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In 1942 G.E. Moore first wrote about the curious sort of "nonsense" exhibited by the statement "it is raining but I do not believe it". What Moore discovered was a species of blindspots: consistent propositions that cannot be rationally accepted by certain individuals even though they mightbe true. In this book, Professor Sorenson aims to provide a unified solution to a large family of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes through a study of blindspots. He devotes special attention to revealing their role in "slippery slope" reasoning.
Shadows appear to be counterexamples to the causal theory of perception. After all, an absence of light cannot reflect light into our eyes. Roy Sorensen sets out to resolve this anomaly and to show how the causal theory solves a broad range of visual puzzles about dark things.
If you want to learn how to conform to confound, raze hopes, succeed your successor, order absence in the absence of order, win by losing and think contrapositively, look no further. Here you can unlock the secrets of Plato's void, Wittgenstein's investigations, Schopenhauer's intelligence test, Voltaire's big bet, Russell's slip of the pen and lobster logic. Among your discoveries will be why the egg came before the chicken, what the dishwasher missed, and just what it was that made Descartes disappear. Experience the unbearable lightness of logical conclusions in Professor Sorensen's intriguing cabinet of riddles, problems, paradoxes, puzzles and the anomalies of human utterance. As you accompany him on investigations into the mysteries of truth, falsehood, reason and delusion, prepare to be surprised, enlightened, mystified and, above all, entertained.
Did Buddha become a fat man in one second? Is there a tallest short giraffe? Epistemicists answer 'Yes!' They believe that any predicate that divides things divides them sharply. They solve the ancient sorites paradox by picturing vagueness as a kind of ignorance. The alternative solutions are radical. They either reject classical theorems or inference rules or reject our common sense view of what can exist. Epistemicists spare this central portion of our web of belief by challenging peripheral intuitions about the nature of language. So why is this continuation of the status quo so incredible? Why do epistemicists themselves have trouble believing their theory? In Vagueness and Contradictio...
A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities is a collection of puzzles, paradoxes, riddles, and miscellaneous logic problems. Depending on taste, one can partake of a puzzle, a poem, a proof, or a pun.
Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This third volume in the series, What Do Artists Know?, is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving way to the PhD in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art continue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories that underwr...
This book offers a novel analysis of the widely-used but ill-understood technique of thought experiment. The author argues that the powers and limits of this methodology can be traced to the fact that when the contemplation of an imaginary scenario brings us to new knowledge, it does so by forcing us to make sense of exceptional cases.
If a spinning disk casts a round shadow does this shadow also spin? When you experience the total blackness of a cave, are you seeing in the dark? Or are you merely failing to see anything (just like your blind companion)? Seeing Dark Things uses visual riddles to explore our ability to see things that do not reflect light. Shadows and holes are anomalies for the causal theory of perception, which states that anything we see must be a cause of what we see. This requirement neatly explains why you see the front of a book's jacket and not its rear when you look at it face-on. However, the causal theory has trouble explaining how you manage to see the black letters on its surface. The letters a...
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First published in 1993. Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down? Does time flow at an even rate? These are just two of the questions that won't be answered in Pseudo-Problems. This book explains how problems are dissolved rather than solved. Roy Sorenson takes the most important and interesting examples from one hundred years of analytic philosophy (and the odd one from the centuries before) to consolidate a new theory of dissolution. Pseudo-Problems is a fast-moving, fascinating alternative history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and a fine example of what philosophical analysis should be. Not least, it is an important contribution to the debates about creativity and problem solving.