Four billion years ago, there was no freedom on our planet, because there was no life. What kinds of freedom have evolved since the origin of life? Can there be freedom and free will in a determinist
Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity
This book reconsiders the fate of the doctrine of mimesis in the eighteenth century. Standard accounts of the aesthetic theories of this era hold that the idea of mimesis was supplanted by the far mor
Damian Byers analyzes the form Husserl gives to the problem of knowledge—the way this form influences the development of the phenomenological method, and the results of its application. In a very clea
When originally published in 1960, this was the first complete English translation since 1799 of Kant's early work on aesthetics. More literary than philosophical, Observations shows Kant as a man of
William Irwin has taken philosophy out of the academy and put it on the bestseller list. The series has been featured in The New York Times and People, and on NPR's All Things Considered. Now philosop
Although fallacies have been common since Aristotle, until recently little attention has been devoted to identifying and defining them. Furthermore, the concept of fallacy itself has lacked a sufficie
Setting the Moral Compass brings together the (largely unpublished) work of nineteen women moral philosophers whose powerful and innovative work has contributed to the "re-setting of the compass" of m
Essential readings in the philosophy of literature are brought together for the first time in this anthology. Contains forty-five substantial and carefully chosen essays and extracts. Provides a balan
S. A. Lloyd proposes a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan that shows transcendent interests - interests that override the fear of death - to be crucial to both Hobbes's analysis of social disorder and his proposed remedy to it. Most previous commentators in the analytic philosophical tradition have argued that Hobbes thought that credible threats of physical force could be sufficient to deter people from political insurrection. Professor Lloyd convincingly shows that because Hobbes took the transcendence of religious and moral interests seriously, he never believed that mere physical force could ensure social order. Lloyd's interpretation demonstrates the ineliminability of that half of Leviathan devoted to religion, and attributes to Hobbes a much more plausible conception of human nature than the narrow psychological egoism traditionally attributed to Hobbes.
The Blackwell Guide to American Philosophy offers the most ambitious survey to date of American philosophical thought. Provides a comprehensive history of philosophical thought in America. Brings toge
"Magnanimity is in short supply," writes A. C. Grayling is this wonderfully incisive book, "but it is the main ingredient in everything that makes the world a better place" And indeed Meditations for
The Judith Butler Reader is a collection of writings that span her impressive career and trace her intellectual history. Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built he
A philosophical analysis of some of history's most pressing mental challenges covers a range of issues, from the existence of God to the ethics of designer babies, illustrating each with a story and t
According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents (such as truth-conditions) to natural language sentences, independently of what the speaker actually means. This view contrasts with that held by ordinary language philosophers fifty years ago: according to them, speech acts, not sentences, are the primary bearers of content. François Recanati argues for the relevance of this controversy to the current debate about semantics and pragmatics. Is 'what is said' (as opposed to merely implied) determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the s
