General

Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World

Gerd Gigerenzer

Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive ... More

Where do new ideas come from? What is social intelligence? Why do social scientists perform mindless statistical rituals? This vital book is about rethinking rationality as adaptive thinking: to understand how minds cope with their environments, both ecological and social. The author proposes and illustrates a bold new research program that investigates the psychology of rationality, introducing the concepts of ecological, bounded, and social rationality. His path-breaking collection takes research on thinking, social intelligence, creativity, and decision-making out of an ethereal world where the laws of logic and probability reign, and places it into our real world of human behavior and interaction. This book is accessibly written for general readers with an interest in psychology, cognitive science, economics, sociology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and animal behavior. It also teaches a practical audience, such as physicians, AIDS counselors, and experts in criminal law, how to understand and communicate uncertainties and risks. Less

Advaita: A Contemporary Critique

Srinivasa Rao

The book proposes a contemporary framework for critiquing Advaita and formulating its basic thesis in a more logical and convincing way. Any proper theory in philosophy and science has ... More

The book proposes a contemporary framework for critiquing Advaita and formulating its basic thesis in a more logical and convincing way. Any proper theory in philosophy and science has to follow from accepted assumptions. Hence the book begins by identifying basic presuppositions required for Advaita and determining the different cognitive possibilities arising out of them. After thus determining what is logically and conceptually possible and impossible in Advaita, the new framework is used to assess whether or not the traditionally held Advaitic concepts and theories are satisfactory and acceptable. This is done in many chapters covering discussions of the notions of not-Self (anātman), cosmic ignorance (māyā), individual ignorance (avidyā), illusoriness (mithyātva), sublation (bādha), entities that are different from the real and the unreal (sadasadvilaksana) and so on. The book argues that all these concepts, as specifically formulated and defended in traditional Advaita for centuries after Śankara, are simply faulty and untenable both individually and as related clusters of concepts. Traditional Advaita has also defended an elaborate ontology of experiences like mistaking a rope-for a snake. It has also heavily defended the metaphysical thesis of the empirical world of our experience being a total illusion. The logical faults and conceptual inadequacies of this ontology and metaphysics are also discussed in great detail, offering absolutely new criticisms of them. Despite this almost totally negative portrayal of traditional Advaita, the book is also quite positive in showing that any belief in non-duality is still very much philosophically possible and also necessary. Less

Aesthetic Essays

Malcolm Budd

The book contains a selection of essays on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to ... More

The book contains a selection of essays on aesthetics, some of which have been revised or added to. A number of the essays are aimed at the abstract heart of aesthetics, attempting to solve a cluster of the most important issues in aesthetics which are not specific to particular art forms. These include the nature and proper scope of the aesthetic, the intersubjective validity of aesthetic judgements, the correct understanding of aesthetic judgements expressed through metaphors, aesthetic realism versus anti-realism, the character of aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic value, the aim of art, and the artistic expression of emotion. Others are focussed on central issues in the aesthetics of particular art forms: two engage with the most fundamental issue in the aesthetics of music, the question of the correct conception of the phenomenology of the experience of listening to music with understanding; and two consider the nature of pictorial representation, one examining the well-known views of Ernst Gombich, Richard Wollheim, and Kendall Walton, the other articulating an alternative conception of seeing a picture as a depiction of a certain state of affairs. The final essay in the book is a comprehensive reconstruction and critical examination of Wittgenstein's aesthetics, both early and late. Less

The Aesthetics of Design

Jane Forsey

This book offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, ... More

This book offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics. Aesthetic theory has traditionally occupied itself with fine art in all its forms, sometimes with craft, and often with notions of beauty and sublimity in art and nature. In so doing, it has largely ignored the quotidian and familiar objects and experiences that make up our daily lives. Yet how we interact with design involves aesthetic choices and judgements as well as practical, cognitive and moral considerations. This work challenges the discipline to broaden its scope to include design, and illustrates how aesthetics helps define our human concerns. Subjecting design to as rigorous a treatment as any other aesthetic object exposes it to three main challenges that form the core of this book. First, design must be distinguished from art and craft as a unique kind of object meriting separate philosophical attention, and is here defined in part by its functional qualities. Second, the experience of design must be defended as having a particularly aesthetic nature. Here Forsey adapts the Kantian notion of dependent beauty to provide a model for our appreciation of design as different from our judgments of art, craft and natural beauty. Finally, design is important for aesthetics and philosophy as a whole in that it is implicated in broader human concerns. Forsey situates her theory of design as a constructive contribution to the recent movement of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to re-enfranchise philosophical aesthetics as an important part of philosophy at large.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

Argument and Persuasion in Descartes’ Meditations

David Cunning

Descartes’ Meditations is a search after truth in the sense that it contains arguments for a view about the ultimate nature of reality, but it is also a search after truth in that it ... More

Descartes’ Meditations is a search after truth in the sense that it contains arguments for a view about the ultimate nature of reality, but it is also a search after truth in that it captures the difficult and error-ridden struggle of a thinker (the meditator) who is moving from an extremely confused representation of reality to a view that is accurate but unexpected. Every single claim of the Meditations is advanced from the first-person point of view of Descartes’ struggling meditator, and so most of the Meditations is confused. At the start of inquiry, and as inquiry unfolds, the meditator will put forward claims that he takes to be true, but in most cases these claims do not have anything going for them but their longevity, and they are to be rejected. For example, the meditator will put forward claims about what is possible, but without having arrived at clear and obvious axioms (the primary notions of metaphysics) that entail that God is the author of what is possible, and without having considered which possibilities God has or has not authored. The meditator will get clear about some of these axioms as inquiry unfolds, and as a result he will recognize many of the claims that he put forward initially as confused and provincial, though he will continue to assert any confusions that are not emended. The Meditations does not draw out all of the implications of the primary notions of metaphysics; at the end of the Meditations the meditator is not a full-blown Cartesian, and a number of Cartesian theses (e.g., necessitarianism) are generated only with further reflection. Finally, the Meditations is written for reception by a variety of minds, so that readers from a number of backgrounds and confusions would be able to start from their first-person epistemic position and move in the direction of truth. Descartes is of course interested in locating ideas that are an accurate representation of reality, but he is also interested in pedagogy and the rhetoric of inquiry, or else communication would be for nought. He employs the analytic method to help his readers to move from and beyond a faulty paradigm. Less

Art, Self and Knowledge

Keith Lehrer

Art changes the totality of human experience as Dewey emphasized. Goodman and Heidegger propose that art reveals a special contribution to the world-making experience of the artist and ... More

Art changes the totality of human experience as Dewey emphasized. Goodman and Heidegger propose that art reveals a special contribution to the world-making experience of the artist and the receivers of the artwork. Art is often representational. It may, as Bell and Fry affirmed, contain significant form giving rise to a special emotion, it may be expressive of human feelings, as Croce and Collingwood averred. It may deconstruct previous artworks, removing them from their frames to assemble something new, as Derrida suggests. Some art does each, and I seek to explain how. But not all art does these things, and not only art does them. So what is the special contribution that art makes to experience that changes human life? Art uses sensory consciousness as the focus of attention to create new form and content out of exemplars of experience. The exemplars mark a new distinction in conceptual space. I call this exemplarization. We value art because of the new content it offers us in our lives. We are provoked by art to ask ourselves whether to transfer the content of the artwork to our world and ourselves beyond the artwork. Our answer reveals to us what we are like as we exercise our freedom and autonomy in how we represent our world. Art is that part of experience that uses experience to change the content of experience. Exemplar representation, exemplarization, unifies the aesthetic, creating a new understanding of our selves and our world. Less

Artha: Meaning

Jonardon Ganeri

This book covers śakti and artha, and specifically relates them to the significance of testimony and the epistemology of meaning in the Indian discussion. It pays attention to thinkers ... More

This book covers śakti and artha, and specifically relates them to the significance of testimony and the epistemology of meaning in the Indian discussion. It pays attention to thinkers in the various grammatical and philosophical schools, primarily emphasizing on the school of Nyāya, whose authors entered into an extraordinary, rich and diverse discussion of the problem of meaning over a period of some fifteen centuries. It argues that their ideas speak strongly to contemporary concerns in the philosophy of language. The sections of the book correspond to schools roughly as follows: Grammarian theories of meaning; Mīmāṃsaka theories of meaning; Buddhist theories of meaning; early Naiyāyika theories of meaning; Navya-Naiyāyika theories of meaning; and Vedāntin theories of meaning. Less

Aspects of Reason

Paul Grice

Richard Warner (ed.)

This book, based on Grice's 1979 Locke Lectures at Oxford and published posthumously, elaborates the notions of reasons, reasoning, and rationality, with particular emphasis on the unity ... More

This book, based on Grice's 1979 Locke Lectures at Oxford and published posthumously, elaborates the notions of reasons, reasoning, and rationality, with particular emphasis on the unity of practical and non‐practical (‘alethic’) reasoning. It begins with a look at the nature of ordinary reasoning and distinguishes between ‘flat rationality’, the formal capacity to apply inferential rules, and ‘variable rationality’, the excellence or competence of good reasoning (Ch. 1). Grice then proposes an ‘Equivocality Thesis’, arguing that a structural representation can be given for justificatory (normative) reasons that allows for modals (ought, must, etc.) to be used univocally across the alethic/practical divide in terms of general acceptability statements (Chs. 2–3). In addition, he shows that valid inferences can be drawn from alethic to practical acceptability statements (Ch. 4). Finally, Grice provides a characterization of happiness as it features in practical thinking, and suggests it to be an ‘inclusive end’, consisting of the realization of other ends that are desirable for their own sake as well as for the sake of happiness (Ch. 5). An extensive introduction by Richard Warner provides a helpful summary and explanation of key aspects of the book. Less