Metaphysics/Epistemology

Accessing Kant: A relaxed introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason

Jay F. Rosenberg

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 ... More

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. Less

Action and its Explanation

David-Hillel Ruben

This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it ... More

This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it calls a ‘prolific theory’ of act individuation. It also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. The book identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, the book denies that it is true. The book's own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. The book sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalizations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. It addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing. Less

Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification

Erik J. Olsson

According to the popular coherence theory of knowledge and justification, if a person's beliefs are coherent, they are also likely to be true. This book is the most extensive and ... More

According to the popular coherence theory of knowledge and justification, if a person's beliefs are coherent, they are also likely to be true. This book is the most extensive and detailed study of coherence and probability to date. The book takes the reader through much of the history of the subject, from early theorists like A. C. Ewing and C. I. Lewis to contemporary figures like Laurence BonJour and C. A. J. Coady. The arguments presented are general enough to cover coherence between any items of information, including those deriving from belief, memory, or testimony. It is argued that coherence does not play the positive role that it is generally ascribed in the process whereby beliefs are acquired. The opposite of coherence, incoherence, is nonetheless the driving force in the process whereby beliefs are retracted. Less

Agency and Responsibility: A Common-Sense Moral Psychology

Jeanette Kennett

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these ... More

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control are possible is of great practical significance. Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sense distinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, and the varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) — and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moral responsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil. Less

All the Power in the World

Peter Unger

This work of philosophy presents a new picture of concrete reality. The author breaks with what he terms the conservatism of present-day philosophy, and returns to central themes from ... More

This work of philosophy presents a new picture of concrete reality. The author breaks with what he terms the conservatism of present-day philosophy, and returns to central themes from Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Russell. He works from the ground up, to formulate a new metaphysic capable of accommodating our distinctly human perspective. The author proposes a world with inherently powerful particulars of two basic sorts: one mental but not physical, the other physical but not mental. Whether of one sort or the other, each individual possesses powers for determining his or her own course, as well as powers for interaction with other individuals. It is only a purely mental particular—an immaterial soul, like yourself—that is ever fit for real choosing, or for conscious experiencing. Reasoning that the only satisfactory metaphysic is one that situates the physical alongside the non-physical, the author explains the genesis of, and continual interaction of, the two sides of our deeply dualistic world. He reveals the need for an entirely novel approach to the nature of physical reality, and shows how this approach can lead to wholly unexpected possibilities, including disembodied human existence for billions of years. The book returns philosophy to its most ambitious roots in its attempt to answer difficult human questions about ourselves and our world. Less

Analysis and Metaphysics: An Introduction to Philosophy

P. F. Strawson

All developed human beings possess a practical mastery of a vast range of concepts, including such basic structural notions as those of identity, truth, existence, material objects, ... More

All developed human beings possess a practical mastery of a vast range of concepts, including such basic structural notions as those of identity, truth, existence, material objects, mental states, space, and time; but a practical mastery does not entail theoretical understanding. It is that understanding which philosophy seeks to achieve. This book sets out to explain and illustrate a certain conception of the nature of analytical philosophy. The author draws on his many years of teaching at Oxford University, during which he refined and developed his route to understanding the fundamental structure of human thinking. Among the distinctive features of his exposition are the displacement of an older, reductive conception of philosophical method (the ideal of ‘analysing’ complex ideas into simpler elements) in favour of elucidating the interconnections between the complex but irreducible notions which form the basic structure of our thinking; and the demonstration that the three traditionally distinguished departments of metaphysics (ontology), epistemology, and logic are but three aspects of one unified enquiry. Less

Anti-Externalism

Joseph Mendola

Externalism about mental content is the view that things outside of the skin or in the past are constitutive parts of present mental states. Internalism is the denial of externalism. ... More

Externalism about mental content is the view that things outside of the skin or in the past are constitutive parts of present mental states. Internalism is the denial of externalism. This book propounds a plausible physicalist internalism, called qualia empiricism. Qualia empiricism is the conjunction of a modal structuralist account of perceptual experience, an account of the content contributed to thought by referring terms that deploys rigidified description clusters, and an account of non-epistemic internal resources that can bridge those first two elements. It also argues that externalism is supported by no reasons that withstand close scrutiny. These include case-based arguments and arguments entwined with externalist accounts of perceptual states and language. The book critically considers externalist arguments rooted in work by Putnam, Kripke, Burge, Millikan, Dretske, Papineau, Prinz, Fodor, Harman, Stampe, Stalnaker, Tye, Kant, Williamson, disjunctivists, Wittgenstein, Wright, Davidson, and Brandom, among others. Less

Aristotle's Metaphysics Alpha: Symposium Aristotelicum

Oliver Primavesi

Carlos Steel (ed.)

he volumes of the “Symposium Aristotelicum” have become in the last fifty years the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this 18th volume a distinguished group of ... More

he volumes of the “Symposium Aristotelicum” have become in the last fifty years the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this 18th volume a distinguished group of scholars offers a chapter-by-chapter study of the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle presents here his philosophical project as a search for wisdom, which is found in the knowledge of the first principles allowing us to explain whatever exists. As he shows, the earlier philosophers all had been seeking such a wisdom, though they had divergent views on what these first principles were. Before Aristotle sets out his own views, he offers a critical examination of his predecessors' views, ending up with a lengthy discussion of Plato's doctrine of the Forms. Book Alpha is not just a fundamental text for reconstructing the early history of Greek philosophy, it sets itself the agenda for Aristotle's own project of wisdom after what he had learned from his predecessors. Besides eleven chapters, each dealing with a different section of the text, the volume also offers a new edition of the Greek text of Metaphysics Alpha by Oliver Primavesi, based on an exhaustive examination of the complex manuscript and indirect tradition. The introduction to the edition offers new insights into the question which has haunted editors of the Metaphysics since Bekker, namely the relation between the two divergent traditions of the text. Less