"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

This book brings together Wollheim's broad and abiding concerns to illuminate human thought at its furthest reaches of introspection and expression.

Self-deception poses tantalizing conceptual conundrums and provides fertile ground for empirical research. Recent interdisciplinary volumes on the topic feature essays by biologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, and psychologists (Lockard & Paulhus 1988, Martin 1985). Self-deception's location at the intersection of these disciplines is explained by its significance for questions of abiding interdisciplinary interest. To what extent is our mental life present--or even accessible--to consciousness? How rational are we? How is motivated irrationality to be explained? To what extent are our beliefs subject to (...) our control? What are the determinants of belief, and how does motivation bear upon belief? In what measure are widely shared psychological propensities products of evolution? (shrink)

Cavell elaborates the view, traceable from Wittgenstein to Davidson, that there is no thought, and thus no meaning, without language, and shows how this concurs ...

`For those readers who favour an empirical-scientific approach to counselling and therapy, and who view therapy, at least potentially or in principle, as an objective science, this will no doubt be a very useful and informative book... We should be grateful that Erwin has set out more fully than anyone to date the specifically philosophical case for a "science of therapy"; and those of a New Paradigm persuasion at least now know the nature of the arguments they will have to (...) refute in order to sustain their position. I look forward with eager anticipation to their efforts, and to an emerging and fruitful engagement between philosophy and therapy - for both have a great deal to learn from each other' - Counselling, The Journal of the Br. (shrink)

"Well over one half of this brilliant new Monograph constitutes a major sequel to Professor Grunbaum's highly influential 1984 book The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, which was labeled "magisterial" by Frank J. Sulloway, and "the most important book ever written on Freud's status as a scientist" by J. Allan Hobson. The importance of the present Monograph lies in the extent to which the author now goes beyond that earlier volume to offer new original ideas on fundamental themes." "Validation (...) in the Clinical Theory of Psycho-analysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psycho-analysis contains Adolf Grunbaum's new basic critique of the psychoanalytic theory of transference in its role of an etiologic theory; it turns out that etiologic transference interpretations rest on fallacious causal inferences from so-called "meaning connections" between mental states: moreover, just these unsound inferences are the stock-in-trade of the "hermeneutic" reconstruction of psychoanalysis, which charges Freud with a "scientistic self-misunderstanding."" "This volume joins the issue with Marshall Edelson's defenses of the investigative viability of the single-subject case study method. As a spin-off from the import of the serious placebo challenge to psychoanalysis, this Monograph presents the author's widely recognized new account of the placebo concept across all of medicine and psychotherapy. Whereas Foundations of Psychoanalysis objected that Freud's dream theory was evidentially ill-founded, the burden of the present book is to give two new basic reasons for presuming the theory to be false. It also develops the import of the author's appraisal of psychoanalytic theory for the scrutiny of Freud's triadic psychology of religious belief in theism." "Since Sir Karl Popper's most detailed charge of pseudoscience against psychoanalysis in 1983 could not be examined for inclusion in the 1984 book, the present monograph shows in what ways it is wide of the mark as an incoherent diagnosis of the scientific liabilities of psychoanalytic theory. In addition, four important papers that had antedated Foundations by a few years and were scattered over diverse publications have been updated and integrated with the other chapters herein."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment setting are (...) themselves epistemically quite suspect. (shrink)

This book critically examines Freud's own detailed arguments for his major explanatory and therapeutic principles, the current neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis, and the hermeneuticists' reconstruction of Freud's theory and therapy as an alternative to what they claim was a “scientistic” misconstrual of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The clinical case for Freud's cornerstone theory of repression – the claim that psychic conflict plays a causal role in producing neuroses, dreams, and bungled actions – turns out to be ill-founded for two main reasons: (...) Even if clinical data were valid, the method of free association has failed to support the psychoanalytic theory of unconscious motivation; Clinical data tend in any case to be artifacts of the analyst's self-fulfilling expectations, thus losing much of their evidential value. The hypothesis that psychoanalytic treatment is in reality a placebo poses a serious challenge to the assumption that insight is a key causal factor when therapy is successful. This challenge has yet to be met by psychoanalysts. Similar conclusions undermine the neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis. The most influential hermeneuticists, on the other hand, are shown to have imposed an alien philosophy on psychoanalysis, partly through their reliance on gross misconceptions of the natural sciences. Karl Popper's criticism of the Freudian corpus as empirically untestable has misjudged its evidential weaknesses, which are more subtle. If there exists empirical evidence for the principal psychoanalytic doctrines, it cannot be obtained without well-designed extraclinical studies of a kind that have for the most part yet to be attempted. (shrink)