Download or read book Limits of Intelligibility written by Jens Pier and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chapters in this volume investigate the question of where, and in what sense, the bounds of intelligible thought, knowledge, and speech are to be drawn. Is there a way in which we are limited in what we think, know, and say? And if so, does this mean that we are constrained—that there is something beyond the ken of human intelligibility of which we fall short? Or is there another way to think about these limits of intelligibility—namely, as conditions of our meaning and knowing anything, beyond which there is no specifiable thing we cannot do? These issues feature prominently in the writings of Kant and Wittgenstein who each engaged with them in unique and striking ways. Their thoughts on the matter remain provocative and stimulating, and accordingly, the contributions to this volume address the issues surrounding the limits of intelligibility both exegetically and systematically: they examine how they figure in Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s most significant works and put them in touch with contemporary debates that are shaped by their legacy. These debates concern, inter alia, logically and morally alien thought, the semantics and philosophy of negation, disjunctivism in philosophy of perception and ethics, paraconsistent approaches to contradiction, and the relation between art, literature, and philosophy. The book is divided into four parts: Part I gives a first assessment of the issues, Part II examines limits as they feature in Kant, Part III as they feature in Wittgenstein, and Part IV suggests some ways in which the questions might be reconsidered, drawing upon ideas in phenomenology, dialetheism, metamathematics, and the works of other influential authors. Limits of Intelligibility provides insight into a theme that is central to the thought of two of the most important figures in modern philosophy, as well as to recent metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, epistemology, and ethics.
Download or read book Explaining the Normative written by Stephen P. Turner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as ‘correct,' ‘ought,' ‘must,' and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries. The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative conceptsÑminimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of ‘concepts' themselves. Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism. This account has no need for a parallel normative world, and has a surprising and revealing lineage in the history of philosophy, as well as a basis in neuroscience.
Download or read book The Nature and Limits of Political Science written by Maurice Cowling and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-20 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a fascinating and critical overview of the study of political subjects within English universities in the mid-twentieth-century, and the strengths and weaknesses of certain patterns of thinking.
Download or read book Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language written by Hanne Appelqvist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The limit of language is one of the most pervasive notions found in Wittgenstein’s work, both in his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and his later writings. Moreover, the idea of a limit of language is intimately related to important scholarly debates on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, such as the debate between the so-called traditional and resolute interpretations, Wittgenstein’s stance on transcendental idealism, and the philosophical import of Wittgenstein’s latest work On Certainty. This collection includes thirteen original essays that provide a comprehensive overview of the various ways in which Wittgenstein appeals to the limit of language at different stages of his philosophical development. The essays connect the idea of a limit of language to the most important themes discussed by Wittgenstein—his conception of logic and grammar, the method of philosophy, the nature of the subject, and the foundations of knowledge—as well as his views on ethics, aesthetics, and religion. The essays also relate Wittgenstein’s thought to his contemporaries, including Carnap, Frege, Heidegger, Levinas, and Moore.
Download or read book The Intelligible World written by James Lawler and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding Kant’s “pre-critical” philosophy is central to appreciating his three critiques. Overshadowed by the critiques, the early work stands on its own as a central contribution to the development of the philosophy of its time. In addition, it not only prepares the way for the critiques, but constitutes a hidden background without which they cannot be adequately understood. Here we find Kant’s great cosmology, which is what Kant later regarded as the “thing-in-itself,” persisting behind his notions of the noumenon, the intelligible world, and the postulates of morality. Although he finally decided that his grand cosmological vision could not be demonstrated, what cannot be strictly known can still be conjectured, justifiably believed, or postulated. Kant’s “only possible proof” for the existence of God remains implicit in the first critique. The only writer about whom Kant ever dedicated a major work, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, was Emanuel Swedenborg. Kant here explores a conjectural metaphysics of matter and spirit, and further formulates the meaning of “the intelligible world,” providing the ontological framework of his later ethics. If only one of Swedenborg’s documented spirit-seeings was valid, how feeble must the metaphysical dreams of philosophers themselves seem.
Download or read book Logic and the Limits of Philosophy in Kant and Hegel written by C. Bohnet and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines the boundary between logic and philosophy in Kant and Hegel. Through a detailed analysis of 'quantity', it highlights the different ways Kant and Hegel handle this boundary. Kant is consistent in maintaining this boundary, but Hegel erases it and in the process transforms both logic and philosophy.
Download or read book Rationality Relativism and the Human Sciences written by Joseph Margolis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1986-10-31 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium was launched in the early eighties. It began during a particularly lean period in the American economy. But its success is linked as much to the need to be in touch with the rapidly changing currents of the philosophical climate as with the need to insure an adequately stocked professional community in the Philadelphia area faced, perhaps permanently, with the threat of increasing attrition. The member schools of the Consortium now include Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Villanova University, that is, the schools of the area that offer advanced degrees in philosophy. The philosophy faculties of these schools form the core of the Consortium, which offers graduate students the instructional and library facilities of each member school. The Consortium is also supported by the associated faculties of other regional schools that do not offer advanced degrees - notably, those at Drexel University, Haverford College, La Salle University, and Swarthmore College - both philosophers and members of other departments as well as interested and professionally qualified persons from the entire region. The affiliated and core professionals now number several hundreds, and the Consortium's various ventures have been received most enthusiastically by the academic community. At this moment, the Consortium is planning its fifth year of what it calls the Conferences on the Philosophy of the Human Studies.
Download or read book Kant s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 written by Immanuel Kant and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beyond the Limits of Thought written by Graham Priest and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham Priest presents an expanded edition of his exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Embracing contradiction and challenging traditional logic, he engages with issues across philosophical borders, from the historical to the modern, Eastern to Western, continental to analytic.
Download or read book Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons written by Tuomo Tiisala and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-31 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the received view of the distinction between freedom and power must be rejected because it rests on an untenable account of the discursive cognition that endows individuals with the capacity for autonomy and self-governed rationality. In liberal and Kantian approaches alike, the autonomous subject is a self-standing starting point whose freedom is constrained by relations of power only contingently because they are external to the subject’s constitution. Thus, the received view defines the distinction between freedom and power as a dichotomy. Michel Foucault is arguably the most important critic of that dichotomy. However, it is widely agreed that Foucault falls short of justifying the alternative view he develops, where power and freedom are essentially entangled instead. The book fills out the gap by investigating the social preconditions of discursive cognition. Drawing on pragmatist-inferentialist resources from the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Brandom), it presents a new interpretation of Foucault’s philosophy that is unified by his overlooked idea of “the archaeology of knowledge.” As a result, the book not only explains why and how power and freedom must be entangled but also what it means ethically to pursue and gain autonomy with respect to one’s own understanding. Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, critical theory, ethics, philosophy of language, and the history of 20th-century philosophy.
Download or read book Anti Crisis written by Janet Roitman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crisis is everywhere: in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and the Congo; in housing markets, money markets, financial systems, state budgets, and sovereign currencies. In Anti-Crisis, Janet Roitman steps back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we declare so many crises but also what sort of analytical work the concept of crisis enables. What, she asks, are the stakes of crisis? Taking responses to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 as her case in point, Roitman engages with the work of thinkers ranging from Reinhart Koselleck to Michael Lewis, and from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Shiller. In the process, she questions the bases for claims to crisis and shows how crisis functions as a narrative device, or how the invocation of crisis in contemporary accounts of the financial meltdown enables particular narratives, raising certain questions while foreclosing others.
Download or read book Ecology and Existence written by Matthew C. Ally and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the increasingly troubled relationship between humankind and the Earth, with the help of a simple example and a complicated interlocutor. The example is a pond, which, it turns out, is not so simple as it seems. The interlocutor is Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, and, despite his several disavowals, doyen of twentieth-century existentialism. Standing with the great humanist at the edge of the pond, the author examines contemporary experience in the light of several familiar conceptual pairs: nature and culture, fact and value, reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, society and ecology, Earth and world. The theoretical challenge is to reveal the critical complementarity and experiential unity of this family of ideas. The practical task is to discern the heuristic implications of this lived unity-in-diversity in these times of social and ecological crisis. Interdisciplinary in its aspirations, the study draws upon recent developments in biology and ecology, complexity science and systems theory, ecological and Marxist economics, and environmental history. Comprehensive in its engagement of Sartre’s oeuvre, the study builds upon his best-known existentialist writings, and also his critique of colonialism, voluminous ethical writings, early studies of the imaginary, and mature dialectical philosophy. In addition to overviews of Sartre’s distinctive inflections of phenomenology and dialectics and his unique theories of praxis and imagination, the study also articulates for the first time Sartre’s incipient philosophical ecology. In keeping with Sartre’s lifelong commitment to freedom and liberation, the study concludes with a programmatic look at the relative merits of pragmatist, prefigurative, and revolutionary activism within the burgeoning global struggle for social and ecological justice. We learn much by thinking with Sartre at the water’s edge: surprising lessons about our changing humanity and how we have come to where we are; timely lessons about the shifting relation between us and the broader community of life to which we belong; difficult lessons about our brutal degradation of the planetary system upon which life depends; and auspicious lessons, too, about a participatory path forward as we work to preserve a habitable planet and build a livable world for all earthlings.
Download or read book Indeterminacy and Intelligibility written by Brian John Martine and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1992-09-09 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the argument of Indeterminacy and Intelligibility develops, Martine shows that indeterminacy in our experience in logically bound to the determinate dimensions of thought and practice. Continuing the investigation that began in his earlier book Individuals and Individuality, the author draws concrete experience together with abstract reflection to reveal the ontological relation between determinacy and indeterminacy that lies at the very core of our drive to understand.
Download or read book Social Practices written by Theodore R. Schatzki and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses key topics in social theory such as the basic structures of social life, the character of human activity, and the nature of individuality. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, the author develops an account of social existence that argues that social practices are the fundamental phenomenon in social life. This approach offers new insight into the social formation of individuals, surpassing and critiquing the existing practice theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Lyotard, and Oakeshott.
Download or read book The Soul s Upward Yearning written by Robert Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D. and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2015-10-03 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western culture has been moving away from its Christian roots for several centuries but the turn from Christianity accelerated in the 20th century. At the core of this decline is a loss of a sense of our own transcendence. Scientific materialism has so seriously impacted our belief in human transcendence that many people find it difficult to believe in God and the human soul. This anti-transcendent perspective has not only cast its spell on the natural sciences, psychology, philosophy, and literature, it has also negatively impacted popular culture through the writings of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many others. The warning signs of this loss of transcendence have been expressed by thinkers as diverse as Carl Jung (psychiatrist), Mircea Eliade (historian of religion), Gabriel Marcel (philosopher), C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. These warnings were validated by a 2004 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry which showed that the absence of religion alone was responsible for a marked increase in suicide rates, sense of meaningless, substance abuse, separation from family, and other psychiatric problems. Thus, the loss of transcendence is negatively affecting not only individuals’ sense of happiness, dignity, ideals, virtues, and destiny, but also the culture. Ironically, the evidence for transcendence is greater today than in any other period in history. The problem is – this evidence has not been compiled and propagated. Fr. Spitzer’s book provides a bright light in the midst of this cultural darkness by presenting both traditional and contemporary evidence for God and a transphysical soul from several major sources. He also shows how human consciousness and intelligence is completely special – and cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence or animal consciousness. We are transcendent beings with souls capable of surviving bodily death – self-reflective beings aware of perfect truth, love, goodness, and beauty. We are beings with an unrestricted capacity to know and create science, law, culture, art, music, literature, and so much more. The evidence reveals that we have the dignity of being created in the very image of God, and if we underestimate it, we will undervalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny. This work is the most comprehensive treatment of human transcendence available today.
Download or read book Handbook on Complexity and Public Policy written by Robert Geyer and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Over recent years Complexity Science has revealed to us new limits to our possible knowledge and control in social, cultural and economic systems. Instead of supposing that past statistics and patterns will give us predictable outcomes for possible actions, we now know the world is, and will always be, creative and surprising. Continuous structural evolution within such systems may change the mechanisms, descriptors, problems and opportunities, often negating policy aims. We therefore need to redevelop our thinking about interventions, policies and policy making, moving perhaps to a humbler, more 'learning' approach. In this Handbook, leading thinkers in multiple domains set out these new ideas and allow us to understand how these new ideas are changing policymaking and policies in this new era.' - Peter M Allen, Cranfield University, UK
Download or read book Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Recognition written by Paul Giladi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-12 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes original essays that examine the underexplored relationship between recognition theory and key developments in critical social epistemology. Its aims are to explore how far certain kinds of epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and types of ignorance can be understood as distorted varieties of recognition and to determine whether contemporary work on epistemic injustice and critical social epistemology more generally have significant continuities with theories of recognition in the Frankfurt School tradition. Part I of the book focuses on bringing recognition theory and critical social epistemology into direct conversation. Part II is devoted to analysing a range of case studies that are evocative of contemporary social struggles. The essays in this volume propose answers to a number of thought-provoking questions at the intersection of these two robust philosophical subfields, such as the following: how well can different types of epistemic injustice be understood as types of recognition abuses? How useful is it to approach different forms of social oppression as recognition injustices and/or as involving epistemic injustice? What limitations do we discover in either or both recognition theory and the ever-expanding literature on epistemic injustice when we put them into conversation with each other? How does the conjunction of these two accounts bear on specific domains, such as questions of silencing? Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Recognition heralds new directions for future research that will appeal to scholars and students working in critical social epistemology, social and political theory, continental philosophy, and a wide range of critical social theories.
