General

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.

Barry Stroud’s work has had a profound impact on a wide range of topics in contemporary philosophy. This volume contains contributions by students, colleagues, and well‐known interlocuters of Stroud on the main topics and themes in Stroud’s work. It is divided into four sections: “Hume,” “Skepticism and Knowledge,” “Meaning and Reason,” and “Subjectivism and Reality.” The introductory essay offers an overview of main themes of Stroud’s work, with an emphasis on Stroud’s broad interest in understanding and assessing the prospects for philosophical understanding as such. Most of the remaining contributions are expositions and critical examinations of Stroud’s views on specific philosophical topics: his antiskeptical strategy, his nonreductionism about meaning, his treatment of metaphysics in The Quest for Reality, his opposition to metaphysical subjectivism about value, his criticism of the idea of colors as secondary qualities, his treatment of epistemic entitlement, his defense of a broadly Humean view of the explanation of action, his work on transcendental and circular reasoning, and his interpretation of Hume on personal identity. Other contributions attempt to extend some of his lines of thought to topics that he has not discussed in detail, such as contextualism about knowledge attributions and the metaphysics of time.

Can human history as a whole be interpreted in any meaningful way? Has there been real progress between stone age and space age? Does history repeat itself? Is there evidence of divine providence? Questions such as these have fascinated thinkers, and some of the greatest philosophers, notably Kant and Hegel, have turned their minds to philosophical history. As a branch of philosophy, however, it has received little attention in the analytical tradition. This work aims to bring the methods of analytical philosophy to the critical examination of some of these questions. In addition to Hegel and Kant, the discussion ranges over the writings of Augustine, Machiavelli, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The ideas of historical progress, secularization and the decline of religion, cultural cycles, historical rupture, and God in history are all subjected to careful analysis. The book argues that, although unfashionable, the claim that history is the story of progress under the guidance of providence is one of the most plausible accounts of the shape of the past.

This book develops an interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later writings (in particular, his Philosophical Investigations) that differs in substantial respects from what can already be found in the literature. For it is argued here that his fundamental idea is not a new conception of language (as most commentators have supposed), but rather a revolutionary conception of what philosophy is — one that is opposed to the construction of philosophical theories. This idea is what lies behind Wittgenstein's distinctive treatments of specific issues within the subject: issues concerning language, the mind, mathematics, knowledge, art, religion, and so on. Thus the first aim of the present work is to preset a clear and compelling account of his meta-perspective, to explain and justify his view of how philosophy should (and should not) be conducted, and of what it might achieve. The second aim is to defend that view against a variety of objections, and thereby to display its virtues, not merely as an accurate reading of Wittgenstein, but as a good analysis of philosophy itself. The third aim is to examine its application to a wide collection of particular topics, but most thoroughly to meaning and to experience. The centrality of Wittgenstein's metaphilosophy and its susceptibility to rigorous articulation and rational support are admittedly controversial assumptions, but they are vindicated here — not just textually, but by the power and plausibility of the philosophy that results from them. Thus the book simultaneously offers a fresh account of Wittgenstein's thought and dramatically deflationary picture of the entire subject.