Wittgenstein's Copernican Revolution explores the relation between language and reality without embracing Linguistic Realism and without courting any form of Linguistic Idealism either. It argues that this is precisely what Wittgenstein does. This book also examines some well known contemporary philosophers who have been concerned with this same question.

The debate between free will and its opposing doctrine, determinism, is one of the key issues in philosophy. Ilham Dilman brings together all the dimensions of the problem of free will with examples from literature, ethics and psychoanalysis, and draws out valuable insights from both sides of the freedom-determinism divide. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to this highly important question and examines the contributions made by sixteen of the most outstanding thinkers from the time of early Greece to modern (...) times: Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, Sartre, Weil, Wittgenstein, Moore. (shrink)

What is the place of human free will in our lives if all our actions are the result of some other cause? Does our processing unconscious beliefs or desires make us less free? Is our free will necessarily restricted if we do not choose our own beliefs? The debate between free will and its opposing doctrine, determinism, is one of the key issues in philosophy. _Free Will: An historical and philosophical introduction_ provides a comprehensive introduction to this highly important question (...) and examines the contributions made by sixteen of the most outstanding thinkers from the time of early Greece to the twentieth century: *Homer *Sophocles *Platto *Aristotle *St Augustine *St Thomas Aquinas *Descaartes *Spinoza *Hume *Kant *Schopehauer *Freud *Sartre *Weil *Wittgenstein *Moore Ilham Dilman brings together all the dimensions of the problem of free will with examples from literature, ethics and psychoanalysis. Drawing out valuable insights from both sides of the free will-determinism divide, and he provides an accessible and highly readable introduction to this perennial problem. (shrink)

If there is an inherent connection between love and generosity, between love and creativeness, as this book argues there is, then how can love itself be selfish, destructive and tyrannical? Concerned with questions about love in its different forms, this book seeks and discusses the views of writers--Plato, Proust, Sartre, Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Erich Fromm, C. S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Kahlil Gibran--who have suggested distinctive solutions to the problems which love poses in the face of its obstacles. (...) The enquiry which the book undertakes emcompasses both the conceptual and existential experience of love. (shrink)

JOHN WISDOM AND THE BREADTH OF PHILOSOPHY hham Dhman 1. THE ESSAYS IN THIS VOLUME The essays following the two pieces by John Wisdom have all been written by philosophers who are former students or friends of Wisdom or who have a high regard for his work. Their contributions were all written with him in mind and to be discussed at a conference honouring his work. This conference was held in August 1983 at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which Wisdom has (...) been a fellow since 1935. Wisdom is a master of discursive reasoning and one of his distinctive contributions in philosophy has been to examine its various forms and their interconnections, particularly the form it takes in philosophical inquiry and the way it advances our understanding there. His concern to bring out the links between all that is abstract in such reasoning and the concrete and particular is well known and represented in many of the essays in this volume. But Wisdom has also a deep appreciation of the kind of understanding that is advanced non-discursively. As he puts it in the first piece in this volume: However skilled a good critic 'I am sure that much of what makes "Hamlet" "Hamlet" will run between his fingers'. He has himself advanced our understanding on many questions in philosophy in this way, not simply by what he has said, but also by what he has suggested 'between the lines'. (shrink)

Among modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has few rivals for his influence over the development of contemporary philosophy as a whole. While the issue of language has become a key fulcrum of continental philosophy since the twentieth century, Kant has been overlooked as a thinker whose breadth of insight has helped to spearhead this advance.