Philosophical Relativity

ISBN-13: 9780195155532 / Angielski / Miękka / 2002 / 144 str.

Peter Unger

Opis

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at an opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean.

Recenzje

"Current debates about contextualism in epistemology begin with Philosophical Relativity, where Unger gives the term 'contextualism' the meaning that, in many philosophical circles, it enjoys today, and gives the position designated by the term its first serious and systematic treatment. Few are likely to accept Unger's 'relativistic' conclusion that the advantages and disadvantages of contextualism and its rival, invariantism, balance out in such a way that there simply is no fact of the matter which is the correct theory, but all who want to think seriously about the issue should confront the challenging arguments in this seminal book."—Keith DeRose, Yale University