What Philosophers Know

What Philosophers Know PDF Author: Gary Gutting
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139478273
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Philosophy has never delivered on its promise to settle the great moral and religious questions of human existence, and even most philosophers conclude that it does not offer an established body of disciplinary knowledge. Gary Gutting challenges this view by examining detailed case studies of recent achievements by analytic philosophers such as Quine, Kripke, Gettier, Lewis, Chalmers, Plantinga, Kuhn, Rawls, and Rorty. He shows that these philosophers have indeed produced a substantial body of disciplinary knowledge, but he challenges many common views about what philosophers have achieved. Topics discussed include the role of argument in philosophy, naturalist and experimentalist challenges to the status of philosophical intuitions, the importance of pre-philosophical convictions, Rawls' method of reflective equilibrium, and Rorty's challenge to the idea of objective philosophical truth. The book offers a lucid survey of recent analytic work and presents a new understanding of philosophy as an important source of knowledge.

What Philosophers Know

What Philosophers Know PDF Author: Gary Gutting
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139478273
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
Philosophy has never delivered on its promise to settle the great moral and religious questions of human existence, and even most philosophers conclude that it does not offer an established body of disciplinary knowledge. Gary Gutting challenges this view by examining detailed case studies of recent achievements by analytic philosophers such as Quine, Kripke, Gettier, Lewis, Chalmers, Plantinga, Kuhn, Rawls, and Rorty. He shows that these philosophers have indeed produced a substantial body of disciplinary knowledge, but he challenges many common views about what philosophers have achieved. Topics discussed include the role of argument in philosophy, naturalist and experimentalist challenges to the status of philosophical intuitions, the importance of pre-philosophical convictions, Rawls' method of reflective equilibrium, and Rorty's challenge to the idea of objective philosophical truth. The book offers a lucid survey of recent analytic work and presents a new understanding of philosophy as an important source of knowledge.

What Philosophers Know

What Philosophers Know PDF Author: Gary Gutting
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521856213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Drawing upon the work of Quine, Rawls, Rorty and others, Gutting challenges the standard view about what philosophers have achieved.

Feeling Our Feelings

Feeling Our Feelings PDF Author: Eva Brann
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
ISBN: 1589880463
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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Book Description
Eva Brann considers what the great philosophers on the passions and feelings have thought and written about them. She examines the relevant work of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Adam Smith, Hume, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and also includes a chapter on contemporary studies on the brain. This book provides a comprehensive look at this pervasive and elusive topic.

What Do Philosophers Do?

What Do Philosophers Do? PDF Author: Penelope Maddy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190618698
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
How do you know the world around you isn't just an elaborate dream, or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? If all you have to go on are various lights, sounds, smells, tastes and tickles, how can you know what the world is really like, or even whether there is a world beyond your own mind? Questions like these -- familiar from science fiction and dorm room debates -- lie at the core of venerable philosophical arguments for radical skepticism: the stark contention that we in fact know nothing at all about the world, that we have no more reason to believe any claim -- that there are trees, that we have hands -- than we have to disbelieve it. Like non-philosophers in their sober moments, philosophers, too, find this skeptical conclusion preposterous, but they're faced with those famous arguments: the Dream Argument, the Argument from Illusion, the Infinite Regress of Justification, the more recent Closure Argument. If these can't be met, they raise a serious challenge not just to philosophers, but to anyone responsible enough to expect her beliefs to square with her evidence. What Do Philosophers Do? takes up the skeptical arguments from this everyday point of view, and ultimately concludes that they don't undermine our ordinary beliefs or our ordinary ways of finding out about the world. In the process, Maddy examines and evaluates a range of philosophical methods -- common sense, scientific naturalism, ordinary language, conceptual analysis, therapeutic approaches -- as employed by such philosophers as Thomas Reid, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin. The result is a revealing portrait of what philosophers do, and perhaps a quiet suggestion for what they should do, for what they do best.

What Philosophers Should Know About Truth

What Philosophers Should Know About Truth PDF Author: Fred Stoutland
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110618303
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Fred Stoutland was a major figure in the philosophy of action and philosophy of language. This collection brings together essays on truth, language, action and mind and thus provides an important summary of many key themes in Stoutland’s own work, as well as offering valuable perspectives on key issues in contemporary philosophy.

Why Does the World Exist

Why Does the World Exist PDF Author: Jim Holt
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871404095
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this astonishing and profound work, an irreverent sleuth traces the riddleof existence from the ancient world to modern times.

The Failures of Philosophy

The Failures of Philosophy PDF Author: Stephen Gaukroger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691241740
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The first book to address the historical failures of philosophy—and what we can learn from them Philosophers are generally unaware of the failures of philosophy, recognizing only the failures of particular theories, which are then remedied with other theories. But, taking the long view, philosophy has actually collapsed several times, been abandoned, sometimes for centuries, and been replaced by something quite different. When it has been revived it has been with new aims that are often accompanied by implausible attempts to establish continuity with a perennial philosophical tradition. What do these failures tell us? The Failures of Philosophy presents a historical investigation of philosophy in the West, from the perspective of its most significant failures: attempts to provide an account of the good life, to establish philosophy as a discipline that can stand in judgment over other forms of thought, to set up philosophy as a theory of everything, and to construe it as a discipline that rationalizes the empirical and mathematical sciences. Stephen Gaukroger argues that these failures reveal more about philosophical inquiry and its ultimate point than its successes ever could. These failures illustrate how and why philosophical inquiry has been conceived and reconceived, why philosophy has been thought to bring distinctive skills to certain questions, and much more. An important and original account of philosophy’s serial breakdowns, The Failures of Philosophy ultimately shows how these shortcomings paradoxically reveal what matters most about the field.

What Can She Know?

What Can She Know? PDF Author: Lorraine Code
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150173573X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In this lively and accessible book Lorraine Code addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary theory of knowledge, a question of fundamental concern for feminist theory as well: Is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant? Responding in the affirmative, Code offers a radical alterantive to mainstream philosophy's terms for what counts as knowledge and how it is to be evaluated. Code first reviews the literature of established epistemologies and unmasks the prevailing assumption in Anglo-American philosophy that "the knower" is a value-free and ideologically neutral abstraction. Approaching knowledge as a social construct produced and validated through critical dialogue, she defines the knower in light of a conception of subjectivity based on a personal relational model. Code maps out the relevance of the particular people involved in knowing: their historical specificity, the kinds of relationships they have, the effects of social position and power on those relationships, and the ways in which knowledge can change both knower and known. In an exploration of the politics of knowledge that mainstream epistemologies sustain, she examines such issues as the function of knowledge in shaping institutions and the unequal distribution of cognitive resources. What Can She Know? will raise the level of debate concerning epistemological issues among philosophers, political and social scientists, and anyone interested in feminist theory.

The Trials of Socrates

The Trials of Socrates PDF Author: C. D. C. Reeve
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 9780872205895
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This unique and expertly annotated collection of the classic accounts of Socrates left by Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon features new translations of Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the death scene from Phaedo by C. D. C. Reeve, Peter Meineck's translation of Clouds, and James Doyle's translation of Apology of Socrates.

On Philosophy and Philosophers

On Philosophy and Philosophers PDF Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108488455
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
"Philosophers suffer from a peculiar occupational hazard; people are always coming up and asking them just what it is that they do and how they do it. This is not the sort of question that biologists or economists or musicians get asked; people know, pretty well, what they do, and they may or may not be interested in the details. But a philosopher is different - it is very hard to imagine just what he does with his time"--