Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays

Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays PDF Author: Willard Van Orman Quine
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
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.

Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays

Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays PDF Author: Willard Van Orman Quine
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030848
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Terry Horgan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019985842X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Willard Van Orman Quine
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231083577
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
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.

Philosophy and the Human Paradox

Philosophy and the Human Paradox PDF Author: Alan Montefiore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000765717
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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.

This Book Needs No Title

This Book Needs No Title PDF Author: Raymond Smullyan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671628313
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
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.

Rituals of the Way

Rituals of the Way PDF Author: Paul Rakita Goldin
Publisher: Open Court Publishing
ISBN: 9780812694000
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
The 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."

Paradoxes from A to Z

Paradoxes from A to Z PDF Author: Michael Clark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415538572
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Paradoxes 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.

The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays

The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays PDF Author: Willard Van Orman Quine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
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.

The Limits of a Limitless Science

The Limits of a Limitless Science PDF Author: Stanley L. Jaki
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This new collection of writings from America's foremost authority on the relationship between science and religion, Templeton Prize-winner Stanley L. Jaki, is an incisive overview of the intersection of science with the most fundamental areas of human culture.

Paradoxes of Gambling Behaviour

Paradoxes of Gambling Behaviour PDF Author: Willem A. Wagenaar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134879369
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
Why does a large proportion of the population engage in some form of gambling, although they know they are most likely to lose, and that the gambling industry makes huge profits? Do gamblers simply accept their losses as fate, or do they believe that they will be able to overcome the negative odds in some miraculous way? The paradox is complicated by the fact that those habitual gamblers who are most aware that systematic losses cannot be avoided, are the least likely to stop gambling. Detailed analyses of actual gambling behaviour have shown gamblers to be victims of a variety of cognitive illusions, which lead them to believe that the general statistical rules of determining the probability of loss do not apply to them as individuals. The designers of gambling games cleverly exploit these illusions in order to promote a false perception of the situation. Much of the earlier interest in gambling behaviour has been centred on the traditional theories of human decision-making, where decisions are portrayed as choices among bets. This led to a tradition of studying decision-making in experiments on betting. In this title, originally published in 1988, the author argues that betting behaviour should not be used as a typical example of human decision-making upon which a general psychological theory could be founded, and that these traditional views can in no way account for the gambling behaviour reported in this book.