Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

Knowledge and its Limits presents a systematic new conception of knowledge as a kind of mental stage sensitive to the knower's environment. It makes a major contribution to the debate between externalist and internalist philosophies of mind, and breaks radically with the epistemological tradition of analyzing knowledge in terms of true belief. The theory casts new light on such philosophical problems as scepticism, evidence, probability and assertion, realism and anti-realism, and the limits of what can be known. The arguments are (...) illustrated by rigorous models based on epistemic logic and probability theory. The result is a new way of doing epistemology and a notable contribution to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Hare has written a clear, brief, and readable introduction to ethics which looks at all the fundamental problems of the subject.

Introduction to the Two Volumes xi PART ONE: G. E. MOORE ON ETHICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS 1 CHAPTER 1 Common Sense and Philosophical Analysis 3 CHAPTER 2 Moore on Skepticism, Perception, and Knowledge 12 CHAPTER 3 Moore on Goodness and the Foundations of Ethics 34 CHAPTER 4 The Legacies and Lost Opportunities of Moore’s Ethics 71 Suggested Further Reading 89 PART TWO: BERTRAND RUSSELL ON LOGICAL AND LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS 91 CHAPTER 5 Logical Form, Grammatical Form, and the Theory of (...) Descriptions 93 CHAPTER 6 Logic and Mathematics: The Logicist Reduction 132 CHAPTER 7 Logical Constructions and the External World 165 CHAPTER 8 Russell’s Logical Atomism 182 Suggested Further Reading 194 PART THREE: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S TRACTATUS 195 CHAPTER 9 The Metaphysics of the Tractatus 197 CHAPTER 10 Meaning, Truth, and Logic in the Tractatus 214 CHAPTER 11 The Tractarian Test of Intelligibility and Its Consequences 234 Suggested Further Reading 254 PART FOUR: LOGICAL POSITIVISM, EMOTIVISM, AND ETHICS 255 CHAPTER 12 The Logical Positivists on Necessity and Apriori Knowledge 257 CHAPTER 13 The Rise and Fall of the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning 271 CHAPTER 14 Emotivism and Its Critics 300 CHAPTER 15 Normative Ethics in the Era of Emotivism: The Anticonsequentialism of Sir David Ross 320 Suggested Further Reading 346 PART FIVE: THE POST-POSITIVIST PERSPECTIVE OF THE EARLY W. V. QUINE 349 CHAPTER 16 The Analytic and the Synthetic, the Necessary and the Possible, the Apriori and the Aposteriori 351 CHAPTER 17 Meaning and Holistic Verificationism 378 Suggested Further Reading 406 Index 409. (shrink)

This is a major, wide-ranging history of analytic philosophy since 1900, told by one of the tradition's leading contemporary figures. The first volume takes the story from 1900 to mid-century. The second brings the history up to date.

summaryThis paper discusses objections against the idea that the meaning of a word is its use. Sct. 1 accepts Rundle's point that ‘meaning’ and ‘use’ are used differently, but insists that this is compatible with holding that use determines meaning, an therefore holds the key to conceptual analysis. Scts. 2–4 rebut three lines of argument which claim that linguistic philosophy goes astray by reading into the meaning of words non‐semantic features of its use: Searle's general speech act fallacy charge, Hacker's (...) use of the Frege‐point against Wittgenstein's account of avowals, and Grice's attack on Wittgenstein's discussion of ‘trying’. Sct. 5 argues that Grice's doctrine of conversational implicature fails to show that the features he disregards are pragmatic rather than semantic. Sct. 6 ends with some suggestions about how use can be related to meaning without being abused. (shrink)

summaryThis paper discusses objections against the idea that the meaning of a word is its use. Sct. 1 accepts Rundle's point that ‘meaning’ and ‘use’ are used differently, but insists that this is compatible with holding that use determines meaning, an therefore holds the key to conceptual analysis. Scts. 2–4 rebut three lines of argument which claim that linguistic philosophy goes astray by reading into the meaning of words non‐semantic features of its use: Searle's general speech act fallacy charge, Hacker's (...) use of the Frege‐point against Wittgenstein's account of avowals, and Grice's attack on Wittgenstein's discussion of ‘trying’. Sct. 5 argues that Grice's doctrine of conversational implicature fails to show that the features he disregards are pragmatic rather than semantic. Sct. 6 ends with some suggestions about how use can be related to meaning without being abused. (shrink)

What is philosophy about and what are its methods? _Philosophy and Ordinary Language_ is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means _ordinary_ language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true. Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a (...) wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy. (shrink)