Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

Jonathan Bennett here examines the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Dialectic, where Kant is concerned with problems about substance, the nature ...

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Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson's most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson's now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances. Throughout, Individuals advances some highly (...) influential and controversial ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the concept of a person a 'primitive concept'. (shrink)

The classic, influential essay in 'descriptive metaphysics' by the distinguished English philosopher.

This analysis of the concept of a human action takes its point of departure in the fact that actions are things done by persons. But people do many things which do not qualify as actions. A necessary condition for calling something done an action, is that the agent intends or means something by it, in the sense that the agent has some specific end in mind. Thus an action may be said to be the externalization, realization, or expression of the (...) agent's meaning. But what precisely are such meanings or intentions that are given expression in actions? How are they to be distinguished from other mental contents ? The author tries to answer these questions by distinguishing them, on the one hand, from experiences, sensations, feelings, and, on the other hand, from other thoughts and meanings that do not find expression in the action. It is claimed that this account of action explains many characteristics of actions: that actions are appraised, not described (because meanings are evaluated), that an action is regarded as a unity (because the meaning is a unity), that the intention and the performance are not causally related, but related as are the content and expression of linguistic utterances, etc. (shrink)

Although largely conceptual, the book is an unequivocal defense of this new theory in the explanation of human behavior.

Rosenberg applies current thinking in philosophy of science to neoclassical economics in order to assess its claims to scientific standing. Although philosophers have used history and psychology as paradigms for the examination of social science, there is good reason to believe that economics is a more appropriate subject for analysis: it is the most systematized and quantified of the social sciences; its practitioners have reached a measure of consensus on important aspects of their subject; and it encompasses a large number (...) of apparently law-like propositions. (shrink)