Philosophy

This book introduces Immanuel Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason, from a ‘relaxed’ problem-oriented perspective which treats Kant as an especially insightful practising philosopher, from whom we still have much to learn, intelligently and creatively responding to significant questions that transcend his work's historical setting. The book's main project is to command a clear view of how Kant understands various perennial problems, how he attempts to resolve them, and to what extent he succeeds. The constructive portions of the First Critique—the Aesthetic and Analytic—are explored in detail; the Paralogisms and Antinomies more briefly. At the same time the book is an introduction to the challenges of reading the text of Kant's work and, to that end, selectively adopts a more rigorous historical and exegetical stance.

This book features a collection of essays that seek to provide accurate and well-developed characterizations of the epistemological and metaphysical concerns that shaped the conceptual languages and philosophical thought of sub-Saharan Africa. A common theme between the essays is that a word shared by different cultures can have different extensions while being taken to have the same sense. It is argued that the ability to appreciate or understand the conceptual languages of others is influenced by the extent to which this content is viewed from the perspectives of the native users of the language. Among the topics covered by the essays are conceptions of the person, truth, destiny, personal identity, and metaphysics.

This book contains an analysis, development, and defense of a number of central ideas in Kurt Gödel's writings on the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and logic, with reference to his three philosophical heroes, Plato, Leibniz, and Husserl, and to his engagement with Kant. Close readings of Gödel's texts on foundations are supplemented with materials from the Gödel Nachlass and from Hao Wang's discussions with Gödel. Gödel's views on the philosophical significance of his technical results on completeness, incompleteness, undecidability, consistency proofs, speed‐up theorems, and independence proofs are discussed throughout the book. A detailed analysis of his critique of Hilbert and Carnap, and of his subsequent turn to Husserl's transcendental philosophy in 1959, is provided. On this basis, a new type of platonic rationalism that requires rational intuition, called ‘constituted platonism’, is developed and defended. It is shown how constituted platonism addresses the problem of the objectivity of mathematics and of the knowledge of abstract mathematical objects. The implications of the position for the claim that human minds (‘monads’) are machines are considered in some detail. Issues about pragmatic holism and rationalism are discussed in a final chapter.

This book contains chapters on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on a conception of rational agency autonomy. The opening chapters explore different elements of Kant's views about motivation, including an account of respect for morality as the distinctive moral motive and a view of the principle of happiness as a representation of the shared structure of non-moral choice. These chapters stress the unity of Kant's moral psychology by arguing that moral and non-moral considerations motivate in essentially the same way. Several of the chapters develop an original approach to Kant's conception of autonomy that emphasizes the political metaphors found throughout Kant's writings on ethics. They argue that autonomy is best interpreted not as a psychological capacity, but as a kind of sovereignty: in claiming that moral agents have autonomy, Kant regards them as a kind of sovereign legislator with the power to give moral law through their willing. The final chapters explore some of the implications of this conception of autonomy elsewhere in Kant's moral thought, arguing that his Formula of Universal Law uses this conception of autonomy to generate substantive moral principles and exploring the connection between Kantian self-legislation and duties to oneself.

Examines the debate in early modern philosophy over the composition and internal architecture of matter, focussing on problems concerning the structure of continua, the metaphysics of parts and wholes, and the individuation of material beings. Are the parts of material bodies actual or potential entities? Is matter divisible to infinity? Do material bodies resolve to atoms? All the leading figures of the period address this cluster of issues, including Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Newton, Hume, Boscovich, Reid, and Kant. Presents a historical and critical study of these discussions, and offers an overarching interpretation of the controversy. Locates the central problem in the tension between the early moderns’ actual parts ontology on the one hand, and the programme of the geometrization of nature on the other.

Presents a set of extended essays on a variety of aspects of the life and work of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Some have previously been published as journal articles, etc., but two‐thirds of the material in this book is new. While each essay may be read independently of the others and in any order, there are two introductory essays (Chs. 1 and 2), which nonspecialists may prefer to read first. The topics covered include Hobbes's political philosophy, his theory of international relations, the development of his mechanistic world‐view, his Biblical criticism, and the European reception of his thought.

For the first time Averroes' physics is studied on the basis of all available texts and versions of his three commentaries on Aristotle's Physics, including texts that are extant only in Hebrew manuscripts and have not been hitherto studied. A comparison of these sources shows that a diachronic study is absolutely essential. Averroes changed his interpretation of the basic notions of physics—the structure of corporeal reality and the definition of motion—more than once. He has repeatedly rewritten and edited several key chapters in all three commentaries. After many hesitations he offers a bold new interpretation of physics to which this book refers as ‘Aristotelian atomism’. Ideas that are usually ascribed to scholastic scholars and others that were traced back to Averroes but only in a very general form, not only originated with him, but were fully developed by him into a comprehensive and systematic physical system. Unlike earlier Greek or Muslim atomistic systems, Averroes' Aristotelian atomism endeavours to be fully scientific, by Aristotelian standards, and still to provide a basis for an indeterministic natural philosophy. Commonly known as ‘the commentator’ and usually considered to be a faithful follower of Aristotle, Averroes is revealed in his commentaries on the Physics to be an original and sophisticated philosopher.

This book explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics, first being, or what there is, secondly humanity – what makes a human being a human – and thirdly understanding, namely both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues by different individuals and collectivities in both ancient and modern times. The aim is to juxtapose the evidence available from ethnography and from the study of ancient societies, both to describe that diversity and to investigate the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, even paradoxical, to the point where they have often been described as irrational or frankly unintelligible. Many implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements, where again we may seem to be faced with an impossible task in attempting to arrive at a fair-minded evaluation. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we happen to belong? To what extent and in what circumstances is it possible to challenge the basic concepts of such systems? This study examines these questions cross‐culturally and seeks to draw out the implications for the revisability of some of our habitual assumptions concerning such topics as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.

This book presents a full commentary on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality and combines close reading of key passages with an overview of Nietzsche's wider aims. It argues that Nietzsche's practice of genealogy pursues psychological and historical truths concerning the origins of modern moral values, but also emphasizes the significance of his rhetorical methods as an instrument of persuasion. Nietzsche's outlook is broadly one of naturalism, but he is critical of typical scientific and philosophical methods for their advocacy of impersonality and suppression of the affects. Nietzsche's principal opponents are Schopenhauer and Paul Rée, both of whom account for morality in terms of selflessness. Nietzsche believes that our allegiance to a post-Christian morality that centres around selflessness, compassion, guilt, and denial of the instincts is not primarily rational but affective: underlying feelings, often ambivalent and poorly grasped in conscious thought, explain our moral beliefs. The Genealogy is designed to detach the reader from his or her allegiance to morality and prepare for the possibility of new values. According to Nietzsche's ‘perspectivism’, this book argues that one can best understand a topic such as morality through allowing as many of one's feelings as possible to speak about it. And Nietzsche's further aim is to enable us to ‘feel differently’: to this end his provocation of the reader's affects both helps us grasp the affective origins of our attitudes and prepares the way for healthier values such as the affirmation of life and the self-satisfaction to be attained by ‘giving style to one's character’.