The Philosophy of 'as If'

ISBN-13: 9780367550219 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 354 str.

H. Vaihinger; Michael Rosenthal

Opis

Widely acknowledged today as a philosophical masterwork, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Michael Rosenthal, which provides fascinating and important background to Vaihinger’s life and the legacy of The Philosophy of ‘As If’.

Spis treści

Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Michael Rosenthal  General Introduction  Part 1: Basic Principles  General Introductory Remarks on Fictional Constructs  A. The Enumeration and Division of Scientific Fictions  B. The Logical Theory of Scientific Fictions  C. Contributions to the History and Theory of Fictions  D. Consequences for the Theory of Knowledge  Part 2: Amplified Study of Special Problems  1. Artificial Classification  2. Further Artificial Classifications  3. Adam Smith's Method in Political Economy  4. Bentham's Method in Political Science  5. Abstractive Fictional Methods in Physics and Psychology  6. Condillac's Imaginary Statue  7. Lotze's 'Hypothetical Animal'  8. Other Examples of Fictitious Isolation  9. The Fiction of Force  10. Matter and Materialism as Mental Accessories  11. Abstract Concepts as Fictions  12. General Ideas as Fictions  13. Summational, Nominal, and Substitutive Fictions  14. Natural Forces and Natural Laws as Fictions  15. Schematic Fictions  16. Illustrative Fictions  17. The Atomic Theory as a Fiction  18. Fictions in Mathematical Physics  19. The Fiction of Pure Absolute Space  20. Surface, Line, Point, etc., as Fictions  21. The Fiction of the Infinitely Small  22. The History of the Infinitesimal Fiction  23. The Meaning of the' As If' Approach  24. The Fictive Judgment  25. The Fiction contrasted with the Hypothesis  Part 3: Historical Confirmations  A. Kant’s Use of the ‘As If’ Method  B. Forberg, The Originator of the Fichtean Atheism-Controversy, and his Religion of As-If  C. Lange's 'Standpoint of the Ideal'  D. Nietzsche and his Doctrine of Conscious Illusion.  Subject Index  Index of Names

O autorze

Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) was born near Tübingen in Germany. He made important contributions to epistemology, the philosophy of science and mathematics, and to the historiography of philosophy. Vaihinger produced groundbreaking work on Kant’s philosophy, as well as one of the first serious philosophical commentaries on Nietzsche. He is best known as the father of the philosophical theory of fictionalism, which he sets out in his most famous book, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, and his work also influenced the philosophical movement of pragmatism.