This is the paperback edition of Dr Reeves’ valuable book: in the four years since its original publication it has received merited attention and praise for correlating, in substantial detail, the old ‘inspectionist’, ‘picture’ view of thinking with the contemporary ‘action’, ‘process’ conceptions. ‘In the empirical tradition at any rate, and in this tradition much early systematic psychologizing was rooted, interest tended to be focused on the content of thinking, sensation was considered a fundamental source of that content, and thinking, (...) so far as it was an activity, approximated to some form of visual inspection. Ideas, images, their permutations and combinations constituted that which came under this conscious scrutiny’. Excellent chapters on Locke, Spinoza, Freud, Gestalt Psychology and Binet detail the breakdown and rejection of this simple associationist treatment of thought. However ‘in assimilating thinking to action and moving away from the inspectionist viewpoint, we must be careful not to throw away key processes such as recognition, without which it seems impossible to derive constructive, realistic and logical thinking from that which is governed by immediate stimulus and motive’. (shrink)

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 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.

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)

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 inter-war period was quite remarkable in the intellectual and cultural life of Poland. ‘Philosophy in particular was the field where talent was abundant and the calibre of contributions surprisingly high. Analytical Philosophy was the embodiment of what was best and most accomplished in the Polish philosophy of that time’. With complete lucidity Professor Skolimowski traces its origins and development, linking it with the entire contemporary analytical movement and following it after the war to the point of its decline in (...) the 1950’s and of its emasculation in the 1960’s. The finest achievements of this movement and the work of its major figures are thoroughly described. (shrink)

The inter-war period was quite remarkable in the intellectual and cultural life of Poland. ‘Philosophy in particular was the field where talent was abundant and the calibre of contributions surprisingly high. Analytical Philosophy was the embodiment of what was best and most accomplished in the Polish philosophy of that time’. With complete lucidity Professor Skolimowski traces its origins and development, linking it with the entire contemporary analytical movement and following it after the war to the point of its decline in (...) the 1950’s and of its emasculation in the 1960’s. The finest achievements of this movement and the work of its major figures are thoroughly described. (shrink)

This is a revised edition of Quine’s standard introduction to the topics and best-known axiomatizations of set theory. It confines itself to abstract set theory as against point-set theory.

This is an excellent book, leaving no gaps in the exposition of its subject and maintaining throughout a high standard in human and technical communication.

‘During the 1930’s and early 1940’s a thoughtful observer might well have tended towards the conclusion that logic would break off from the ancient moorings that kept it joined to philosophy, and either link itself to mathematics, or go its own way as an independent discipline’. Professor Rescher finds however, on the contrary, that the literature of the last ten to fifteen years displays a significant cluster of developments in logic that may be called philosophical. Branches of logical theory have (...) been developed with philosophical applications in mind. Foundations have been laid for an exact logic of obligation, preference, choice, command; the traditional problem of universals has been focused from the perspective of mathematical logic; existence, time, tense, change and process is being explored with techniques of logic; literature on the logic of belief, hypothesis and probability is extensive. (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.