Download or read book Unnatural Doubts written by Michael Williams and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-01-11 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived. Although philosophers have often found problems in efforts to study the nature and limits of human knowledge, Williams provides the first book that systematically argues against there being such a thing as knowledge of the external world. He maintains that knowledge of the world consitutes a theoretically coherent kind of knowledge, whose possibility needs to be defended, only given a deeply problematic doctrine he calls "epistemological realism." The only alternative to epistemological realism is a thoroughgoing contextualism.
Download or read book Unnatural Doubts written by Michael Williams and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pragmatism as Anti Authoritarianism written by Richard Rorty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Provocative and engaging...The array of urgent questions and crises facing our democracy makes one miss Richard Rorty’s voice: insistent, relentlessly questioning, and dedicated to the proposition that we can’t afford to let our democracy fail.” —Chris Lehmann, New Republic “Richard Rorty was the most iconoclastic and dramatic philosopher of the last half-century. In this final book, his unique literary style, singular intellectual zest, and demythologizing defiance of official philosophy are on full display.” —Cornel West “Coherent, often brilliant, and it presents a clear and timely case for political pragmatism.” —Jonathan Rée, Prospect “Today, there are few philosophers left whose thoughts are inspired by a unifying vision; there are even fewer who can articulate such a view in terms of such a ravishing flow of provocative, but sharp and differentiated, arguments.” —Jürgen Habermas Richard Rorty’s final masterwork offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. He identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, in this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on—and argue with—are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. It demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, and that we account for their doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. No book offers a more accessible account of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.
Download or read book Skepticism written by G. Anthony Bruno and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skepticism is one of the most enduring and profound of philosophical problems. With its roots in Plato and the Sceptics to Descartes, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein, skepticism presents a challenge that every philosopher must reckon with. In this outstanding collection philosophers engage with skepticism in five clear sections: the philosophical history of skepticism in Greek, Cartesian and Kantian thought; the nature and limits of certainty; the possibility of knowledge and related problems such as perception and the debates between objective knowledge and constructivism; the transcendental method as a response to skepticism and the challenge of naturalism; overcoming the skeptical challenge. Skepticism: Historical and Contemporary Inquiries is essential reading for students and scholars in epistemology and the history of philosophy and will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as religion and sociology.
Download or read book Berkeley s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge written by P. J. E. Kail and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge is a crucial text in the history of empiricism and in the history of philosophy more generally. Its central and seemingly astonishing claim is that the physical world cannot exist independently of the perceiving mind. The meaning of this claim, the powerful arguments in its favour, and the system in which it is embedded, are explained in a highly lucid and readable fashion and placed in their historical context. Berkeley's philosophy is, in part, a response to the deep tensions and problems in the new philosophy of the early modern period and the reader is offered an account of this intellectual milieu. The book then follows the order and substance of the Principles whilst drawing on materials from Berkeley's other writings. This volume is the ideal introduction to Berkeley's Principles and will be of great interest to historians of philosophy in general.
Download or read book Skepticism From Antiquity to the Present written by Diego Machuca and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-01-25 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present is an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the entire history of skepticism. Divided chronologically into ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern, and contemporary periods, and featuring 50 specially-commissioned chapters from leading philosophers, this comprehensive volume is the first of its kind. By exploring each of the distinct traditions and providing expert insights, this extensive reference work: - covers major thinkers such as Sextus Empiricus, Cicero, Descartes, Hume, Spinoza, and Wittgenstein. - acknowledges the influence of ancient skeptical traditions on later philosophy and explains why it is still a fertile topic of inquiry among today's philosophers and historians of philosophy. - analyzes various forms of skepticism including Pyrrhonian, Academic, religious, moral, and neo-Pyrrhonian. - addresses issues in contemporary epistemology and indicates new directions of study. Skepticism, a driving force in the history of philosophy, remains at the center of debates in ethics, philosophy of religion, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present is an essential point of reference for any student, researcher, or practitioner of philosophy, presenting a systematic and historical survey of this core philosophical topic.
Download or read book Under Any Sky written by Matthew Caleb Flamm and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana is a testament to the cross-cultural relevance of the work of one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, George Santayana (1863-1952, birth name Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana). A list of geographic origins of the twenty-two contributions contained in this volume indicates the transatlantic cultural diversity of scholarly representation: scholars variously hailing from Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Slovakia, and Switzerland, and from the United States, representing three of its major regions. The authors explore the major plots of Santayana's thinking, including materialistic Platonism in ontology, skepticism in epistemology, rationality in social philosophy, naturalism in aesthetics, piety in materialism, and literary and poetic expression as a means to cosmic understanding. After a preface by Professor John Lachs (also a contributor), and an editorial introduction, the book is divided into three respective thematic parts: I. Ontology and Naturalism; II. Culture, Society, America; and III. Aesthetics, Poetry, and Spirit. Before each thematic section brief introductions of the section papers is provided to accommodate specific scholarly interests. The authors entrust the present volume to readers appreciative of the philosophic catholicity of the subject's work, invoking the book title which is taken from the preface of Santayana's mature system of philosophy, Scepticism and Animal Faith: "In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy"
Download or read book Context Truth and Objectivity written by Eduardo Marchesan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The claim according to which there is a categorial gap between meaning and saying – between what sentences mean and what we say by using them on particular occasions – has come to be widely regarded as being exclusively a claim in the philosophy of language. The present essay collection takes a different approach to these issues. It seeks to explore the ways in which that claim – as defended first by ordinary language philosophy and, more recently, by various contextualist projects – is grounded in considerations that transcend the philosophy of language. More specifically, the volume seeks to explore how that claim is inextricably linked to considerations about the nature of truth and representation. It is thus part of the objective of this volume to rethink the current way of framing the debates on these issues. By framing the debate in terms of an opposition between "ideal language theorists" and their semanticist heirs on the one hand and "communication theorists" and their contextualist heirs on the other, one brackets important controversies and risks obscuring the undoubtedly very real oppositions that exist between different currents of thought.
Download or read book Contextualisms in Epistemology written by Elke Brendel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-03-02 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contextualism has become one of the leading paradigms in contemporary epistemology. According to this view, there is no context-independent standard of knowledge, and as a result, all knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive. Contextualists contend that their account of this analysis allows us to resolve some major epistemological problems such as skeptical paradoxes and the lottery paradox, and that it helps us explain various other linguistic data about knowledge ascriptions. The apparent ease with which contextualism seems to solve numerous epistemological quandaries has inspired the burgeoning interest in it. This comprehensive anthology collects twenty original essays and critical commentaries on different aspects of contextualism, written by leading philosophers on the topic. The editors’ introduction sketches the historical development of the contextualist movement and provides a survey and analysis of its arguments and major positions. The papers explore, inter alia, the central problems and prospects of semantic (or conversational) contextualism and its main alternative approaches such as inferential (or issue) contextualism, epistemic contextualism, and virtue contextualism. They also investigate the connections between contextualism and epistemic particularism, and between contextualism and stability accounts of knowledge. Elke Brendel is Professor of Philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. She has published numerous articles on logic, epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of language. She is the author of Die Wahrheit über den Lügner (The Truth About the Liar, 1992), Grundzüge der Logik II – Klassen, Relationen, Zahlen (Foundations of Logic II – Sets, Relations, Numbers, with Wilhelm K. Essler, 1993), and Wahrheit und Wissen (Truth and Knowledge, 1999). Christoph Jäger is Lecturer in Philosophy at Aberdeen University, United Kingdom, and Privatdozent of Philosophy (honorary office) at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He has published numerous articles on epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion. Books: Selbstreferenz und Selbstbewusstsein (Self-reference and Self-knowledge, 1999), Analytische Religionsphilosophie (Analytic Philosophy of Religion, ed., 1998), Kunst und Erkenntnis (Art and Knowledge, ed., with Georg Meggle, 2004), Religion und Rationalität (Religion and Rationality, forthcoming).
Download or read book Ignorance written by Andrew Bennett and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Bennett argues in this fascinating book that ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. He sees that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing. From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, including their own. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature’s agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human. This exciting approach to literary theory will be of interest to lecturers and students of literary theory and criticism.
Download or read book Peirce James and a Pragmatic Philosophy of Religion written by John W. Woell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, John W. Woell shows us how contemporary readings of American Pragmatism founded on mistakenly used categories of the Analytic tradition have led to misreadings of Peirce and James. By focusing on terms drawn largely from Descartes and Kant, contemporary debates between metaphysical realists, antirealists, Realists and Nonrealists, have, argues Woell, failed to shed great light on pragmatism in general and a pragmatic philosophy of religion in particular. Woell contends that paying close attention to the internal relationships among inquiry, belief, and their objects in the respective works of Peirce and James provides a means for fully appreciating pragmatism's richness as a resource for philosophy of religion. By taking account of a pragmatic point of view in philosophy of religion, this book incites a more productive discussion of the metaphysical status of religious objects and of the epistemic status of religious belief.
Download or read book Truth written by David Wood and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Setting the stage with a selection of readings from importantnineteenth century philosophers, this reader on truth puts inconversation some of the main philosophical figures from thetwentieth century in the analytic, continental, and pragmatisttraditions. Focuses on the value or normativity of truth through exposingthe dialogues between different schools of thought Features philosophical figures from the twentieth century inthe analytic, continental, and pragmatist traditions Topics addressed include the normative relation between truthand subjectivity, consensus, art, testimony, power, andcritique Includes essays by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, James, Heidegger,Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Levinas, Arendt, Foucault, Rorty,Davidson, Habermas, Derrida, and many others
Download or read book Philosophy And Its Epistemic Neuroses written by Michael Hymers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that analytical philosophy and radical theory alike stand in an ambivalent relationship with skepticism. It explains structuralism, feminist theory and critical theory to outline a therapeutic alternative to philosophical theoreticism.
Download or read book Engaging Putnam written by James Conant and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hilary Whitehall Putnam was one of the leading philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. As student of Rudolph Carnap's and Hans Reichenbach's, he went on to become not only a major figure in North American analytic philosophy, who made significant contributions to the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, and physics but also to the disciplines of logic, number theory, and computer science. He passed away on March 13, 2016. The present volume is a memorial to his extraordinary intellectual contributions, honoring his contributions as a philosopher, a thinker, and a public intellectual. It features essays by an international team of leading philosophers, covering all aspects of Hilary Putnam's philosophy from his work in ethics and the history of philosophy to his contributions to the philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics. Each essay is an original contribution. “Hilary Putnam is one of the most distinguished philosophers of the modern era, and just speaking personally, one of the smartest and most impressive thinkers I have ever been privileged to know—as a good friend for 70 years. The fine essays collected here are a fitting tribute to a most remarkable figure.” Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “In Engaging Putnam excellent philosophers engage the writings and ideas of Hilary Putnam, one of the most productive and influential philosophers of the last century. Putnam stands out because of the combination of brilliance and a firm grasp of reality he brought to a very broad range of issues: the logic and the philosophy of mathematics, free-will, skepticism, realism, internalism and externalism and a lot more. Along with this he offered penetrating insights about other great philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. All great philosophers make us think. With many, we try to figure out the strange things they say. With Putnam, we are made to think about clearly explained examples and arguments that get to the heart of the issues he confronts. This book is a wonderful contribution to the continuation of Putnam-inspired thinking.” John Perry, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
Download or read book Thomas Nagel written by Alan Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-28 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first systematic study of the philosophy of Thomas Nagel, Alan Thomas discusses Nagel's contrast between the "subjective" and the "objective" points of view throughout the various areas of his wide ranging philosophy. Nagel's original and distinctive contrast between the subjective view and our aspiration to a "view from nowhere" within metaphysics structures the chapters of the book. A "new Humean" in epistemology, Nagel takes philosophical scepticism to be both irrefutable and yet to indicate a profound truth about our capacity for self-transcendence. The contrast between subjective and objective views is then considered in the case of the mind, where consciousness proves to be the central aspect of mind that contemporary theorising fails to acknowledge adequately. The second half of the book analyses Nagel's work on moral and political philosophy where he has been most deeply influential. Topics covered include the contrast between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons and values, Nagel's distinctive version of a hybrid ethical theory, his discussion of life's meaningfulness and finally his sceptical arguments about whether a liberal society can reconcile the conflicting moral demands of self and other.
Download or read book Pragmatism and Realism written by Frederick L. Will and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 1996-12-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I have no doubt at all, that if philosophy is to prosper in the coming decades, it will have to treat with great seriousness that splendid seriousness that splendid body of philosophical writing of which the essays in this volume constitute one major part'. from the Foreword by Alasdair MacIntyre When historians of philosophy turn to the work of distinguished philosopher Frederick L. Will, Pragmatism and Realism will be an important part of the discussion. In this collection of nine essays, Will demonstrates that a social account of human knowledge is consistent with, and ultimately requires, realism. A timely contribution to the current debate, the book culminates in a naturalistic account of the generation, assessment, and revision of cognitive, moral and social norms. It is written clearly enough for undergraduates, and includes a critical introduction by the editor discussing the bearing of Will's views on current debates among analytic epistemologists, philosophers of science, and moral theorists.
Download or read book Metaepistemology and Skepticism written by Richard A. Fumerton and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1995 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this excellent treatment of the internalism-externalism debate in contemporary epistemology, Richard Fumerton explores its implications for traditional skeptical concerns. When one fully understands these implications, Fumerton argues, one will see philosophical usefulness of a foundationalism relying on acquaintance. Contending that the externalist response to skepticism is too quick and easy, Fumerton defends a version of internalism, but in doing so puts into stark relief the radically different alternatives for dealing with skepticism that our metaepistemological views force upon us.
