With this third edition of Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appear ance, we are pleased to make available once more one of the most in fluential and important works in the philosophy of our times. Professor Geoffrey Hellman's introduction gives a sustained analysis and appreciation of the major themes and the thrust of the book, as well as an account of the ways in which many of Goodman's problems and projects have been picked up and developed by others. Hellman also (...) suggests how The Structure of Appearance introduces issues which Goodman later continues in his essays and in the Languages of Art. There remains the task of understanding Good man's project as a whole; to see the deep continuities of his thought, as it ranges from logic to epistemology, to science and art; to see it therefore as a complex yet coherent theory of human cognition and practice. What we can only hope to suggest, in this note, is the b. road Significance of Goodman's apparently technical work for philosophers, scientists and humanists. One may say of Nelson Goodman that his bite is worse than his bark. Behind what appears as a cool and methodical analysis of the conditions of the construction of systems, there lurks a radical and disturbing thesis: that the world is, in itself, no more one way than another, nor are we. It depends on the ways in which we take it, and on what we do. (shrink)

Shows that when Qyuine's criterion of ontological commitment is modified to allow for the legitimacy of substitutional quantification, two consequences follow: (i) fundamental questions of ontology cease to be settled by mere appeal to logical form and truth, and (ii) a powerful method for reducing ontological commitments becomes available.

The subject of this paper is the philosophical problem of accounting for the relationship between mathematics and non-mathematical reality. The first section, devoted to the importance of the problem, suggests that many of the reasons for engaging in philosophy at all make an account of the relationship between mathematics and reality a priority, not only in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science, but also in general epistemology/metaphysics. This is followed by a (rather brief) survey of the major, traditional philosophies (...) of mathematics indicating how each is prepared to deal with the present problem. It is shown that (the standard formulations of) some views seem to deny outright that there is a relationship between mathematics and any non-mathematical reality; such philosophies are clearly unacceptable. Other views leave the relationship rather mysterious and, thus, are incomplete at best. The final, more speculative section provides the direction of a positive account. A structuralist philosophy of mathematics is outlined and it is proposed that mathematics applies to reality though the discovery of mathematical structures underlying the non-mathematical universe. (shrink)

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

§30. Significance of Desargues's theorem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 CHAPTER VI. PASCAL'S THEOREM. §31. ...

The material contained in the following translation was given in substance by Professor Hilbertas a course of lectures on euclidean geometry at the University of G]ottingen during the wintersemester of 1898-1899. The results of his investigation were re-arranged and put into the formin which they appear here as a memorial address published in connection with the celebration atthe unveiling of the Gauss-Weber monument at G]ottingen, in June, 1899. In the French edition, which appeared soon after, Professor Hilbert made some additions, (...) particularly in the concludingremarks, where he gave an account of the results of a recent investigation made by Dr. Dehn.These additions have been incorporated in the following translation.Geometry, like arithmetic, requires for its logical development only a small number ofsimple, fundamental principles. These fundamental principles are called the axioms ofgeometry. The choice of the axioms and the investigation of their relations to one anotheris a problem which, since the time of Euclid, has been discussed in numerous excellentmemoirs to be found in the mathematical literature.1 This problem is tantamount to thelogical analysis of our intuition of space. (shrink)