The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

Author: Willard Van Orman Quine

Publisher:

Published: 1976

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13:

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A 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.


Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays

Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays

Author: Willard Van Orman Quine

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2008-11-30

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9780674030848

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In 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.


Essays on Paradoxes

Essays on Paradoxes

Author: Terry Horgan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 019985842X

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This 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.


Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

Ontological Relativity and Other Essays

Author: Willard Van Orman Quine

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780231083577

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Intended 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.


Moore's Paradox

Moore's Paradox

Author: Mitchell S. Green

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2007-01-11

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0191515728

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G. 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


Philosophy and the Human Paradox

Philosophy and the Human Paradox

Author: Alan Montefiore

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-12-09

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1000765717

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This 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.


Selected Logic Papers

Selected Logic Papers

Author: Willard Van Orman Quine

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780674798366

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For more than two generations, W. V. Quine has contributed fundamentally to the substance, the pedagogy, and the philosophy of mathematical logic. Selected Logic Papers, long out of print and now reissued with eight additional essays, includes much of the author's important work on mathematical logic and the philosophy of mathematics from the past sixty years.


This Book Needs No Title

This Book Needs No Title

Author: Raymond Smullyan

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1986-10-15

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0671628313

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From 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.