This volume of the collected works of J.L. Shaw contains twelve papers that fall in the intersection of logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Professor Shaw's methodology in these papers is that of comparative philosophy. With an emphasis on classical Indian analytical philosophy and late 19th and 20th century Western analytical philosophy, Professor Shaw compares such traditions as the Nyaya, Navya Nyaya, Mimamsa, Vedanta, and Buddhism with each other and with Western thinke...

A Treatise of Human Nature (1738–40) is a book by Scottish philosopher David Hume, considered by many to be Hume's most important work and one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. The Treatise is a classic statement of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. In the introduction Hume presents the idea of placing all science and philosophy on a novel foundation: namely, an empirical investigation into human nature. Impressed by Isaac Newton's achievements...

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who is considered to be the father of modern philosophy. Kant’s writings continue to influence the philosophy in many fields including metaphysics, ethics, and political theory. This edition of The Critique of Practical Reason includes a table of contents.

THE TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. The project had a broad aim - to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science - and is recognized as a significant philosophical work of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it when a prisoner of war at Com...

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...

Is what could have happened but never did as real as what did happen? What did happen, but isn't happening now, happened at another time. Analogously, one can say that what could have happened happens in another possible world. Whatever their views about the reality of such things as possible worlds, philosophers need to take this analogy seriously. Adriane Rini and Max Cresswell exhibit, in an easy step-by-step manner, the logical structure of temporal and modal discourse, and show that e...

An exploration of the fundamental realities of the existenceIs this the end? If not; how are we to discover and assure for stricken Humanity the vision and the possession of a Better Land?In this volume plumbing the depths of human experience, Alexander Philip explores the nature of reality at its most basic level. Examining the ways that time, abstract thought, and physical sensation affect consciousness, this book posits that matter and energy are the foun...

Bertrand Russell changed Western philosophy forever. He tackled many puzzles--how our minds work, how we experience the world, and what the true nature of meaning is. In "Introducing Bertrand Russell "we meet a passionate eccentric, active in world politics, who had outspoken views on sex, marriage, religion, and education.

In Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Nicholas Smith develops a new theory of vagueness: fuzzy plurivaluationism. A predicate is said to be vague if there is no sharply defined boundary between the things to which it applies and the things to which it does not apply. For example, 'heavy' is vague in a way that 'weighs over 20 kilograms' is not. A great many predicates - both in everyday talk, and in a wide array of theoretical vocabularies, from law to psychology to engineer...

If there is one utterly inescapable problem for the metaphysician, it is this: is metaphysics itself a theoretically legitimate discipline? Is it, in other words, capable of a systematic and well-confirmed set of theoretical results? And if not, why not? From its inception, metaphysics has found itself exercised by the nagging worry that its own inquiries might reveal it to be a subject without an object, or a mode of inquiry without a method. Such concerns were voiced as early as Plato's ...

Since the advent of the Semantic Web, interest in the dynamics of ontologies (ontology evolution) has grown significantly. Belief revision presents a good theoretical framework for dealing with this problem; however, classical belief revision is not well suited for logics such as Description Logics.Belief Revision in Non-Classical Logics presents a framework which can be applied to a wide class of logics that include – besides most Description Logics such as the ones behin...

Berkeley: Ideas, Immaterialism, and Objective Presence offers a novel interpretation of the arc of George Berkeley's philosophical thought, from his theory of vision through his immaterialism and finally to his proof of God's existence. Keota Fields unifies these themes to focus on Berkeley's use of the Cartesian doctrine of objective presence, which demands causal explanations of the content of ideas. This is particularly so with respect to Berkeley's arguments for immaterialism....