Metaphysics/Epistemology

This book provides a presentation of views on the relations between metaphysics and logic from Aristotle through twentieth century philosophers who contributed to the return of metaphysics in the analytic tradition. The collection combines interest in logic and its history with interest in analytical metaphysics and the history of metaphysical thought. The focus is on metaphysica generalis, or the systematic study of the most general categories of being. The volume aims at historical coverage of certain influential figures and themes. As the tradition is very rich, some choices between important philosophers and topics cannot be avoided. The volume seeks for a balance between different periods; still, early modern, modern and twentieth century metaphysics are more extensively studied than the pre-modern tradition. Thinkers discussed include Aristotle, Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William Ockham, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Bernard Bolzano, Charles Sanders Peirce, Georg Cantor, Gottlob Frege, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, C. I. Lewis, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Peter F. Strawson, Ruth Barcan Marcus, David Armstrong, Saul Kripke, and David Lewis. Not all of these have a chapter of their own, however, for some figure only in connection with other thinkers and specific themes related with their work. The individual chapters seek to cover more than one philosopher's thought and also to take notice of other periods in the history than what is their main focus.

Some philosophers think physical explanations stand on their own: what happens, happens because things have the properties they do. Others think that any such explanation is incomplete: what happens in the physical world must be partly due to the laws of nature. This book follows the debate between these views from Descartes to Hume. The book argues that the competing models of causation in the period grow out of the scholastic notion of power. On this Aristotelian view, the connection between cause and effect is logically necessary. Causes are “intrinsically directed” at what they produce. But when the Aristotelian view is faced with the challenge of mechanism, the core notion of a power splits into two distinct models, each of which persists throughout the early modern period. It is only when seen in this light that the key arguments of the period can reveal their true virtues and flaws. To make this case, the book explores such central topics as intentionality, the varieties of necessity, and the nature of relations. Arguing for controversial readings of many of the canonical figures, the book also focuses on lesser‐known writers such as Pierre‐Sylvain Régis, Nicolas Malebranche, and Robert Boyle.

This account of rational belief revision explains how a rational agent ought to proceed when adopting a new belief — a difficult matter if the new belief contradicts the agent’s old beliefs. Belief systems are modeled as finite dependency networks. So one can attend not only to what the agent believes, but also to the variety of reasons the agent has for so believing. The computational complexity of the revision problem is characterized. Algorithms for belief revision are formulated, and implemented in Prolog. The implementation tests well on a range of simple belief‐revision problems that pose a variety of challenges for any account of belief‐revision. The notion of ‘minimal mutilation’ of a belief system is explicated precisely. The proposed revision methods are invariant across different global justificatory structures (foundationalist, coherentist, etc.). They respect the intuition that, when revising one's beliefs, one should not hold on to any belief that has lost all its former justifications. The limitation to finite dependency networks is shown not to compromise theoretical generality. This account affords a novel way to argue that there is an inviolable core of logical principles. These principles, which form the system of Core Logic, cannot be given up, on pain of not being able to carry out the reasoning involved in rationally revising beliefs. The book ends by comparing and contrasting the new account with some major representatives of earlier alternative approaches, from the fields of formal epistemology, artificial intelligence and mathematical logic.

The word ‘phenomenology’ as it occurs in the title of this book is a name for the subjective qualitative character of experience. It is widely agreed that there is such a thing as sensory phenomenology, and imagistic phenomenology. The central concern of the cognitive phenomenology debate is whether there is a distinctive ‘cognitive phenomenology’—that is, a kind of phenomenology that has cognitive or conceptual character in some sense that needs to be precisely determined. Most of the authors in this collection of essays are concerned with whether conscious thought has cognitive phenomenology, but a number of papers also consider whether cognitive phenomenology is part of conscious perception and conscious emotion. Three broad themes run through the volume. First, some authors focus on the question of how the notion of cognitive phenomenology ought to be understood. How should the notion of cognitive phenomenology be defined? Are there different kinds of cognitive phenomenology? A second theme concerns the existence of cognitive phenomenology. Some contributors defend the existence of a distinctive cognitive phenomenology, whereas others deny it. The arguments for and against the existence of cognitive phenomenology raise questions concerning the nature of first‐person knowledge of thought, the relationship between consciousness and intentionality, and the scope of the explanatory gap. A third theme concerns the implications of the cognitive phenomenology debate. What are the implications of the debate for accounts of our introspective access to conscious thought and for accounts of the very nature of conscious thought?

The mistakes we make about ourselves result in our deepest sufferings. Philosophy, meant to be a medicine for our souls' affliction, claims to offer both a diagnosis and a cure. This book looks to ancient India, where Buddhists and Hindus alike grapple with the fundamental human quest for peace of mind. For Indian thinkers, a philosophical treatise about the self is meant not only to lay out the truth, but also to embed itself in a process of study and contemplation that will lead eventually to self-transformation. The survey includes the Upaniṣads, the Buddha's discourses, the epic Mahābhārata, and the philosopher Candrakīrti, whose work was later to become foundational in Tibetan Buddhism. The book shows that many contemporary theories of selfhood and personal identity are not only anticipated but developed to an extraordinary degree of sophistication in these works, and that there are other ideas about the self found here which modern philosophers have not yet begun to explore. In the Appendices, the book begins to disclose some of the paths along which Indian ideas about the self have migrated throughout history to the West.

The book examines the central tenets of Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology. It adopts a two level approach. On the one hand, it considers Hume's thought in its own terms and historical context. So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the operation of the understanding in which reason is subordinated to custom and other non-rational propensities. Scepticism arises in the fourth part as a form of metascepticism, directed not against first-order beliefs, but against philosophical attempts to ground these beliefs in the ‘space of reasons’. On the other hand, it provides a critique of these tenets from a Kantian perspective. This involves a comparison of the two thinkers on a range of issues, including space and time, causation, existence, induction, and the self. In each case, the issue is seen to turn on a contrast between their underlying models of cognition. Hume is committed to the perceptual model, according to which cognition is regarded as a seeing with the ‘mind's eye’ of the relation between mental contents. By contrast, Kant appeals to a discursive model in which the fundamental cognitive act is judgment, understood as the application of concepts to sensory data. Regarded from the first point of view, Hume's account is deemed a major philosophical achievement, while seen from the second it suffers from a failure to develop an adequate account of concepts and judgments.

Vagueness is a familiar but deeply puzzling aspect of the relation between language and the world. It is highly controversial what the nature of vagueness is; a feature of the way we represent reality in language, or rather a feature of reality itself? Assuming standard logical principles, Sorites' arguments suggest that vague terms are either inconsistent or have a sharp boundary. The account we give of such paradoxes plays a pivotal role for our understanding of natural languages. If our reasoning involves any vague concepts, is it safe from contradiction? Do vague concepts really lack any sharp boundary? If not, why are we reluctant to accept the existence of any sharp boundary for them? And what rules of inference can we validly apply, if we reason in vague terms? This book presents the latest work towards a clearer understanding of these old puzzles about the nature and logic of vagueness. The collection offers a stimulating series of original chapters on these and related issues by some of the world's leading experts.