David Hume is the greatest and also one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. No philosopher is more important for his careful, critical, and deeply perceptive examination of the grounds for belief in divine powers and for his sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, expressed most powerfully in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. The Dialogues ask if belief in God can be inferred from the (...) nature of the universe or whether it is even consistent with what we know about the universe. The Natural History of Religion investigates the origins of belief, and follows its development from harmless polytheism to dogmatic monotheism. Together they constitute the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious belief ever mounted by a philosopher. This edition also includes Section XI of The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and a letter concerning the Dialogues, as well as particularly helpful critical apparatus and abstracts of the main texts, enabling the reader to locate or relocate key topics. (shrink)

Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

‘Performative’ transcendental arguments exploit the status of a subcategory of self-falsifying propositions in showing that some form of skepticism is unsustainable. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between performatively inconsistent propositions and transcendental arguments, and then to compare performative transcendental arguments to modest transcendental arguments that seek only to establish the indispensability of some belief or conceptual framework. Reconceptualizing transcendental arguments as performative helps focus the intended dilemma for the skeptic: performative transcendental arguments directly confront the (...) skeptic with the choice of abandoning either skepticism or some other deep theoretical commitment. Many philosophers, from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to Jaakko Hintikka, C.I. Lewis, and Bernard Lonergan, have claimed that some skeptical propositions regarding knowledge, reason, and/or morality can be shown to be self-defeating; that is to say, they have claimed that the very upholding of some skeptical position is in some way incompatible with the position being upheld, or with the implied, broader dialectical position of the skeptic in question. Statements or propositions alleged to have this characteristic also sometimes are called ‘self-falsifying,’ ‘self-refuting,’ ‘self-stultifying,’ ‘self-destructive,’ or ‘pointless.’ However, proponents of the strategy of showing skepticism to be self-defeating have not in general adequately distinguished between two types of self-defeating proposition: self-falsifying and self-stultifying. In the first part of this paper I distinguish between self-falsifying and self-stultifying propositions, and introduce the notion of performative self-falsification. In the second part I discuss classical transcendental arguments, ‘modest’ transcendental arguments, and objections to each. In the third part I introduce two types of transcendental argument—each labeled “performative”—corresponding to two types of performatively self-falsifying proposition, and I compare them to modest transcendental arguments. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.

überall einen richtigen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft giebt, in welchem Fall es auch einen Canon derselben geben muß, so wird dieser nicht den speculativen, sondernden pr.ntischen Vernunftgebrauch betreffen, den wir also iezt ...

The concept of necessity plays a central role in Kant's philosophy, but seems to lead to severe paradoxes. On the one hand he states: ‘Notwendigkeit und strenge Allgemeinheit sind sichere Kennzeichen einer Erkenntnis a priori’. On the other hand he talks also about ‘notwendig (d. i. nach einer Regel)’, which means ‘necessary according to the empirical natural laws’. However, he never states explicitly the distinction between these two different concepts of necessity. Either Kant's philosophy is inconsistent or we have to (...) assume that he indeed interchanges two different concepts, even if he does not tell us that there is a difference between synthetic apriori necessity and natural necessity. This paper defends the hypothesis of two different necessities and then shows how this strategy makes possible a rational reconstruction of Kant's epistemology. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz beantwortet die Frage „Warum ist überhaupt etwas“ mit einer Version des kosmologischen und ontologischen Argumentes, für deren Gültigkeit plädiert wird. Die Version des kosmologischen Argumentes, die aus der Existenz kontingenter Dinge und aus dem Satz vom zureichenden Grund auf ein notwendig existierendes Wesen schließt, wird gegen zwei Einwände verteidigt. Während der erste Einwand behauptet, eine zureichende Erklärung der Welt komme ohne die Annahme eines notwendig existierenden Wesens aus, wendet sich der zweite Einwand gegen den Satz vom zureichenden Grund. (...) Aus dem kosmologischen Argument ergibt sich die Anschlussfrage, wie sich ein notwendig existierendes Wesen denken lässt, die traditionell mit dem ontologischen Argument beantwortet wurde. Nun hat Kant aber gezeigt, dass die klassische Form des ontologischen Argumentes misslingt, weil Sein kein reales Prädikat ist. Daher wird eine Version des ontologischen Argumentes entwickelt, die auf dem Boden des Kantschen Existenzverständnisses steht und die vom Seinsstreben des Guten ausgeht.This essay answers the question „Why is there anything at all?“ with a version of the cosmological and the ontological argument, whose validity is argued for. The version of the cosmological argument, which deduces a necessarily existing being from both the existence of contingent things, and from the principle of sufficient reason, is defended against two objections. While the first objection states that a sufficient explanation of the world does not need the assumption of a necessarily existing being, the second objection turns against the principle of sufficient reason. From the cosmological argument the question results, in what way a necessarily existing being can be imagined, which was traditionally answered with the ontological argument. Kant showed, however, that the classical form of the ontological argument fails because being is not a real predicate. For this reason, a version of the ontological argument is here developed, which stands on the ground of Kant's understanding of existence, and which works with the assumption of the good's tendency to be. (shrink)

This book provides a commentary on Kant‘s „Postulates of Empirical Thought in General“. It investigates Kant‘s entire theory of modal concepts from the mid-1750s up to the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. It was in this work that Kant first answered the question „What is an object?“. In the process, he responded to other theories of objectivity native to the 18th century: rationalism, empiricism, idealism, and skepticism.

Dieses Buch bietet die umfassende neuere Darstellung und Analyse des ganzen Hegelschen Systems. Dabei wird Hegels Philosophie in einer klaren und leichtverständlichen Sprache einer immanenten Kritik unterzogen, die sich weder in Paraphrasen erschöpft noch mit der Versicherung entgegengesetzter Behauptung ihr Ende findet. "Ein wirklich faszinierendes Werk, das das systematische Philosophieren selbst erneut zu wecken vermag" Philosophisches Jahrbuch.

Logic for Philosophy is an introduction to logic for students of contemporary philosophy. It is suitable both for advanced undergraduates and for beginning graduate students in philosophy. It covers (i) basic approaches to logic, including proof theory and especially model theory, (ii) extensions of standard logic that are important in philosophy, and (iii) some elementary philosophy of logic. It emphasizes breadth rather than depth. For example, it discusses modal logic and counterfactuals, but does not prove the central metalogical results for (...) predicate logic (completeness, undecidability, etc.) Its goal is to introduce students to the logic they need to know in order to read contemporary philosophical work. It is very user-friendly for students without an extensive background in mathematics. In short, this book gives you the understanding of logic that you need to do philosophy. (shrink)