he present book and its companion volume The Tensed Theory of Time: a T Critical Examination are an attempt to adjudicate what one recent discussant has called "the most fundamental question in the philosophy of time," namely, "whether a static or a dynamic conception ofthe world is correct. "] I had originally intended to treat this question in the space of a single volume; but the study swelled into two. I found that an adequate appraisal of these two competing theories of time requires a wide-ranging discussion of issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of...

Current debate in cognitive science, from robotics to analysis of vision, deals with problems like the perception of form, the structure and formation of mental images and their modelling, the ecological development of artificial intelligence, and cognitive analysis of natural language. It focuses in particular on the presence of a hierarchy of intellectual constructions in different formats of representation.
These diverse approaches, which share a common assumption of the inner nature of representation, call for a new epistemology - even a new psychophysics - based on a theory of...

1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-episte mological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, "Introduction," Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely - sometimes quite heavily - on the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the most...

A collection of papers presented at the conference on Probability Theory - Philosophy, Recent History and Relations to Science, University of Roskilde, Denmark, September 16-18, 1998. Since the measure theoretical definition of probability was proposed by Kolmogorov, probability theory has developed into a mature mathematical theory. It is today a fruitful field of mathematics that has important applications in philosophy, science, engineering, and many other areas. The measure theoretical definition of probability and its axioms, however, are not without their problems; some of them even...

The topic of this book is a comparison between holism in the philosophy and language and social holism on the one hand and holism about space-time and quantum systems on the other hand. The main claim is that holism in the humanities and holism in fundamental physics come under the same substantial, general conception of holism. That is to say: arguments to the effect that the holism of the mental is unscientific or that the mental is separated from the physical owing to holism are not sound. The holism of the mental fits into a world-view that bases itself on scientific realism. The...

1. Metaphors and Logic Metaphors are among the most vigorous offspring of the creative mind; but their vitality springs from the fact that they are logical organisms in the ecology of l- guage. I aim to use logical techniques to analyze the meanings of metaphors. My goal here is to show how contemporary formal semantics can be extended to handle metaphorical utterances. What distinguishes this work is that it focuses intensely on the logical aspects of metaphors. I stress the role of logic in the generation and int- pretation of metaphors. While I don't presuppose any formal training in...

Although there is an abundance of highly specialized monographs, learned collections and general introductions to the philosophy of science, only a few 25 years. synthetic monographs and advanced textbooks have appeared in the last The philosophy of science seems to have lost its self-confidence. The main reason for such a loss is that the traditional analytical, logical-empiricist approaches to the philosophy of science had to make a number of concessions, especially in response to the work of Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos. With Structures in Science I intend to present both a synthetic mono...

For some years we have been conducting at the University of Haifa an interdisciplinary seminar on explanation in philosophy and psychology. We habitually begin the seminar with some philosophical reflections on explanation - an analysis of the concept and its metaphysical underpinnings. We discuss the various models and proceed to examine explanation in the setting of psychology. Thus, from the outset, we have focused not only on the concept itself but also on its application. The objective that we have set for the seminar, attended by students from both departments, Philosophy and...

At first glance, Robinson's original form of nonstandard analysis appears nonconstructive in essence, because it makes a rather unrestricted use of classical logic and set theory and, in particular, of the axiom of choice. Recent developments, however, have given rise to the hope that the distance between constructive and nonstandard mathematics is actually much smaller than it appears. So the time was ripe for the first meeting dedicated simultaneously to both ways of doing mathematics and to the current and future reunion of these seeming opposites.

Consisting of peer-reviewed...

The subject of the present inquiry is the approach-to-the-truth research, which started with the publication of Sir Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. In the decade before this publication, Popper fiercely attacked the ideas of Rudolf Carnap about confirmation and induction; and ten years later, in the famous tenth chapter of Conjectures he introduced his own ideas about scientific progress and verisimilitude (cf. the quotation on page 6). Abhorring inductivism for its apprecia tion of logical weakness rather than strength, Popper tried to show that fallibilism could serve the purpose...