Professor Armstrong defends the view ‘that mental states are nothing but physical states of the brain’. He is aware that it is not humanly possible to prove such an identification. But he feels that it is possible to show that the philosophical and logical objections formulated against it are not valid; possible, also, to refute rival philosophical views and to reach a point where one gives a reasonably complete explanation of all mental states in physical terms. The completeness of the (...) explanation would not prove its truth but would give it force and value. Accordingly, the major part of the book is an attempt ‘to give an account of all mental states as states of the person apt for the bringing about of certain sorts of physical behaviour’. (shrink)

This is a very useful book, a programmed course of the ‘linear’ type, carrying the student along in short steps and continuously testing him by its question-answer format. It provides a considerable amount of solid practice in the areas of logical relations in general, the logic of unanalysed statements and the logic of predicates The kind of selftuition it makes possible should lighten the load of tutorial work.

This book presents three chapters of a comprehensive French work on experimental psychology, under the general editorship of Paul Fraisse and Jean Piaget. They are expert summaries of concepts and experimental work, with excellent bibliographies.

This book presents three chapters of a comprehensive French work on experimental psychology, under the general editorship of Paul Fraisse and Jean Piaget. They are expert summaries of concepts and experimental work, with excellent bibliographies.

The following series of questions exemplifies the cluster of problems with which Professor Goodman is concerned.

The title reminds us that scientific enquiry is a predominantly heuristic enterprise, with its logical roots in probability theory. This suggests the possibility of taking the purely cognitive process, inductive inference, and handling it as a behavioural process of decision-making under risk of uncertainty i.e. as a process of deciding what to believe. It is certainly worth considering whether similar conditions of rationality are present in both practical deliberation and scientific inference, in both real action and academic belief. Such is (...) an aim of this book. Its particular character is perhaps better presented as an endeavour to build a model which, in situations of inductive inference, will guide us to the best belief. (shrink)

This book brings together papers presented at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania and later revised. They are concerned with the concept of rational belief and with the rôle that induction plays in theories of rationality. There are three well-known theories: subjectivism provides the norm that ‘we may believe a proposition if and only if it fits in with those we already believe, and that we must believe it if and only if avoiding the belief would make for some (...) imbalance in the set of all our beliefs’; an empiricist logic argues that probability must be our guide and holds that a rational person believes a proposition if and only if it has a sufficiently high degree of confirmation assessed on the basis of observation; the pragmatist conceives belief as a species of action, assessing it as rational when it contributes to the furtherance of ends. (shrink)

This is an excellent book. It is concerned with four problems: what is Being? what is meaning? what is the philosophical significance of language? what is a world? The core of the discussion is an extremely lucid and sensitive exposition of the views of the early Heidegger, valuable comparisons being made with Wittgenstein, Austin, Merleau-Ponty and Wilfred Sellars. Convinced that substantive philosophical questions benefit from both the approach of linguistic analysis and from that of phenomenology, the author uses and describes (...) both viewpoints, explaining their different commitments. This is his reason for sub-titling the book: An Analytic Phenomenology. He is very successful in recasting Heidegger’s view in the vocabulary of analysis. (shrink)

This is an excellent book. It is concerned with four problems: what is Being? what is meaning? what is the philosophical significance of language? what is a world? The core of the discussion is an extremely lucid and sensitive exposition of the views of the early Heidegger, valuable comparisons being made with Wittgenstein, Austin, Merleau-Ponty and Wilfred Sellars. Convinced that substantive philosophical questions benefit from both the approach of linguistic analysis and from that of phenomenology, the author uses and describes (...) both viewpoints, explaining their different commitments. This is his reason for sub-titling the book: An Analytic Phenomenology. He is very successful in recasting Heidegger’s view in the vocabulary of analysis. (shrink)

Language and the Pursuit of Truth is a brief, clear and readable introduction to the study of linguistic communication. Intended for the general public, it presents basic considerations about words, statements and truths which are necessary for ‘our rational understanding of language in general, our ability to argue, to answer questions, and to solve problems through the medium of words’. It also introduces the reader to the contemporary practice of linguistic analysis. One may easily have reservations here particularly in the (...) way ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysical statements’ are conceived and presented. But the book is an excellent presentation of semantics to ordinary people. (shrink)

This is a developmental study of Wittgenstein. It is concerned exclusively with his philosophy of language and is remarkably clear and simple in contrasting the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.

This is a developmental study of Wittgenstein. It is concerned exclusively with his philosophy of language and is remarkably clear and simple in contrasting the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.

The papers in this volume were written over a period of nine years. Thematically they represent Hintikka’s great interest in what can be said, in formal terms, about philosophically important concepts. Since these concepts are embedded in ordinary language their logic may be viewed as an explanatory model displaying an aspect of the rationale of ordinary language. This model is not simply a mirror: ‘As the case is with theoretical models in general, it does not seem to be derivable from (...) any number of observations concerning ordinary language. It has to be invented rather than discovered’. Hintikka’s own work on the central epistemic concepts of knowledge and belief convinced him that in the final analysis of philosophical concepts, syntactical methods have to be supplemented by semantical ones: ‘We have to ask what conditions the truth of a set of statements imposes on the world, or what kinds of “possible worlds” there must be in order for a set of statements to be consistent. Such a semantical analysis often gives us deeper insights into the logic of philosophically important notions. It seems to me that the critics of formal logic as a weapon of philosophical analysis have often overlooked the force of semantical methods and in effect spoken of syntactical methods only’. (shrink)

This is an excellent book, providing a broad understanding ‘of the ways of thinking of those contemporary philosophers who apply the tools of symbolic logic to classical philosophical problems’, with a very complete, exact analysis of contemporary problems that bear on the correlation of language and reality. The book should be of great value to the logician, the technical linguist, the mathematician and the philosopher.

This book consists of selections that cover almost thirty years of writing, from Nausea to the essay, Search for a Method which summarizes the Critique of Dialectical Reason The selections succeed in giving us a substantial account of Sartre’s explanation of the nature and conditions of human freedom, and in reflecting also his thinking on contemporary issues which affect human rights. They are arranged chronologically and suggest an actual development of thought. In Nausea Sartre uses Roquentin’s struggle to dramatize his (...) discovery of ‘the key to existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life’; through the void of his own conceptual existence he glimpses the fact and possibilities of his own freedom. In The Psychology of Imagination ’Sartre examines the function of consciousness in creating a world of unrealities, probes the nature of the psychic life and the mind’s complex ties with the outer world, defines the intentional structure of the image and the uniqueness of man’s freedom to create, and concludes that “the imagination is the necessary condition for the freedom of empirical man in the midst of the world”’. The full exposition of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom is given in Being and Nothingness. But for Sartre, a writer must use his own freedom to promote the freedom of all men. There are selections from his writings on freedom from persecution, freedom to write, freedom to do evil, freedom from exploitation. Finally, in Search for a Method there is an excerpt on his positive social theory and his hope that Marxism will take on ‘the human dimension’. (shrink)