Dr White's book is the first to be written on Schopenhauer's important foundation-work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It presents the arguments and analyses of Schopenhauer's work in systematic form and assesses the worth of those arguments and analyses, with particular emphasis on their positive merits. Schopenhauer divides the phenomenal world into four classes of object, discussing each of these in turn, and the chapters of White's book generally follow that order. But the book also contains a chapter of introduction showing how the Fourfold Root...

In an autobiographical introduction the author tells about the two forces which have shaped his intellectual life: philosophy as an academic profession and philosophy as a search for a view of life. The book, accordingly, divides in two parts.
The essays in the first part survey developments in logic and analytical philosophy in the perspective of the closing century and in the light of the author's long experience and participation in them. There are also essays on Musil's criticism of Mach, on the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila's search for a monistic world view, and on Wittgenstein's...

This collection of essays deals with some pressing social, cultural and moral concerns. It addresses problems of trans-cultural and intro-cultural understanding due to diverse perceptions of various themes. Moving beyond Cultural Otherness its aim is to evolve linkages between alternative visions of convergent character avoiding the extremes of hegemonic globalization and radical relativism. Themes included are: alternative perceptions of 1. history and historiography; 2. flux; 3. satisfactions, and obstacles in cross-cultural understanding; 4. A-self and other; 5. cultural objects; 6....

Without God or His Doubles offers a sympathetic, but critical interpretation of the philosophy of Richard Rorty. Rorty is one of the most widely discussed of contemporary philosophers, but there exist few attempts to deal with the full scope of Rorty's writings in a systematic fashion. This book shows that the unifying theme that runs through Rorty's writings on epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and political philosophy is a quasi-religious conception of human creativity and human freedom. In other words, Rorty's attempt to...

The What and the Why of History deals with history as a cognitive discipline concerned to establish justifiable knowledge about a past we can never experience. It is divided into three parts. The first focuses on the conditions that are presupposed when historians offer explanations of what they have come to know. But whatever is to be explained must first come to be known, and the second part is concerned with the character of the cognitive activity which is the constitution of the historical past. The point is that we must attend to the historical enterprise on its own terms, and not...

This engaging, wide-ranging study in comparative social and political philosophy gives a well-argued account of how ideological and even utopian views, such as normative communication, development and justice, are sociologically rooted. It also shows how this fact has been reflected in the social history of Asian countries like India and China, as well as some Western countries during the last two centuries.
To illustrate the underlying concepts, reference is made to influential thinkers, both from the East and West, from Hegel and James Mill to Marx and Maozedong, and from Gandhi to...

Building bridges between Asian and Western philosophies, Kuang-ming Wu provides a novel approach to the "self-other" issue, casting it in terms of togetherness. On the "Logic" of Togetherness is a natural sequel to On Chinese Body Thinking (Brill, 1997). It is an essay on a cultural hermeneutics of togetherness, and of the homo-ecological community of differences, cultural and otherwise. "Togetherness" is the concrete primal "that" by which we explain and analyze concrete things and situations: an intrinsic interactive principle of integrity, growth, reflection, and behavior. In...

The purpose of this book is to reveal the antique pedigree of a now commonplace term, "Inspiration," an essential creation-myth now propelling notions of "self-expression" in modern art-making. Knowledge of the ancient sources of such supposedly "modernist" fixations will make a significant contribution to historical-cultural thinking, particularly by showing in detail the facts of an unrecognized evolutionary continuity. In order to personify "Inspiration," this study initially focuses upon Michelangelo's Bacchus of 1496, so revealing now-forgotten meanings once typically to be attached in a...

This volume investigates how, through critical engagement, the philosophy of Donald Davidson in the Western analytic tradition and some thoughts and strands in Chinese philosophy can jointly contribute to the common philosophical enterprise and shows how such comparative methodology of constructive engagement is important or even indispensable in general philosophical inquiry. The anthology consists of 12 previously unpublished essays by experts in relevant areas of study, which are organized into five parts respectively on conceptual schemes and cross-cultural understanding, the principle of...

Using the ideas of the American scientist and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, three conceptions of interpretation can be distinguished: the Iconic, the Indexical and the Intellective. This trichotomy is based on Peirce's use of his sign theory and his logic of scientific discovery. The Iconic captures what is valuable in itself for an individual interpreter as opposed to the Indexical which is available for public appreciation as an outcome beyond Interpretative activities. The Intellective extends the Iconic to include the interpretative activities of groups of interpreters employing...