This collection of essays looks at analytic philosophy in its historical context. It argues that analytic philosophy is in a state of crisis - having to deal with its self-image, its relationship with philosophical alternatives, its fruitfulness and even legitimacy in the general philosophical community. This crisis manifests itself both within analytic philosophy, as we can see with the discussions and debates concerning the interpretation of its origins and key players (such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein), as well as in its evaluation by philosophers of different bents (such as...

The Subject in Question provides a fascinating insight into a debate between two of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers - Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl - over the key notions of conscious experience and the self. Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego, published in 1937, is a major text in the phenomenological tradition and sets the course for much of his later work. The Subject in Question is the first full-length study of this famous work and its influence on twentieth-century philosophy. It also investigates the relationship between Sartre's...

What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true.
Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will,...

What constitutes beauty? And how do we identify it? Philosophical approaches to this question have swayed from the claim that there are principles of beauty out there waiting to be discovered, to the claim that there are simply no aesthetic principles and that beauty is an expression of disorder. This text rejects these approaches.

D'Oro explores Collingwood's work in epistemology and metaphysics, uncovering his importance beyond his better known work in philosophy of history and aesthetics. This contribution to our understanding of one of the most important figures in history of philosophy should be useful reading for scholars of Collingwood and all students of metaphysics and the history of philosophy.

This book offers a systematic and critical discussion of Peter Winch's writings on the philosophy of the social sciences. The author points to Winch's tendency to over-emphasize the importance of language and communication, and his insufficient attention to the role of practical, technological activites in human life and society.
It also offers an appendix devoted to the controversy between the anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere regarding Captain James Cook's Hawaiian adventures.
Essential reading for those studying the development of philosophy in the twentieth...

After International Relations articulates a systematic critical realist response to a quest for more emancipatory methodologies in International Relations. Heikki Patomaki here establishes a way out of the international relations problematic which has puzzled so many great thinkers and scholars for the last two hundred years. After International Relations shows how and why theories based on the international problematic have failed; articulates an alternative, critical realist research programme; and illustrates how this research programme can be put to work to enable better research...

The Logic of Liberal Rights uses basic logic to develop a model of argument presupposed in all disputes about civil rights and liberties. No prior training in logic is required, as each step is explained. This analysis does not merely apply general logic to legal arguments but is also specifically tailored to the issues of civil rights and liberties. It shows that all arguments about civil rights and liberties presuppose one fixed structure and that there can be no original argument in rights disputes, except within the confines of that structure. Concepts arising in disputes about...

Formulating a new approach to philosophy which, instead of simply rejecting postmodern thought, tries to assimilate some of its main features, Paul Crowther identifies conceptual links between value, knowledge, personal identity and civilization understood as a process of cumulative advance.
To establish these links, Crowther deploys a mode of analytic philosophy influenced by Cassirer. This approach recontextualizes precisely those aspects of postmodernism which appear, superficially, to be fuel for the relativist fire. This method also enables him to illuminate some of the great...

Over the last few decades there has been a phenomenal growth of interest in metaphor as a device which extends or revises our perception of the world. Clive Cazeaux examines the relationship between metaphor, art and science, against the backdrop of modern European philosophy and, in particular, the work of Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. He contextualizes recent theories of the cognitive potential of metaphor within modern European philosophy and explores the impact which the notion of cognitive metaphor has on key positions and concepts within aesthetics, epistemology and the philosophy...