The German philosopher Rickert substituted for Hegel's formulation of the dialectic a "Heterological Principle of Thought" where identity and otherness become moments within the pure logical object of thought. The logical object of thought takes precedence over dialectical movement, and otherness takes precedence over negation. Flach expounds and defends Rickert's position against its critics. The discussion is specialized but contains some valuable insights into Hegel. --R. H. K.

Measurement is a special type of evaluation that is more exact than either opinion or estimation. In the social sciences, in particular, most evaluations are not measures, but rather mixtures of opinion and estimation. Over-measurement represents anchoring to evaluations which are not measures. For an over-measured characteristic, single measures are used when instead a portfolio of possible measures should be used. There are three implications. First, measurements of characteristics which depend on the over-measured characteristic are biased. Secondly, decisions which depend (...) on the over-measured characteristic are biased. Thirdly, over-measurement biases the measurement of uncertainty. (shrink)

At the University of Newcastle, health law and ethics is taught and assessed in each year of the five-year curriculum. However, the critical question for assessment remains: 'Does teaching ethics have a measurable effect on the clinical activity of medical students who have had such courses?' Those responsible for teaching confront this question each year they sit down to construct their assessment tools. Should they assess what the student knows? Should they assess the student's moral reasoning, that is, what decisions (...) the student makes, and, how these decisions are justified, or should they assess what the student actually does when dealing with patients in the clinical setting, and how he or she does it? From 1982 to 1991, assessment at Newcastle was primarily aimed at determining the quality of the students' ethics knowledge base. This paper describes the strengths and limitations of a purely knowledge-based method of evaluation and why in 1992, we are now attempting to redefine and assess, what we call 'clinical ethical competence' in terms of how students actually apply this knowledge base in a controlled clinical context. (shrink)

A crucial debate currently raging in the fields of cognitive and social science centers around general and specific approaches to understanding the actions of others. When we understand the actions of another person, do we do so on the basis of a general theory of psychology, or on the basis of an effort to place ourselves in the particular position of that specific person? Hans Herbert Kögler and Karsten R. Stueber's Empathy and Agency addresses this other issues vital to current (...) social science in an advanced and diverse analysis of the foundations of social-scientific methodology based on recent cognitive psychology. The book serves as both an introduction to the debate for non-academic audiences and as a catalyst for further discussion for serious theorists. Empathy and Agency provides a solid foundation of the fundamental issues in social and cognitive science, but also presents the most influential paradigms in the field at this time. (shrink)

The title essay was originally presented as two lectures inaugurating the John Dewey lectures at Columbia. It is an important essay for understanding Quine's work for it brings together many themes at the center of his thinking since Word and Object. Quine quotes with approval Dewey's statement "meaning is primarily a property of behavior" and then goes on to consider a thesis which, according to Quine, is a consequence of such a behavioral theory of meaning, i.e., the thesis of the (...) indeterminacy of meaning and translation. Quine relates this indeterminacy thesis, which he has been defending for some time, to language learning, the foundations of mathematics, and to a general view of ontological relativity. Other essays in the volume concern natural kinds and the various paradoxes of confirmation, propositional objects, quantification and existence and the empirical basis of science. All the essays are post-1965 except the introductory essay which was Quine's Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1956. This address was something of an introduction to the ideas to appear in Word and Object and is placed at the beginning of this collection to emphasize that all the essays collected here expand on and defend some of the positions of Word and Object. Quine's fluid style is everywhere in evidence.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Why do we persist in the relentless pursuit of artificial nourishment and other treatments to maintain a permanently unconscious existence? In facing the future, if not the present world-wide reality of a huge number of persistent vegetative state (PVS) patients, will they be treated because of our ethical commitment to their humanity, or because of an ethical paralysis in the face of biotechnical progress? The PVS patient is cut off from the normal patterns of human connection and communication, with a (...) life unlike other forms of human existence. Why the struggle to justify ending a life which, it is said, has suffered an irreversible loss of the content of consciousness? Elsewhere, the authors have addressed the ethical controversies and confusion engendered by ambiguous terminology, misuse of medical facts and the differing interpretations of what constitutes 'effective' treatment: in particular, the issue of whether in fact artificial nutrition and hydration is a medical treatment, or simply part of the obligatory care owed to all patients, permanently unconscious or not. In this paper, we intend to argue that recent analyses of medical futility, its meaning and ethical implications, despite an absence of public consensus, permit some tentative re-evaluation of our ethical obligations to the PVS patient. (shrink)

In this work R. M. Martin carries his semiotical studies into the fields of intensional semantics and pragmatics, dealing with such philosophically important concepts as meaning, preference, reasonableness and indifference. The crucial notion is that of the meaning or intension of an expression. Two major categories are distinguished, objective intensions and subjective intensions. To deal with objective intensions an intensional semantics is developed as an extension of denotational semantics in the tradition of Tarski, Carnap and Martin's earlier Truth and Denotation. (...) In the treatment of subjective intensions Martin makes an advance over his earlier study of pragmatics by utilizing the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern in their Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.—R. H. K. (shrink)

Reichenbach wrote this book just after taking the first course Einstein ever taught on the theory of relativity. His important and influential work The Philosophy of Space and Time was written several years later and relied in part on the axiomatization of the special and general theories of relativity already worked out in this book. For special relativity Reichenbach divides his axioms into two sets, the light axioms which relate light signals to the topology and metric of time and space, (...) and the matter axioms which do the same for rigid rods and clocks. Thus the axioms focus on the conventions uniting theory and observation and give more insight into the physical foundations of the theory than do most axiomatizations. Reichenbach's approach has been criticized by Weyl and others, but at least some of the criticism seems to rest on a misunderstanding of what Reichenbach was attempting to do. Now that this early work has been translated into English, there is hope that it will be more widely read. There is no doubt that students of the theory or of recent philosophical discussion of space and time will profit from a careful reading of this book.--R. H. K. (shrink)

This fifth volume in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science is devoted primarily to the natural sciences, but like previous volumes in this series there is considerable variety in the topics discussed and the approaches taken by different contributors differ markedly. The first contribution is a 150 page essay by A. Grünbaum which is a reply to Hilary Putnam's critique of Grünbaum's philosophy of geometry. The essays by Peter Havas on causality and relativity and by Carl F. von (...) Weizäcker on the unity of physics are essays on the foundations of physical science by physicists who have distinguished themselves in this area. Helpful comments are added to the Havas' paper by John Stachel and to the von Weizäcker paper by Francis Zucker. Zucker provides a useful introduction to von Weizäcker's ambitious project of unifying physics for reader's unfamiliar with von Weizäcker's work. A symposium on theoretical entities and functional explanation in biology is included, with a paper by June Goodfield and comments by Ernst Mayr and Joseph Agassi. Historical essays include a discussion of hypotheses in Newton's philosophy and the development of the cognitive faculties in the theories of Ernst Mach. In addition, there are essays on logic in relation to physical science, measurement, models, symmetry, proof, truth, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory.--R. H. K. (shrink)

In an introductory sketch of history of scholastic interest in aesthetics, the author notes the reawakening of Thomistic interest in this subject since the last century. He adds, with evidence drawn from nineteenth and twentieth century works, that this interest has been accompanied by methodological confusions and a misunderstanding of the theory of beauty of St. Thomas himself. He seeks to remedy this situation with a scholarly treatment of Aquinas' theory of beauty, divided into two parts; the first a genetic (...) investigation of the development of Thomas's ideas on beauty, the second a systematic account of the mature theory. A notable attempt to develop Aquinas' ideas on this subject from the entire corpus of his writings and not merely from the Summas and one or two other major works.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Rapid handwriting, popularly known as shorthand, involves writing symbols and abbreviations in lieu of common words or phrases. This method increases the speed of transcription and is primarily used to record oral dictation. Someone skilled in shorthand will be able to write as fast as the dictation occurs, and these patterns are later transliterated into actual, natural language words. A new kind of rapid handwriting scheme is proposed, called the Pattern-Based Shorthand. A word on a keyboard involves pressing a unique (...) sequence of keys in a particular order. This sequence forms a pattern that defines the word. Such a pattern forms the shorthand for that word. Speech recognition involves identifying, by a machine, the words spoken by a speaker. These spoken words form speech input signals to a computer that is equipped to correctly recognize the words and do further action, such as convert it to text. From this text input, unique shorthand patterns are generated by the system. The system employs machine learning to improve its performance with experience, by creating a dictionary of mappings from word to patterns in such a way that the access to existing patterns is faster with progression. This forms a new knowledge representation schema that reduces the redundancy in the storage of words and the length of information content. In conclusion, the speech is converted into textual form and then reconstructed into Pattern-Based Shorthand. (shrink)

In this Eddington Memorial lecture, Von Wright distinguishes two points of view from which a logician may study time. The one focuses interest on the order of temporal events and the macro-aspect of time, its flow from an indefinitely remote past through the present to an indefinitely remote future. The other focuses attention on the micro-aspect of time, the nature of the time medium, on questions of whether time is discrete or infinitely divisible or the internal structure of limited time (...) intervals. Von Wright takes the second point of view and as a result his study of time is different in some respects than that of other contemporary tense logicians. Assuming a Tractatus type ontology of possible worlds which can be totally described by stating the existence or non-existence of all possible states of affairs, Von Wright constructs several logical systems, one of discrete time ordering, another of discrete time division. He shows the latter, which is the most important for his purposes, to be formally related to certain systems of modal logic. An interpretation of this system yields an interesting definition of continuity of change and time. The definition is interesting because of its relation to another result which he derives, namely that this definition of continuity implies that the world sometimes will have to be described as being in two contradictory states at one time, a conclusion which he relates to Hegel's philosophy. This is an original and thought provoking essay.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Two fundamental theses of sensationalism as a theory of science, formulated by Mach and influential since his time, are critically treated in this analytic study. The first is that the basic elements of experience are sensations, the second that scientific explanation is no more than a complete description of phenomena in terms of sensations. In arguing against these claims the author touches on many important issues in the philosophy of science, including questions about the nature of description and explanation. He (...) argues against the view that there are no pure descriptions, in the sense of descriptions which are free of interpretation.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The debate between hard and soft determinists is dealt with in this brief but interesting study. The author argues that there is no empirical dispute between hard and soft determinists. They draw different conclusions from the observed facts and these differences are the result of using different senses of the terms 'freedom' and 'moral responsibility'. Moritz Schlick's Problems of Ethics is the author's favored source for the soft determinist position and well-known articles by Paul Edwards and John Hospers the sources (...) for hard determinism. Other writers are quoted and briefly discussed. The treatment of many criticisms and countercriticisms is all too brief to do full justice to all the issues involved, but those topics which the author discusses are often illuminated. Interesting things are said about such topics as kleptomania, post-hypnotic suggestion, punishment, and excusable behavior. The book makes a convincing case, at least for the claim that a sophisticated version of the hard determinist position, such as appears in Hospers article, is only verbally different than many versions of soft determinism. Other versions of hard and soft determinism can and do come in substantive conflict with one another.--R. H. K. (shrink)

A painstaking examination of theories of good and right in twentieth century British thought leads the author back to Kant, whose views are in turn exposed and criticized. Out of these investigations is developed a theory of good in terms of the dignity of man, which will account for the Kantian ideas of obligation and autonomy, yet give material content to ethical judgments. The concluding thesis is a challenge that an ultimate choice is required between the book's humanitarian view of (...) morality and maximalist views. No compromise is possible. The arguments are clear, cogent, and provocative. --R. H. K. (shrink)

This work gives a fresh approach to the discussion of psychological phenomena in philosophical terms. Beginning with a discussion of the emotions and feelings, it works back to a theory of willing and judging. The method is analytic, and the influence of Wittgenstein and Ryle is everywhere in evidence, though in different ways: the author usually improves on what Ryle, but simply approves of what Wittgenstein, says. In the final two chapters, the theory of judgment put forward by Geach in (...) Mental Acts is modified and extended to apply to acts of will, in the light of what has been said in the earlier chapters about emotions, feelings and desires.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The expressed aim of Alf Ross' study is to lay the philosophical foundations for deontic logic by explicating the concepts of directive and norm. But there is a wider significance to his task, for he makes clear throughout that the concepts of directive and norm are central to a wide variety of disciplines, including moral, legal, and social philosophy, linguistics and the other social sciences. Moreover, the test of adequacy of his explications include an appeal to the usefulness the concepts (...) have, not only to the logician, but for the moral and legal philosopher and especially in the case of his account of norms, for the social scientist. He begins with a discussion of speech acts, developing a distinction between indicative and directive speech. A "directive" is defined in terms of directive speech as an action-idea conceived as a pattern of behavior in directive speech and a variety of different sorts of directives are distinguished. A "norm" is then defined as a directive which stands in a certain kind of relation to social facts and the elements of norms are discussed. Finally, Ross offers an interpretation of deontic logic as a set of postulates defining directive speech. He discusses some of the problems of interpretation although he does not make contact with some of the more recent discussion of deontic paradoxes, e.g., the paradoxes engendered by contrary-to-duty imperatives. This is an informative and thought provoking study. The writing is very clear and the reader is guided throughout by a helpful analytical index.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The first part of this long two-part work is a history of the development of the modern theory of the atom from Dalton to the present. The second part offers philosophical reflections on this history beginning with a discussion of epistemological implications and following that with an account of ontological implications. The author deals with familiar questions about the reality of micro-particles, complementarity, indeterminism, the role of the observer and other topics. But he also discusses topics like holism, atomic order, (...) the intelligibility of matter and others which are less commonly discussed by philosophers in connection with modern physical theories. The author, who is trained in physics as well as philosophy, has a flair for metaphysical speculation as well as wide knowledge of contemporary physical theory. He stresses the novelties of the quantum conception of matter, argues against its critics like Bohm, and sees it as presenting a radically new conception of atomic order despite its commitment to indeterminism. The views of Werner Heisenberg, who encouraged the author to write the book and who read it in manuscript, have clearly influenced the author, although they do not dominate his thinking.--R. H. K. (shrink)

In this phenomenological approach to meaning, the author defines his task as one of taking account of the kinds of relations the logical order can have to the preconceptual order. This preconceptual order is represented by a pre-logical activity which is called "experiencing." There is experiencing of meaning as well as of things. This "experienced or felt meaning" is said to be as important a dimension of meaning as the traditional modes distinguished by philosophers, e.g., denotation, connotation. Apparent throughout is (...) the author's concern as a psychotherapist to find theoretical foundations for clinical methods.--R. H. K. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study of Schrödinger's scientific and philosophical writings. The task requires a person trained thoroughly in physical science and yet capable of appreciating the sometimes puzzling philosophical ideas Schrödinger put forward. Professor Scott, a physicist, is remarkably successful at communicating both the physical and the philosophical ideas. After a brief summary of Schrödinger's diverse writings, he divides the writings into four groups which are treated in separate chapters. The first group, including very early papers, deals with (...) Schrödinger's work on Statistical Mechanics, and statistical theories in general. The second covers the crucial development of Wave Mechanics. The third concerns Schrödinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics and the important departures from the prevailing views of the Copenhagen school. Finally the fourth group contains Schrödinger's views on life and the self. The author shows that Schrödinger was led to his doctrine of identity by reflecting on the paradox of freedom and determinism. His study "What is Life?" convinced him that living systems are governed by the law of causality but he also believed that men were free. The doctrine of identity was his solution to the paradox. Scott is critical of this solution and a number of other doctrines of Schrödinger. The book is clearly written throughout and is a good introduction to Schrödinger's thought.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Anyone interested in the highly active field of human communication will find this collection of essays by authors in different disciplines a very useful compendium of present results and problems. Communication theory is related in different essays to current work in Anthropology, Neurophysiology, Organization Theory, Philosophy of Language, Psychiatry, Psycholinguistics, Psychology, Sociology, and several other areas. The editor concludes with an essay "Toward a Theory of Human Communication." Each essay contains a very helpful bibliography of work in the appropriate area (...) and in addition the book contains a general bibliography prepared by Hugh Duncan which includes comments about the contents and nature of each book listed. The excellent essays of Searle and Fodor, Jenkins, and Saporta make the most direct connection with philosophical issues being widely discussed today, but most of the essays provide material which should be of interest to philosophers.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Those looking for extensive accounts of Islamic theological and philosophical systems will not find them in this survey. It presents rather a historical sketch of the political and social forces operating in the Islamic world, from the time of Mohammed to the present, which gave rise to the basic trends in theology and philosophy. The complexity of these forces will impress the Western reader, and those wanting a background for more detailed study of Islamic philosophers and theologians will find the (...) book useful. The first in a series of volumes on Islamic culture directed to the English-speaking student.--R. H. K. (shrink)

In this book the author develops his own systems of and semantics for presupposition free logic. He calls his systems logics without existence assumptions, by which he means logical systems which are sound and complete with respect to a semantic theory in which a universe of discourse can be empty but any term which denotes must denote something in the universe, all predicates including identity represent relations holding among members of the universe and the quantifiers range over just all the (...) members of the universe. In a brief introductory chapter the author reviews the motivations for constructing non-standard logics of this kind and briefly discusses what he takes to be the limitations of previous work done in the field. Persons interested in the philosophical problems and uses of such logics are likely to find this chapter interesting though disappointingly brief. Four of the eight chapters are devoted to the development of a natural deduction system N which is a logic without existence assumptions in the author's sense. The system N is shown to be sound and complete with respect to the author's semantics. An axiomatic system L is later developed and shown to be equivalent to N. The final chapter is devoted to discussing the relation of his work to many-valued logics, modal logics, intuitionistic logic and the theory of classes among other topics. The author believes that logics without existence assumptions "will in the long run displace the less natural and more narrow standard logics."--R. H. K. (shrink)

A critical treatment of four basic methodological principles of science: simplicity, micro-reduction, verification, and connectivity. In each case, the major question is whether, and on what grounds, the principle can be justified. This quest for justification should be of particular interest to those concerned with the philosophy of science from the standpoint of epistemology and metaphysics.--R. H. K.

The translator has collected passages from the varied corpus of Schweitzer's writing and has pieced them together into a brief but impressive sketch of the man and the thinker. Some sections are autobiographical; others contain Schweitzer's thoughts on Africa, world peace, on Goethe and Bach among historical figures, and a few of his basic philosophical ideas. An index provides references to the original works.--R. H. K.

This collection contains twenty-three papers published by Suppes over the last eighteen years. For the most part they are foundational studies ranging over a wide variety of topics in the philosophy of science. The first two of four parts contain papers on methodological issues like models, measurement, probability and utility. There are two papers on models, an axiomatic treatment of extensive quantity and two papers on measurement. The six papers in Part II deal with probability theory and decision theory with (...) reference to theories of behavior, economics, and other topics. Part III contains studies in the axiomatic foundations of physics, one on relativistic kinematics and three on probability in quantum mechanics. The final and longest section contains eight papers on the foundations of psychology. Several of these deal with the psychological or behavioral bases of mathematics. Others deal with unpredictability in human behavior, finite automata, cognition and other topics. The book is nicely printed and those who have learned from Suppes work in the past will be grateful for this collection of his most important papers.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The fact that this study of Russian dialectical materialism originally appeared before the demotion of Stalin should not be allowed to obscure its value as a source book in the development of dialectical materialism in the U.S.S.R. The author notes its limitations in the preface to the second edition and remedies the situation somewhat in a second appendix with an account of significant developments from 1950 to 1958. Each of the two major parts of the main text, the first historical (...) the second systematic, is marked by the author's capacity for terse and pointed analysis of his material.—R. H. K. (shrink)

A highly technical theory of visual perception is developed in the first half of this psychological study with the aid of set-theoretical symbols and a complex array of variables ranging over states of the various sub-systems of the organism related to perception. In the later chapters the author describes several new and crucial experiments favoring the theory over other theories of perception, and discusses its philosophical implications for a behavioral account of mind. Those who wade through the welter of symbols (...) will find important material for a philosophy of perception in the theory and especially in the experiments, involving externally induced environmental changes which are corrected by the behavior of the organism over a period of time. --R. H. K. (shrink)

This book is a study of meaning and meaninglessness which takes as its point of departure a discussion of sentences like "The theory of relativity is blue" which some philosophers call category mistakes and which this author calls type crossings. His answer to the question of the basis of the meaninglessness of such sentences differs from most currently fashionable ones. For example, he argues in separate chapters against the view that the basis for the meaninglessness of sentences involving type crossings (...) is in the fact that they are ungrammatical. He also rejects the view that this basis is in the fact that the sentences violate certain rules of language His answer is that type crossings are meaningless because they designate unthinkable propositions. He then devotes two long and crucial chapters to an attempt to elaborate on the notion of unthinkability. His approach is more complicated than this brief summary would suggest for he distinguishes between accidental and essential properties and relations, requiring different criteria for type crossings involving accidental or essential attributes. Drange's views run against the grain of much contemporary philosophizing about meaning, e.g., his essentialism, his advocacy of a kind of synthetic a priori and his emphasis on thinkability over rules of language. But he comes to these positions by exposing what he takes to be difficulties in alternative views, so that his views are always challenging. Aside from its main theses, the book looks into topics about meaning and type crossings which other writers have scarcely noticed or discussed. For example, he tries to come to grips with the largely uncharted region of type crossings involving relational properties and those involving types other than types of things.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Originally published as a long essay in Mind and Cosmos, Volume II of the University of Pittsburgh series in the philosophy of science, this study admirably fills the need for an elementary survey of problems in the area of probability and induction. But it is more than an introduction. The author is working on the general thesis that Bayes' theorem of the probability calculus holds the key to the understanding of scientific inference. Guided by this idea he attempts to salvage (...) what he thinks is of value in various current theories of probability and scientific inference, particularly, the frequency theory of probability as defended by Reichenbach, Popper's views on the falsifiability of theories, and Hanson's work on the logic of discovery. These attempts to develop a theory in the latter part of the book follow discussions of Hume's critique of induction, the probability calculus and five past and present interpretations of the calculus. This is a well-written and challenging introduction to the field.—R. H. K. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to introduce the reader to some new areas of contemporary logic which generally fall under the rubric of philosophical logic. It succeeds in this task to a degree, although the chapters are for the most part adaptations of journal articles published by Rescher over the last ten years and are more self-contained than they might have been. But the book should renew interest in the problems of philosophical logic. It contains many interesting discussions and (...) a great deal of useful information. Rescher begins with chapters on modal logic which include some discussion of intuitionistic logic and the causal modalities as well as the alethic modalities. He then discusses the notion of belief as a representative notion of epistemic logic. A long chapter is devoted to a history and survey of the main systems of many valued logics. Shorter, but still substantial, chapters are devoted to the logic of existence, non-standard quantification theory, chronological or tense logic, topological or positional logic, logic of assertion and logic of preference. Still shorter chapters are given to deontic logic, probability logic, a discussion of random individuals and self-reference. An interesting final chapter provides a new "discourse on method" for the philosophical or applied logician.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The essays in philosophical logic collected in this volume are dedicated to Henry S. Leonard who was one of the first American philosophers to urge the application of modern logic to non-mathematical areas. Leonard also inspired the development of certain areas of contemporary philosophical logic discussed in some of the papers of this volume. This is especially clear in the case of free, or presupposition free, logics which Leonard's early work on a logic of existence inspired. In one essay of (...) this volume Bas C. Van Frassen further develops his work on the semantics of free logic. In another, Milton Fisk relates free logic to modal logic, suggesting a new semantics of strength to deal with various problems in the area and in a third essay, Karel Lambert relates free logic to certain logical puzzles about quantum theory. Leonard was also one of the first to entertain the idea of and discuss a logic of questions and an erotetic logic or logic of interests. The volume contains essays on these topics by Nuel D. Belnap and David Harrah. Leonard's interest in modal logic is reflected in Fisk's article as well as in an article by Richmond Thomason on modal logic and metaphysics. His interest in epistemic logic is seen in an essay on the logic of belief by Jon Vickers and an essay by Hintikka applying the logic of belief and knowledge to problems about the ontological argument. In addition to these essays, there are five others of high quality on diverse topics: R. M. Martin on intentions, Wilfrid Sellars on the metaphysics of the person, R. M. Chisholm on agency, Frederick Fitch on combinatory logic and negative numbers, and H. E. Hendry and G. J. Massey on Sheffer functions. This is a worthy memorial to a quietly influential American philosopher.--R. H. K. (shrink)

In spite of the title, the author of this book asserts that its primary aim is to offer a reasonable account of the concepts of possibility and potentiality. His analysis of these concepts allows him to approach the free will controversy in his own way and to offer many interesting analyses and arguments bearing on the issue. He distinguishes three kinds of non-logical possibility: epistemic or relative possibility, natural possibility or natural power, and possibility of choice or personal power. He (...) thinks that the arguments for determinism have been based in one way or another on a failure to notice the subtle differences which exist between these three kinds of non-logical possibility. Although there is room for doubt that his analysis adds up to a decisive refutation of determinism, he has found many interesting differences between kinds of possibility and potentiality which bear on the free will issue and other philosophical issues as well. There is a discernible influence of Ryle and Austin on the book although both of these philosophers come in for criticism, especially Ryle for his failure to carefully separate the different meanings of 'power', 'tendency', 'capacity', and similar terms, and for his general commitment to the notion that all power is conditional. This latter thesis is one of the author's main targets.--R. H. K. (shrink)

The author attempts to extract from Carnap’s writings a coherent theory of the nature of philosophical questions and then tries to defend this theory against criticism from various quarters. Special attention is given in the middle chapters to the alternative views of Quine on ontological questions and ontological commitment and to Quine’s criticisms of related Carnapian views.