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Author: Willard Van Orman Quine
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2008-11-30
Total Pages: 556
ISBN-13: 9780674030848
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the twenty years between his last collection of essays and his death in 2000, Quine continued his work and occasionally modified his position on central philosophical issues. This volume collects the main essays from this last, productive period of Quine’s prodigious career.
Author: Terry Horgan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 019985842X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume brings together many of Terence Horgan's essays on paradoxes: Newcomb's problem, the Monty Hall problem, the two-envelope paradox, the sorites paradox, and the Sleeping Beauty problem. Newcomb's problem arises because the ordinary concept of practical rationality constitutively includes normative standards that can sometimes come into direct conflict with one another. The Monty Hall problem reveals that sometimes the higher-order fact of one's having reliably received pertinent new first-order information constitutes stronger pertinent new information than does the new first-order information itself. The two-envelope paradox reveals that epistemic-probability contexts are weakly hyper-intensional; that therefore, non-zero epistemic probabilities sometimes accrue to epistemic possibilities that are not metaphysical possibilities; that therefore, the available acts in a given decision problem sometimes can simultaneously possess several different kinds of non-standard expected utility that rank the acts incompatibly. The sorites paradox reveals that a certain kind of logical incoherence is inherent to vagueness, and that therefore, ontological vagueness is impossible. The Sleeping Beauty problem reveals that some questions of probability are properly answered using a generalized variant of standard conditionalization that is applicable to essentially indexical self-locational possibilities, and deploys "preliminary" probabilities of such possibilities that are not prior probabilities. The volume also includes three new essays: one on Newcomb's problem, one on the Sleeping Beauty problem, and an essay on epistemic probability that articulates and motivates a number of novel claims about epistemic probability that Horgan has come to espouse in the course of his writings on paradoxes. A common theme unifying these essays is that philosophically interesting paradoxes typically resist either easy solutions or solutions that are formally/mathematically highly technical. Another unifying theme is that such paradoxes often have deep-sometimes disturbing-philosophical morals.
Author: Willard Van Orman Quine
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 1969
Total Pages: 180
ISBN-13: 9780231083577
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIntended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by W. V. Quine in Word and Objects, the essays included herein are intimately related and concern themselves with three philosophical preoccupations: the nature of meaning, the meaning of existence and the nature of natural knowledge.
Author: Alan Montefiore
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-09
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 1000765717
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book collects essays by Alan Montefiore on the role philosophy plays in the formation of the self, and how philosophical questions regarding the nature of reason, truth, and identity inform ethics and politics. It offers a comprehensive overview of Montefiore’s influential, non-dogmatic philosophical voice. Throughout his 70-year career, Montefiore sought to bridge the analytic/continental divide and develop a new way of thinking about philosophy. He defines philosophy as the search for a higher-order understanding of whatever the situation or activity in which one may be involved or engaged, an understanding which may be achieved and expressed by and in a variety of different forms of philosophical persuasion, and which may serve to shed new light on particular problems. The book’s essays, half of which are previously unpublished, are divided into two thematic sections. The first focuses on the nature of philosophy, while the second addresses the relationship between philosophy and moral and political responsibilities. Philosophy and the Human Paradox will be of interest to philosophers and students who work on ethics, Kantian and post-Kantian continental philosophy, and political philosophy.
Author: Paul Rakita Goldin
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780812694000
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe first study of this ancient text in over 70 years, Rituals of the Way explores how the Xunzi influenced Confucianism and other Chinese philosophies through its emphasis on "the Way."
Author: Raymond Smullyan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1986-10-15
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 0671628313
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom Simon & Schuster, This Book Needs No Title is Raymond Smullyan's budget of living paradoxes—the author of What is the Name of This Book? Including eighty paradoxes, logical labyrinths, and intriguing enigmas progress from light fables and fancies to challenging Zen exercises and a novella and probe the timeless questions of philosophy and life.
Author: Dale Jacquette
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-09-19
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 1317546539
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this challenging and provocative analysis, Dale Jacquette argues that contemporary philosophy labours under a number of historically inherited delusions about the nature of logic and the philosophical significance of certain formal properties of specific types of logical constructions. Exposing some of the key misconceptions about formal symbolic logic and its relation to thought, language and the world, Jacquette clears the ground of some very well-entrenched philosophical doctrines about the nature of logic, including some of the most fundamental seldom-questioned parts of elementary propositional and predicate-quantificational logic. Having presented difficulties for conventional ways of thinking about truth functionality, the metaphysics of reference and predication, the role of a concept of truth in a theory of meaning, among others, Jacquette proceeds to reshape the network of ideas about traditional logic that philosophy has acquired along with modern logic itself. In so doing Jacquette is able to offer a new perspective on a number of existing problems in logic and philosophy of logic.
Author: Michael Clark
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-11-12
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 113621805X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKParadoxes from A to Z, Third edition is the essential guide to paradoxes, and takes the reader on a lively tour of puzzles that have taxed thinkers from Zeno to Galileo, and Lewis Carroll to Bertrand Russell. Michael Clark uncovers an array of conundrums, such as Achilles and the Tortoise, Theseus’ Ship, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma, taking in subjects as diverse as knowledge, science, art and politics. Clark discusses each paradox in non-technical terms, considering its significance and looking at likely solutions. This third edition is revised throughout, and adds nine new paradoxes that have important bearings in areas such as law, logic, ethics and probability. Paradoxes from A to Z, Third edition is an ideal starting point for those interested not just in philosophical puzzles and conundrums, but anyone seeking to hone their thinking skills.
Author: Willard Van Orman Quine
Publisher:
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 358
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA respected Harvard logician and philosopher gathers together twenty-nine writings dealing with the foundations of mathematics, Rudolf Carnap, lin-guistics, truth, analyticity, modal logic, propositional attitudes, and ontology.
Author: Mitchell S. Green
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2007-01-11
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 0191515728
DOWNLOAD EBOOKG. E. Moore famously observed that to assert, 'I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don't believe that I did' would be 'absurd'. Moore calls it a 'paradox' that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Over half a century later, such sayings continue to perplex philosophers and other students of language, logic, and cognition. Ludwig Wittgenstein was fascinated by Moore's example, and the absurdity of Moore's saying was intensively discussed in the mid-20th century. Yet the source of the absurdity has remained elusive, and its recalcitrance has led researchers in recent decades to address it with greater care. In this definitive treatment of the problem of Moorean absurdity Green and Williams survey the history and relevance of the paradox and leading approaches to resolving it, and present new essays by leading thinkers in the area. Contributors Jonathan Adler, Bradley Armour-Garb, Jay D. Atlas, Thomas Baldwin, Claudio de Almeida, André Gallois, Robert Gordon, Mitchell Green, Alan Hájek, Roy Sorensen, John Williams
