Speakers can get to know the meaning of any of indefinitely many sentences that they have never heard before. This statement encapsulates the problem of linguistic creativity, which lies at the core of philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has also sparked off a considerable amount of work on the philosophy of mind.
After establishing the failure of the familiar compositional approach to the problem, the book adopts a radically new start. It develops core elements of the later Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, putting them to work todissolve' the problem, proving...

In the Preliminary Dissertation' of his Theodicy, Leibniz declares himself an apologist for the compatibilist doctrines of original sin, election and reprobation propounded by the theologians of the Augsburg Confession. According to those theologians, man's actions are determined but man retains the power to act otherwise and therefore is responsible for his actions. Savage argues that Leibniz, in formulating his apology, availed himself of both his doctrine of possible worlds and his finite-infinite analysis distinction (the latter being applied within the former). Savage challenges...

The late Hector-Neri Castaneda, the Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, and founding editor of Nous, has deeply influenced current analytic pjilosophy with diverse contributions, including guise theory, the theory on indicators and quasi-indicators, and the proposition/practition theory. This volume collects 15 papers - for the most part previously unpublished - in ontology, philosophy of language, cognitive science and related areas by ex-students of Professor Castaneda, most of whom are now well-known researchers or even distinguished scholars. The authors share the...

There is an interesting and far-reaching disagreement between Smith and Frederick Stoutland. In his 'The Real Reasons' Stoutland argues that one of the mistakes that turned the belief-desire model of action into the 'received view' is the underlying commitment to the idea that there is an underlying unity to all action explanations. According to Stoutland the unity is no deeper than the superficial fact that actions are responses of agents to the world, and the challenge for the philosophy of action is to make sense of that fact without falling victim to the un- fruitful assumption that...

This volume contains outstanding studies by some of the best scholars in ancient Greek Philosophy on key topics in Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought. These studies provide rigorous analyses of arguments and texts and often advance original interpretations. The essays in the volume range over a number of central themes in ancient philosophy, such as Socratic and Platonic conceptions of philosophical method; the Socratic paradoxes; Plato's view on justice; the nature of Platonic Forms, especially the Form of the Good; Aristotle's views on the faculties of the soul; Aristotle's...

In this book, I discuss the question whether God exists, not as a Tillichian religious symbol, but as an actual person, albeit a person who is very different from you and me. My procedure is to examine arguments bdth for and against God's existence qua person and to assess their relative merits. I shall try to show that there is more evidence that God exists than that he does not. This position is, of course, rejected nowadays, even by most religious thinkers, who hold, for one reason or another, that evidence has nothing to do with religious belief, properly understood. My reply to these...

My interest in the issues considered here arose out of my great frustration in trying to attack the all-pervasive relativism of my students in introductory ethics courses at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. I am grateful to my students for forcing me to take moral relativism and skepticism seriously and for compelling me to argue for my own dogmatically maintained version of moral objectivism. The result is before the reader. The conclusions reached here (which can be described either as a minimal objectivism or as a moderate verson of relativism) are considerably weaker...

"He Francis Bacon] writes of science like a Lord Chan cellor" - William Harvey "Don't say: 'There must be something common . . . ' - but look and see" Ludwig Wittgenstein In the history of western moral philosophy since Plato, there has been a pervasive tendency for the moral theorist to wri e, in effect, like a scientist, Le. to seek completely general prin ciples of right conduct. Of late, moreover, there has been an attempt to set forth a theory underlying the general principles, not of right conduct, admittedly, but of justice. To be sure, we are sometimes warned that the principles...

This book is an exercise in philosophical criticism. What I criticize are some variations on a recurrent theme in religious thought: the theme that faith and reason are so disparate that faith is not undermined, but strengthened, if we judge that reason can give it no support. The common name for this view is Fideism. Those representatives of it that I have chosen to discuss do more, however, than insist on keeping faith free of the alleged contaminations of philosophical argument. They consider the case for Fideism to be made even stronger if one judges that reason cannot give us truth or...

In this book, setting aside his consideration of specifically ethical topics, I try to provide a comprehensive interpretation of Moore's thought. Against the background of this general interpretation I examine in detail his work on some of the central problems of metaphysics and, because Moore's being able to sustain a consistent anti-skepticism is essential to the survival of the base from which he works on those problems, of epistemology too. The interpretation of which I speak involves my taking as the centerpiece of Moore's philosophical work his book, Some Main Problems of Philosophy,...