Download or read book Aboutness written by Stephen Yablo and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-04 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness-features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. But it has played no real role in philosophical semantics. This is surprising; sentences have aboutness-properties if anything does. Aboutness is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth-conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection--about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. Stephen Yablo maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results--directed content--is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. Written by one of today's leading philosophers, Aboutness represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.

Download or read book On Philosophy and Philosophers written by Richard Rorty and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Philosophers suffer from a peculiar occupational hazard; people are always coming up and asking them just what it is that they do and how they do it. This is not the sort of question that biologists or economists or musicians get asked; people know, pretty well, what they do, and they may or may not be interested in the details. But a philosopher is different - it is very hard to imagine just what he does with his time"--

Download or read book How to Write a Philosophy Paper written by James Sidney Stramel and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Write a Philosophy Paper is a handbook which provides students with a ready arsenal of analytical and compositional techniques. It is intended for undergraduate students in any type of philosophy course and is written and organized in a user-friendly manner. The first half includes discussions of the nature of philosophy and a variety of basic and essential techniques of philosophical enquiry and argumentation. The second half takes the student step-by-step through the writing process, from choosing a suitable topic, to developing his or her thought, to preparation of the final draft. Includes an index and bibliographical material.

Download or read book Writing Philosophy written by Lewis Vaughn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing Philosophy: A Student's Guide to Reading and Writing Philosophy Essays, Second Edition, is a concise, self-guided manual that covers how to read philosophy and the basics of argumentative essay writing. It encourages students to master fundamental skills quickly--with minimal instructor input--and provides step-by-step instructions for each phase of the writing process, from formulating a thesis, to creating an outline, to writing a final draft, supplementing this tutorial approach with model essays, outlines, introductions, and conclusions. Writing Philosophy is just $5 when packaged with any Oxford University Press Philosophy text. Contact your Oxford representative for details and package ISBNs.

Download or read book Collected Papers on Philosophy of Chemistry written by Eric R. Scerri and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2008 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents a collection of papers from one of the founders of the new Philosophy of Chemistry. It is only the second single-author collection of papers on the Philosophy of Chemistry.The author is the editor-in-chief of Foundations of Chemistry, the leading journal in the field. He has recently gained worldwide success with his book on the periodic table of the elements titled The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. This volume provides an in-depth examination of his more philosophical and historical work in this area and further afield.

Download or read book The Time is Now Essays on the Philosophy of Becoming written by Douglas ALLEN and published by Zeta Books. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time for what? The title of Mihaela Gligor’s edited collection is wonderfully flexible, as anything having to do with time should be. There is something not only boundless about time, but also raw and untamed. In its pure form, time would be too much for us to handle. We would be crushed by the sheer immensity of it, or else we would lose our minds trying to make sense of such unmediated time. Luckily, for the most part we don’t experience time in its pure form. Time comes to us already processed: shaped, engineered, tamed. The volume does fine justice to the notion that we experience time as already shaped by religion, politics, and culture. Whether its contributions cover religious or political figures, philosophers or poets, mystics or physicists, they show – sometimes explicitly, sometimes more discreetly – how difficult it is to deal with time in a pure, unmediated form. The contributors’ cultural, religious, and intellectual rooting inform the way think about time, just as about anything else. Which, far from being a weakness, is something to be recognized and celebrated. (Costică Brădățan, Texas Tech University, U.S.A.)

Download or read book Essays in the Philosophy of Religion written by Philip L. Quinn and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a selection of essays by the late Philip Quinn, one of the world's leading philosophers of religion. Quinn left behind an influential body of work on a wide variety of topics. He was the author of Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (1978) and of more than two hundred papers in philosophy. Fourteen of his best and most influential contributions to the philosophy of religion are gathered here. The papers have been organized around the following topics: religious epistemology, religious ethics, religion and tragic dilemmas, religion and political liberalism, topics in Christian philosophy, and religious diversity.

Download or read book Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy Volume 3 written by David Lewis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume of Lewis's papers is devoted to his work in ethics and social philosophy. Topics covered include the logic of obligation and permission; decision theory and its relation to the idea that beliefs might play the motivating role of desires; a subjectivist analysis o f value; dilemmas in virtue ethics; the problem of evil; problems about self-prediction; social coordination, linguistic and otherwise; alleged duties to rescue distant strangers; toleration as a tacit treaty; nuclear warfare; and punishment. The purpose of this collection, and the two preceding volumes, is to disseminate more widely the work of an eminent and influential contemporary philosopher.

Download or read book Essays in Ancient Philosophy written by Michael Frede and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text contains seventeen papers written by the author over the course of the last twelve years on the topic of philosophy.

Download or read book Philosophical Traditions written by Anthony O'Hear and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one sense all philosophies attempt to analyse a small number of questions central to human life: the self, knowledge, the nature of the cosmos and reality, God or the divine. But while topics may be common, approaches have differed historically, and according to the traditions and times in which particular thinkers have worked. The Royal Institute of Philosophy's London Lecture series for 2012-13 brought together contributions from scholars expert in different traditions in order to explore continuities and discontinuities in world philosophy. In this volume there are papers on Indian thought, including Buddhist and Jain contributions, on Daoism, on modern Japanese approaches, on Jewish and Islamic thought, on stoicism, and on African philosophy, as well as on modern analytical philosophy, the so-called 'Continental' tradition and on the thought of Nietzsche.

Download or read book Intention written by G. E. M. Anscombe and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-16 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

Download or read book The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan Volume 1 written by Alan Donagan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 1 includes essays on Spinoza, Descartes, Bradley, Collingwood, Russell, Moore, and Popper, as well as two previously unpublished papers on the history of philosophy as a discipline, and on Ryle and Wittgenstein's nature of philosophy. Linked by Donagan's commitment to the central importance of history for philosophy and his interest in problems of historical understanding, these essays represent the remarkable scope of Donagan's thought.

Download or read book Essays on Philosophy Politics Economics written by Gerald Gaus and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together distinguished philosophers with interdisciplinary expertise to show how the resources of philosophy can be employed in the tasks of evaluating economics and fostering policy debates. Contributors offer analyses of basic ideas in economics, such as the notion of efficiency, "economic man", incentives, self-interest, and utility maximization. They discuss key concepts in political theory such as desert, compensation, autonomy, equality, consent or fairness. The book then offers examples of how philosophical resources can be applied to specific, timely debates, such as discrimination, affirmative action, and ethical considerations in Social Security. These applications demonstrate how philosophy, politics, and economics can be fruitfully combined, while the more theoretical chapters clarify fundamental relationships across these related disciplines. Ultimately, the text guides students and scholars in expanding their perspectives as they approach the necessarily complex research questions of today and tomorrow.

Download or read book Public Philosophy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Michael Sandel takes up some of the hotly contested moral and political issues of our time, including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, gay rights, stem cell research, the meaning of toleration and civility, the gap between rich and poor, the role of markets, and the place of religion in public life. He argues that the most prominent ideals in our political life--individual rights and freedom of choice--do not by themselves provide an adequate ethic for a democratic society. Sandel calls for a politics that gives greater emphasis to citizenship, community, and civic virtue, and that grapples more directly with questions of the good life. Liberals often worry that inviting moral and religious argument into the public sphere runs the risk of intolerance and coercion. These essays respond to that concern by showing that substantive moral discourse is not at odds with progressive public purposes, and that a pluralist society need not shrink from engaging the moral and religious convictions that its citizens bring to public life.

Download or read book A Logical Approach to Philosophy written by David DeVidi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-07-10 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Graham Solomon, to whom this collection is dedicated, went into hospital for antibiotic treatment of pneumonia in Oc- ber, 2001. Three days later, on Nov. 1, he died of a massive stroke, at the age of 44. Solomon was well liked by those who got the chance to know him—it was a revelation to ?nd out, when helping to sort out his a?airs after his death, how many “friends” he had whom he had actually never met, as his email included correspondence with philosophers around the world running sometimes to hundreds of messages. He was well respected in the philosophical community more broadly. He was for several years a member of the editorial board for the Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. While he was employed at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, several of us at the University of Wat- loo always regarded our own department as a sort of second academic home for him. We therefore decided that it would be appropriate to hold a memorial conference in his honour. Thanks to the generous ?nancial support of the Humphrey Conference Fund, we were able to do so in May 2003. Many of the papers in this volume were presented at that conf- ence.

Download or read book Essays on the History of Moral Philosophy written by J. B. Schneewind and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.B. Schneewind presents a selection of his published essays on ethics, the history of ethics and moral psychology, together with a new piece offering an intellectual autobiography. The essays range across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, with a particular focus on Kant and his relation to earlier thinkers.

Download or read book Essays on Philosophy Praxis and Culture written by Lou Marinoff and published by . This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection provides a panoramic view of practical philosophical insight, ranging across a spectrum of humanistic themes. These essays cast light on our perennially imperfect human condition. They are written from the complementary standpoints of a classical liberal scholar with one foot planted in the academy, and of a peripatetic pioneer whom The New York Times called "the world's most successful marketer of philosophical counseling." These writings, therefore, span space in which theory and praxis are mutually informative and seamlessly collaborative. The collection ranges from Alfred Korzybski's general semantics; Thomas Mann's prognosis for Western civilization; Hume's moral skepticism applied to globalization; Jungian synchronicity and encounters with Irvin Yalom; J.S. Mill's harm principle applied to cyberspace; Ayn Rand's prophetic apocalypse; philosophical practice as Dadaist activism; humanities-based therapies as remedies for culturally induced illnesses; biological roots of human conflict; deconstruction and critique of "sustainable development"; dangers and detriments of over-digitalized and hyper-virtualized lifestyles and learning methods; and calls for the re-emergence of philosophy from inactive academic entombment to pro-active modes of personal guidance, social influence, consumer advocacy, and political engagement. A unifying claim of this anthology is the cautionary tale that humanity's recurrent and conflict-ridden predicaments are only exacerbated by myopic analyses, toxic ideologies, and expedient prescriptions. While philosophy is scarcely a panacea for human afflictions, its proper exercise illuminates our understanding of them, thereby suggesting better as opposed to worse ways forward. Overall, the thrust of this collection can be viewed as a realization of John Dewey's forthright vision, expressed in 1917: "Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men." Indeed, these essays deal with problems of humanity writ large. They also constitute a compelling response to Mortimer Adler's clarion call in 1965, that philosophy "must cease to be an activity conducted by moles, each burrowing in its own hole, and become a public and cooperative enterprise." As these essays reveal, Marinoff has accomplished Adler's mission, transforming and returning philosophy to the agora, which in contemporary parlance amounts to the global village. That his popular books on philosophy for everyday life have sold millions of copies in dozens of languages has distracted some--perhaps too many--philosophers from exploring what he has written for a philosophical audience itself. This book helps remedy that distraction.