- 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons
- Rebecca Kukla
- Mark Lance
- Much of twentieth-century philosophy was organized around the “linguistic turn,” in which metaphysical and epistemological issues were approached through an analysis of language. This book demonstrates that non-declarative speech acts—including vocative hails (“Yo!”) and calls to shared attention (“Lo!”)—are as fundamental to the possibility and structure of meaningful language as are declaratives.
- Hardcover 2009
- All or Nothing
- Paul W. Franks
- In this work, the first overview of German Idealism that is both conceptual and methodological, Paul W. Franks offers a philosophical reconstruction that is true to the movement's own times and resources and, at the same time, deeply relevant to contemporary thought. The result is a characterization of German Idealism that reveals its sources as well as its pertinence--and its challenge--to contemporary philosophical naturalism.
- Hardcover 2005
- Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays
- W. V. Quine
- Edited by Dagfinn Follesdal
- Edited by Douglas Boynton Quine
- 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.
- Hardcover 2008
- Confusion
- Joseph L. Camp
- Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. He proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science.
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2004
- The Course of Recognition
- Paul Ricoeur
- Translated by David Pellauer
- Recognition, though it figures profoundly in our understanding of objects and persons, identity and ideas, has never before been the subject of a single, sustained philosophical inquiry. This work, by one of contemporary philosophy's most distinguished voices, pursues recognition through its various philosophical guises and meanings and, through the "course of recognition," seeks to develop nothing less than a proper hermeneutics of mutual recognition.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge
- Henry Plotkin
- Bringing together evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, Henry Plotkin presents a new science of knowledge that traces an unbreakable link between instinct and our ability to know. Since our ability to know our world depends primarily on what we call intelligence, intelligence must be understood as an extension of instinct. The capacity for knowledge is deeply rooted in our biology and, in a special sense, is shared by all living things.
- Hardcover 1994 / Paperback 1997
- Depth
- Michael Strevens
- Strevens proposes a theory of scientific explanation and understanding that revises and augments the familiar causal approach to explanation. The result is an account of explanation that has especially significant consequences for the higher-level sciences: biology, psychology, economics, and other social sciences.
- Hardcover 2009
- Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
- Wilfrid Sellars
- Richard Rorty
- Study Guide by Robert B. Brandom
- The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. This publication makes comprehensible a difficult but important figure in this movement.
- Paperback 1997 / Hardcover 1997
- Ethics without Ontology
- Hilary Putnam
- In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered objective--a question that has vexed philosophers over the past century. Reviewing what he deems the disastrous consequences of ontology's influence on analytic philosophy--in particular, the contortions it imposes upon debates about the objective of ethical judgments--Putnam proposes abandoning the very idea of ontology.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005
- Expression and the Inner
- David H. Finkelstein
- At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. This book contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion of expression. What's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge and first-person authority, but also what it is that distinguishes conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the philosophy of mind.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2008
- Frege's Logic
- Danielle Macbeth
- For many philosophers, modern philosophy begins in 1879 with the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift, in which Frege presents the first truly modern logic in his symbolic language, Begriffsschrift, or concept-script. Macbeth's book, the first full-length study of this language, offers a highly original new reading of Frege's logic based directly on Frege's own two-dimensional notation and his various writings about logic.
- Hardcover 2005
- From Stimulus to Science
- W. V. Quine
- W. V. Quine has produced a sharp, sprightly book that encapsulates the whole of his philosophical enterprise, including his thinking on all the key components of his epistemological stance--especially the value of logic and mathematics.
- Hardcover 1995 / Paperback 1998
- In the Space of Reasons
- Wilfrid Sellars
- Edited by Kevin Scharp
- Edited by Robert B. Brandom
- Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy. The volume presents the most readable of Sellars's essays in a sequence that illuminates the meaning at the heart of his work.
- Hardcover 2007
- Invariances
- Robert Nozick
- Recent scientific advances have placed many traditional philosophical concepts under great stress. In this pathbreaking book, the eminent philosopher Robert Nozick rethinks and transforms the concepts of truth, objectivity, necessity, contingency, consciousness, and ethics. Using an original method, he presents bold new philosophical theories that take account of scientific advances in physics, evolutionary biology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience, and casts current cultural controversies (such as whether all truth is relative and whether ethics is objective) in a wholly new light.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
- J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words
- Eli Friedlander
- Friedlander's book provides an afterlife for the Reveries in modern philosophy. It constitutes an alternative to the analytic tradition's revival of Rousseau, primarily through Rawls's influential vision of the social contract. It also counters the fate of Rousseau's writings in the continental tradition, determined by and large by Derrida's deconstruction.
- Hardcover 2004
- Life and Action
- Michael Thompson
- Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts—concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Thompson’s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson’s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus.
- Hardcover 2008
- Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality
- John McDowell
- This is the second volume of John McDowell's selected papers. These nineteen essays collectively report on McDowell's involvement, over more than twenty years, with questions about the interface between the philosophies of language and mind and with issues in general epistemology. Throughout McDowell focuses on questions to do with content.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001
- Mind, Value, and Reality
- John McDowell
- This volume collects some of John McDowell's most influential papers of the last two decades. These essays deal with several themes including the interpretation of Aristotle and Plato's ethical writings, questions in moral philosophy that arise from reflection on the Greek tradition, Wittengensteinian ideas about reason in action, and issues central to the philosophy of mind.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001
- Naturalism in Question
- Mario De Caro, Editor
- David Macarthur, Editor
- Today the majority of philosophers in the English-speaking world adhere to the "naturalist" credos that philosophy is continuous with science, and that the natural sciences provide a complete account of all that exists--whether human or nonhuman. However, there is a growing skepticism about the adequacy of this complacent orthodoxy. This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a more inclusive or liberal naturalism.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2008
- Persons and Things
- Barbara Johnson
- In Persons and Things, Johnson begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence. The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space.
- Hardcover 2008
- Quine in Dialogue
- W. V. Quine
- Edited by Dagfinn Follesdal
- Edited by Douglas Boynton Quine
- Quine was one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers. This volume begins with a number of interviews Quine gave about his perspectives on twentieth-century logic, science and philosophy, the ideas of others, and philosophy generally. Also included are his most important articles, reviews, and comments on other philosophers, from Rudolf Carnap to P. F. Strawson.
- Hardcover 2008
- Reasonably Vicious
- Candace Vogler
- Is unethical conduct necessarily irrational? Answering this question requires giving an account of practical reason, of practical good, and of the source or point of wrongdoing. By the time most contemporary philosophers have done the first two, they have lost sight of the third, chalking up bad action to rashness, weakness of will, or ignorance. In this book, Candace Vogler does all three, taking as her guides scholars who contemplated why some people perform evil deeds. In doing so, she sets out to at once engage and redirect contemporary debates about ethics, practical reason, and normativity
- Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2008
- Saving the Differences
- Crispin Wright
- Crispin Wright's Truth and Objectivity brought about a far-reaching reorientation of the metaphysical debates concerning realism and truth. The essays in this companion volume prefigure, elaborate, or defend the proposals put forward in that landmark work. The collection includes the Gareth Evans memorial lecture in which the program of Truth and Objectivity was first announced, as well as all of Wright's published reactions to the extensive commentary his study provoked; it presents substantial new developments and applications of the pluralistic outlook on the realism debates proposed in Truth and Objectivity, and further pursues its distinctive minimalist conceptions of truth and of truth-aptitude.
- Hardcover 2003
- Self-Consciousness
- Sebastian Rödl
- The topic of this book is self-consciousness, which is a kind of knowledge, namely knowledge of oneself as oneself, or self-knowledge. Rödl's thesis is that self-knowledge is not empirical; it does not spring from sensory affection. Rather, self-knowledge is knowledge from spontaneity; its object and its source are the subject's own activity, in the primary instance its acts of thinking, both theoretical and practical thinking, belief and action. As the centrality of self-consciousness can be said to be the principal thought animating Kant and his Idealist successors, the book can be read as an attempt to recover and rejuvenate the achievement of the German Idealist tradition.
- Hardcover 2007
- Signs of Sense
- Eli Friedlander
- This work seeks to shed light on one of the most enigmatic masterpieces of twentieth-century thought. At the heart of Eli Friedlander's interpretation is the internal relation between the logical and the ethical in the Tractatus, a relation that emerges in the work of drawing the limits of language. Bearing on the question of the divide between analytic and Continental philosophy, this interpretation views Wittgenstein's work as a possible mediation between these two central philosophical traditions of the modern age.
- Hardcover 2001
- The Struggle against Dogmatism
- Oskari Kuusela
- The Struggle against Dogmatism elucidates Wittgenstein’s view that there are no theses, doctrines, or theories in philosophy. This book makes Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach comprehensible by presenting it as a response to specific problems relating to the practice of philosophy, in particular the problem of dogmatism.
- Hardcover 2008
- Tales of the Mighty Dead
- Robert B. Brandom
- A work in the history of systematic philosophy that is itself animated by a systematic philosophic aspiration, this book by one of the most prominent American philosophers working today provides an entirely new way of looking at the development of Western philosophy from Descartes to the present.
- Hardcover 2002
- Truth and Predication
- Donald Davidson
- Edited by Kevin Sharpe
- Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
- Unshadowed Thought
- Charles Travis
- This book mounts a sustained attack on ideas that are dear to many practitioners of analytic philosophy. Charles Travis targets the seductive illusion that--in Wittgenstein's terms--"if anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it, he is operating a calculus according to definite rules." This book rejects the idea that thoughts are essentially representational items whose content is independent of context. In doing so, it undermines the foundations of much contemporary philosophy of mind.
- Hardcover 2001