This volume presents Rosenberg's previously published studies of the central elements and implications of Sellars' philosophy, along with three new essays that ...

Jay Rosenberg offers a systematic philosophical theory of knowledge which is specifically responsive to the fact that we always engage the world from a particular perspective within it. It consequently calls into question in a fundamental way many received understandings regarding the relationships among the concepts of knowledge, belief, justification, and truth.

Jay Rosenberg introduces Immanuel Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason, from a "relaxed" problem-oriented perspective which treats Kant as an especially insightful practicing philosopher, from whom we still have much to learn, intelligently and creatively responding to significant questions that transcend his work's historical setting. Rosenberg's main project is to command a clear view of how Kant understands various perennial problems, how he attempts to resolve them, and to what extent he succeeds. At the same time the book is (...) an introduction to the challenges of reading the text of Kant's work and, to that end, selectively adopts a more rigorous historical and exegetical stance. Accessing Kant will be an invaluable resource for advanced students and for any scholar seeking Rosenberg's own distinctive insights into Kant's work. (shrink)

This book is nominally about linguistic representation. But, since it is we who do the representing, it is also about us. And, since it is the universe which we represent, it is also about the universe. In the end, then, this book is about everything, which, since it is a philosophy book, is as it should be. I recognize that it is nowadays unfashionable to write books about every thing. Philosophers of language, it will be said, ought to stick to (...) writing about language; philosophers of science, to writing about science; epis temologists, to writing about knowing; and so on. The real world, however, perversely refuses to carve itself up so neatly, and, although I recognize that the real w,orld is nowadays also unfashionable, in the end I judged that one might get closer to the truth of various matters by going along with it. So I have done so. lt was Wilfrid Sellars who initially convinced me of the virtues of this way of proceeding. At this point one normally says something like "The debt that this book owes him is immense". I would say it too, were it not to understate the case, From Wilfrid, I learned to think about things. If the upshot of my thinking tends, as it obviously does, to show a general con silience with the upshot of his, it is primarily because he is so very good at it - and he had a head start. (shrink)

Based on the author's nearly 30 years' of teaching introductory philosophy — and his observations of where beginning readers run into difficulty — this compact “primer” gives readers the basic tools they need to explore philosophical reading and writing for the first time. Provides insights and strategies for helping readers get started with reading, thinking about, and discussing philosophical concepts and writing short philosophical essays about what they've been reading and thinking; includes a new chapter that illustrates techniques for probing (...) beneath the expository surface of a given question to uncover the inevitable structure of presuppositions and problems underlying it. (shrink)

Jay Rosenberg's penetrating and persuasively argued analysis of the central metaphysical and moral questions pertaining to death has been updated and revised to expand and deepen several of its key arguments and to address conceptual developments of the past fifteen years. Among the topics discussed are: Life After Death; The Limits of Theorizing; The Limits of Imagination; Death and Personhood; Values and Rights; Mercy Killing; Prolonging Life; Rational Suicide; and One's Own Death. Rosenberg's prose is lucid, lively, thoroughly absorbing, and (...) accessible to introductory-level readers. Essential reading for anyone interested in reflecting on this engaging topic. (shrink)

Sellars’s views on the Myth of the Given and the ontological status of secondary qualities, one would have thought, are well-known, even if not always well-understood. One would not have expected his Carus Lectures, then, to offer anything radically new and exciting. The ground that they cover is, after all, familiar—from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, from “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, from “The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem”, and from the ensuing debates with Cornman and (...) with Firth. One would not really have anticipated many surprises. But one would have been wrong. (shrink)

Rosenberg concludes with a critical reassessment of widely accepted views regarding the relationships among natural languages, mathematical formalisms, and philosophical commitments. The culmination of twenty years' reflection, Beyond Formalism is an original and sophisticated book of importance to both philosophers and linguists.

According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting "fictions". Each rests upon a "mistake", the commingling of "qualities of the imagination" or "impressions of reflection" with "external" impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither. Among Kant's aims in the First Critique is the securing of precisely these entitlements. Like (...) Hume, he acknowledges the correlativity of the notions of temporal duration and persisting self-identical objects (i.e., continuant substances). Unlike Hume, however, he undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes. (shrink)

During his atomistic period, Russell felt compelled to include negative facts in his ontology. In this essay, I diagnose the grounds of that compulsion, Assess the cogency of an ontology which includes negative facts, And, Finding it inadequate, Consider finally alternative solutions within the atomistic framework to the root problems of negation.

I develop one account of propositions as pictures sharing logical form with what they depict. Two concepts of simplicity in the "tractatus" are then isolated. Since characterization of sachverhalten as configurations of referential simples does not entail their inferential simplicity, By rejecting the tractarian theory of inference, I retain the picture theory without commitment to atomistic ontology. Interpretation of inference as performance then gives rise to a second sense of picturing.

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,, Cambridge University Press,, pp. 201+xvi ____________, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth,, Philosophical Papers Volume 1, Cambridge University Press,, pp. 226+x. ____________, Essays on Heidegger and Others,, Philosophical Papers Volume 2, Cambridge UniversityPress,, pp. 202+x. Alan R. Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty,, Basil Blackwell,, pp. 384+xiv.

Rorty rejects the idea of a "permanent and neutral matrix of Heuristic concepts". The claim of privilege, however, is separable from the aim of universality, and this idea can be transposed into a regulative ideal, while still preserving the unique intellectual mission of a discipline of philosophy. Rorty's own positive picture of "edifying Philosophy" in contrast is arguably irresponsible and grounded in misreadings both of the epistemology of science and of episodes in the history of philosophy, especially the contributions of (...) Kant. (shrink)

Sellars’s views on the Myth of the Given and the ontological status of secondary qualities, one would have thought, are well-known, even if not always well-understood. One would not have expected his Carus Lectures, then, to offer anything radically new and exciting. The ground that they cover is, after all, familiar—from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, from “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, from “The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem”, and from the ensuing debates with Cornman and (...) with Firth. One would not really have anticipated many surprises. But one would have been wrong. (shrink)

Remarks such as 'I am in pain' and 'I think that it's raining' present opportunity for reflection and theory. Ostensibly such remarks report what one feels or thinks. But we do not in conversation treat these remarks as we do ordinary reports. If I ask you about the weather and you say, "I think it's raining," I can't complain that you told me just about your thoughts, and not about the weather. It is often held, moreover, when we do take (...) such remarks as revealing the speaker's mental states, those remarks are not subject to the kind of challenges that are in place with ordinary reports. Indeed, such remarks are often taken to exhibit some kind of epistemic privilege, and some have even maintained that one cannot be wrong when one says such things. (shrink)

Descartes' First Meditation is widely supposed to contain an intuitive and compelling argument in support of skepticism with respect to the existence of a natural world. The leading question of this essay is whether that is indeed the case. To this end, I undertake a detailed rereading of Descartes' text on its own terms, abstracting from what has been made of it during subsequent centuries. I conclude that the argument in fact to be found in the First Meditation rests upon (...) a series of problematic and disputable commitments - a classical formalist paradigm in epistemology, according to which, explicitly or implicitly, mathematical knowledge is treated as a model for knowledge in general; a broad notion of "reasons for doubt" which subsumes mere possibilities; and, most contentiously of all, the presumed ontological independence of mind and body. (shrink)

Philosophy is by its nature systematic in intent. In Wilfrid Sellars’ words, it aims “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Philosophical systematicity is thus a matter of both scope and structure. The purview of a philosophical inquiry may encompass more or less of what is of rational concern to us, and such structure as its outcome has will constituted by the fundamental globalcommitments that inform (...) it—realism, nominalism, expressivism, naturalism, pragmatism, or the like. Lack of systematic vision arguably subverts philosophical reflection, but genuine systematicity turns out to be surprisingly difficult to achieve. I offer three brief case studies, which illustrate different, but significantly related, ways of failing to achieve it. (shrink)

The argument of Kant's Second Analogy provides only for causal connections between successive appearances, but, as Kant himself immediately notes, in many cases cause and effect are simultaneous. This essay examines Kant's solution to the resulting problem of simultaneous causation. I argue that there are, in fact, at least two distinct problems falling together under the rubric 'simultaneous causation', both reflecting significant features of paradigmatic causal-explanatory scenarios within Newtonian mechanics - a problem about the 'persisting simultaneity' of a continuous or (...) sustaining cause with its effect, and a problem about the 'instantaneous simultaneity' of what Kant calls the causality of a cause with the onset of its effect. An exploration of the ingenious conceptual resources which Kant brings to bear on these problems turns out to yield interesting and important insights regarding his philosophy of mathematics as well. (shrink)