Judgments which assign relative importance to the causes of particular results can be objective. Historians usually do and can use a factual principle of selection to distinguish between causes and conditions and between more and less important causes. The judgments which distinguish between causes and conditions and the judgments which distinguish between more and less important causes require radically different analyses. In A. M. Jones's work on the decline and fall of Rome, he argued that increased barbarian pressure on the (...) West was the most important cause of Rome's fall. It is possible to understand this statement as an instantiation of the following: A was a more important cause of P relative to 0 than was B if 1) A and B were each a cause of P relative to 0 and 2) either A was necessary for P or B was not necessary for P and 3) had B not occurred, something would have occurred which more closely approximates P than had A not occurred. (shrink)

The philosophical papers comprising this volume range from process metaphysics and theology, through the phenomenological study of intentionality, to the foundations of geometry and of the system of real numbers. New light, it is thought, is shed on all these topics, some of them being of the highest interest and under intensive investigation in contemporary philosophical discussion. Metaphysi cians, process theologians, semanticists, theorists of knowledge, phenomenologists, and philosophers of mathematics will thus find in this book, it is hoped, helpful materials (...) and methods. The categoreal scheme of Whitehead's Process and Reality is discussed rather fully from a logical point of view in the first paper [I] in the light of the author's previous work on the logico-metaphysical theory of events. The clarification that results is thought to provide a new depth and precision to the problem of interpreting one of the most difficult books in the recent history of metaphysics and cosmol ogy. A detailed examination of some aspects of Hartshorne's recent Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method is given in II. This book is perhaps the most significant work on process philosophy since Process and Reality itself, and its logical underpinnings thus merit a full critical discussion. (shrink)

This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork (...) for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west. (shrink)

In this entertaining and challenging collection of logic puzzles, Raymond Smullyan-author of Forever Undecided-continues to delight and astonish us with his gift for making available, in the thoroughly pleasurable form of puzzles, some of the most important mathematical thinking of our time.

Collects a variety of mathematics and logic puzzles, some based on the theorems of the mathematician Kurt Godel.

The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective. By C. Behan McCullagh.

A collection of paradoxes, dialogues, problems, and essays discusses aspects of philosophy, including the natures of reality, truth, existence, and death.

The Tao Is Silent Is Raymond Smullyan's beguiling and whimsical guide to the meaning and value of eastern philosophy to westerners. "To me," Writes Smullyan, "Taoism means a state of inner serenity combined with an intense aesthetic awareness. Neither alone is adequate; a purely passive serenity is kind of dull, and an anxiety-ridden awareness is not very appealing." This is more than a book on Chinese philosophy. It is a series of ideas inspired by Taoism that treats a wide (...) variety of subjects about life in general. Smullyan sees the Taoist as "one who is not so much in search of something he hasn't, but who is enjoying what he has." Readers will be charmed and inspired by this witty, sophisticated, yet deeply religious author, whether he is discussing gardening, dogs, the art of napping, or computers who dream that they're human. (shrink)

Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘ demonstrated ’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the supposed possibility (...) that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’. (shrink)

This book is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the nature of the self, personal identity and survival. Its distinctive methodology is one that is phenomenologically descriptive rather than metaphysical and normative. On the basis of this approach Raymond Martin shows that the distinction between self and other is not nearly as fundamental a feature of our so-called egoistic values as has been traditionally thought. He explains how the belief in a self as a fixed, continuous point (...) of observation enters into our experience of ourselves and the world. He also reveals the explosive implications this thesis has for recent debates over personal identity and what matters in survival. This is the first book of analytic philosophy directly on the phenomenology of identity and survival. It builds bridges between analytic and phenomenological traditions and, thus, to open up a new field of investigation. (shrink)

William Hazlitt's moment occurred in 1794, when he was sixteen years old. In that moment Hazlitt thought he realized three things: that we are naturally connected to ourselves in the past and present but only imagina-.

These are the very scholars that were involved in initiating the revolution in personal identity theory.

My thesis is that there is a deep, intractable difference, not between history and science per se, but between paradigmatically central kinds of historical interpretations-call them humanistic historical interpretations-and theories of any sort that are characteristic of the physical sciences. The difference is that unlike theories in the physical sciences, good humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning. I use the controversy provoked by Gordon Wood's recent reinterpretation of the American Revolution to illustrate and substantiate this thesis. I also (...) use it to support the claim that unless one attends to the ways in which humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning one has no hope whatsoever of getting the epistemology of historical studies right. (shrink)

Everyone with their feet on the ground admits that in the physical sciences there has been progress. One can debate the niceties. The hard rock is that our ability to predict and control natural events and processes is greater now than it has ever been. And there has been astonishing technological fallout.

What really matters fundamentally in survival? That question—the one on which I focus—is not about what should matter or about metaphysics. Rather, it is a factual question the answer to which can be determined, if at all, only empirically. I argue that the answer to it is that in the case of many people it is not one’s own persistence, but continuing in ways that may involve one’s own cessation that really matters fundamentally in survival. Call this the surprising result. (...) What are we to make of it? According to several philosophers, not much. I argue that these philosophers are wrong. What best explains the surprising result is that in the case of many people one’s special concern for oneself in the future is not fundamental, but derived. I explain what this means. Finally I explain why the task of explaining empirically what matters fundamentally in survival is in some ways more like a meditative quest than a traditional inquiry in western philosophy or social science and, as such, is best answered not by psychologists, but by philosophers. (shrink)

An entertaining series of logic problems and puzzles of increasing difficulty, and all relating important mathematical and logical concepts, includes mind-benders, paradoxes, metapuzzles, number exercises, and a mathematical novel.

I argue for adopting a conception of obligation that is broader than the conception commonly adopted by moral philosophers. According to this broader conception, the crucial marks of an obligatory action are, first, that the reasons for the obliged party to perform the action include an exclusionary reason and, second, that the obliged party is the appropriate target of blaming reactive attitudes, if they inexcusably fail to perform the obligatory action. An obligation is directed if the exclusionary reason depends on (...) the relationship between the obliged person and the person to whom they owe the obligatory action, and the latter person is positioned to personally blame the obligated person for inexcusably failing to perform the obligatory action. Some direc- ted obligations are not owed as a matter of right, and the person to whom the obligatory action is owed is the only person positioned to blame nonperformance. Other directed obligations are owed as a matter of right, and people who are not part of the relationship grounding the obligation nevertheless are also positioned to (impersonally) blame non-performance. Only the rights-based form of directed obligation has received signifi- cant attention from moral philosophers, yet the former—which is at the heart of what I call “personal bonds”—is a pervasive and significant theme of our ordinary interpersonal lives. (shrink)