Philosophy

The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin and the Passionate Life is a return to some of the perennial questions of philosophy, questions about the meaning of life, about death and tragedy, about the respective roles of rationality and passion in the good life, about love, compassion, and revenge, about honesty, deception, and betrayal, about who we are, and how we think about who we are. It is an attempt to save philosophy from a century‐old fiber diet of thin arguments and logical analysis and recover the richness and complexity of life in thought. It tackles the question, loathed by professional philosophers but asked all too often by nonphilosophers, “Has Analytic Philosophy Ruined Philosophy?” The answer is “no,” or at least, “not yet,” but superprofessionalization and a near‐exclusive emphasis on the “thinnest” of philosophical formulations and arguments have either robbed the perennial questions of their gut‐level force or dismissed them altogether as “pseudoquestions” suited only for sophomores. This is a book that tries to put the fun back in philosophy, recapturing the heartfelt confusion and excitement that originally brings us all into philosophy. But it is not a critique of contemporary philosophy so much as it is an attempt to engage in philosophy in a different kind of way, beginning with a reevaluation of Socrates and the nature of philosophy and defending the passionate life in contrast to the calm life of thoughtful contemplation so often held up as an ideal by traditional philosophers. It includes discussions of love as a virtue, Nietzsche's Will to Power, the politics of emotion, rationality in a multicultural perspective, the rationality of emotions, and the rationality of such emotions as sympathy and vengeance, the tragic sense of life, the nature of fate and luck, the denial of death and death fetishism, the nature of personal identity in multicultural and emotional perspective, and the role of deception and self‐deception in philosophy. In short, it is an attempt to recapture the kind of philosophy that Nietzsche celebrated as a “joyful wisdom.” My concern is to break down the walls between academic philosophy and its lost audience, between thin logic and thick rhetoric, between philosophical reason and philosophical passion, between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, and between philosophy and life. As the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda says (of his poetry), the result is an “impure philosophy, as impure as old clothes, as a body with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophesies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations, and taxes.”

In a world of limited resources, competition between the young and old prompt difficult questions of justice. In countries with public pension and health care systems, or with aging populations, there is often a concern that members of different generations are not always treated fairly. This book examines justice between age-groups with the ultimate goal of a new theory of justice that effectively grapples with those questions. In the realm of public policy and medical ethics this is an important and timely topic, but surprisingly one that has received relatively little attention from moral philosophers. The book develops a comprehensive view of fairness between age groups that applies the egalitarian values of equality, or priority for the badly off, to temporal parts of lives—not just to complete lives.

This book presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the relation between them. The rise of analytic philosophy decisively marked the end of the hundred-year dominance of Immanuel Kant's philosophy in Europe. However, the book shows that the analytic tradition also emerged from Kant's philosophy in the sense that its members were able to define and legitimate their ideas only by means of an intensive, extended engagement with, and a partial or complete rejection of, the Critical Philosophy. This book therefore comprises both an interpretative study of Kant's massive and seminal Critique of Pure Reason and a critical essay on the historical foundations of analytic philosophy from Gottlob Frege to Willard Van Orman Quine.

The chapters in the first part of this book explore Kant's conception of the systematicity of concepts and laws as the ultimate goals of natural science, explore the implications of Kant's account of our experience of organisms for the goal of a unified science, and examine Kant's attempt to prove the existence of an ether as the condition of the possibility of experience of the physical world. The second group of chapters explore Kant's conception of a systematic union of persons as ends in themselves and of their particular ends as the object of morality, and examine his conception of the systems of political and ethical duties necessary to achieve such an end. The third group of chapters examine Kant's attempt to unify the systems of nature and freedom through a radical transformation of traditional teleology.

Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in intelligent action? This book contains fifteen state-of-the-art chapters by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that amplify and sharpen the debate between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists about mind and action, highlighting the conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and sustain the conflict. The chapters also explore various ways in which this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice. This is the book on knowing how—an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action.

This book studies Leibniz's conception of the physical world. Leibniz's commentators usually begin with monads, mind-like simple substances, the ultimate building-blocks of the Monadology. But Leibniz's apparently idealist metaphysics is very puzzling: how can any sensible person think that the world is made up of tiny minds? This book tries to make Leibniz's thought intelligible by focusing instead on his notion of body. Beginning with Leibniz's earliest writings, it shows how Leibniz starts with a robust sense of the physical world, and how, step by step, he advances to the monadological metaphysics of his later years. Much of the book's focus is on Leibniz's middle years, where the fundamental constituents of the world are corporeal substances, unities of matter, and form understood on the model of animals. It is argued that monads only enter fairly late in Leibniz's career, and when they enter, the book argues, they do not displace bodies but complement them. In the end, though, it is argued that Leibniz never works out the relation between the world of monads and the world of bodies to his own satisfaction: at the time of his death, his philosophy is still a work in progress.

This book discusses the nature of identity, existence, predication, necessity, and truth. Its main claims are that identity, existence, and truth are logical properties, that predicates are singular terms that refer to properties, and that necessity (and other modalities) are modes of instantiation of properties by objects. The book develops a realist anti‐naturalist stance on logical properties, which takes logical notions at face value, and refuses to reduce them to other notions. Two further contentions central to this work are, first, that the quantifier has been overrated as an instrument of logico‐linguistic analysis; and secondly, that past attempts to define logical notions such as identity or existence have been largely unsuccessful.

This book addresses questions in ethical theory and practical questions about lying, deception, and information disclosure in public affairs, business and professional ethics, and personal relationships. Part I is a conceptual map for the rest of the book. It proposes an analysis of the concepts of lying and deception and related concepts such as withholding information, “keeping someone in the dark,” and “half-truths.” Part II addresses questions in ethical theory. The book examines the implications of Kant's theory, act-utilitarianism, Ross's theory, and rule-consequentialism for moral questions about lying and deception. The book argues that Kant's absolutism about lying is untenable and that his moral theory doesn't commit him to being an absolutist. It also argues that the standard debates about lying and deception between act-utilitarians and their critics are inconclusive because they rest on appeals to disputed intuitions. The book defends a version of the golden rule and a theory of moral reasoning. The book's theory implies that there is a moral presumption against lying and deception that cause harm — a presumption that is at least as strong as that endorsed by act-utilitarianism. The book uses this theory to justify its claims about the issues it addresses in Part III: deception and withholding information in sales, deception in advertising, bluffing and deception in negotiations, the duty of professionals to inform their clients, lying and deception by leaders as a pretext for fighting wars (or avoiding wars), lying and deception about history (with special attention to the Holocaust), and cases of distorting the historical record by telling half truths. The book concludes with a qualified defense of the view that honesty is a virtue.