text stringlengths 646 5.29k | textbook_name stringclasses 14
values |
|---|---|
The Blackwell Companion
to Philosophy
Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative
survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume
provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, ... | Blackwell |
Set in 10 on 121/2 pt Photina
by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by T. J. International, Padstow, Cornwall
For further information on
Blackwell Publishing, visit our website:
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com
For Antonia and Oliver Bunnin and Jamie Perry
Contents
Pr... | Blackwell |
figures and chapters discussing newly developing fields within philosophy. Throughout
the course of
its chapters, the Companion examines the views of many of the
most widely influential figures of contemporary philosophy.
Although wide-ranging, the Companion is not exhaustive, and emphasis is placed
on develop... | Blackwell |
The complexity of their insights and the clarity of their presentations are the chief
attractions of the Companion. We appreciate their care in making the difficult not only
accessible but delightful as well. We also wish to thank the Departments of Philosophy
at the University of Essex and the University of ... | Blackwell |
Existentialism: A Reconstruction (2nd revd edn 2000), World Philosophies: An Historical
Introduction (2nd revd edn 2002) and The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility and
Mystery (2002).
Martin Davies is Professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences,
Australian National University. He was formerly ... | Blackwell |
losophy. She has edited (with Jane Arthurs) Women’s Bodies: Discipline and Transgression
(1999).
Gary Gutting is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the
author of Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (1982), Michel Foucault’s Archaeology
of Knowledge (1989) and French Philoso... | Blackwell |
of North Carolina. He has published a number of books, including Consciousness
(1987), Judgement and Justification (1988) and Consciousness and Experience (1996). He
is the editor of Mind and Cognition (1990). His interests are in the philosophy of mind,
the philosophy of language and epistemology.
A. W. Moore... | Blackwell |
where he has been a faculty member since 1959. Before that, he was a lecturer at Christ
Church, Oxford, and he received all his university degrees from Oxford. Most of his work
is in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and social philosophy. His
most recently published books are Rationality i... | Blackwell |
of Locke’s Philosophy of Science and Knowledge (1971), Locke (1983), The Empiricists
(1988) and Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz: The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth-Century
Philosophy (1993).
xviii
Contemporary Philosophy in
the United States
J O H N R. S E A R L E
Philosophy as an academic discipline in Ame... | Blackwell |
methods of analytic philosophy. We can best summarize the origins of modern analytic
philosophy by saying that it arose when the empiricist tradition in epistemology,
together with the foundationalist enterprise of Kant, were tied to the methods of
logical analysis and the philosophical theor... | Blackwell |
truths. Indeed, it was a characteristic feature of the analytic philosophy of this central
period that terms such as ‘analytic’, ‘necessary’, ‘a priori’ and ‘tautological’ were
taken to be co-extensive. Contrasted with these were synthetic propositions, which, if
they were true, were true as a matter of emp... | Blackwell |
to exaggerate. One radical consequence of the distinction between descriptive and
evaluative propositions was that certain traditional areas of philosophy, such as ethics,
aesthetics and political philosophy, were virtually abolished as realms of cognitive
meaningfulness. Propositions in these areas ... | Blackwell |
reduction was analytic or definitional, it had the consequence that statements about
empirical reality could be translated into statements about sense data. Similarly, accord-
ing to behaviourism, statements about mental phenomena could be translated into
statements about behaviour.
Within the camp of analyti... | Blackwell |
and consequently, the attempts to define analyticity were invariably circular. However,
an even more important objection that emerged in Quine’s article was this: the notion
of an analytic proposition is supposed to be a notion of a proposition that is immune
to revision, that is irrefutable. Quine claimed that there we... | Blackwell |
not as cases of describing or stating, but rather as doing, as acting. Austin baptized
these utterances ‘performatives’ and contrasted them with ‘constatives’. The distinction
between constatives and performatives was supposed to contain three features: con-
statives, but not performatives, could... | Blackwell |
prise. He asserted, on the contrary, that philosophy is a purely descriptive enterprise,
that the task of philosophy is neither to reform language nor to try to place the various
uses of language on a secure foundation. Rather, philosophical problems are removed
by having a correct understanding of how language actuall... | Blackwell |
social contract theory, which had long been assumed to be completely defunct; but he
did it by an ingenious device: he did not attempt, as some traditional theorists had done,
to show that there might have been an original social contract, nor did he try to show
that the participation of individuals in society involved... | Blackwell |
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNITED STATES
with immediate problems. The lesson that Feyerabend draws from this is that we should
abandon the constraining idea of there being such a thing as a single, rational method
that applies everywhere in science; rather, we should adopt an ‘anarchistic’ view,
accord... | Blackwell |
most analytic philosophers as being adjacent to and overlapping with the sciences.
My own view, which I feel is fairly widely shared, is that words like ‘philosophy’ and
‘science’ are in many respects misleading, if they are taken to imply the existence of
mutually exclusive form... | Blackwell |
identities are, but the progress of the neurosciences makes it seem overwhelmingly
probable that every mental state will be discovered to be identical with some brain state.
In the early version of the identity thesis it was supposed that every type of mental state
would be discovered to be identical wi... | Blackwell |
useful. Important things can be learned about the mind by pursuing the computer
metaphor, and the research effort has not necessarily been wasted. The most exciting
recent development has been to think of mental processes not on the model of the con-
ventional serial digital computer, but rather to think of... | Blackwell |
world which are independent of the ideas that people have in their heads. Meanings on
this view are not concepts in people’s heads, but objective relations in the world. Well,
if associated ideas are not sufficient for meaning, what is? The answer given by the three
authors I have mentioned is that there must be some so... | Blackwell |
representation. However, the combination of an intentionalistic account of meaning,
together with rational principles of co-operation, is immensely fruitful in analysing
such problems as those of ‘indirect speech acts’ and figurative uses of language such
as metaphors. So, for example, in an indirect speech act... | Blackwell |
notion of meaning in order to define the notion of truth. Davidson proposes to turn this
procedure around by taking the notion of truth for granted, by taking it as a primitive,
and using it to explain meaning.
Here is how it works. Davidson hopes to get a theory of meaning for a speaker of a
language that would be suf... | Blackwell |
cal with the state of affairs described by the latter. But the former example simply does
not give the speaker’s meaning. The speaker might hold true the sentence ‘Schnee ist
weiss’ under these and only these conditions and not know the slightest thing about
H2O molecules and wavelengths of light. The T-sentence gives ... | Blackwell |
Wittgenstein throughout emphasizes the difference between causes and reasons, and he
also emphasizes the roles of interpretation and rule following. On the most extreme
interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks about following a rule, he is the proponent of
a certain type of scepticism. According to one view... | Blackwell |
of mathematics to mathematics, or the history of chemistry to chemistry. This attitude
has changed recently, and there is now a feeling of the historical continuity of analytic
philosophy with traditional philosophy in a way that contrasts sharply with the origi-
nal view of analytic philosophers, who thought that they... | Blackwell |
gence. However, in the history of philosophy, I do not believe we have seen anything to
equal the history of analytic philosophy for its rigour, clarity, intelligence and, above
all, its intellectual content. There is a sense in which it seems to me that we have been
living through one of the great eras in philosophy.
... | Blackwell |
is unproblematical, and only needs more aptly chosen titles to represent it. The
distinctions involved are obscure, and the titles serve to conceal this fact. The term
‘continental’ serves to discourage thought about the possible contrasts to analytical
philosophy, and so about the... | Blackwell |
cultivates are much more important than any attempt to make philosophy look like
a science. With many other branches of philosophy there is no plausible version of
sharing a party wall with science, and yet these virtues are still regarded as virtues. In
fact, even in the case of the more scien... | Blackwell |
also call it, ethics) is certainly a higher-order study. It discusses such things as the
nature of moral judgements, and asks whether they express genuine beliefs, whether
they can be objectively true, and so forth. Such higher-order questions are the concern
25
BERNARD WILLIAMS
of meta-ethics. At one... | Blackwell |
parties understand the question at issue, they see how after further enquiry they may
26
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY: A SECOND LOOK
end up in one of several positions: they may come to rational agreement on one answer
or another, they may recognize that such evidence as they can obtain underdeter-
mines the... | Blackwell |
analyses run into difficulty precisely because the air of being a statement that sur-
rounds moral judgements is not merely superficial – they behave syntactically just as
other kinds of statements do.
An alternative is to argue that moral judgements can indeed be true or false, but that
nothing interesting... | Blackwell |
their ways of describing the world, in particular their psychological concepts for
describing people’s behaviour, remain the same. Again, how far can their psychologi-
cal concepts themselves intelligibly vary, and how should we understand those
variations?
In considering such questions, it is hel... | Blackwell |
simply as anyone offers moral opinions – they need to have some professional claim to
attention. They are not, as philosophers, necessarily gifted with unusual insight or
imagination, and they may not have a significantly wide experience or knowledge of
the world. Their claim to attention rests on the... | Blackwell |
theory sees as most basically bearing ethical value. For the first type of theory, it is good
states of affairs, and right action is understood as action tending to bring about good
states of affairs. For the second type, it is right action; sometimes what makes an action
right is a fact about its consequences, but ofte... | Blackwell |
is to look for terms of coexistence that will not presuppose a common conception of the
good. On such an account, citizens can understand themselves as sharing a social exis-
tence although they have as individuals, or as members of communities less extensive
than the state, varying conceptions of a good life. ... | Blackwell |
political philosophers in the analytical tradition (unlike Rawls himself, and also unlike
Habermas, who comes from a sociological tradition) do not see the role of their theo-
ries in these terms, but rather as advancing trans-historical views about the demands
of a just political order. But even if liberals do ... | Blackwell |
sible complexity, ambivalence and ultimate insecurity of those considerations. Good
literature stands against the isolation of moral considerations from the psychological
and social forces that both empower and threaten them. But this isolation of moral
considerations from the rest of experience is... | Blackwell |
posals have been offered to meet the difficulties, either by adding further conditions or
by finding a better statement of the definition as it stands. The first part of the follow-
ing discussion considers these proposals.
In parallel with the debate about how to define knowledge is another about how
knowledg... | Blackwell |
properly justify doing so.
Of these proposed conditions for knowledge, it is the third that gives most trouble.
The reason is simply illustrated by counter-examples. These take the form of cases in
which S believes a true proposition for what are in fact the wrong reasons, although
they are from his or her own ... | Blackwell |
hand, and belief and truth on the other. In this connection there are several standard
species of theory.
Foundationalism
One class of theories of justification employs the metaphor of an edifice. Most of our ordi-
nary beliefs require support from others; we justify a given belief by appealing to another
or others on ... | Blackwell |
or criterial – are by their nature defeasible, and therefore, unless somehow supplemented,
insufficient to the task of transmitting justification from the foundations to other beliefs.
The supplementation would have to consist of guarantees that the circumstances that
defeat non-deductive justification do not in... | Blackwell |
an occurrent sense.
Here an objection immediately suggests itself. Any S has only finite access to what
might justify or undermine his beliefs, and that access is confined to his particular view-
point. It seems that full justification for his beliefs would rarely be available, because his
experience would be restricted ... | Blackwell |
copious literature does so. Their most serious flaw, however, is that they are question-
begging. They do not address the question of how S is to be confident that a given belief
is justified; instead they help themselves to two weighty realist assumptions, one about
the domain over which belief ranges and the other about... | Blackwell |
have been realized.
Scepticism is often described as the thesis that nothing is – or, more strongly, can be –
known. But this is a bad characterization, because if we know nothing, then we do not
know that we know nothing, and so the claim is trivially self-defeating. It is more telling
to characterize scepticism in t... | Blackwell |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
README.md exists but content is empty.
- Downloads last month
- 3