This landmark collection of essays by six renowned philosophers explores the implications of the contentious realism/antirealism debate for epistemology. The essays examine issues such as whether epistemology needs to be realist, the bearing of a realist conception of truth on epistemology, and realism and antirealism in terms of a pragmatist conception of epistemic justification. Richard Rorty's essay provides a critical commentary on the other five.

Throughout much of human history most people conceived of death as a transitional event. An alternative, secular, conception of death is as the permanent cessation of all life‐sustaining biological functions. The death of the physical organism is the death of the person or human being. However death be conceived, human beings are the only creatures that are aware of their mortality. The death penalty is often thought to be the most severe punishment of all, far worse than life imprisonment. Attitudes (...) towards death vary according to the acceptance or rejection of belief in an afterlife. Death in old age is generally held to be less deplorable than death in one's prime. Premature death, however, is commonly deemed to be tragic, but not because merely being alive is a good of one kind or another, let alone good in itself. Lucretius exaggerated the symmetry between prenatal and post‐ mortem events. (shrink)

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to (...) be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal. (shrink)

Global fatalism is an attitude towards life, an attitude of resignation and acceptance of what happens. Global fatalism in the form of predestinarianism is typically, but not exclusively, associated with monotheism rather than with polytheism, and in particular with Christianity and Islam. An individual form of fatalism consists in the belief that specific incidents in a person's life are preordained. Local fatalism appears to be common to many different cultures and societies. Individual fatalism is associated with other important events in (...) human life, such as meeting the person with whom one is destined to fall in love. The ubiquity of the various forms of individual fatalism suggests that they have a deep appeal to human sentiment. Descartes's successors, lumbered with dualism but rejecting causal interaction, struggled to preserve human freedom while acknowledging nomological determinism. Global nomological determinism is a picture, a preconception of the nature of change in all its forms. (shrink)

Entertainments and celebrations are meant to give audiences and participants pleasure. Pleasure and enjoyment are an integral part of flourishing human life, and the desire for pleasure and enjoyment is a distinctive aspect of human nature. Psychological hedonism is a descriptive doctrine concerned with giving an account of actual human motivation. Ethical hedonism is a prescriptive doctrine that advances the view that human beings ought to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, that prospective pleasure and pain are severally the only good (...) reasons for action. ‘Pleasure’, ‘enjoyment’, and ‘being pleased’ are three graces that stand at the intersection of psychology, axiology, and practical reasoning. The relation between pleasure and awareness or consciousness of pleasure is subtle and unlike the corresponding relation to having a pain. To live the life of a practical hedonist is to live a life guided by the pursuit of pleasure. (shrink)