Do we know or even have evidence that external material objects exist? Drawing powerfully on techniques from both analytic and continental philosophy, Butchvarov offers a strikingly original approach to this perennial issue. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception--the view that in perception we are directly aware of material objects--has any hope of providing a compelling response to the skeptic. The seemingly insuperable problem for direct realism has always been to explain hallucination, dreaming, and other situations where the object of awareness is not a really...
Do we know or even have evidence that external material objects exist? Drawing powerfully on techniques from both analytic and continental philosophy,...
Are there nonexistent things? What is the nature of informative identity statements? Are the notions of essential property and of essence intelligible, and, if so, how are they to be understood? Are individual things material substances or clusters of qualities? Can the account of the unity of a complex entity avoid vicious infinite regresses?
These questions have attracted widespread attention among philosophers recently, as evidenced by a proliferation of articles in the leading philosophical journals. In Being Qua Being they receive systematic, unified treatment, grounded in an...
Are there nonexistent things? What is the nature of informative identity statements? Are the notions of essential property and of essence intelligi...
Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist metaphysics holds that the world depends on our cognitive capacities. But humans good and knowledge, including their language and concepts, are empirical matters, whereas philosophers do not engage in empirical research. And humans are inhabitants, not 'makers', of the world. Nevertheless, all three (ethics, epistemology, and antirealist metaphysics) can be drastically reinterpreted as making no reference to humans."
Anthropocentrism in philosophy is deeply paradoxical. Ethics investigates the human good, epistemology investigates human knowledge, and antirealist m...
