Based on the author's nearly 30 years' of teaching introductory philosophy — and his observations of where beginning readers run into difficulty — this compact “primer” gives readers the basic tools they need to explore philosophical reading and writing for the first time. Provides insights and strategies for helping readers get started with reading, thinking about, and discussing philosophical concepts and writing short philosophical essays about what they've been reading and thinking; includes a new chapter that illustrates techniques for probing (...) beneath the expository surface of a given question to uncover the inevitable structure of presuppositions and problems underlying it. (shrink)

Essays discuss cognition, perception, art, science, truth, metaphor, education, philosophy, and cognitive psychology.

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

A renewal of philosophy is precisely the point of this book, drawn from the 1989 Gifford Lectures by one of America's most distinguished philosophers.

Symbolic Worlds contains fifteen chapters, with all but the first published between 1972 and 1996. The unifying theme concerns aspects of the symbolic function in language, science, art, ritual, and play. The approach is nominalist and heavily influenced by the work of Nelson Goodman.

The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philosophy should serve. Part I contains more purely theoretical and methodological discussion, of such (...) questions as whether there are 'timeless' philosophical problems, whether the issues of one epoch are commensurable with those of another, and what style is appropriate to the historiography of the subject. The essays in Part II consider a number of case-histories. They present important revisionist scholarship and original contributions on topics drawn from ancient, early modern and more recent philosophy. All the essays have been specially commissioned, and the contributors include many of the leading figures in the field. The volume as a whole will be of vital interest to everyone concerned with the study of philosophy and of its history. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam, one of America’s most distinguished philosophers, surveys an astonishingly wide range of issues and proposes a new, clear-cut approach to philosophical questions—a renewal of philosophy. He contests the view that only science offers an appropriate model for philosophical inquiry. His discussion of topics from artificial intelligence to natural selection, and of reductive philosophical views derived from these models, identifies the insuperable problems encountered when philosophy ignores the normative or attempts to reduce it to something else.

Nelson Goodman’s work is universally regarded as pioneering and fundamental, and his attempts to clarify the nature of induction, symbol systems, art, theorizing and understanding have received and continue to receive great attention. Central to that work is a view Goodman describes as “radically relativist.” Goodman’s unusual brand of relativism, however, while basic to the entire Goodman corpus, has yet to be carefully delineated and studied. I hope in this paper to begin such a study. I will first briefly review (...) the development of Goodmanian relativism through his earlier books and articles. Then I will develop a more detailed and elaborate account of the relativist position Goodman develops in his most recent book, Ways of Worldmaking. Because Goodman’s relativism is significantly different from more traditional accounts of relativism, I will attempt to shed light on Goodmanian relativism by contrasting it with those more traditional accounts. Finally, I will argue that there is a crucial ambiguity in Goodman’s portrayal and defense of relativism, having to do with the role of “criteria of rightness” in Goodman’s system, and that this ambiguity licenses two quite distinct versions of Goodmanian relativism. I will argue that the weak version of relativism is defensible, and important, but that the strong, or “radical,” relativist position suffers from a fatal flaw. My hope is that the paper will serve to clarify not only Goodman’s position, but epistemological relativism more generally. (shrink)

Anyone familiar with Nelson Goodman’s philosophical career knows that to have quarreled with him was a hazardous enterprise. For aside from his creative brilliance and analytical subtlety, he was also one of the foremost dialecticians of the age. Seeing through the flaws of rival views and rebutting putative counterarguments to his own came as easily to him as breathing. To recall his rejoinders to a long list of would-be rebuttals of his paper, “On Likeness of Meaning”, or the acute series (...) of counterexamples to received views of scientific law in his pioneering paper, “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals”, or his replies to criticisms of his nominalism in “A World of Individuals”, or again, his replies to confident attacks on his theory of projection is to find ample evidence of an intimidating intellectual presence. To take issue with him was in fact to take one’s philosophical life in one’s hands and many are those over the course of his career who rued the venture. (shrink)

Anyone familiar with Nelson Goodman’s philosophical career knows that to have quarreled with him was a hazardous enterprise. For aside from his creative brilliance and analytical subtlety, he was also one of the foremost dialecticians of the age. Seeing through the flaws of rival views and rebutting putative counterarguments to his own came as easily to him as breathing. To recall his rejoinders to a long list of would-be rebuttals of his paper, “On Likeness of Meaning”, or the acute series (...) of counterexamples to received views of scientific law in his pioneering paper, “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals”, or his replies to criticisms of his nominalism in “A World of Individuals”, or again, his replies to confident attacks on his theory of projection is to find ample evidence of an intimidating intellectual presence. To take issue with him was in fact to take one’s philosophical life in one’s hands and many are those over the course of his career who rued the venture. (shrink)

In contrast to monistic realism (as represented by Peirce) and pluralistic irrealism (as represented by Goodman) I argue for what I call plurealism, a view which is both pluralistic and realist, recognizing different worlds that are not only independent of one another, but also independent of us.

Required reading at more than 100 colleges and universities throughout North America.

Starmaking brings together a cluster of work published over the past 35 years by Nelson Goodman and two Harvard colleagues, Hilary Putnam and Israel Scheffler, on the conceptual connections between monism and pluralism, absolutism and relativism, and idealism and different notions of realism -- issues that are central to metaphysics and epistemology. The title alludes to Goodman's famous defense of the claim that because all true representations of stars and other objects are human creations, it follows that in an important (...) sense the stars themselves are made by us. More generally, the argument moves from the fact that our right representations are constructed by us to the claim that the world itself is similarly constructed. Starmaking addresses the question of whether this seeming paradox can be turned into a serious philosophical view. Goodman and Putnam are sympathetic; Scheffler is the critic. Although many others continue to write about pluralism, relativism, and constructionalism, Starmaking brings together the protagonists in the debate since its beginnings and follows closely its still developing form and substance, focusing sharply on Goodman's claim that "we make versions, and right versions make worlds.". (shrink)

Symbolism is a primary characteristic of the mind, deployed and displayed in every aspect of our thought and culture. In this important and broad-ranging book, Israel Scheffler explores the various ways in which the mind functions symbolically. This involves considering not only the world of science and the arts, but also such activities as religious ritual and child's play. The book offers an integrated treatment of ambiguity and metaphor, analyses of play and ritual, and an extended discussion of the relations (...) between scientific symbol systems and reality. What emerges is a picture of the basic symbol-forming character of the mind. In addition to philosophers of art and science, likely readers of this book will include students of linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, religion, and psychology. (shrink)