retrospect SUPPLEMENT The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference APPENDIX I: The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers APPENDIX II: Epistemological Intelligence References Index About the author
Download or read book An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis written by John Hospers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Hospers' Introduction to Philosophical Analysis has sold over 150,000 copies since its first publication. This new edition ensures that its success will continue into the twenty-first century. It remains the most accessible and authoritative introduction to philosophy available using the full power of the problem-based approach to the area to ensure that philosophy is not simply taught to students but practised by them. The most significant change to this edition is to respond to criticisms regarding the omission in the third edition of the famous opening chapter. A brand new chapter, Words and the World, replaces this in the fourth edition - which now features a large number of examples and illustrative dialogues. The rest of the text has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of recent developments in some areas of philosophy.
