This pioneering book demonstrates the crucial importance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics to his philosophy as a whole. Marion traces the development of Wittgenstein's thinking in the context of the mathematical and philosophical work of the times, to make coherent sense of ideas that have too often been misunderstood because they have been presented in a disjointed and incomplete way. In particular, he illuminates the work of the neglected 'transitional period' between the Tractatus and the Investigations.

Is it merely a matter of taste or convention to consider something right or wrong? Or can we find good reasons for our values and judgements that are independent of culture and tradition? The problem is as old as philosophy itself; and after more than two millennia of scholarly debate, there seems no end to the controversy. But Christian Illies suggests that powerful new forms of transcendental argument (a philosophical tool known since antiquity) may offer a long-sought cornerstone for morality.

This book presents a novel theory of probability applicable to general reasoning, science, and the courts. Based on a strongly subjective starting-point, with probabilities viewed simply as the guarded beliefs one can reasonably hold, the theory shows how such beliefs are legitimately "projected" outwards as if they existed in the world independent of our judgements.

This book departs from much of the scholarship on Kant by demonstrating the centrality of imagination to Kant's philosophy as a whole. In Kant's works, human experience is simultaneously passive and active, thought and sensed, free and unfree: these dualisms are often thought of as unfortunate byproducts of his system. Gibbons, however, shows that imagination performs a vital function in "bridging gaps" between the different elements of cognition and experience. Thus, the role imagination plays in Kant's works expresses his fundamental insight into the complexity of cognition for finite...

There is not one but many ways to picture the world--Australian "x-ray" pictures, cubish collages, Amerindian split-style figures, and pictures in two-point perspective each draw attention to different features of what they represent. Understanding Pictures argues that this diversity is the central fact with which a theory of figurative pictures must reckon. Lopes advances the theory that identifying pictures' subjects is akin to recognizing objects whose appearances have changed over time. He develops a schema for categorizing the different ways pictures represent--the different kinds of...

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the sorts of things there are in the mind--events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinctions between them, and argues that the category of state has been very widely and seriously misunderstood.

This book casts new light on the traditional disagreement between those who hold that we cannot be morally responsible for our actions if they are causally determined, and those who deny this. Klein suggests that reflection on the relation between justice and deprivation offers a way out of this perplexity.

Daniel Schwartz examines the views on friendship of the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas friendship is the ideal type of relationship that rational beings should cultivate. Schwartz argues that Aquinas fundamentally revises some of the main features of Aristotle's paradigmatic account of friendship so as to accommodate the case of friendship between radically unequal beings: man and God. As a result, Aquinas presents a broader view of friendship than Aristotle's, allowing for a higher extent of disagreement. lack of mutual understanding, and inequality between...

These days almost everyone seems to think it obvious that equality of opportunity is at least part of what constitutes a fair society. At the same time they are so vague about what equality of opportunity actually amounts to that it can begin to look like an empty term, a convenient shorthand for the way jobs (or for that matter university places, or positions of power, or merely places on the local sports team) should be allocated, whatever that happens to be.
Matt Cavanagh offers a highly provocative and original new view, suggesting that the way we think about equality and opportunity...

George Karamanolis breaks new ground in the study of later ancient philosophy by examining the interplay of the two main schools of thought, Platonism and Aristotelianism, from the first century BC to the third century AD. From the time of Antiochus and for the next four centuries Platonists were strongly preoccupied with the question of how Aristotle's philosophy compared with the Platonic model. Scholars have usually classified Platonists into two groups, the orthodox ones and the eclectics or syncretists, depending on whether Platonists rejected Aristotle's philosophy as a whole or...