This collection originated at a conference organized by the Institute Vienna Circle and the University of Vienna on the Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism and was held in Vienna in July 2001. (cf. The Vienna Orcle and Logical Empiricism. Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives. Edited by Frie drich Stadler. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer, 2003, Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 10). All the essays in this volume with one exception are based on talks presented on that occasion and appear he...

Nothing is more usual and more natural for those, who pretend to discover anything new to the world in philosophy and the sciences, than to insinuate the praises of their own systems, by decrying all those, which have been advanced before them. And indeed were they content with lamenting that ignorance, which we still lie under in the most important questions, that can come before the tribunal of human reason, there are few, who have an acquaintance with the sciences, that would not readil...

Plato was the first Western philosopher to apply philosophy to politics. His ideas on, for example, the nature and value of justice, and the relationship between justice and politics, have been extraordinarily influential. „The Republic” of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of the „Laws”, and is certainly the greatest of them. Presented as a series of dialogue between Socrates and Plato’s brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon, in eleven parts Plato step by step forms his ideal...

Kant argues that while theoretical reason cannot prove the existence of God or freedom, practical reason demands them as necessary postulates for moral action. He posits that the moral law within us is an undeniable fact that points towards a higher order of existence. The text explores the relationship between virtue and happiness, suggesting they can only be reconciled in an afterlife. It represents a shift from skepticism to a faith grounded in rational moral necessity.

"Some Remarks on Logical Form" was the only academic paper ever published by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and contained Wittgenstein's thinking on logic and the philosophy of mathematics immediately before the rupture that divided the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus from the late Wittgenstein. Some Remarks on Logical Form is a concise yet profound inquiry into the ways logic underpins our understanding of language and reality. Composed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, this short ph...

This book is designed to explain the technical ideas that are taken for granted in much contemporary philosophical writing. Notions like 'denumerability', 'modal scope distinction', 'Bayesian conditionalization', and 'logical completeness' are usually only elucidated deep within difficult specialist texts. By offering simple explanations that by-pass much irrelevant and boring detail, Philosophical Devices is able to cover a wealth of material that is normally only available to specialists...

The main purpose of this book is the development of a new method for the semantical analysis of meaning, that is, a new method for analyzing and describing the meanings of linguistic expressions. This method, called the method of extension and intension, is developed by modifying and extending certain customary concepts, especially those of class and property. The method will be contrasted with various other semantical methods used in traditional philosophy or by contemporary authors. Thes...

Forgotten Origin is the third in a series of books dedicated to the first Homo sapiens: the Australian Aboriginal people. Steven Strong and Evan Strong continue in their investigation into the global impact of Aboriginal people sailing from, never to, Australia no less than 50,000 years ago, paying particular attention to the shared principles found within many Gnostic scriptures and the Dreaming. As radical as this theory may appear, the rigor applied, whether through mt...

What is truth? Michael Lynch defends a bold new answer to this question. Traditional theories of truth hold that truth has only a single uniform nature. All truths are true in the same way. More recent deflationary theories claim that truth has no nature at all; the concept of truth is of no real philosophical importance. In this concise and clearly written book, Lynch argues that we should reject both these extremes and hold that truth is a functional property. To understand truth we must...

On the occasion of bis sixtieth birthday, we dedicate this volume to Jan Wo leriski-s-our teacher, our colleague, our friend. Both of us are particularly indebted to Jan not only with regards to profes sional matters, but some private ones as well. Hence, we hope that he forgives us an occasional lapse into fondness and affection. That said, may the list of bis personalmerits remain shrouded in mystery; rather than unveil them, we open here by appraising Jan's presence from a broader persp...

Interest in the metaphysics and logic of possible worlds goes back at least as far as Aristotle, but few books address the history of these important concepts. This volume offers new essays on the theories about the logical modalities (necessity and possibility) held by leading philosophers from Aristotle in ancient Greece to Rudolf Carnap in the twentieth century. The story begins with an illuminating discussion of Aristotle's views on the connection between logic and metaphysics, continu...

The problem of the nature of fiction and the problem of nonexistence are closely tied because fiction often talks about nonexistent entities. In Fiction, Reference, and Nonexistence, A. P. Martinich and Avrum Stroll, two of America's leading philosophers, explore fiction and undertake an analytic philosophical study of fiction and its reference and its relation to truth. Included in the discussion is the authors' new, contemporary theory of fiction developed as an extension of the...