Reason's Nearest Kin

Reason's Nearest Kin
Author: Michael Potter
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2000-03-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0191520225

How do we account for the truth of arithmetic? And if it does not depend for its truth on the way the world is, what constrains the world to conform to arithmetic? Reason's Nearest Kin is a critical examination of the astonishing progress made towards answering these questions from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. In the space of fifty years Frege, Dedekind, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ramsey, Hilbert, and Carnap developed accounts of the content of arithmetic that were brilliantly original both technically and philosophically. Michael Potter's innovative study presents them all as finding that content in various aspects of the complex linkage between experience, language, thought, and the world. Potter's reading places them all in Kant's shadow since it was his attempt to ground arithmetic in the spatio-temporal structure of reality that they were reacting against; but it places us in Gödel's shadow since his incompleteness theorems supply us with a measure of the richness of the content they were trying to explain. This stimulating reassessment of some of the classic texts in the philosophy of mathematics reveals many unexpected connections and illuminating comparisons, and offers a wealth of ideas for future work in the subject.

Reason's Nearest Kin

Reason's Nearest Kin
Author: Michael Potter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2000-03-16
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 019825041X

Reason's Nearest Kin is a critical examination of the most exciting period there has been in the philosophical study of the properties of the natural numbers, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Reassessing the brilliant innovations of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others, which transformed philosophy as well as our understanding of mathematics, Michael Potter places arithmetic at the interface between experience, language, thought, and the world.

The Domain of Reasons

The Domain of Reasons
Author: John Skorupski
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2012-11-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 019165163X

This book is about normativity and reasons. By the end, however, the subject becomes the relation between self, thought, and world. If we understand normativity, we are on the road to understanding this relation. John Skorupski argues that all normative properties are reducible to reason relations, so that the sole normative ingredient in any normative concept is the concept of a reason. This is a concept fundamental to all thought. It is pervasive (actions, beliefs, and sentiments all fall within its range), primitive (all other normative concepts are reducible to it), and constitutive of the idea of thought itself. Thinking is sensitivity to reasons. Thought in the full sense of autonomous cognition is possible only for a being sensitive to reasons and capable of deliberating about them. In Part II of the book Skorupski examines epistemic reasons, and shows that aprioricity, necessity, evidence, and probability, which may not seem to be normative at all, are in fact normative concepts analysable in terms of the concept of a reason. In Part III he shows the same for the concept of a person's good, and for moral concepts including the concept of a right. Part IV moves to the epistemology and metaphysics of reasons. When we make claims about reasons to believe, reasons to feel, or reasons to act we are asserting genuine propositions: judgeable, truth-apt contents. But these normative propositions must be distinguished from factual propositions, for they do not represent states of affairs. So Skorupski's ambitious theory of normativity has broad and deep implications for philosophy. It shows how reflection on the logic, epistemology, and ontology of reasons finally leads us to an account of the interplay of self, thought, and world.

The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics

The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics
Author: Robin Le Poidevin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 632
Release: 2009-04-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134155867

The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics is an outstanding, comprehensive and accessible guide to the major themes, thinkers, and issues in metaphysics. The Companion features over fifty specially commissioned chapters from international scholars which are organized into three clear parts: History of Metaphysics Ontology Metaphysics and Science. Each section features an introduction which places the range of essays in context, while an extensive glossary allows easy reference to key terms and definitions. The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics is essential reading for students of philosophy and anyone interested in surveying the central topics and problems in metaphysics from causation to vagueness and from Plato and Aristotle to the present-day.

Working Knowledge

Working Knowledge
Author: Joel Isaac
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674065220

The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward "science" and "objectivity" but were linked to the ways in which knowledge was created and taught in laboratories and seminar rooms. Isaac places special emphasis on the practical, local manifestations of their complex theoretical ideas. In the case of Percy Williams Bridgman, Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, and Thomas Kuhn, the institutional milieu in which they constructed their models of scientific practice was Harvard University. Isaac delineates the role the "Harvard complex" played in fostering connections between epistemological discourse and the practice of science. Operating alongside but apart from traditional departments were special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs that shaped thinking in sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, science studies, and management science. In tracing this culture of inquiry in the human sciences, Isaac offers intellectual history at its most expansive.

In Defense of Intuitions

In Defense of Intuitions
Author: A. Chapman
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 694
Release: 2013-10-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1137347953

A reply to contemporary skepticism about intuitions and a priori knowledge, and a defense of neo-rationalism from a contemporary Kantian standpoint, focusing on the theory of rational intuitions and on solving the two core problems of justifying and explaining them.

The Qurʾan, Morality and Critical Reason

The Qurʾan, Morality and Critical Reason
Author: Muhammad Shahrur
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 636
Release: 2009-03-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9047424344

This book presents the work and ideas of the Syrian writer Muhammad Shahrur to the English-speaking world. Shahrur is at the moment the most innovative intellectual thinker in the Arab Middle East. Often described as the ‘Martin Luther of Islam,’ he offers a liberal, progressive reading of Islam that aims to counter the influences of religious fundamentalism and radical politics. Shahrur’s innovative interpretation of the Qur’an offers groundbreaking new ideas, based on his conviction that centuries of historical Islam, including scholarship in the traditional Islamic religious sciences, have obscured or even obliterated the Qur’an’s progressive and revolutionary message. That message is one that has endured through each period of human history in which Islam has existed, encouraging Muslims to apply the most contemporary perspective available to interpret the Qur’an’s meaning.

Wittgenstein and Psychotherapy

Wittgenstein and Psychotherapy
Author: J. Heaton
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2014-06-12
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1137367695

Using the work of Wittgenstein, John Heaton challenges the notion of theoretical expertise on the mind, arguing for a new understanding of therapy as an attempt by patients to express themselves in an effort to see and say what has not been said or seen, and accept that the world is not as fixed as they are constituting it.