Introduction to Philosophy, Fourth Edition, is the most comprehensive topically organized collection of classical and contemporary philosophy available. Building on the exceptionally successful tradition of previous editions, this edition for the first time incorporates the insights of a new coeditor, John Martin Fischer, and has been updated and revised to make it more accessible. Ideal for introductory philosophy courses, the text includes sections on the meaning of life, God and evil, knowledge and reality, the philosophy of science, the mind/body (...) problem, freedom of will, consciousness, ethics, and philosophical puzzles and paradoxes. It presents seventy substantial--and in some cases complete--selections from the best and most influential works in philosophy, offering a unique balance between classical and contemporary material. An extensive glossary of philosophical terms is also included. The fourth edition features fifteen new readings, including work by Albert Camus, Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel Dennett, Harry G. Frankfurt, William Paley, Derek Parfit, John Perry, Richard Taylor, Peter Van Inwagen, Bernard Williams, and Susan Wolf. Part III, Knowledge and Reality, has been restructured and now includes Plato's Thaetetus, selections by Edmund L. Gettier and Robert Nozick, and an essay by Christopher Grau that explores the philosophical concepts presented in the popular film The Matrix. Two new ethics puzzles--"The Trolley Problem" and "Ducking Harm and Sacrificing Others"--are also included. This edition incorporates Study Questions after each reading and is accompanied by an Instructor's CD and a Student Companion Website, both containing helpful resources. (shrink)

Developmental psychologists have long recognized the extraordinary influence of action on learning (Held & Hein, 1963; Piaget, 1952). Action experiences begin to shape our perception of the world during infancy (e.g., as infants gain an understanding of others’ goal-directed actions; Woodward, 2009) and these effects persist into adulthood (e.g., as adults learn about complex concepts in the physical sciences; Kontra, Lyons, Fischer, & Beilock, 2012). Theories of embodied cognition provide a structure within which we can investigate the mechanisms underlying (...) action’s impact on thinking and reasoning. We argue that theories of embodiment can shed light on the role of action experience in early learning contexts, and further that these theories hold promise for using action to scaffold learning in more formal educational settings later in development. (shrink)

An accessible and enjoyable introduction to Zen Buddhist practice--in a reader-friendly question-and-answer format--by two highly regarded teacher-writers. The question-and-answer format makes this introduction to Zen especially easy to understand--and also to use as a reference, as you can easily look up just the question you had in mind. The esteemed Zen teacher Norman Fischer and his old friend and teaching colleague Susan Moon (both of them in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind) give (...) this collaborative effort a playful tone: Susan asks a question on our behalf, Norman answers it, and then Sue challenges him. By the time you get through their conversations, you'll have a good basic education in Zen--not only the history, theory, and practice but also the contemporary issues, such as gender inequality, sexual ethics, and the tension between Asian traditions and the modern American reality. (shrink)

This book/CD package guides readers and listeners on a journey through Franz Schubert's Winterreise song cycle, in which the composer set the poetry of Wilhelm Muller to music. The complete text of the 24 poems is presented in both German and English, with 116 b&w photographs of winter scenes on the facing pages. An introductory essay by Susan Youens offers a critical examination of the song cycle. The music CD features a new recording of Winterreise, performed by baritone Paul (...) Rowe and pianist Martha Fischer. Oversize: 10.25x10.25". Annotation 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

I argue that we need to distinguish between three concepts of actual causation: total, path-changing, and contributing actual causation. I provide two lines of argument in support of this account. First, I address three thought experiments that have been troublesome for unified accounts of actual causation, and I show that my account provides a better explanation of corresponding causal intuitions. Second, I provide a functional argument: if we assume that a key purpose of causal concepts is to guide agency, we (...) are better off making a distinction between three concepts of actual causation. (shrink)

In this analysis of one of the most difficult and neglected topics in Hegelian studies, Songsuk Susan Hahn tackles the status of contradiction in Hegel's ...

Introduction: "meaning in life and death : our stories" -- John Martin Fischer and Anthony B rueckner, "Why is death bad?", Philosophical studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (September 1986) -- "Death, badness, and the impossibility of experience," Journal of ethics -- John Martin Fischer and Daniel Speak, "Death and the psychological conception of personal identity," Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 24 -- "Earlier birth and later death : symmetry through thick and thin," Richard Feldman, Kris McDaniel, Jason R. (...) Raibley, eds., The good, the right, life and death (Aldershot : Ashgate Publishing, 2006) -- "Why immortality is not so bad," International journal of philosophical studies, vol. 2, no. 2 (September 1994) -- John Martin Fischer and Ruth Curl, "Philosophical models of immortality in science fiction," in George Slusser et. al., eds., Immortal engines : life extension and immortality in science fiction and fantasy (Athens, Ga. : University of Georgia Press, 1996) -- "Epicureanism about death and immortality," Journal of ethics, vol. 10, no. 4 -- "Stories," Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 20 -- "Free will, death, and immortality : the role of narrative," Philosophical papers (Special issue : meaning in life) volume 34, number 3, November 2005 -- "Stories and the meaning of life," revised and expanded version of "A reply to Pereboom, Zimmerman, and Smith," part of a book symposium on John Martin Fischer, my way : essays on moral responsibility, philosophical books, vol. 47, no. 3. (shrink)

Introduction -- Foundationalism versus coherentism : a dichotomy disclaimed -- Foundationalism undermined -- Coherentism discomposed -- Foundherentism articulated -- The evidence of the senses : refutations and conjectures -- Naturalism disambiguated -- The evidence against reliabilism -- Revolutionary scientism subverted -- Vulgar pragmatism : an unedifying prospect -- Foundherentism ratified -- Selected essays -- "Know" is just a four-letter word -- Knowledge and propaganda : reflections of an old feminist -- "The ethics of belief" reconsidered -- Epistemology legalized : or, (...) truth, justice, and the American way. (shrink)

After the success of the hardback, students and academics will welcome the publication of this book in paperback. The aim of the book is to explore the connection between two perspectives that have had a profound effect upon contemporary thought: post–modernism and feminism. Through bringing together and systematically analysing the relations between these, Hekman is able to make a major intervention into current debates in social theory and philosophy. The critique of Enlightenment knowledge, she argues, is at the core of (...) both post–modernism and feminism. Each also offers a basis for critical reflections about the other. In particular, post–modern philosophy provides a means of criticizing aspects of contemporary feminism and thus contributing to the development of a more sophisticated approach to current feminist issues. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss an external whistleblowing event that occurred after all internal whistleblowing through the hierarchy of the organization had failed. It is argued that an organization that does not support those that whistle blow because of violation of professional standards is indicative of a failure of organizational ethics. Several ways to build an ethics infrastructure that could reduce the need to resort to external whistleblowing are discussed. A relational ethics approach is presented as a (...) way to eliminate the negative consequences of whistleblowing by fostering an interdependent moral community to address ethical concerns. (shrink)

Romanis and Adkins explore the near-term prospect of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) which is being developed to supplement the gestational process following the premature ending of a pregnancy.1 While fetal-centric narratives prevail in discussions surrounding AAPT, the authors subvert this trend by centering the experience of pregnant persons with respect to pregnancy loss. The overarching aim of their paper is to move beyond a ‘philosophical understanding of pregnancy towards practical-orientated conclusions regarding the care pathways surrounding [AAPT]’ (Romanis and (...) Adkins,1 p1). This commentary will critically examine the viability of this aim. Romanis and Adkins use the term ‘pregnancy loss’ to refer to the phenomenon where individuals experience a complex set of emotions following the premature ending of pregnancy, despite the survival of the gestated entity. Following Golish and Powell, the authors note how parents may experience contradictory emotions, such as joy mixed with grief, as well as a range of negative feelings including shame, disappointment and a sense of failure.2 At present, this phenomenon has been recognised among parents, particularly the (formerly) pregnant person, in the context of neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) when the infant survives preterm delivery and …. (shrink)

_Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy_ provides new foundations and methods for the revolutionary project of philosophical therapy pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book vindicates this currently much-discussed project by reconstructing the genesis of important philosophical problems: With the help of concepts adapted from cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology, the book analyses how philosophical reflection is shaped by pictures and metaphors we are not aware of employing and are prone to misapply. Through innovative case-studies on the genesis of classical problems about (...) the mind and perception, and on thinkers including Locke, Berkeley and Ayer, the book demonstrates how such autonomous habits of thought systematically generate unsound intuitions and philosophical delusions, whose clash with reality, or among each other, gives rise to ill-motivated but maddening problems. The book re-examines models of therapeutic philosophy, due to Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and develops an approach that may let us overcome philosophical delusions and the problems they engender. In this way, the book explains where and why therapy in called for in philosophy, and develops techniques to carry it out. (shrink)

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter first talks about LEGO modal epistemology. Modal epistemology has the two parts. Some of it is the study of how one knows that some things are contingent and others necessary. The other part of modal epistemology concerns how much one know about what is contingent and necessary. The chapter then talks about what went wrong with the imagination‐based story. Whatever the story about how one knows what he/she can build, it had better be one that factors in his/her (...) background knowledge, since that is what makes the imagination useful. With working knowledge of those little pieces, one can make judgments about what can and can not be done with them. Crucially, there are various ways to make those judgments. The chapter further focuses on a segment of the LEGO community that might seem a bit fussy: purists. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects of employing a functional approach in order to improve our concept of actual causation. Claims of actual causation play an important role for a variety of purposes. In particular, they are relevant for identifying suitable targets for intervention, and they are relevant for our practices of ascribing responsibility. I argue that this gives rise to the challenge of purpose. The challenge of purpose arises when different goals demand adjustments of the concept that pull in opposing (...) directions. More specifically, I argue that a common distinction between certain kinds of preempted and preempting factors is difficult to motivate from an interventionist viewpoint. This indicates that an appropriately revised concept of actual causation would not distinguish between these two kinds of factors. From the viewpoint of retributivist responsibility, however, the distinction between preempted and preempting factors sometimes is important, which indicates that the distinction should be retained. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility (...) ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

How does experimental philosophy address philosophical questions and problems? That is: What projects does experimental philosophy pursue? What is their philosophical relevance? And what empirical methods do they employ? Answers to these questions will reveal how experimental philosophy can contribute to the longstanding ambition of placing philosophy on the ‘secure path of a science’, as Kant put it. We argue that experimental philosophy has introduced a new methodological perspective – a ‘meta-philosophical naturalism’ that addresses philosophical questions about a phenomenon by (...) empirically investigating how people think about this phenomenon. This chapter asks how this novel perspective can be successfully implemented: How can the empirical investigation of how people think about something address genuinely philosophical problems? And what methods – and, specifically, what methods beyond the questionnaire – can this investigation employ? We first review core projects of experimental philosophy and raise the question of their philosophical relevance. For ambitious answers, we turn to experimental philosophy’s most direct historical precursor, mid-20th century ordinary language philosophy, and discuss empirical implementations of two of its research programmes that use experimental methods from psycholinguistics and corpus methods from the digital humanities. (shrink)

The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell (...) provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. (shrink)

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's work is distinctive not only in its importance to philosophy but also for its remarkable interdisciplinary range. Cavell is read avidly by students of film, photography, painting, and music, but especially by students of literature, for whom Cavell offers major readings of Thoreau, Emerson, Shakespeare, and others. In this first book-length study of Cavell's writings, Michael Fischer examines Cavell's relevance to the controversies surrounding poststructuralist literary theory, particularly works by Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, (...) and Stanley Fish. Throughout his study, Fischer focuses on skepticism, a central concern of Cavell's multifaceted work. Cavell, following J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein, does not refute the radical epistemological questioning of Descartes, Hume, and others, but rather characterizes skepticism as a significant human possibility or temptation. As presented by Fischer, Cavell's accounts of both external-world and other-minds skepticism share significant affinities with deconstruction, a connection overlooked by contemporary literary theorists. Fischer follows Cavell's lead in examining how different genres address the problems raised by skepticism and goes on to show how Cavell draws on American and English romanticism in fashioning a response to it. He concludes by analyzing Cavell's remarks about current critical theory, focusing on Cavell's uneasiness with some of the conclusions reached by its practitioners. Fischer shows that Cavell's insights, grounded in powerful analyses of Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein, permit a fresh view of Derrida, Miller, de Man, and Fish. The result is not only a revealing characterization of deconstruction but a much-needed and insightful introduction to Cavell's rich but difficult oeuvre. (shrink)

"Überphilosophie" ist das spannende Gedankenexperiment Engelbert Lorenz Fischers zu bis dato bestehenden philosophischen Strömungen und Theorien. Fischer verfolgt hierbei den Grundsatz der Harmonisierung, in dem er versucht, sich über bestehende Gegensätze und Einseitigkeiten in der Philosophie zu erheben und die Hauptgegensätze der Philosophie zu einer höheren Einheit zu verbinden. Sorgfältig bearbeiteter Nachdruck der Originalausgabe von 1907.

Although the seasons have been a perennial theme in literature and art, their significance for philosophy and environmental theory has remained largely unexplored. This pioneering book demonstrates the ways in which inquiry into the seasons reveals new and illuminating perspectives for philosophy, environmental thought, anthropology, cultural studies, aesthetics, poetics, and literary criticism. The Seasons opens up new avenues for research in these fields and provides a valuable resource for teachers and students of the environmental humanities. The innovative essays herein address (...) a wide range of seasonal cultures and geographies, from the traditional Western model of the four seasons––spring, summer, fall, and winter––to the Indigenous seasons of Australia and the Arctic. Exemplifying the crucial importance of interdisciplinary research, The Seasons makes a compelling case for the relevance of the seasons to our daily lives, scientific understanding, diverse cultural practices, and politics. (shrink)

Moral responsibility and autonomy are closely related structurally and contentwise: they are both members of the “freedom family”. Here I argue that because of these similarities, they are often conflated or at least not carefully separated, and that this has resulted in confusions in important contemporary debates. Autonomy and moral responsibility involve the agent’s identification with the sources of her actions; but autonomy-identification is more robust than responsibility-identification.

Her careful building of positions, her unique approaches to analyzing problems, and her excellent insights make this an important work for feminists, those ...

The paper presents a novel account of nature and genesis of some philosophical problems, which vindicates a new approach to an arguably central and extensive class of such problems: The paper develops the Wittgensteinian notion of ‘philosophical pictures’ with the help of some notions adapted from metaphor research in cognitive linguistics and from work on unintentional analogical reasoning in cognitive psychology. The paper shows that adherence to such pictures systematically leads to the formulation of unwarranted claims, ill-motivated problems, and pointless (...) theories. To do so, the paper proceeds from a case-study on a lastingly influential development in early modern philosophy: the adoption of the doctrine of secondary qualities, and its principal consequences. The findings motivate a new approach to an arguably extensive and important class of philosophical problems: to the problems we raise in the grip of philosophical pictures. (shrink)

There isn’t one conversation about animal ethics. Instead, there are several important ones that are scattered across many disciplines. This volume both surveys the field of animal ethics and draws professional philosophers, graduate students, and undergraduates more deeply into the discussions that are happening outside of philosophy departments. To that end, the volume contains more nonphilosophers than philosophers, explicitly inviting scholars from other fields—such as animal science, ecology, economics, psychology, law, environmental science, and applied biology, among others—to bring their own (...) disciplinary resources to bear on matters that affect animals. -/- The Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics is composed of 44 chapters, all appearing in print here for the first time, and organized into the following six sections: -/- I. Thinking About Animals -/- II. Animal Agriculture and Hunting -/- III. Animal Research and Genetic Engineering -/- IV. Companion Animals -/- V. Wild Animals: Conservation, Management, and Ethics -/- VI. Animal Activism -/- The chapters are brief, and they have been written in a way that is accessible to serious undergraduate students, regardless of their field of study. The volume covers everything from animal cognition to the state of current fisheries, from genetic modification to intersection animal activism. It is a resource designed for anyone interested in the moral issues that emerge from human interactions with animals. (shrink)

Moral responsibility skepticism has traditionally been dismissed as a nonstarter, but because of the important work of Derk Pereboom, Gregg Caruso, and others, it has become increasingly influential. I lay out this doctrine, and I subject it to critical scrutiny. I argue that the metaphysical arguments about free will do not yield the result that we do not deserve (in a “basic” sense) the attitudes and actions definitive of moral responsibility. Further, I argue that skepticism leaves out crucial components of (...) our considered views about moral responsibility, making it seriously problematic. (shrink)

I revisit my article, “Why Immortality Is Not So Bad,” in which I argued that Bernard Williams’s thesis that immortality would necessarily be boring for any human being is false. Here I point out various ways in which Williams’s treatment of the issues has tilted and distorted the subsequent debates.

“Excited Delirium Syndrome” (ExDS) is a controversial diagnosis. The supposed syndrome is sometimes considered to be a potential cause of death. However, it has been argued that its sole purpose is to cover up excessive police violence because it is mainly used to explain deaths of individuals in custody. In this paper, we examine the epistemic conditions giving rise to the controversial diagnosis by discussing the relation between causal hypotheses, evidence, and data in forensic medicine. We argue that the practitioners’ (...) social context affects causal inquiry through background assumptions that enter inquiry at multiple stages. This analysis serves to better understand the wide usage of the controversial diagnosis of ExDS. (shrink)

The Unity of Reason is the first major study of Kant's account of reason. It argues that Kant's wide-ranging interests and goals can only be understood by redirecting attention from epistemological questions of his work to those concerning the nature of reason. Rather than accepting a notion of reason given by his predecessors, a fundamental aim of Kant's philosophy is to reconceive the nature of reason. This enables us to understand Kant's insistence on the unity of theoretical and practical reason (...) as well as his claim that his metaphysics was driven by practical and political ends. Neiman begins by discussing the historical roots of Kant's conception of reason, and by showing Kant's solution to problems which earlier conceptions left unresolved. Kant's notion of reason itself is examined through a discussion of all the activities Kant attributes to reason. In separate chapters discussing the role of reason in science, morality, religion, and philosophy, Neiman explores Kant's distinctions between reason and knowledge, and his difficult account of the regulative principles of reason. Through examination of these principles in Kant's major and minor writings, The Unity of Reason provides a fundamentally new perspective on Kant's entire work. (shrink)

Kant war uberzeugt, dass er das "Wissen aufheben" musste, "um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen". Wie sich der philosophisch begrundete "Vernunftglaube" aber zum Offenbarungsglauben verhalt, ist eine Frage, die bis heute Nachdenkens bedarf. Der Band vergegenwartigt Uberlegungen von der Stoa bis in unsere Zeit. Er verdeutlicht: Wo Philosophie die Fragen der Religion vergisst oder missachtet, verliert sie Rang und Tiefe. Wo religioser Glaube die Beziehung zum philosophischen Fragen vernachlassigt, wird er verlieren und scheitern. Wo jedoch etwas philosophisch gedachtes Absolutes die (...) Beziehung zur Geschichtlichkeit des menschlichen Lebens aus dem Blick verliert und die faktische Absolutheit im Geschichtlichen nicht zu verstehen versucht, verliert die Philosophie ihre Kernaufgaben aus dem Blick. (shrink)