We contrived at last, somehow or other, to agree in a general conclusion, that he who had wisdom had no need of fortune.

Der für die Begründung und spätere Ausformung der Husserlschen Phänomenologie programmatische Text "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft" entstand in wenigen Wochen um die Jahreswende 1910/1911 und bildete die erste größere Veröffentlichung Husserls seit seinem vielbeachteten Frühwerk, den "Logischen Untersuchungen" von 1900/ 1901. Trotz der erstaunlich kurzen Zeit, die Husserl für die schriftliche Fixierung benötigte, bietet diese - erstmals in der Zeitschrift Logos publizierte - Schrift auf beeindruckende Weise bereits einen umfassenden Überblick über die leitenden Gedanken und Einsichten, die für sein späteres (...) Schaffen und für die Grundlegung der phänomenologischen Philosophie überhaupt von zentraler Bedeutung waren. (shrink)

In this important new work, Haack develops an original theory of empirical evidence or justification, and argues its appropriateness to the goals of inquiry. In so doing, Haack provides detailed critical case studies of Lewis's foundationalism; Davidson's and Bonjour's coherentism; Popper's 'epistemology without a knowing subject'; Quine's naturalism; Goldman's reliabilism; and Rorty's, Stich's, and the Churchlands' recent obituaries of epistemology.

This article reviews the transition between post-Fregean anti-naturalistic epistemology and contemporary naturalistic epistemologies. It traces the revival of naturalism to Quine’s critique of the "a priori", and Kuhn’s defense of historicism, and use the arguments of Quine and Kuhn to identify a position, "traditional naturalism", that combines naturalistic themes with the claim that epistemology is a normative enterprise. Pleas for more radical versions of naturalism are articulated, and briefly confronted.

The relation between logic and thought has long been controversial, but has recently influenced theorizing about the nature of mental processes in cognitive science. One prominent tradition argues that to explain the systematicity of thought we must posit syntactically structured representations inside the cognitive system which can be operated upon by structure sensitive rules similar to those employed in systems of natural deduction. I have argued elsewhere that the systematicity of human thought might better be explained as resulting from the (...) fact that we have learned natural languages which are themselves syntactically structured. According to this view, symbols of natural language are external to the cognitive processing system and what the cognitive system must learn to do is produce and comprehend such symbols. In this paper I pursue that idea by arguing that ability in natural deduction itself may rely on pattern recognition abilities that enable us to operate on external symbols rather than encodings of rules that might be applied to internal representations. To support this suggestion, I present a series of experiments with connectionist networks that have been trained to construct simple natural deductions in sentential logic. These networks not only succeed in reconstructing the derivations on which they have been trained, but in constructing new derivations that are only similar to the ones on which they have been trained. (shrink)

Naturalism - the thesis that all facts are natural facts, that is the facts that can be recognised and explained by a natural science - plays a central role in contemporary analytical philosophy. Yet many philosophers reject the claims of naturalism. The essays in this anthology explore the difficulties of naturalism by revealing the ambiguities surrounding it, as well as the tensions that exist among its critics.

A. ON THE MEANING OF PHENOMENOLOGY 1. "PHENOMENOLOGY" * "Phenomenology" is, in the 20th century, mainly the name for a philosophical movement whose primary ...