Despite the familiarity of hope in human experience, it is a phenomenon infrequently considered from a philosophical point of view. This book charts the centrality of hope in thought and action from first, second and third person perspectives. From everyday situations to extreme circumstances of trail and endings in life, the contours of hope are given a phenomenological description and subjected to conceptual analysis. This consistently secular account of hope sheds a different light on questions of agency and (...) meaning. (shrink)

The concept of scientific history / Isaiah Berlin -- The limits of scientific history / W.H. Walsh -- The objectivity of history / J.A. Passmore -- Explanation in science and in history / C.G. Hempel -- The Popper-Hempel theory reconsidered / Alan Donagan -- The autonomy of historical understanding / Louis O. Mink -- Historical continuity and causal analysis / Michael Oakeshott -- Causal judgment in history and in the law / H.L.A. Hart and A.M. Honoré -- Causes, connections (...) and conditions in history / Michael Scriven -- The historical individual / A.C. Danto -- Methodological individualisms : definition and reduction / May Brodbeck -- Societal laws / Maurice Mandelbaum -- Determinism in history / Ernest Nagel. (shrink)

This paper uses tools of philosophical analysis critically to examine accounts of the nature of racism that have recently been offered by writers including existentialist philosopher Lewis Gordon, conservative theorist Dinesh D'Souza, and sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. These approaches, which conceive of racism either as a bad-faith choice to believe, a doctrine, or as a type of 'social formation', are found wanting for a variety of reasons, especially that they cannot comprehend some forms of racism. I (...) propose an account that conceives racism chiefly as a motivational/volitional matter, in short, as a form of moral viciousness. I show how this approach offers a unified account that comprises inter alia individual and institutional racism, expressed and unexpressed racism. I point out advantages that my view has over Thomas Schmid's somewhat similar suggestion, and use the account to examine a number of claims made about racism by H. L. Gates, Jr, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Gertrude Ezorsky, and others. Finally, I defend this approach from the general criticism that Benjamin DeMott has levelled against any effort so to understand racism. Key Words: Benjamin DeMott • Dinesh D'Souza • existentialism • Lewis Gordon • moral concepts • Michael Omi • racism • social formation • Howard Winant. (shrink)

Philosophical Analysis Its Development between the Two World Wars.

Introduction to the Two Volumes xi PART ONE: G. E. MOORE ON ETHICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS 1 CHAPTER 1 Common Sense and Philosophical Analysis 3 CHAPTER 2 Moore on Skepticism, Perception, and Knowledge 12 CHAPTER 3 Moore on Goodness and the Foundations of Ethics 34 CHAPTER 4 The Legacies and Lost Opportunities of Moore’s Ethics 71 Suggested Further Reading 89 PART TWO: BERTRAND RUSSELL ON LOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS 91 CHAPTER 5 Logical Form, Grammatical (...) Form, and the Theory of Descriptions 93 CHAPTER 6 Logic and Mathematics: The Logicist Reduction 132 CHAPTER 7 Logical Constructions and the External World 165 CHAPTER 8 Russell’s Logical Atomism 182 Suggested Further Reading 194 PART THREE: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS 195 CHAPTER 9 The Metaphysics of the Tractatus 197 CHAPTER 10 Meaning, Truth, and Logic in the Tractatus 214 CHAPTER 11 The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 234 Suggested Further Reading 254 PART FOUR: LOGICAL POSITIVISM, EMOTIVISM, AND ETHICS 255 CHAPTER 12 The Logical Positivists on Necessity and Apriori Knowledge 257 CHAPTER 13 The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 271 CHAPTER 14 Emotivism and Its Critics 300 CHAPTER 15 Normative Ethics in the Era of Emotivism: The Anticonsequentialism of Sir David Ross 320 Suggested Further Reading 346 PART FIVE: THE POST-POSITIVIST PERSPECTIVE OF THE EARLY W. V. QUINE 349 CHAPTER 16 The Analytic and the Synthetic, the Necessary and the Possible, the Apriori and the Aposteriori 351 CHAPTER 17 Meaning and Holistic Verificationism 378 Suggested Further Reading 406 Index 409. (shrink)

Philosophical analysis was the central preoccupation of 20th-century analytic philosophy. In the contemporary methodological debate, however, it faces a number of pressing external and internal challenges. While external challenges, like those from experimental philosophy or semantic externalism, have been extensively discussed, internal challenges to philosophical analysis have received much less attention. One especially vexing internal challenge is that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are deeply unclear. According to the standard textbook view, a (...) class='Hi'>philosophical analysis aims at a strict biconditional that captures the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the relevant category. The textbook view arguably identifies a necessary condition on successful philosophical analyses, but understood as a sufficient condition it is untenable, as I will argue in this paper. To this end, I first uncover eight conditions of adequacy on successful philosophical analyses, some of which have rarely been spelled out in detail. As we shall see, even sophisticated alternatives to the textbook view fail to accommodate some of these conditions. I then propose the concept grounding view as a more promising account of philosophical analysis. According to this view, successful philosophical analyses require necessary biconditionals that are constrained by grounding relations among the concepts involved. Apart from providing a satisfactory account of philosophical analysis in its own right, the concept grounding view is also able to meet the challenge that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are problematically unclear. (shrink)

Philosophical Analysis Its Development between the Two World Wars.

The aim of this book is to provide a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. While some of these problems have been the focus of extensive philosophical debate, others have received insufficient attention. In particular, the epistemology of fiction has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, but there have been few attempts to explain how audiences (...) identify their contents, or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of works of fiction. -/- This book answers a wide range of both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relations between them. The metaphysical questions include: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction?; What is the nature of fictive utterances?; What determines the contents of works of fiction?; What kinds of fictive content are there?; How broad in scope is fictive content?; and What kinds of things are fictional entities? The epistemological questions include: How do audiences identify the contents of authors’ fictive utterances?; How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it?; and What role does thinking and talking about fiction from an external perspective play in enabling communication through fiction? It develops the first single theory that provides answers to all these questions. (shrink)

[Sally Haslanger] In debates over the existence and nature of social kinds such as 'race' and 'gender', philosophers often rely heavily on our intuitions about the nature of the kind. Following this strategy, philosophers often reject social constructionist analyses, suggesting that they change rather than capture the meaning of the kind terms. However, given that social constructionists are often trying to debunk our ordinary (and ideology-ridden?) understandings of social kinds, it is not surprising that their analyses are counterintuitive. This article (...) argues that externalist insights from the critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction can be extended to justify social constructionist analyses. /// [Jennifer Saul] Sally Haslanger's 'What Good Are Our Intuitions? Philosophical Analysis and Social Kinds' is, among other things, a part of the theoretical underpinning for analyses of race and gender concepts that she discusses far more fully elsewhere. My reply focuses on these analyses of race and gender concepts, exploring the ways in which the theoretical work done in this paper and others can or cannot be used to defend these analyses against certain objections. I argue that the problems faced by Haslanger's analyses are in some ways less serious, and in some ways more serious, than they may at first appear. Along the way, I suggest that ordinary speakers may not in fact have race and gender concepts and I explore the ramifications of this claim. (shrink)

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures.

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date.

Introduction MAX BLACK Nothing of any value can be said on method except through examples; but now, at the end of our course, we may collect certain general ...

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F is that which makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional, and possesses desirable logical and modal features. These sentences are reflexive, transitive and symmetric, and, (...) if they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I close by defining an asymmetric and irreflexive notion of analysis in terms of the reflexive and symmetric one. (shrink)

What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”. The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far (...) surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines. This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence 1 designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards. The argument for a speed explosion was set out by the artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomonoff in his 1985 article “The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence”.1 Eliezer Yudkowsky gives a succinct version of the argument in his 1996 article “Staring at the Singularity”: “Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.. (shrink)

My dissertation philosophically analyzes experiments in evolutionary biology, an area of science where experimental approaches have tended to supplement, rather than supercede more traditional approaches, such as field observations. I conduct the analysis on the basis of three case studies of famous episodes in the history of selection experiments: H. B. D. Kettlewell's investigations of industrial melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia; two of Th. Dobzhansky's studies of adaptive radiation in the fruit fly, Drosophila pseudoobscura; and M. Wade's (...) studies of group selection in the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. The case studies analyze the arguments and evidence these investigators used to identify the respective roles of experiments and other forms of inquiry in their investigations. I discuss three philosophical issues. ;First, the analysis considers whether these selection experiments fit models of experimentation developed in the context of micro-and high energy physics by Allan Franklin and Peter Galison . My analysis documents that the methods used in the case studies can be accommodated on both Franklin and Galison's views. I conclude the case studies do not support claims regarding the relative autonomy of biology. ;Second, the analysis documents a number of important roles for life history data acquired by strictly observational means in the process of experimentation, from identification of research problems and development of experimental designs to interpretation of results. Divorced from this context experiments in biology make no sense. Thus, in principle, experimental approaches cannot replace more traditional methods. ;Third, the analysis examines a superficial tension between the use of experiments, which I characterize by the presence of artificial intervention, and the stated goal of most investigations in evolutionary biology, that of understanding how systems behave in the absence of intervention. Experiments involve trade-offs between the control one has over the circumstances of the study and how informative the study is with regard to questions of interest to biologists regarding specific, actual systems in nature. Experimental simulations of natural phenomena in other historical sciences involve similar trade-offs, but there are reasons for believing this tension is more prominent in biology. (shrink)

John Hospers' _Introduction to Philosophical Analysis_ has sold over 150,000 copies since its first publication. This new edition ensures that its success will continue into the twenty-first century. It remains the most accessible and authoritative introduction to philosophy available using the full power of the problem-based approach to the area to ensure that philosophy is not simply taught to students but practised by them. The most significant change to this edition is to respond to criticisms regarding the omission in (...) the third edition of the famous opening chapter. A brand new chapter, Words and the World, replaces this in the fourth edition - which now features a large number of examples and illustrative dialogues. The rest of the text has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of recent developments in some areas of philosophy. (shrink)

When I was Dickinson Miller's assistant from 1940 to 1942, I soon realized that I had encountered an unusually powerful, acute, and original mind and a writer whose clear but vivid style matched the high quality of his intelligence. These traits were apparent in his comments about eminent philosophers with whom he had associated - particularly William James but also Santayana, Dewey, Husserl, and Wittgenstein - and in the mutual criticism he demanded of his writing and my first efforts. I (...) was pleased and felt immensely privileged to share in his planning of a book devoted to "analysis, the method of philosophy at work" as in his articles on the knowledge-problem, induction, and free will. In view of the penetration of his articles, such a book seemed long overdue as James had insisted even in 1905. When Miller's projected book on "analysis at work" did not appear by 1956, I consulted him about putting together a collection of his published essays. Such a collection seemed but slight homage to one who had made such a striking contribution to American philosophy in rela tion to James and one from whom I had learned so much. He felt, however, that such a collection would be inappropriate and preferred to concentrate on a book, never finished, on "the principles of practical intelligence", the application of intelligence in a "morality of results" for human welfare. (shrink)

Canadian and international nursing educators are increasingly concerned with the quality of university nursing education. Contemporary nursing education is fraught by a growing anti‐intellectualism coupled with the dominance of neoliberalism and corporate university business culture. Amid these challenges, nursing schools must prepare nurses to provide care in an era compounded by social and health inequities. The purpose of this paper was to explore the philosophical and contextual factors influencing anti‐intellectualism in nursing education. We use John Henry Newman's view of (...) the purpose of a university education as a heuristic perspective to examine anti‐intellectualism in nursing. We contend that the ideological worship of technological advances, a culture of consumerism, quality improvement and risk management, the primacy of doing over thinking, competency‐based curricula and business models rooted in neoliberal financial policies reinforce anti‐intellectualism in nursing. Anti‐intellectualism is a complex issue to address within the corporate university culture. We propose multiple strategies at the disciplinary, university and sociopolitical levels to decrease anti‐intellectualism. Counteracting anti‐intellectualism requires critical thinking, praxis and emancipation. Nurses should critically examine this anti‐intellectual trend as it limits the advancement of the discipline and marginalizes its contributions within the academy. If nurses do not address this challenge, the survival of nursing as an academic discipline may be jeopardized. (shrink)

After more than a century of its development, philosophers working in the analytic tradition have recently begun to consider its history as an object of philosophical investigation.1 This development, particularly significant in the context of a tradition of inquiry that has often conceived of its own problems as ahistorical, is salutary in that it offers to show what, within the tradition, remains rich and vital for philosophy today, as well as to extract the significant theoretical and doctrinal results that (...) can be considered to have been achieved in its itinerary so far. The appearance of a comprehensive, two-volume consideration of the history of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, written by one of the tradition’s leading contemporary practitioners, is therefore cause for excitement. And Scott Soames’ two-volume Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century is, by any measure, an impressive work. Running to almost 900 pages, it assembles careful, meticulous and detailed expositions and analyses of the arguments and positions of a wide variety of thinkers within the analytic tradition, evaluating the extent of their insight and suggesting implications for philosophical thought today. The analysis is uniformly lucid and clearly written, offering the student of the analytic tradition an indispensable source of arguments she may want to consider in her own work, as well as, in its own argumentation, a suggestive model of at least one way of doing analytic philosophy. Over the course of his reconstructive and evaluative analysis, Soames considers the views and arguments of early analytic philosophers like Russell and Moore, logical positivists like Ayer and.. (shrink)

Around the turn of the century the American engineer Frederick Taylor introduced scientific methods in manufacturing to improve the efficiency. The objective was to control labour by means of rational methods, technological means, and management techniques. Taylor has been at the centre of bitter controversies. On the one hand, his principles were warmly welcomed by industries and universities. On the other hand, they were strongly opposed by unions and politics. Despite the strong opposition, the ideas of Taylor spread quickly.

This book provides an analysis of the construction, diagnosis (as chaotic) and evaluation of models in chaos theory. It contains a detailed look at the interaction of the different models used in chaos theory and analyses how these models influence the way chaos is defined. Furthermore, the book discusses the conditions for the occurrence of chaos and the detection of chaos in nature.

This book provides an analysis of the construction, diagnosis (as chaotic) and evaluation of models in chaos theory. It contains a detailed look at the interaction of the different models used in chaos theory and analyses how these models influence the way chaos is defined. Furthermore, the book discusses the conditions for the occurrence of chaos and the detection of chaos in nature.

Much critical attention has been paid to the use of qualitative research in the medical sciences, with proponents advancing discussions of what it is and how it may be appraised, and critics arguing that it is of exploratory use only. Using philosophical analysis, I argue that such discussions are flawed insofar as they endorse the idea that qualitative and quantitative research are epistemically distinct categories involving different types of knowledge. Rather, I claim that such approaches are actually culturally (...) distinct involving different intellectual histories. Thus highlighting that qualitative research may not necessarily be exploratory, and that the qualitative-quantitative divide could be closed through the development of innovative social strategies. This makes possible not only shared standard setting practices, but also novel techniques which could optimise medical research to improve health care and save lives. (shrink)

In this paper, two theories of feminist liberalism (Okin and Nussbaum) are evaluated from a multicultural-feminist perspective. This paper argues that Ayelet Shachar's multicultural feminism offers us a better theoretical philosophical model to cope with gender and multicultural issues than feminist comprehensive liberalism and political liberalism do.

Nowadays, there is a growing interest in the study of various philosophical concepts. One of the relevant topics is the mutual influence or antagonism of Eastern and Western teachings about ethics and morality. One of the insufficiently studied problems is the mutual influences of I. Kant’s ideas and Confucius’ teachings. The goal of the study is to analyse the rational ethics of I. Kant and the spiritual and moral values of Confucianism within the comparative philosophical perspective, to consider (...) their common and distinctive features. The novelty of this study is an integrated approach and a detailed approach to the study of the outlined problems. In this study, the directions for further research were outlined, which deal with a deeper analysis of certain aspects of the teachings of I. Kant and Confucius. The materials and conclusions can be used for the preparation of various courses. (shrink)

THE LENGTHENING SHELF of books on the special problems of historical knowledge reminds us that few obiter dicta have worn quite as badly as Santayana's remark that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Though it epitomizes a recurrent mood of impatience with those who refuse to acknowledge our own favorite analogies between present problems and past disasters, yet it leaves one feeling uneasily committed to a set of underlying presuppositions which one would not care to (...) make explicit. Is the historical process of itself really repetitive? How many great historical changes have been brought about—as in the Renaissance—by those who did know history and wished to repeat its classic forms? Or is it possible, as Santayana suggests, that knowledge of history brings release from otherwise ineluctable forces and their consequences? What in Santayana's time seemed a radical denial of the commonplace notion of inevitable progress now appears as the most conservative of nineteenth-century attitudes: the belief that historical reality is there, weaving and reweaving its tangled web, subject like the laws of nature to discovery and perhaps exploitation, but remaining a field of real entities and forces whether discovered or not. Santayana's dictum is of a piece with all those claims which begin, "History shows that...." But few historians or philosophers now have much sympathy even with the possibility of such claims. Were there significantly repetitive patterns of major events, historical knowledge would indeed make the present an elaborate form of déjà vu. Yet historians above all are reluctant to claim that their subject is a manual of politics or of anything else. Call any current event "another Munich," and any historian worth his salt will list seventeen important respects in which that event does not, and even could not resemble Chamberlain's ill-starred agreement. (shrink)