Download or read book From Metaphysics to Ethics written by Frank Jackson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998-01-08 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as central to philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed without it. He anchors his argument in discussion of specific philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of physicalism and movingon, via free will, meaning, personal identity, motion and change, to the philosophy of colour and to ethics. The significance of different kinds of supervenience theses, Kripke and Putnam's work in the philosophy of modality and language, and the role of intuitions about possible cases receivedetailed attention. Jackson concludes with a defence of a version of analytical descriptivism in ethics. In this way the book not only offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also throws fascinating new light on some much-debated problems and their interrelations.puffs which may be quoted (please do not edit without consulting OUP editor):'This is an outstanding book. It covers a vast amount of philosophy in a very short space, advances a number of original and striking positions, and manages to be both clear and concise in its expositions of other views and forceful in its criticisms of them. The book offers something new for those interested in the various individual problems it discusses--conceptual analysis, the mind-body relation, secondary qualities, modality, and ethical realism. But unifying these individualdiscussions is an ambitious structure which amounts to an outline of a complete metaphysical system, and an outline of an epistemology for this metaphysics. It is hard to think of a central area of analytic philosophy which will not be touched by Jackson's conclusions.' Tim Crane, Reader in Philosophy,University College London'The writing is clear, straightforward, and down to earth--the usual virtues one expects from Jackson . . . what he has to say is innovative and valuable . . . the book deals with a large number of apparently diverse philosophical issues, but it is also an elegantly unified work. What gives it unity is the metaphilosophical framework that Jackson works out with great care and persuasiveness. This is the first serious and sustained work on the methodology of metaphysics in recent memory.What he says about the role of conceptual analysis in metaphysics is an important and timely contribution. . . . It is refreshing and heartening to see a first-class analytic philosopher doing some serious metaphilosophical work . . . I think that the book will be greeted as an important event inphilosophical publishing.' Jaegwon Kim, Professor of Philosophy, Brown University

Download or read book From Metaphysics to Ethics written by Frank Jackson and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as a basic method of philosophical inquiry. He offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also throws new light on some much-debated problems and their interrelations.

Download or read book Minds Ethics and Conditionals written by Ian Ravenscroft and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-22 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrious international line-up of contributors present new essays on themes from the philosophy of Frank Jackson, discussing his groundbreaking work on supervenience and conceptual analysis; mind and colour; normative ethics and metaethics; and conditionals. Jackson offers a substantial and illuminating reply to his critics.

Download or read book The Metaphysics of Good and Evil written by David S. Oderberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil – the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds of goodness, showing how they fit into the Scholastic theory. The privation theory of evil is given its most comprehensive contemporary defence, including an account of truthmakers for truths of privation and an analysis of how causation by privation should be understood. In the end, all evil is deviance – a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing’s essential nature. Key Features: Offers a comprehensive defence of a venerable metaphysical theory, conducted using the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy. Revives a much neglected approach to the question of good and evil in their most general nature. Shows how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory has more than historical relevance to a fundamental philosophical issue, but can be applied in a way that is both defensible and yet accessible to the modern philosopher. Provides what, for the Scholastic philosopher, is arguably the only solid metaphysical foundation for a separate treatment of the origins of morality.

Download or read book Moral Error Theory written by Jonas Olson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jonas Olson presents a critical survey of moral error theory, the view that there are no moral facts and so all moral claims are false. Part I explores the historical context of the debate; Part II assesses J. L. Mackie's famous arguments; Part III defends error theory against challenges and considers its implications for our moral thinking.

Download or read book Ethics Without Morals written by Joel Marks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Marks offers a defense of amorality as both philosophically justified and practicably livable. In so doing, the book marks a radical departure from both the new atheism and the mainstream of modern ethical philosophy. While in synch with their underlying aim of grounding human existence in a naturalistic metaphysics, the book takes both to task for maintaining a complacent embrace of morality. Marks advocates wiping the slate clean of outdated connotations by replacing the language of morality with a language of desire. The book begins with an analysis of what morality is and then argues that the concept is not instantiated in reality. Following this, the question of belief in morality is addressed: How would human life be affected if we accepted that morality does not exist? Marks argues that at the very least, a moralist would have little to complain about in an amoral world, and at best we might hope for a world that was more to our liking overall. An extended look at the human encounter with nonhuman animals serves as an illustration of amorality's potential to make both theoretical and practical headway in resolving heretofore intractable ethical problems.

Download or read book Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics written by Alexis Burgess and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceptual engineering is a newly flourishing branch of philosophy which investigates problems with our concepts and considers how they might be ameliorated: 'truth', for instance, is susceptible to paradox, and it's not clear what 'race' stands for. This is the first collective exploration of possibilities and problems of conceptual engineering.

Download or read book The Metaphysics of Practice written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-15 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Metaphysics of Practice brings together Wilfrid Sellars's writings on topics to do with action, community, and obligation: published essays, manuscripts, and correspondence. Sellars's practical philosophy was absolutely central to his overarching philosophical project of situating persons as practically rational, norm-governed animals within the world as described by an ideal science. The Editors' Introduction offers an overview of Sellars's metaethics, detailing its key features and explaining how these features are supposed to solve outstanding metaethical problems that not only faced Sellars's contemporaries, but continue to create lively debate among contemporary theorists. And the editors give chapter summaries indicating the main lines of argument and showing where each piece fits into Sellars's overall picture.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Science written by Anouk Barberousse and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy of science studies the methods, theories, and concepts used by scientists. It mainly developed as a field in its own right during the twentieth century and is now a diversified and lively research area. This book surveys the current state of the discipline by focusing on central themes like confirmation of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanation, causality, the relationship between science and metaphysics, scientific change, the relationship between philosophy of science and science studies, the role of theories and models, unity of science. These themes define general philosophy of science. The book also presents sub-disciplines in the philosophy of science dealing with the main sciences: logic, mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, cognitive science, linguistics, social sciences, and economics. While it is common to address the specific philosophical problems raised by physics and biology in such a book, the place assigned to the philosophy of special sciences is much more unusual. Most authors collaborate on a regular basis in their research or teaching and share a common vision of philosophy of science and its place within philosophy and academia in general. The chapters have been written in close accordance with the three editors, thus achieving strong unity of style and tone.

Download or read book Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy written by David Sobel and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the inaugural volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields. This first volume features eleven papers and an introduction. The papers address a range of central topics and represent cutting edge work in the field. They are grouped into four main themes: democracy, political liberalism and public reason, rights and duties, and method.

Download or read book Fictionalism in Philosophy written by Bradley Armour-Garb and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Within contemporary, analytic philosophy, "Fictionalism"-broadly understood as a view that uses a notion of fiction in order to resolve certain philosophical problems that do not necessarily have anything to do with fiction-has been on the scene for some time. There is a well-known collection, Fictionalism in Metaphysics (OUP, 2005), which provided a good indication of the scope of the view (and its problems) as things stood in the early 2000's. But more than a decade has passed since the appearance of that volume, and much has happened in philosophy, including in the area of fictionalism. In addition to the fact that fictionalism in philosophy appears to be more popular than ever, there are now competing views about how to tackle some of the issues that fictionalists aim to address. Moreover, fictionalism has branched out into many more areas, and there is a continuing debate about what fictionalism in philosophy actually amounts to, and about how precisely it ought to be pursued. There is thus a pressing need for a volume such as Fictionalism in Philosophy. After a detailed discussion in the book's introductory chapter of how, in the light of these ongoing debates, philosophers should think of fictionalism and its connection to metaontology more generally, the remaining chapters provide readers with some of the most current and up-to-date work on fictionalism, both for and against. As such, the volume will be of interest to professional philosophers, as well as to graduate students in philosophy and to advanced undergraduates"--

Download or read book Law and Morality written by KennethEinar Himma and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 857 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects many of the key essays exploring the possible relationships between the concepts of law and morality, a central concern of contemporary philosophizing about law. It is organized around five conceptual issues: classical natural law theory; legal positivism's separability thesis; Ronald Dworkin's constructive interpretivism; inclusive legal positivism's assertion that there can be legal systems with moral criteria of legality; and the relevance of morality and moral theorizing in theorizing about the concept of law and associated legal concepts. Each of the essays makes an important contribution toward addressing these issues.

Download or read book The Nature of International Law written by Miodrag A. Jovanović and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nature of International Law provides a comprehensive analytical account of international law within the prototype theory of concepts.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology written by Herman Cappelen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 1436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology (including logical empiricism, phenomenology, and ordinary language philosophy). The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience.

Download or read book The Worth of Persons written by James Franklin and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death of a person is a tragedy while the explosion of a lifeless galaxy is a mere firework. The moral difference is grounded in the nature of humans: humans have intrinsic worth, a worth that makes their fate really matter. This is the worth that the Australian philosopher James Franklin proposes as the foundation of ethics. In The Worth of Persons he explains that ethics in the usual sense of right and wrong actions, rights and virtues, and how to live a good life, is founded on something more basic that is not itself about actions, namely the worth of persons. Human moral worth arises from certain properties that distinguish humans from the rest of creation (though some animals share a lesser degree of those properties): rationality, consciousness, the ability to act for reasons, emotional structure and love, individuality. This complex package makes humans the "piece of work" of which Hamlet says, “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty." In clear prose and deeply informed philosophical argument, The Worth of Persons establishes a foundation for ethics in the equal worth of persons, which makes ethics absolutely objective and immune to relativist attacks because it is based on the metaphysical truth about humans. The Worth of Persons will appeal to all those who feel that endless debate about ethical dilemmas, rules, and principles fails to connect with what is really important ethically, that is, what makes humans matter.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Science written by Anouk Barberousse and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy of science studies the methods, theories, and concepts used by scientists. It mainly developed as a field in its own right during the twentieth century and is now a diversified and lively research area. This book surveys the current state of the discipline by focusing on central themes like confirmation of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanation, causality, the relationship between science and metaphysics, scientific change, the relationship between philosophy of science and science studies, the role of theories and models, unity of science. These themes define general philosophy of science. The book also presents sub-disciplines in the philosophy of science dealing with the main sciences: logic, mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, cognitive science, linguistics, social sciences, and economics. While it is common to address the specific philosophical problems raised by physics and biology in such a book, the place assigned to the philosophy of special sciences is much more unusual. Most authors collaborate on a regular basis in their research or teaching and share a common vision of philosophy of science and its place within philosophy and academia in general. The chapters have been written in close accordance with the three editors, thus achieving strong unity of style and tone.

Download or read book Representational Content and the Objects of Thought written by Nicholas Rimell and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book defends a novel view of mental representation—of how, as thinkers, we represent the world as being. The book serves as a response to two problems in the philosophy of mind. One is the problem of first-personal, or egocentric, belief: how can we have truly first personal beliefs—beliefs in which we think about ourselves as ourselves—given that beliefs are supposed to be attitudes towards propositions and that propositions are supposed to have their truth values independent of a perspective? The other problem is how we can think about nonexistents (e.g., Santa Claus) given the widespread view that thought essentially involves a relation between a thinker and whatever is being thought about. The standard responses to this puzzle are either to deny that thought is essentially relational or to insist that it is possible to stand in relations to nonexistents. This book offers an error theory to the problem. The responses from this book arise from the same commitment: a commitment to treating talk of propositions—as the things towards which our beliefs are attitudes—as talk of entities that actually exist and that play a constitutive and explanatory role in the activity of thought.