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This book grew out of the lectures that I prepared for my students in epis temology at SUNY College at Brockport beginning in 1974. The conception of the problem of perception and the interpretation of the sense-datum theory and its supporting arguments that are developed in Chapters One through Four originated in these lectures. The rest of the manuscript was first written during the 1975-1976 academic year, while I held an NEH Fellowship in Residence for College Teachers at Brown University, and during the ensuing summer, under a SUNY Faculty Research Fellowship. I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities and to the Research Foundation of the State University of New York for their support of my research. I am grateful to many former students, colleagues, and friends for their stimulating, constructive comments and criticisms. Among the former stu dents whose reactions and objections were most helpful are Richard Motroni, Donald Callen, Hilary Porter, and Glenn Shaikun. Among my colleagues at Brockport, I wish to thank Kevin Donaghy and Jack Glickman for their comments and encouragement. I am indebted to Eli Hirsch for reading and commenting most helpfully on the entire manuscript, to Peter M. Brown for a useful correspondence concerning key arguments in Chapters Five and Seven, to Keith Lehrer for a criticism of one of my arguments that led me to make some important revisions, and to Roderick M.
Intentionality is one of the central problems of modern philosophy. How can a thought, action or belief be about something? Sachs draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, C I Lewis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a new theory of intentionality that solves many of the problems faced by traditional conceptions.
Since Barry Stroud's classic paper in 1968, the general discussion on transcendental arguments tends to focus on examples from theoretical philosophy. It also tends to be pessimistic, or at least extremely reluctant, about the potential of this kind of arguments. Nevertheless, transcendental reasoning continues to play a prominent role in some recent approaches to moral philosophy. Moreover, some authors argue that transcendental arguments may be more promising in moral philosophy than they are in theoretical contexts. Against this background, the current volume focuses on transcendental arguments in practical philosophy. Experts from different countries and branches of philosophy share their views about whether there are actually differences between “theoretical” and “practical” uses of transcendental arguments. They examine and compare different versions of transcendental arguments in moral philosophy, explain their structure, and assess their respective problems and promises. This book offers all those interested in ethics, meta-ethics, or epistemology a more comprehensive understanding of transcendental arguments. It also provides them with new insights into uses of transcendental reasoning in moral philosophy.
This edited collection explores the philosophy of Clarence Irving Lewis through two major concepts that are integral to his conceptual pragmatism: the a priori and the given. The relation between these two elements of knowledge forms the core of Lewis’s masterpiece Mind and the World Order . While Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism is directed against any conception of the a priori as constraining the mind and experience, it also emphasizes the inalterability and the unavoidability of the given that remains the same through any interpretation of it by the mind. The chapters in this book probe Lewis’s new account of the relation between the a priori and the given in dialogue with other notable figures in twentieth-century philosophy, including Goodman, Putnam, Quine, Russell, Sellars, and Sheffer. C.I. Lewis: The A Priori and the Given represents a focused treatment of a longneglected figure in twentieth-century American philosophy.
Theory of "conceptual pragmatism" takes into account both modern philosophical thought and modern mathematics. Stimulating discussions of metaphysics, a priori, philosophic method, much more.
Rational moral action can neither be seen as a way of maximising personal values, nor derived from reason independent of them is this study's assertion. It contends that commitment to the moral point of view is presupposed by value systems.Rational moral action can neither be seen as a way of maximising personal values, nor derived from reason independent of them is this study's assertion. It contends that commitment to the moral point of view is presupposed by value systems.
Roderick Firth's writings on epistemology amount to an exceptionally careful and cogent defense of an account of perceptual knowledge in the tradition Firth called "radical empiricism". This important book collects all of Firth's major works on epistemology; it also contains his only publication in ethics, the extremely influential essay on "Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer". In addition, the book includes a number of important previously unpublished essays. Together, these writings constitute the most finished and compelling version of traditional empiricist epistemology. This book will be of value to students and scholars of epistemology, phenomenalism, and ethics.