Professional Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters

ISBN-13: 9789027720726 / Angielski / Miękka / 1985 / 256 str.

Thomas D. Perry; P. Perry

Opis

Over the past several decades serious work in philosophy has become almost wholly inaccessible to people who do not specialize in the subject. To be sure, the writings of Aristotle and Kant were never easy reading, and even relatively untechnical philosophers like Mill or Santayana de mand careful study if we are really to understand them. But during the last generation or two the situation has steadily become worse for readers who may want to know what philosophers of their own time are doing. And this is true even though many writers have been learning to avoid the unnecessary jargon that disfigures so much of traditional philosophy. No matter how direct the English style of recent philosophers may be, their methodic purposes and argument style will re main obscure to anyone who has not gone to considerable trouble to be introduced to them. Then too, the closeness of their analysis and the con sequent narrowness of many of the issues pursued make it hard to catch onto the argument without some familiarity with slightly earlier discus sions from which those issues emerged. All of this helps to account for the rather common but false belief that professional philosophy is now only a collection of technical exercises that could hardly be of interest to anyone but the philosophers themselves.

Recenzje

`Perry has a real mastery of the subject and he writes clerly and interestingly. His explanations of extremely difficult notions such as Russell's theory of descriptions, Strawson's criticism of that theory and the more recent work of Quine and Kripke are extremely lucid... Perry's work seems to me excellent.'
Paul Edwards, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

Spis treści

One.- 1/Four Stages of Reflection.- 1. Metaphysical Problems and Theories.- 2. The Four Stages Described.- 3. The Four Stages Illustrated.- 4. A Change of Emphasis.- 2/Defending Common Sense.- 5. Moore on Common Sense.- 6. Moore and Later Philosophy.- 7. Private Language.- 8. A Critique and a Promissory Note.- 3/Descriptive Metaphysics.- 9. Identification.- 10. Re-Identification.- 11. A Skeptical Counterattack.- 12. A Final Paradox.- 4/Conceptual Reform.- 13. Time Gaps.- 14. A Prefabricated Philosophy Problem.- 15. The Theory of Stage Four.- Two.- 5/Metaphysics Out of Logic.- 16. Introduction to Part Two.- 17. Russell on Descriptions.- 18. Russell’s Atomism.- 6/Inside the Revolution.- 19. Some Early Wittgenstein.- 20. The Decline of “Analysis”.- 21. Critique of the Tractatus.- 22. Strawson on Reference.- 7/A Passage to America.- 23. The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction.- 24. Time Gaps Revisited.- 25. Canonical Language.- 8/Recent Philosophy of Language.- 26. Proper Names.- 27. Necessary Identity Statements.- 28. Mind-Brain Identity.- 29. Retrospect.- Three.- 9/Values in General.- 30. Introduction to Part Three.- 31. Standards.- 32. True Values.- 10/Ethical Theory.- 33. The Problem of Moral Truth.- 34. Two Types of Moral Thought.- 35. Reforming the Concept of Moral Truth.- 36. The Economy of this Reform.- 11/Applied Ethics.- 37. A Problem of Privacy.- 38. Some Descriptive Inquiries.- 39. Constructing the Right.- 40. The Metaphysics of Politics.- Conclusion.- Notes.- Name Index.