Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1914.

This is a book about infinity, specifically the infinity of numbers and sequences. Amazing properties arise, for instance, some kinds of infinity are argued to be greater than others. Along the way the author will demonstrate how infinity can be made to create beautiful 'art', guided by the development of underlying mathematics. This book will provide a fascinating read for anyone interested in number theory, infinity, math art, and/or generative art, and could be used a valuable supplement to any course (...) on these topics. (shrink)

In Scepticism and Naturalism Strawson characterized his position as a form of naturalism. Not even in that work, however, did he subscribe to any standardly recognized types of naturalism (ontological, epistemological, meta-philosophical). Strawson’s naturalism, as far as it goes, is anthropological instead of scientific, and descriptive rather than revisionary. It insists that central features of our common-sense conceptual scheme are part of our human nature and therefore immune to naturalization by either reduction or elimination. My contribution explores both strengths and (...) weaknesses of this position. It discusses the ‘relativizing move’ that insists on the legitimacy of both the ‘participant’ or ‘involved’ perspective of everyday life vs. the ‘objective’ or ‘detached’ of science as well as Strawson’s ‘relaxed realism’. It ends with a defence of the general idea of anthropological naturalism. In spite of problems concerning details of execution, this approach is more sober, realistic and illuminating than mainstream naturalisms. (shrink)

Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out (...) of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole. (shrink)

Rahat Naqvi and Hans Smits' edited collection, "Thinking about and Enacting Curriculum in 'Frames of War'" is centered on the theme of how the current global order creates precarious conditions for human life. The contributors respond to the challenges Judith Butler posed about the fragility of life and questions about how we apprehend, and take up ethically, our responsibilities for those who are considered "Other." The overarching objective of the book is the meaning of a call to ethics, and (...) how discussion of framing and frames is a provocation to think about our responsibilities as curriculum scholars and practitioners"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Heidegger's Crisis shows not only how the Nazis exploited philosophical ideas and used philosophers to gain public acceptance, but also how German philosophers played into the hands of the Nazis. Hans Sluga describes the growth, from World War I onward, of a powerful right-wing movement in German philosophy, in which nationalistic, antisemitic, and antidemocratic ideas flourished.

Introduces contemporary American philosophy of technology through six of its leading figures. The six American philosophers of technology whose work is profiled in this clear and concise introduction to the field—Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Feenberg, Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, and Langdon Winner—represent a new, empirical direction in the philosophical study of technology that has developed mainly in North America. In place of the grand philosophical schemes of the classical generation of European philosophers of technology, the contemporary American generation addresses (...) concrete technological practices and the co-evolution of technology and society in modern culture. Six Dutch philosophers associated with Twente University survey and critique the full scope and development of their American colleagues’ work, often illustrating shifts from earlier to more recent interests. Individual chapters focus on Borgmann’s engagement with technology and everyday life; Dreyfus’s work on the limits of artificial intelligence; Feenberg’s perspectives on the cultural and social possibilities opened by technologies; Haraway’s conception of the cyborg and its attendant blurring of boundaries; Ihde’s explorations of the place of technology in the lifeworld; and Winner’s fascination with the moral and political implications of modern technologies. American Philosophy of Technology offers an insightful and readable introduction to this new and distinctly American philosophical turn. Contributors are Hans Achterhuis, Philip Brey, René Munnik, Martijntje Smits, Pieter Tijmes, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. (shrink)

Rethinking politics in a new vocabulary, Hans Sluga challenges the firmly held assumption that there exists a single common good which politics is meant to realize. He argues that politics is not a natural but a historical phenomenon, and not a single thing but a multiplicity of political forms and values only loosely related. He contrasts two traditions in political philosophy: a 'normative theorizing' that extends from Plato to John Rawls and a newer 'diagnostic practice' that emerged with Marx (...) and Nietzsche and has found its three most prominent twentieth-century practitioners in Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. He then examines the sources of diagnostic political thinking, analyzes its achievements, and offers a critical assessment of its limitations. His important book will be of interest to a wide range of upper-level students and scholars in political philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

The concept of an evidential conditional If A then C that can be defined by the conjunction of A>C and ¬C>¬A, where > is a conditional of the kind introduced by Stalnaker and Lewis, has recently been studied in a series of papers by Vincenzo Crupi and Andrea Iacona. In this paper I argue that Crupi and Iacona’s central idea that contraposition captures the idea of evidential support cannot be maintained. I give examples showing that contraposition is neither necessary nor (...) sufficient for a conditional’s antecedent supporting its consequent. Crupi and Iacona’s alternative account of evidential conditionals that is based on a probabilistic measure of evidential support cannot add to the credentials of their modal account, because both the theoretical role of contraposition and the resulting logic are different in this account. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the historical roots of the quest for rigor associated with analytic philosophy. Starting out from distinctions between different senses of “rigourµ, it considers the rather diverse conceptions and pursuits of rigour in Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein and Carnap. On that basis it diagnoses a potential conflict that some of them were aware of, but that has been ignored by recent commentators, namely between certain kinds of rigour on the hand, clarity and surveyability on the other. (...) That conflict is related to the contrast between formal and non-formal ways of pursuing rigour. Frege, Wittgenstein and Carnap occupy distinct positions concerning both issues. Nevertheless, all three are united with n the hope to achieve philosophical progress by means of clear questions and statements put in the service of rigorous argument. (shrink)

Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the (...) distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The Tractatus revolves around the connection between two central topics – the preconditions of symbolic representation and the nature of logic-cum-philosophy. Proper philosophy is an activity, namely of revealing the hidden structures that allow language to represent reality by way of logical analysis. At the same time the main purpose of such logical analysis consists in revealing metaphysical statements to be nonsensical. In the subsequent development of analytic philosophy, these two ideas parted company. The positive aim of revealing the logical (...) form of sentences resulted in a program closely associated with Davidson, namely a theory of meaning for natural languages that yields metaphysical corollaries. The negative aim of overcoming metaphysics ushered in the activity of dissolving conceptual confusions through conceptual rather than logical analysis, propelled by the later Wittgenstein. My presentation pursues these historical lines of influence. But the ultimate aim is a substantive one, namely to establish whether the two projects can be kept apart. With the later Wittgenstein, I criticize the claim that formal calculi constitute the hidden structure of natural languages. But I also contend that the hope of engaging in anti-metaphysical dialectic without relying on logico-conceptual analysis of some kind falls prey to a “myth of mere method”. (shrink)

The term theodicy was coined by the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and is inherent in the question of how evil can exist if an intrinsically good God guides everything. The publication of this oeuvre initiated intense philosophical and theological discourse in the subsequent centuries, during which many issues that bare upon human well-being were articulated. Also, Leibniz’s rational approach to the relationship between God and evil raised a number of issues related to the topic of belief. This topic has (...) entangled discourses on theodicy with a long-lasting debate on beliefs, which goes back to Antiquity. Recently, a paradigm-shift shed new light on the understanding of belief. Science has begun to address the neurophysiological mechanisms of the processes that underpin belief formation, modulation, and change. The term credition was coined in order to capture and reflect this new and innovative understanding of the fluidity of beliefs and believing. This paper presents various features of a pattern of interrelationships between well-being, theodicy, and credition. (shrink)

In this article, I put forward a basic philosophical claim: empirical scientific knowledge, that is, knowledge generated in experimental and observational practices, presupposes real causation. My discussion exploits two core notions from the philosophical analysis of scientific experimentation and observation: the aim of realizing object-apparatus correlations and the required control of the relevant interactions between environment and experimental or observational system. The conclusion is that, without the notion of real causation, acquiring epistemically sound empirical knowledge is impossible. Several empiricist objections (...) to this conclusion are discussed and refuted. As a consequence, empiricism faces an unsolvable dilemma: either it cannot account for empirical knowledge or it should accept the existence of unobservable but real causal interactions. (shrink)

This article presents a detailed, novel account of the emergence of (the meaning of) empirical concepts. Acquiring experience and empirical concepts is shown to be the result of multifaceted, cognitive processes, which require both material realization and conceptual interpretation. Generally speaking, the meaning of empirical concepts consists of several distinct components, but it includes at least a structuring and an abstracting component. These two meaning components are abstract entities, which can be justifiably interpreted as real objects. On this basis, I (...) address the subject of emergence. The primary claim is that the abstracting meaning component (but not the structuring one) emerges from its underlying empirical processes: it both depends on and transcends these processes. This claim is expounded by discussing relevant similarities and dissimilarities between the emergence of abstract meanings and a range of central features of emergence prominent in recent debates on this topic. The conception of empirical concepts with emergent abstracting meaning components involves an interpretation that avoids the problematic extremes of both empiricism and Platonism. (shrink)

In this paper we provide an analysis of the logical relations within the conceptual or lexical field of angles in 2D geometry. The basic tripartition into acute/right/obtuse angles is extended in two steps: first zero and straight angles are added, and secondly reflex and full angles are added, in both cases extending the logical space of angles. Within the framework of logical geometry, the resulting partitions of these logical spaces yield bitstring semantics of increasing complexity. These bitstring analyses allow a (...) straightforward account of the Aristotelian relations between angular concepts. In addition, also relational concepts such as complementary and supplementary angles receive a natural bitstring analysis. (shrink)

Most logic–based approaches characterize abduction as a kind of backwards deduction plus additional conditions, which means that a number of conditions is specified that enable one to decide whether or not a particular abductive inference is sound . Despite the fact that these approaches succeed in specifying which formulas count as valid consequences of abductive inference steps, they do not explicate the way people actually reason by means of abductive inferences. This is most clearly shown by the absence of a (...) decent proof theory. Instead, search procedures are provided that enable one to determine the right abductive consequences. However, these do not by far resemble human reasoning. In order to explicate abductive reasoning more realistically, an alternative approach will be provided in this article, namely, one that is based on the adaptive logics programme. Proof theoretically, this approach interprets the argumentation schema affirming the consequent as a defeasible rule of inference. This comes down to the fact that the abductive consequences obtained by means of AC are accepted only for as long as certain conditions are satis.ed—e.g. as long as their negation has not been derived from the background theory. In the end, only the unproblematic applications of AC are retained, while the problematic ones are rejected. In this way, the adaptive logics approach to abduction succeeds to provide a more realistic explication of the way people reason by means of abductive inferences. Moreover, as multiple abduction processes will be characterized, this article may be considered as the first step in the direction of a general formal approach to abduction based on the adaptive logics programme. (shrink)