The Philosophy of Panayot Butchvarov


Book Description

Providing a glimpse of a philosophy style that is as rare as it is valuable, this book is an anthology with twelve essays concerning the thought of Philosophy Professor, Panayot Butchvarov, with his comments on each. His work reveals great depth, running the gamut of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.




The Concept of Knowledge


Book Description




Anthropocentrism in Philosophy


Book Description

Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans’ good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three (ethics, epistemology, and antirealist metaphysics) can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans.




Being Qua Being


Book Description

Are there nonexistent things? What is the nature of informative identity statements? Are the notions of essential property and of essence intelligible, and, if so, how are they to be understood? Are individual things material substances or clusters of qualities? Can the account of the unity of a complex entity avoid vicious infinite regresses? These questions have attracted widespread attention among philosophers recently, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in the leading philosophical journals. In Being Qua Being they receive systematic, unified treatment, grounded in an account of the nature of the application to the world of our conceptual apparatus. A central thesis of the book is that the topic of identity is primary, and that existence and predication, both essential and accidental, are to be understood in terms of identity.




The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson


Book Description

The twenty-sixth volume in the highly acclaimed Library of Living Philosophers series is devoted to the work of British philosopher of logic and metaphysician, P. F. Strawson. Following the Library of Living Philosophers series format, the volume contains an intellectual autobiography, twenty critical and descriptive essays by leading philosophers from around the world, Strawson's replies to the essays, and a bibliography of Strawson's works. Born in 1919, Strawson was a leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy. He is the author of the early and extremely influential paper "On Referring" in which he criticized Russell's theory of definite descriptions. His most influential book, Individuals, helped to raise the status of metaphysics as a philosophical enterprise. Themes first addressed in this book continued to be of concern to him in his later work, including the possibility of objective knowledge, the subject-predicate distinction, the ontological status of persons, and the problem of individuation. Contributors to the book include: Ruth Garrett Millikan, Susan Haack, E. M. Adams, Panayot Butchvarov, Richard Behling, John McDowell, Simon Blackburn, Tadeusz Szubka, David Frederick Haight, Joseph S. Wu, Andrew G. Black, David Pears, Robert Boyd, Hilary Putnam, Paul F. Snowdon, Arindam Chakrabarti, Wenceslao J. Gonzalez, Ernest Sosa, Chung-M. Tse, John R. Searle, P. F. Strawson.




Metaphysical Perspectives


Book Description

In Metaphysical Perspectives, Nicholas Rescher offers a grand vision of how to conceptualize, and in some cases answer, some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics and value theory. Rescher addresses what he sees as the three prime areas of metaphysical concern: (1) the world as such and the architecture of nature at large, (2) ourselves as nature's denizens and our potential for learning about it, and (3) the transcendent domain of possibility and value. Rescher engages issues across a wide range of metaphysical themes, from different worldviews and ultimate questions to contingency and necessity, intelligent design and world-improvability, personhood and consciousness, empathy and other minds, moral obligation, and philosophical methodology. Over the course of this book, Rescher discusses, with his characteristic fusion of idealism and pragmatism, an integrated overview of the key philosophical problems grounded in an idealistically value-oriented approach. His discussion seeks to shed new light on philosophically central issues from a unified point of view.




Presidential Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 1991-2000


Book Description

Founded in 1900 to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly activity in philosophy, to facilitate the professional work and teaching of philosophers, and to represent philosophy as a discipline, the American Philosophical Association (APA) has from a few hundred members to more than ten thousand, now being one of the largest philosophical societies in the world and the only American philosophical society not devoted to a single special school or philosophical approach. In 1999, in anticipation of its centennial, the APA authorized philosopher Richard T. Hull to collect and publish the presidential addresses delivered over the course of the first hundred years of the APA. This is the tenth volume in the series, which covers addresses given between 1991 and 2000. Each presidential address is accompanied by a photo and biography of the author , a chronology of the APA, a list of presidents per decade, a list of universities and colleges closely associated with each president, and name and subject indexes. Distinguished philosophers represented in this volume include Annette Baier, Stuart Hampshire, Judith Thompson, Stanley Cavell, Mary Mothersill, Elliott Sober, Martha Nussbaum, and many others. This unique record of the development and leadership of American philosophy during the twentieth century will complement the libraries of both professional philosophers and interested non-professionals and it provides an excellent resource for students and professionals alike to trace the history of special interest areas in philosophy. An eleventh volume of commissioned essays, covering each decade of The Association's first hundred years, is planned. This will include essays that comment on the philosophical trends represented in each of the decades of the APA's first century.




A Paradigm Theory of Existence


Book Description

The heart of philosophy is metaphysics, and at the heart of the heart lie two questions about existence. What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Why does any contingent thing exist? Call these the nature question and the ground question, respectively. The first concerns the nature of the existence of the contingent existent; the second concerns the ground of the contingent existent. Both questions are ancient, and yet perennial in their appeal; both have presided over the burial of so many of their would-be undertakers that it is a good induction that they will continue to do so. For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist. Ask Willard Quine what existence is, and you will hear that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses. "! Ask Bertrand Russell what it is for an individual to exist, and he will tell you that an individual can no more exist than it can be numerous: there 2 just is no such thing as the existence of individuals. And of course Russell's eliminativist answer implies that one cannot even ask, on pain of succumbing to the fallacy of complex question, why any contingent individual exists: if no individual exists, there can be no question why any individual exists. Not to mention Russell's modal corollary: 'contingent' and 'necessary' can only be said de dicto (of propositions) and not de re (of things).




The Ontology of the Analytic Tradition and Its Origins


Book Description

The analytic movement advertised its 'linguistic turn' as a radical break from the two-thousand-year-old substance tradition. But this is an illusion. On the fundamental level of ontology, there is enough reformulation and presupposition of traditional 'no entity without identity' themes to analogize Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine to Aristotle as paradigmatic of modified realism. Thus the pace of ontology is glacial. Frege and Russell, not Wittgenstein and Quine, emerge as the true analytic progenitors of 'no entity without identity, ' offering between them at least twenty-nine private language arguments and sixty-four 'no entity without identity' theories




Metaethics after Moore


Book Description

Metaethics, understood as a distinct branch of ethics, is often traced to G. E. Moore's 1903 classic, Principia Ethica. Whereas normative ethics is concerned to answer first order moral questions about what is good and bad, right and wrong, metaethics is concerned to answer second order non-moral questions about the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology of moral thought and discourse. Moore has continued to exert a powerful influence, and the sixteen essays here (most of them specially written for the volume) represent the most up-to-date work in metaethics after, and in some cases directly inspired by, the work of Moore.




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