The Historical Dictionary of Existentialism explains the central claims of existentialist philosophy and the contexts in which it developed into one of the most influential intellectual trends of the 20th century. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and more than 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries offering clear, accessible accounts of the life and thought of major existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as (...) well as thinkers influential to its development such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Max Scheler. Historical Dictionary of Existentialism affords readers an integrated, critical, and historically-sensitive understanding of this important philosophical movement. (shrink)

The A to Z of Existentialism explains the central claims of existentialist philosophy and the contexts in which it developed into one of the most influential intellectual trends of the 20th century. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and more than 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries offering clear, accessible accounts of the life and thought of major existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, (...) as well as thinkers influential to its development such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Max Scheler. (shrink)

One of the chief virtues of Gutting’s book is its ambition to tell the “relatively self-contained and coherent story” (xi) of French philosophy in this century, not just the parts of the story that American academics have seized upon as distinctive and interesting. Alongside analyses of well-known philosophers like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Derrida (a 30-40 page chapter is devoted to each), Gutting provides excellent chronological summaries of early figures like Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, Léon Brunschvicg, Henri Bergson, and Gaston (...) Bachelard who are infrequently read or discussed in English. (shrink)

Leiter’s book serves, in one sense, as a summation of two decades of scholarship during which American and British philosophers have sought to reframe Nietzsche’s philosophy in terms of traditional analytic concerns in ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics and thereby to challenge (or simply ignore) dominant Continental readings. Richard Schacht’s comprehensive Nietzsche (Routledge 1983) marked the beginning of this effort. The work of Maudemarie Clark, with whom Leiter has collabroated on other projects, represents another landmark.

We enter here upon a history of conversational traffic between the respective departments of philosophy and law in the old academy of liberalism, where lawyers hear much from philosophers, yes-and philosophers hear from lawyers, too, in what has fruitfully been a both-ways exchange. Our philosophical protagonist is John Rawls. This book comprises a study of the rise and workings, within the Rawlsian political-liberal philosophy, of the idea of a country's higher-legal constitution as a public platform for the justification of political (...) coercion. A study of Rawls on constitutionalism can help us, I believe, in scoping out and managing a cluster of constitutional lawyers' debates-interminable ones, it seems, in the constitutional-democratic precincts of our times-that I will catalogue soon below. But conversely, I believe, those seeking the best and truest readings of Rawls might have something to learn from the controversies of the lawyers. My approach to Rawls has accordingly been that of a critically leavened (while no doubt broadly sympathetic) exegesis, while with the legal-discursive materials I take more of a diagnostic turn. My hope is that a treatment of these two discourses in relation to each other will prove an aid to both political-philosophical and legal-practical reflection. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of ...

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

Why is there anything, rather than nothing at all? This question often serves as a debating tactic used by theists to attack naturalism. Many people apparently regard the question—couched in such stark, general terms—as too profound for natural science to answer. It is unanswerable by science, I argue, not because it’s profound or because science is superficial but because the question, as it stands, is ill-posed and hence has no answer in the first place. In any form in which it (...) is well-posed, it has an answer that naturalism can in principle provide. The question therefore gives the foes of naturalism none of the ammunition that many on both sides of the debate think it does. (shrink)

Many experimental philosophers are philosophers by training and professional affiliation, but some best work in experimental philosophy has been done by people who do not have advanced degrees in philosophy and do not teach in philosophy departments. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is the empirical investigation of philosophical intuitions, the factors that affect them, and the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie them. It explores what are philosophical intuitions, and why do experimental philosophers want to study them using (...) the methods of empirical science. The positive program in experimental philosophy shares the goal of the substantial part of traditional philosophy that is concerned with the analysis of important philosophical concepts. The negative program has implications for philosophical projects whose goal is conceptual analysis. There have been a number of responses to the challenge posed by experimental philosophy's negative program. The chapter also focuses on the expertise defense. (shrink)

Well over five thousand languages are known to exist or to have existed in the world, but hundreds of these are no longer living languages used by speakers and speech communities in their day-to-day activities and lives. Some of them lead a pseudolife as revered monuments of the past which still have some restricted and specialised roles to play today, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Church Slavonic and others, but most of them are of interest and concern only to a (...) small group of linguists, historians and some other experts who look at the past. Many languages have disappeared without being known to us in any great detail, with only some fragmentary materials in them - written or noted down by speakers or observers of them hundreds or even thousands of years ago - at our disposal to give us some idea as to what those languages were like. Others have disappeared without even that scanty information about their nature being available to us; only their names are known from historical records, or perhaps some remarks were written down by someone many years ago and were preserved over the ages to tell us something about some special features of such a language or such languages and who and what kind of people their speakers were. Many other languages, certainly a much larger number than the dead languages about which we know something, have disappeared without our knowing anything of or about them. (shrink)

Science and the End of Ethics examines some of the most important positive and negative implications that science has for ethics. Addressing the negative implications first, author Stephen Morris discusses how contemporary science provides significant challenges to moral realism. One threat against moral realism comes from evolutionary theory, which suggests that our moral beliefs are unconnected to any facts that would make them true. Ironically, many of the same areas of science (e.g. evolutionary biology, neuroscience, psychology) that present difficulties (...) for moral realism point to a new ethical approach that focuses on achieving some of the key practical goals shared by ethicists. Chief among these is how to increase amicable behavior among people. (shrink)

Pidgin languages are generally languages which are more or less rudimentary languages developing in situations of contacts between two different cultures, one of them dominant in the contact situation, with the use of such languages restricted to certain limited contacts such as trading, plantation work involving the employment of indigenous labour, master-servant relationships, and similar types of contact situations. Much of the vocabulary of a pidgin language consists of elements of the language of the dominant culture in a more or (...) less distorted, and often semantically changed, form with elements from the language of the non-dominant culture playing a less important part in its vocabulary. Its structural features do not as a rule reflect structural characteristics of the language of the dominant culture, unless the languages of both the dominant and the non-dominant culture are closely related and structurally very similar, though even in such situations quite significant deviations from the structural set-up of the language of the dominant culture can be observed in the pidgin language. Some to many of the structural features of a pidgin language may reflect features of the language of the non-dominant culture but, in pidgin languages, a number of unique structural and grammatical features can be observed which appear to reflect some basic simplifications in language use in contact situations between speakers of different languages. In any event, in the usual type of pidgin language, the overall vocabulary is small and limited in its usefulness to the specific types of contact situations in which the language is used and its grammatical complexity is greatly reduced when compared with both the language of the dominant culture and the nondominant culture. Also, as a rule, the sound system of a pidgin language constitutes a considerable simplification when compared with the sound system of both these languages. (shrink)

Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field′s diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.

Kant’s pre-1770 philosophy responded to the mind-body problem by applying a theory of “physical influx”. His encounter with Swedenborg’s mysticism, however, left him disillusioned with any dualist solution to Descartes’ problem. One of the major goals of the Critical philosophy was to provide a completely new solution to the mind-body problem. Kant’s new solution is “perspectival” in the sense that all Critical theories are perspectival: it acknowledges a deep truth in both of the controversy’s extremes (i.e., what we might nowadays (...) call eliminative materialism and an absolutely ideal folk psychology), by viewing both as ways of considering the issue, rather than as the only correct approach. Once we take into account its perspectival character, a new way of understanding Kant’s philosophy of mind emerges. The mind is no longer separate from the body, but is a manifestation of it, viewed from another (specifically human, rational) perspective. Kant’s transcendental conditions of knowledge (spatio-temporal intuition, categorial conception, and principled schematization) do not portray the mind as somehow creating the physical world; rather, they imply the opposite, that knowledge of objects is necessarily structured by a set of unconscious assumptions about the physical world. Our pre-conscious (or pre-mental, in Descartes’ sense of “mental”) encounter with an assumed spatio-temporal, causal nexus is entirely physical. A reincarnated Kant’s solution to today’s mind-body problem would be: eliminative materialism is good science; but only the “explanatory idealist” can consistently be an eliminative materialist. Philosophically, multiple perspectives are necessary in order to understand anything we say or do. (shrink)

A reply to Fine’s critique of Aboutness. Fine contrasts two notions of truthmaker, and more generally two notions of “state.” One is algebraic; states are sui generis entities grasped primarily through the conditions they satisfy. The other uses set theory; states are sets of worlds, or, perhaps, collections of such sets. I try to defend the second notion and question some seeming advantages of the first.

Kant and Mysticism interprets Kant’s early criticism of Swedenborg’s mysticism as the fountainhead of the Critical philosophy. Kantian Critique revolutionizes not only traditional metaphysics, but also our understanding of mysticism: Critical mysticism is a unitive experience that impels us to lay bare all human pretensions to reason’s light.

This chapter contains sections titled: Reply to Devitt and Jackson Reply to Egan Reply to Cowie Reply to Goldman Reply to Sterelny Reply to Prinz Reply to Godfrey‐Smith Reply to Sosa Reply to Bishop References.

Abstract This paper examines a number of ways in which Wittgenstein's later philosophical method has been appropriated for moral philosophy. The work of Paul Johnston, Sabina Lovibond and Cora Diamond is discussed in relation to the following questions. Is there a sustainable distinction between ethics and meta-ethics (in the form, say, of distinctively ethical language games and grammatical reminders about them)? What role does the imagination, and hence the domain of literature, play in ethical understanding? How far does ethical discourse (...) presuppose, and hence find itself constrained by, the shared natural reactions of a specific culture or form of life? (shrink)

From 1876, this influential work in the history of ideas focuses on the eighteenth-century deist controversy and its effects.

The choice of emphasis in kinship studies has often resulted in incompatible theoretical models of kinship that are mutually undermining and contradictory. Jones' attempts to reconcile disparate approaches to kinship using OT is useful, however; seeing kinship as a specialized system for representing genealogy may be unwarranted in the light of recent advances in mathematical approaches to kinship terminologies.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the most original philosophers & political thinkers of this century. Coming to Christianity late in her short life, she offered a refreshing creativity & a rare ability to confront theological complacencies. In introducing her writings & thoughts, this book emphasizes her never-ending search for truth, a search that epitomizes twentieth-century spirituality.

"God became man that man might become God. This thought, expressed in terms of a sharing of natures, human and divine, is to be found in the most ancient Christian liturgies and still in use, at the Offertory typically. This book shows how Hegel fleshes this thought out, shorn though of picture-language, in conscious or less-than-conscious continuity with this Biblical belief in the power to become the sons of God. This involves some stripping away of the false fleshliness cast over (...) Hegels philosophy of spirit by interpreters ignorant of and hence unable to see this element in him, wishing, quite hopelessly, rather to adapt his work to a current materialist vision of development. The book is, thus, in the line of Thomas Aquinas and, obliquely, McTaggart and other idealist thinkers immediately prior to the rediscoveries of this strand and more in Hegel by todays theologians and others, such as Charles Taylor in our English-speaking world, who, nonetheless, regrettably, mostly fail to go the whole hog. They cannot believe that Hegels thought corresponds, in development as charted by, say, Newman, to the original Patristic line. Nonetheless, in these respects, at least, it does, as is brought out here."--Back cover. (shrink)

Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical, because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression. Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement (as exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious (...) language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas 'nonsense' is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that, if Wittgenstein is read in the terms provided by the work of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, then a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances--one which depends on exploiting an analogy between religious language and riddles. And once this alignment between Wittgenstein and Aquinas is established, it also allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension--in that it overlaps with the concerns of moral perfectionism, and in that it attributes great philosophical significance to what theology and philosophy have traditionally called 'perfections' and 'transcendentals', particularly concepts such as Being, Truth, and Unity or Oneness. This results in a radical reconception of the role of analogous usage in language, and so in the relation between philosophy and theology. (shrink)

A philosophical miscellany, as diverting as it is instructive, centred on an eclectic sequence of themes, ranging from advice to ageing, from backbiting to bigotry, from freedom to friendship, and from work to walking. Stephen Trombley mines the canon of two and half millennia of Western thought for observations that reflect the seriousness, the joy and the strangeness of human existence, counterpointing these words of wisdom with episodes – sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant, sometimes plain odd – from the lives (...) of the great philosophers. WISE WORDS includes, on each of its themes, the thoughts of philosophers from the distant past to the present. The result is a multi-dimensional treatment of each theme that crosses temporal, national and ideological boundaries. (shrink)

Provides guiding principles and values for practising responsible global media ethics.

Merleau-Ponty's Existential Phenomenology is used to address problems of consciousness, perception, the body, space-time, being, and the limits of science. Arguments are deployed for and against Merleau-Ponty's claims.

In Brennan and Democracy, a leading thinker in U.S. constitutional law offers some powerful reflections on the idea of "constitutional democracy," a concept in which many have seen the makings of paradox. Here Frank Michelman explores the apparently conflicting commitments of a democratic governmental system where key aspects of such important social issues as affirmative action, campaign finance reform, and abortion rights are settled not by a legislative vote but by the decisions of unelected judges. Can we--or should we--embrace (...) the values of democracy together with constitutionalism, judicial supervision, and the rule of law? To answer this question, Michelman calls into service the judicial career of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, the country's model "activist" judge for the past forty years. Michelman draws on Brennan's record and writings to suggest how the Justice himself might have understood the judiciary's role in the simultaneous promotion of both democratic and constitutional government.The first chapter prompts us to reflect on how tough and delicate an act it is for the members of a society to attempt living together as a people devoted to self-government. The second chapter seeks to renew our appreciation for democratic liberal political ideals, and includes an extensive treatment of Brennan's judicial opinions, which places them in relation to opposing communitarian and libertarian positions. Michelman also draws on the views of two other prominent constitutional theorists, Robert Post and Ronald Dworkin, to build a provocative discussion of whether democracy is best conceived as a "procedural" or a "substantive" ideal. (shrink)