Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Ethical Foundations of Postmodernity
A (re-)turn to ethics, which began in the 1980s and 1990s and is still predominant today, has been ascribed to literary studies and theory. In this book theoretical issues within ethics are discussed based on the examples of literary analyses. The authors examined are Margaret Atwood, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Robert M. Pirsig. The main questions concern the foundation on which ethical concepts are based, and the way in which such concepts function. These topics are evidently connected to matters of human concepts and human nature in general, which are understood to be fundamentally communicative. Contrary to popular conclusions of relativity, the need for a realist foundation of ethics - imply...
Signs, Minds and Actions
This second of two volumes brings together invited papers of the 32nd International Wittgenstein Symposium (Kirchberg/W. (Austria), 2009). The collection not only contains articles related to some of Wittgenstein’s central arguments but also holds contributions that deal with the role and function of signs, as well as with the relations between language and action, consciousness and metaphysics. An interdisciplinary workshop was dedicated to “Wittgenstein and Literature”, an area of study which has been prominent in the philosophical discourse of the last decade. Contributors to this volume are Anat Biletzki, Michael Dummett, Laurence Goldstein, Peter Janich, Brian McGuinness, Marjorie Perloff, David Schalkwyk, Joachim Schulte, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, David Stern, Eike von Savigny among others.
Modes of Existence
The volume collects essays by an international team of philosophers aimed at elucidating three fundamental and interconnected themes in ontology. In the first instance, there is the issue of the kind of thing that, in the primary sense, is or exists: must the primitive terms be particular or universal? Any reply will itself raise the question of how to treat discourse that appears to refer to things that cannot be met with in time and space: what difference is there between saying that someone is not sad and saying that something does not exist? If we can speak meaningfully about fictions, what makes those statements true (or false) and how can the entities in question be identified? Assessment of the options that have been opened up in these fields since the work of Bertrand Russell and Alexius Meinong at the beginning of the twentieth century remains an important testing-ground for metaphysical principles and intuitions.
Visual Representations in Science
Visual representations (photographs, diagrams, etc.) play crucial roles in scientific processes. They help, for example, to communicate research results and hypotheses to scientific peers as well as to the lay audience. In genuine research activities they are used as evidence or as surrogates for research objects which are otherwise cognitively inaccessible. Despite their important functional roles in scientific practices, philosophers of science have more or less neglected visual representations in their analyses of epistemic methods and tools of reasoning in science. This book is meant to fill this gap. It presents a detailed investigation into central conceptual issues and into the epistemology of visual representations in science. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.
The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School
Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano (1838–1917) had an often underappreciated influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A general introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume, and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates.
Values and Ontology
The articles in this volume discuss the relation between values and ontology, focusing on the significance of ontology for ethics and aesthetics, i.e., themes which due to the raising interest in ontology come to play a central role in contemporary philosophical debate. The contributors address the questions of whether and in which sense values can be considered to be real, whether it is possible to experience them, and in which sense we can speak about their objective validity. These topics – which were also discussed by early phenomenologists like Brentano, Meinong, Ehrenfels, proponents of Gestalt psychology like Köhler, by Husserl, and by French phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty – are approached by both historical and systematic analysis.
States of Affairs
States of affairs raise, among others, the following questions: What kind of entity are they (if there are any)? Are they contingent, causally efficacious, spatio-temporal and perceivable entities, or are they abstract objects? What are their constituents and their identity conditions? What are the functions that states of affairs are able to fulfil in a viable theory, and which problems and prima facie (counterintuitive consequences) arise out of an ontological commitment to them?
