How do we know what we "know"? How did we –as individuals and as a society – come to accept certain knowledge as fact? In _Human Knowledge,_ Bertrand Russell questions the reliability of our assumptions on knowledge. This brilliant and controversial work investigates the relationship between ‘individual’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge. First published in 1948, this provocative work contributed significantly to an explosive intellectual discourse that continues to this day.

Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson's most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson's now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances. Throughout, Individuals advances some highly (...) influential and controversial ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the concept of a person a 'primitive concept'. (shrink)

In this book, the author of "Language, Truth and Logic" tackles one of the central issues of philosophy - how we can know anything - by setting out all the sceptic's arguments and trying to counter them one by one.

The purpose of this book is to develop a terminological structure in which private perceptions can be discussed publicly without bringing into existence the usual unnecessary philosophical problems of confused usage of language. chisholm displays an appraisive, quasi-ethical use of language, whereby he claims that a thing has some particular sensible property is to have adequate evidence that it actually does have that property. (staff).

The classic, influential essay in 'descriptive metaphysics' by the distinguished English philosopher.

"[Reading Ebersole] requires and often succeeds in producing a radical reorientation of one´s thinking . . . " from a book review Things We Know is a collection of fifteen essays that focus on perennial philosophical problems about knowledge. The essays let you participate in Frank Ebersole´s unique struggles to come to terms with such questions as: Can we know the world? . . . the past? . . . the future? . . . of God´s existence? . . . (...) whether our actions are free? . . . the foundations of logic and language? This is not just another philosophy book about problems of knowledge. In Things We Know, Ebersole, by carefully using examples, exposes the problems to be the products of philosophical pictures. The examples also make the pictures less compelling. Thus, by reading this philosophy book readers can join the author in working to free themselves from some perplexing philosophical concerns. How the Second Edition differs from the First Edition This edition differs from the First Edition (University of Oregon Books, 1967) in three ways. An essay is added. "Everyman´s Ontological Argument" has been inserted as Essay 14, following two other essays about the ontological argument. "Everyman´s Ontological Argument" was published in the Fall 1978 issue of Philosophical Investigations. (The original Chapter 14, "Where the Action Is," is now Chapter 15.) An essay is replaced. The original Essay 3, "How Philosophers See Stars," has been replaced by a modified version that was printed in Philosophy Today (no. 2, 1969). The replacement includes some further improvements. The text is improved. Throughout the book, the author has made corrections, stylistic improvements, and changed the wording as needed to make clearer his line of thought. Summary Each of the fifteen essays takes up a philosophical problem. In most of the essays, Ebersole first clarifies the problem and reviews common attempts to resolve the problem. Then he focuses on the central ideas and terms used to state the problem and creates examples of people using the terms under consideration. The examples are unique because of their focus on the context and point of what we say. If his investigations fail to find a use of the terms that supports the philosophical problem, he is led to conclude that the problem does not really derive from a philosophical insight but rather arises from a philosophical picture or model. Preface The essays in Things We Know address some of the perennial philosophical problems of knowledge. The essays are unified by being similar in method and philosophic aim. Ebersole exposes a picture behind each problem. In the essays he works through some of the ways that pictures control our thinking and tries to make the pictures less compelling. Chapters 1 6: Perception and Language Chapter 1: "Seeing Red in Red Things" Philosophical problem: Must words for simple visual properties (e.g., "red") refer to things because the things share some property (e.g., redness)? Can we see this property? Topics investigated: Family resemblances, properties of colors, when we regard things as the same, when we regard colors as the same, when we regard things as having common properties, language-world philosophical pictures. Philosophers discussed: A. J. Ayer, J. Herder, J. S. Mill. Chapter 2: "Seeing Things" Philosophical problem: Do hallucinations and afterimage. (shrink)

It is an ancient view, to be found even in Aristotle’s analysis of friendship, that the other is an alter ego, another myself. More recently, this conception has provoked spirited debate within and without the phenomenological tradition. It can be found in a wide variety of texts, from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations to Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” The basic position can be summarized as follows. Intentional experiences are subjective, first-person experiences, not objective, third-person experiences.

The concept of ‘time–slice’ turns out to be at best philosophically inconsequential, I argue. Influential philosophies of time as apparently diverse as those of Dummett, Lewis and Bergson, thus must come to grief. The very idea of ‘time–slice’ upon which they rest – the very idea of spatialising time, and of rendering the resulting ‘slices’ of potentially infinitely small measure – turns out on closer acquaintance not to amount to anything consequential that has yet been made sense of. Time is, (...) rather, a ubiquitous lived ‘tool’ for the organisation and co–ordination of human activities, a tool so completely involved in those activities that Anti–Realism about it is as unstateable as Realism about it is unnecessary. (shrink)

It has sometimes been suggested that backwards time travel always incurs causal loops. I show that this is mistaken, by describing worlds where backwards time travel occurs and yet no causal loops occur. Arguments that backwards time travel can occur without causal loops have been given before in the literature, but I show that those arguments are unconvincing.

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral...

Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson's most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson's now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances. Throughout, Individuals advances some highly (...) influential and controversial ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the concept of a person a 'primitive concept'. (shrink)

_Real Time II_ extends and evolves DH Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time,_Real Time._ This new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His _Real Time_ dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. _Real TIme II_ will do the same for the next twenty. GET /english/edu/Studying_at_SU/History_of_Literature.html HTTP/1.0.

Publisher's description: The realistic spirit, a nonmetaphysical approach to philosophical thought concerned with the character of philosophy itself, informs all of the discussions in these essays by philosopher Cora Diamond. Diamond explains Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings, explores the background to his thought in the work of Frege, and discusses ethics in a way that reflects his influence. Diamond's new reading of Wittgenstein challenges currently accepted interpretations and shows what it means to look without mythology at the coherence, commitments, and (...) connections that are distinctive of the mind. (shrink)

[Frank Ebersole is a philosopher] "whose contribution to philosophy... is the greatest of anyone this [the 20th] century, especially in the areas of philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, and perception." from Wittgenstein, Empiricism, and Language by John W. Cook (Oxford University Press, 1999). Language and Perception has nine chapters: seven that address philosophical problems about language and two (chapters 2 and 9) that are more metaphilosophical The metaphilosophical chapters discuss philosophical pictures and some of Frank Ebersole's basic ideas about (...) philosophy. The other seven essays let you participate in his unique struggles to come to terms with such questions as: What is the meaning of a word? Isn't Wittgenstein's idea that things called by the same name have family resemblances significantly flawed? Does language determine what we perceive? Does a thing's being red cause it to look red (the causal theory of perception)? Must the action of speaking be analyzed into simpler actions such as making sounds? Can a bodily movement be part of an action? Is fatalism implied by "what one might say" about the future? Are "natural-kind" words like proper names? are they rigid designators? This and its companion volume, Meaning and Saying, are not just other philosophy books about the philosophy of language. In both books Ebersole, by carefully using examples, convincingly shows that the problems are the products of philosophical pictures. The examples also make the pictures less compelling. How the Second Edition Differs from the First Edition This edition differs from the first edition (University Press of America, 1979) in several ways. Pictures: Material that was formerly part of a postscript to chapter 1 has been revised and is now its own chapter, chapter 2, "Pictures and Wittgenstein on Pictures." As a result the following chapters were renumbered. Essay removed: Chapter 7 in the first edition, "Truth and Fate: Future Actions," has been removed. Essay added: A new essay, entitled "Proper Names and Other Names," has been added to the volume. It's a revised version of an essay originally published in Philosophical Investigations, Oct., 1982, with the title "Stalking the Rigid Designator." Postscript: Material that was formerly part of the preface is now revised and placed as chapter 9 at the end, entitled "Postscript." Improved text: Throughout the book, Ebersole has made corrections, stylistic improvements, and changed the wording to remove ambiguities. Preface The book is concerned with questions about the "relations of language to reality": Does physical reality predetermine the form of our language? Does it determine the kinds of words in our simple, basic vocabulary? Does our language in basic ways determine the way we perceive reality? Does our language embody the outlines of a certain theory of perception? And does it incorporate a certain view of human actions and of the future? These questions are expressions of the problems in the philosophy of language that people inevitably get themselves into while dealing with other philosophical problems. And these are problems in the philosophy of language that have direct consequences for the way one deals with problems in other branches of philosophy. At. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century. Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work in a careful and accessible way, emphasizing Kuhn's detailed studies of (...) the history of science, which often assist the understanding of his more abstract philosophical work. These historical studies provide vital insight into what Kuhn was actually trying to achieve in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: an endeavour far less extreme than either his 'foes' or his 'fans' claim. In the book's second half, Sharrock and Read provide excellent explications, defences and, where appropriate, criticisms of Kuhn's central concept of 'incommensurability', and tackle head on the crucial issue of whether Kuhn's insights concerning the natural sciences can be extrapolated to other disciplines, such as the social sciences. This is the first comprehensive introduction to the work of Kuhn and it will be of particular interest to students and scholars in philosophy, theory of science, management science and anthropology. (shrink)

Real Time II extends and evolves D.H. Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time, Real Time . This wholly new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His Real Time dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. This book will do the same for the next twenty years.

Drawing on findings in psychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may...