This work is both an excellent primer in the development of twentieth-century philosophy, and at the same time, a critique of its linguistic excesses and separation from the world as such. Herbert Hochberg takes as his cue the words of Bertrand Russell that "absorption in language sometimes leads to a neglect of the connection of language with non-linguistic facts, although it is this connection that gives meaning to words and significance to sentences." Introducing Analytic Philosophy is a balanced effort to stay within the linguistic turns that have characterized philosophy in the past century. The author does this by a review of those philosophies that treat things and facts seriously. It is Hochberg's contention that the classical focus on ontology, combined with precise and careful formulations that marked the writings of the early founders of the analytic tradition, has degenerated into the spinning of intricate webs of verbal analysis. The latter supposedly yield theories of meaning, but more often signal the rebirth of idealism in the guises of anti-realism and internal realism. The focus on the world, as what words are about, is often lost by analytic philosophers who concentrate on language itself at the cost of the world itself. Such trends toward linguistic exclusivity have come to typify analytic tradition in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as continental European tendencies. Hochberg is unafraid of a polemical accounting of those trends that display arrogance toward and ignorance of the philosophical tradition that such tendencies illustrate, even in influential works. The book discusses in depth the early works of Frege, Meinong, and Bradley, and follows these with examinations of Russell, Wittgenstein, and other important, if lesser-known works. The author notes the processes by which the early analytic tradition, with its careful and precise formulations, was sometimes transformed into dismissal of real-world concerns as such. The work is clear and incisive. It can be read with great benefit by scientists and students of culture, no less than specialists in the history of philosophy. Herbert Hochberg is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin. Among his works are critical related essays in Philosophical Studies, Methodos, Nous, and a series of edited volumes.

Introducing Analytic Philosophy: Its Sense and Its Nonsense, 1879-2002 (LOGOS: Studien zur Logik, Sprachphilosophie & Metaphysik) (German Edition)

Politics & Social Sciences

Hochberg, Herbert

Philosophy

Ontos Verlag

Possibility and Reality

Hans Rott

Social Facts and Collective Intentionality is a combination of terms that refers to a new field of basic research. Written mainly in the mood and by means of analytical philosophy, at the very heart of this new approach is conceptual explication of all the various versions of social facts and collective intentionality and its ramifications. This approach tackles the topics of traditional social philosophy using new conceptual methods, including techniques of formal logic, computer simulations, and artificial intelligence. Such research also addresses careful research relating to ontological, epistemological, normative and--last but not least-- methodological questions. This volume represents the state of the art in this new field. The volume and its contributors tackle a series of vexing issues in the social sciences: (1) the sense of affiliation to large in contrast to small groups, (2) whether collective membership is the same as common knowledge, (3) the worth of information exchange based on faulty data, (4) the difference between standards of information and transfer of information, and (5) whether reliability is grounded in personal experience or as members in epistemic communities or networks. Contributors to this volume have a strong commitment to the social or collective character and mutual interplay of scientific information. "Collective Intentionality" is the term chosen by researchers working in this cross-disciplinary field. The group is currently conducting research in areas such as artificial intelligence, linguistics, logic, and the philosophy of the social sciences. Its work is distinguished by issues of collective behavior such as jointness, groupness, we and us. The present volume covers the state of the art of collective analysis, while fully appreciating that it is a stepping stone, albeit an important one, in redirecting the attention of basic philosophy away from the individual to the collective mode of exact analysis. Georg Meggle is professor for philosophical foundations of anthropology and of cognitive sciences at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He is a key contributor to Realism in Action with a study of Common Belief and Common Knowledge, and author of an earlier study of theoretical foundations of semantics.

Social Facts and Collective Intentionality

Thanks to their heterogeneity, the nine essays in this volume offer a clear testimony of Donald Davidsons authority, and they undoubtedly show how much his work-even if it has raised many doubts and criticisms-has been, and still is, highly influential and significant in contemporary analytical philosophy for a wide range of subjects. The various articles not only critically and carefully analyze Davidsons theses and arguments (in particular those concerning language and knowledge), but they also illustrate how such theories and ideas, despite their unavoidable difficulties, are still alive and potentially fruitful. Davidons work is indeed an important and provocative starting point for discussing the future progress of philosophy.

Knowledge, Language, and Interpretation: On the Philosophy of Donald Davidson

This is the first of two volumes of the proceedings from the thirtieth International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, August 2007. In addition to several new contributions to Wittgenstein research (by N. Garver, M. Kross, St. Majetschak, K. Neumer, V. Rodych, L. M. Valdés-Villanueva), this volume contains articles with a special focus on digital Wittgenstein research and Wittgenstein's role for the understanding of the digital turn (by L. Bazzocchi, A. Biletzki, J. de Mul, P. Keicher, D. Köhler, K. Mayr, D. G. Stern), as well as discussions-not necessarily from a Wittgensteinian perspective-about issues in the philosophy of information, including computational ontologies (by D. Apollon, G. Chaitin, F. Dretske, L. Floridi, Y. Okamoto, M. Pasin and E. Motta).

Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Information: Proceedings of the 30th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-symposium in Kirchberg, 2007

This is the second of two volumes of the proceedings from the thirtieth International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, August 2007. It contains selected contributions on the Philosophy of media, Philosophy of the Internet, on Ethics and the political economy of information society.

Philosophy of Information Society: Proceedings of the 30th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-symposium in Kirchberg 2007

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Richard Swinburne: Christian Philosophy in a Modern World

While many of the phenomenological currents in philosophy use a peculiar method, the type under consideration here is characterized by Franz Brentanos ambition to make philosophy scientific by adopting no other method but that of natural science. Brentano became particularly influential in teaching his students (such as Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl) his descriptive psychology, which is concerned with mind as intentionally directed at objects. As Brentano and his students continued in their investigations in descriptive psychology, another side of Austrian phenomenology, namely object theory, became more and more prominent. The philosophical orientation under consideration in this collection of essays is accordingly a two-sided discipline, concerned with both mind and objects, and applicable to various areas of philosophy such as epistemology, philosophy of language, value theory, and ontology.

Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object (Phenomenology & Mind)

Rollinger, Robin D.

Employing computer simulations to study the evolution of altruism has been popular since Axelrods The Evolution of Cooperation. But have the myriads of simulation studies that followed in Axelrods footsteps really increased our knowledge about the evolution of altruism or cooperation? This book examines in detail the working mechanisms of simulation-based evolutionary explanations of altruism. It shows that the theoretical insights derived from simulation studies are often quite arbitrary and of little use for empirical research. In the final chapter, a set of epistemological requirements for computer simulations is proposed with recommendations for the proper research design of simulation studies.

Explaining Altruism: A Simulation-based Approach and Its Limits

Arnold, Eckhart

William offers an ethical view consistently arising out of valorization of energy of his days, and effecting a counter-tendency to the two great popular scientific currents of the 19th century: the universalizing of Darwinism and the pessimistic ideologies of social entropy. Jamess ethics moves away from the traditional idealistic or utilitarian grounds and takes place against the background of an up-and-coming philosophical anthropology hinged on the primacy of action. Human activity, however, needs to be understood in relation to Energy as the fabric of the universe pervading the whole spectrum of being in a continuum in which humanity and divinty are intertwined.

The Ethics of Energy: William James's Moral Philosophy in Focus (Process Thought)

Franzese, Sergio

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