EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book On the Nature of Philosophy and Other Philosophical Essays

Download or read book On the Nature of Philosophy and Other Philosophical Essays written by Nicholas Rescher and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book continues Rescher's longstanding practice of publishing groups of philosophical essays. Notwithstanding their thematic diversity, these discussions exhibit a uniformity of method in addressing philosophical issues via a mixture of historical contextualization, analytical scrutiny, and common-sensical concern. Their interest, such as it is, lies not just in what they do but in how they do it.

Book On the Nature of Philosophy and Other Philosophical Essays

Download or read book On the Nature of Philosophy and Other Philosophical Essays written by Nicholas Rescher and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book continues Rescher’s longstanding practice of publishing groups of philosophical essays. Notwithstanding their thematic diversity, these discussions exhibit a uniformity of method in addressing philosophical issues via a mixture of historical contextualization, analytical scrutiny, and common-sensical concern. Their interest, such as it is, lies not just in what they do but in how they do it.

Book Between Naturalism and Religion

Download or read book Between Naturalism and Religion written by Jürgen Habermas and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two countervailing trends mark the intellectual tenor of our age – the spread of naturalistic worldviews and religious orthodoxies. Advances in biogenetics, brain research, and robotics are clearing the way for the penetration of an objective scientific self-understanding of persons into everyday life. For philosophy, this trend is associated with the challenge of scientific naturalism. At the same time, we are witnessing an unexpected revitalization of religious traditions and the politicization of religious communities across the world. From a philosophical perspective, this revival of religious energies poses the challenge of a fundamentalist critique of the principles underlying the modern Wests postmetaphysical understanding of itself. The tension between naturalism and religion is the central theme of this major new book by Jürgen Habermas. On the one hand he argues for an appropriate naturalistic understanding of cultural evolution that does justice to the normative character of the human mind. On the other hand, he calls for an appropriate interpretation of the secularizing effects of a process of social and cultural rationalization increasingly denounced by the champions of religious orthodoxies as a historical development peculiar to the West. These reflections on the enduring importance of religion and the limits of secularism under conditions of postmetaphysical reason set the scene for an extended treatment the political significance of religious tolerance and for a fresh contribution to current debates on cosmopolitanism and a constitution for international society.

Book Philosophical Essays

    Book Details:
  • Author : Bertrand Russell
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2014-02-25
  • ISBN : 1317835700
  • Pages : 160 pages

Download or read book Philosophical Essays written by Bertrand Russell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1966. This collection of essays dates from the first decade of this century and marks an important perio in the evolution of Bertrand Russell's thought. Russell intended the collection 'to appeal to those who take an interest in philosophical questions without having had a professional training in philosophy'- those people will find these writings just as illuminating today.

Book The Understanding of Nature

    Book Details:
  • Author : Marjorie Grene
  • Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
  • Release : 2012-12-06
  • ISBN : 9401022240
  • Pages : 458 pages

Download or read book The Understanding of Nature written by Marjorie Grene and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No student or colleague of Marjorie Grene will miss her incisive presence in these papers on the study and nature of living nature, and we believe the new reader will quickly join the stimulating discussion and critique which Professor Grene steadily provokes. For years she has worked with equally sure knowledge in the classical domain of philosophy and in modern epistemological inquiry, equally philosopher of science and metaphysician. Moreover, she has the deeply sensible notion that she should be a critically intelligent learner as much as an imaginatively original thinker, and as a result she has brought insightful expository readings of other philosophers and scientists to her own work. We were most fortunate that Marjorie Grene was willing to spend a full semester of a recent leave here in Boston, and we have on other occasions sought her participation in our colloquia and elsewhere. Now we have the pleasure of including among the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science this generous selection from Grene's philosophical inquiries into the understanding of the natural world, and of the men and women in it. Boston University Center for the R. S. COHEN Philosophy and History of Science M. W. W ARTOFSKY April 1974 PREFACE This collection spans - spottily - years from 1946 ('On Some Distinctions between Men and Brutes') to 1974 ('On the Nature of Natural Necessity').

Book Respect

    Book Details:
  • Author : Richard Dean
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2021-04-23
  • ISBN : 0192558366
  • Pages : 325 pages

Download or read book Respect written by Richard Dean and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-23 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Respect plays a prominent role in contemporary moral philosophy, as well as our every-day moral thought. Ordinary discussion about morality is often framed in terms of demands for respect or complaints about being disrespected, yet basic questions about the concept and role of respect are frequently overlooked. Here, leading philosophers present their latest ideas and fresh perspectives to point research on the topic in new directions. Following an introduction to the historical rise of respect as a central concept in moral discourse, Part I addresses the fundamental questions of what respect is; its nature and basis. Part II then examines questions in moral theory, for example what exactly ought to be respected, what role respect plays in morality, and which different types of respect are appropriate and morally significant. Part III concludes with the practical application of requirements of respect, with implications for significant moral issues of our time including environmental ethics, social justice, disability, bioethics, and more.

Book Supervenience and Mind

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jaegwon Kim
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 1993-11-26
  • ISBN : 9780521439961
  • Pages : 404 pages

Download or read book Supervenience and Mind written by Jaegwon Kim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-11-26 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays presents the core of the work of influential philosopher Jaegwon Kim.

Book Being and Value and Other Philosophical Essays

Download or read book Being and Value and Other Philosophical Essays written by Nicholas Rescher and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being and Value collects together fifteen essays by Nicholas Rescher on salient issue in metaphysics, axiology and metaphilosophy. In the way in which they shed new light on significant philosophical issues, these deliberations are emblematic of Rescher’s characteristic way of illuminating timeless issues and historical perspectives in a reciprocal interrelationship. The chapter of the book are as follows: Being and Value: On the Prospect of Optimalism; On Evolution and Intelligent Design; Mind and Matter; Fallacies Regarding Free Will; Sophisticating Naïve Realism; Taxonomic Complexity and the Laws of Nature; Practical Vs. Theoretical Reason; Pragmatism as a Growth Industry; Cost Benefit Epistemology; Quantifying Quality; Explanatory Surdity; Can Philosophy be Objective?; On Ontology in Cognitive Perspective; Plenum Theory [Essay Written Jointly with Patrick Grim]; and Onometrics (On Referential Analysis in Philosophy)

Book Is Philosophy Dispensable

Download or read book Is Philosophy Dispensable written by Nicholas Rescher and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "During 2005-2006 I continued my longstanding practice of writing occasional studies on philosophical topics, both for formal presentation and for informal discussion with colleagues. While my forays of this kind have usually been issued in journal publications, this has not been so in the preset case so that the studies offered here encompass substantially new material. Notwithstanding their thematic variation, they manifest a uniformity of treatment and method in a way that is characteristic of my philosophical modus operandi and inherent is its endeavors to treat classical issues from novel points of view." --Nicholas Rescher Contents Preface Chapter 1: IS PHILOSOPHY DISPENSABLE? (AN APORETIC ANALYSIS) Chapter 2:FIRST PRINCIPLES AND THEIR PLACEIN PHILOSOPHY Chapter 3: THE HUME-EDWARDS PRINCIPLE AND ITS PROBLEMS Chapter 4:THE LIMITS OF NATURALISM (NATURE AND CULTURE IN PERSPECTIVAL DUALITY) Chapter 5:ON UNIVERSALS, NATURAL KINDS, AND LAWS OF NATURE Chapter 6:AQUINAS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF EPISTEMIC DISPARITY Chapter 7:SELF-SUBSTANTIATING STATEMENTS Chapter 8:REGRET Chapter 9:THE PROBLEM OF EVIL Chapter 10:RATIONALITY, SELF-INTEREST, ALTRUISM, AND OBLIGATION Chapter 11:WHAT IS PRAGMATISM? Chapter 12:THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Index of Names

Book Truth  Language  and History

Download or read book Truth Language and History written by Donald Davidson and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2005-02-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In the four groups of essays that comprise it, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations? And, can a scientific world view make room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic? Davidson's underlying picture, which can be seen in many of these essays, is that we are acquainted directly with the world, not indirectly via some intermediary such as sense-data, representations, or language itself; that thought emerges in the first place through interpersonal communication in a shared material world, and continues to develop as we engage each other in dialogue; and that language depends on communication, not vice versa. This is the triangulating situation - two creatures communicating about a common world - about which Davidson has written elsewhere. As for the mind-body relation: our ontology need posit nothing more that material objects and events; but as explainers we require two mutually irreducible vocabularies: mind and body. In the last six essays Davidson finds interconnections between his own views and those of some of the major philosophers of the past. Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy.

Book Kant s Human Being

    Book Details:
  • Author : Robert B. Louden
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2011-07-25
  • ISBN : 0199877580
  • Pages : 251 pages

Download or read book Kant s Human Being written by Robert B. Louden and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Kant's Human Being, Robert B. Louden continues and deepens avenues of research first initiated in his highly acclaimed book, Kant's Impure Ethics. Drawing on a wide variety of both published and unpublished works spanning all periods of Kant's extensive writing career, Louden here focuses on Kant's under-appreciated empirical work on human nature, with particular attention to the connections between this body of work and his much-discussed ethical theory. Kant repeatedly claimed that the question, "What is the human being" is philosophy's most fundamental question, one that encompasses all others. Louden analyzes and evaluates Kant's own answer to his question, showing how it differs from other accounts of human nature. This collection of twelve essays is divided into three parts. In Part One (Human Virtues), Louden explores the nature and role of virtue in Kant's ethical theory, showing how the conception of human nature behind Kant's virtue theory results in a virtue ethics that is decidedly different from more familiar Aristotelian virtue ethics programs. In Part Two (Ethics and Anthropology), he uncovers the dominant moral message in Kant's anthropological investigations, drawing new connections between Kant's work on human nature and his ethics. Finally, in Part Three (Extensions of Anthropology), Louden explores specific aspects of Kant's theory of human nature developed outside of his anthropology lectures, in his works on religion, geography, education ,and aesthetics, and shows how these writings substantially amplify his account of human beings. Kant's Human Being offers a detailed and multifaceted investigation of the question that Kant held to be the most important of all, and will be of interest not only to philosophers but also to all who are concerned with the study of human nature.

Book Philosophical Essays

Download or read book Philosophical Essays written by Bertrand Russell and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bertrand Russell wrote most of his Philosophical Essays during the first decade of this century, a period when he was at the height of his creative energy in the realms of philosophy and mathematics. Fifty-five years later, in re-issuing the book, Russell replaced two of the essays that were available elsewhere, but made no changes to the others despite changes in his own opinions and beliefs. These seven essays display Russell's incisiveness and brilliance of exposition in the examination of ethical subjects and the nature of truth. The essays mark an important stage in the evolution of Russell's thought, and are designed to appeal to readers with an interest in philosophical questions who do not have a background in philosophy.

Book The Good Life and Other Philosophical Essays on Human Nature

Download or read book The Good Life and Other Philosophical Essays on Human Nature written by Robert Craig and published by Tate Publishing & Enterprises. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I believe my long essay, �The Good Life,� and the companion essays contain important insights into understanding the difficulties in setting specific prescriptions and proscriptions for normative behavior, for understanding our nature and what is meant by virtuous behavior, and for leading the Good Life. The discussion is developed along five human life modes: health, need to work to satisfy our basic and secondary needs, morality and its quest for equality or fairness, political implementation, and aesthetic and religious experience. It is couched in the understanding that our Good Life must be consistent with our nature, in the Classical Greek sense. My acceptance of rationality, free will, and a moral sense is basic to the discussion, as reason cannot prove reasonableness, and normative discourse cannot occur without this moral sense. I show conflicts among the five categories with examples such as that between the ethical dictum not to kill, and our need to protect our family and us from harm. These conflicts also occur among our virtues, for example that between courage and prudence, and between unrestricted liberty and the quest for equality. The conflicts are confounding, but they do not preclude our elucidating how they ought to be resolved.

Book Philosophical Essays  Volume 1

Download or read book Philosophical Essays Volume 1 written by Scott Soames and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world's foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays. The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts. The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics--including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind. The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language.

Book Shadows of Being

    Book Details:
  • Author : Marko Uršič
  • Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
  • Release : 2019-01-15
  • ISBN : 1527525651
  • Pages : 201 pages

Download or read book Shadows of Being written by Marko Uršič and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the phenomena of shadows, meant in a broader sense as “symbolic forms”. The shadow is a less real, “surface” replica of some more real form. From the Platonic point of view, empirical objects are “shadows of ideas”, while from the modern “natural” point of view, shadows are seen and conceived primarily as “weaker” replicas of bodies, which give evidence of their material reality. In the first three essays here, several topics from the Ancient Egypt and Greece to modern arts and sciences are considered, while in the fourth essay, the contemporary virtual reality, cyber-technology and the internet as our parallel “shadow world” are discussed from the philosophical point of view. The main and innovative point of this book is the connection between the meaning of shadows in philosophy and art on the one hand, and their role in modern science and technology on the other. The book will appeal to a wide span of readers, from academic circles, students, and artists, to the general reader interested in the humanities, especially in philosophy and art.

Book Philosophical Provocations

Download or read book Philosophical Provocations written by Colin McGinn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-08-18 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pithy, direct, and bold: essays that propose new ways to think about old problems, spanning a range of philosophical topics. In Philosophical Provocations, Colin McGinn offers a series of short, sharp essays that take on philosophical problems ranging from the concept of mind to paradox, altruism, and the relation between God and the Devil. Avoiding the usual scholarly apparatus and embracing a blunt pithiness, McGinn aims to achieve as much as possible in as short a space as possible while covering as many topics as possible. Much academic philosophical writing today is long, leaden, citation heavy, dense with qualifications, and painful to read. The essays in Philosophical Provocations are short, direct, and engaging, often challenging philosophical orthodoxy as they consider issues in mind, language, knowledge, metaphysics, biology, ethics, and religion. McGinn is looking for new ways to think about old problems. Thus he writes, about consciousness, “I think we have been all wrong,” and goes on to suggest that both consciousness and the unconscious are mysteries. Summing up his proposal on altruism, he remarks, “My suggestion can now be stated, somewhat brutally, as follows: human altruism is the result of parasitic manipulation.” He takes a moment to reflect: “I really don't know why it is good to be alive, though I am convinced that the standard suggestions don't work.” McGinn gets straight to the point and states his position with maximum clarity. These essays offer provocative invitations to think again.

Book A Rational Animal and Other Philosophical Essays on the Nature of Man

Download or read book A Rational Animal and Other Philosophical Essays on the Nature of Man written by Antony Flew and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1978 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These 'philosophical' essays are related by a concern to develop and defend and Aristotelian view - that we are both essentially and entirely creatures of mortal flesh and blood, and uniquely rational animals.