Davidson attacks the intelligibility of conceptual relativism, i.e. of truth relative to a conceptual scheme. He defines the notion of a conceptual scheme as something ordering, organizing, and rendering intelligible empirical content, and calls the position that employs both notions scheme-content dualism. He argues that such dualism is untenable since: not only can we not parcel out empirical content sentence per sentence but also the notion of uninterpreted content to which several schemes are relative, and the related notion of a (...) theory ”fitting the evidence’, can be shown to lack intelligibility too. Davidson argues further that belief in incommensurable schemes or non-intertranslatable languages is possible only on violating a correct understanding of interpretability : if we succeed in interpreting someone else then we have shown there is no need to speak of two conceptual schemes, while if we fail ”there is no ground for speaking of two.’. (shrink)

Written for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards, this article provides a survey of Phenomenology, beginning with the work of Edmund Husserl and going on to discuss the very different approaches to phenomenology of Heidegger in the period of Sein und Zeit and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

From FRANZ BRENTANO's manuscripts for his Vienna lectures 1888/89. Photo by his son, Dr. John CM Brentano, Highland Park, Illinois...

In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

As a teaching text, The Idea of Phenomenology is ideal: it is brief, it is unencumbered by the technical terminology of Husserl's later work, it bears a clear ...

The structure and key elements of Husserl's philosophy are analyzed in this chronological examination of his doctrines. Bibliogs.

Edmund Husserl is the founder of phenomenology. The Logical Investigations is Edmund Husserl's most famous work and has had a decisive impact on the direction of twentieth century philosophy. This is the first time both volumes of this classic work, translated by J.N. Findlay, have been available in paperback. They include a new introduction by Dermot Moran, placing the Logical Investigations in historical context and bringing out its importance for contemporary philosophy.

Science in a new sense arises in the first instance from Plato's establishing of logic, as a place for exploring the essential requirements of "genuine" ...

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a cultural philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and historian of music who, along with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, founded the Frankfurt School. Against Epistemology is one of his most important works.

This dissertation attempts to demonstrate that the Platonic thesis that thought is like a dialogue of the soul with itself, in the form it is given in the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, is a key to the metaphysics of transcendental subjectivity, and can be used fruitfully as a foil in critically interpreting the classical Cartesian and Kantian texts on the metaphysics of the subject. The metaphor becomes fruitful only when developed in the direction of a functional account of acts of (...) thought, according to which the concepts of intentionality are indifferent as to the material constitution of the items which function in such a manner as to be acts of thought. ;Chapter I demonstrates that although the Platonic thesis appears again and again in ancient and Medieval texts, a functional account is never pursued seriously. The tradition assumes that acts of thought are "diaphanous." Chapter II shows that although there are hints of a functional turn in Descartes' distinction between ideas materialiter and ideas objective, he remains true to the tradition in developing his substance metaphysics of the subject. After a brief look at Leibniz in Chapter III, Chapter IV shows how Kant makes the turn to a functional account of the thinking subject, according to which it is a category mistake to say that the transcendental 'I' is in the world either phenomenally or noumenally. Chapter V shows how Wilfrid Sellars develops the Kantian position by taking up the Platonic thesis and interpreting it in a functional direction. This opens up the way to a positive metaphysics of transcendental subjectivity which is able to do justice to the fact that the subject which constitutes the world is also a subject in the world. (shrink)

ESSAY HUSSERL, FREGE AND THE OVERCOMING OF PSYCHOLOGISM* I In a letter to Marvin Farber, Husserl wrote, "External 'influences' are without significance . ...

The "Cartesian Meditations" translation is based primarily on the printed text, edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume of Husserliana ...