Some of a person's mental states have the power to represent real and imagined states of affairs: they have semantic properties. What Minds Can Do has two goals: to find a naturalistic or nonsemantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behavior. In the process, the book addresses issues that are central to much contemporary philosophical debate. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy of mind and of language, cognitive science, and psychology.

How should we reason about what we do? The answer offered by most recent philosophy, as well as such disciplines as decision theory, welfare economics, and political science, is that we should select efficient means to our ends. However, if we ask how we should decide which ends or goals to aim at, these standard theoretical approaches are silent. Henry Richardson argues that we can determine our ends rationally. He constructs a rich and original theory of how we can reason about what to seek for its own sake as a final goal. Richardson defuses the counterarguments for the limits of rational...

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesizes but also develops his thinking over the past twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the "logical atomism" of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts (or states of affairs, as the author calls them) the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. It will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy.

This is the first of a three-volume collection of David Lewis' most recent papers in all the areas to which he has made significant contributions. This first volume is devoted to Lewis' work on philosophical logic from the past twenty-five years. The topics covered include: deploying the methods of formal semantics from artificial formalized languages to natural languages, model-theoretic investigations of intensional logic, contradiction, relevance, the differences between analog and digital representation, and questions arising from the construction of ambitious formalized philosophical...

This third volume of Lewis' papers is devoted to his work in ethics and social philosophy. Topics covered include the logic of obligation and permission; decision theory and its relation to the idea that beliefs might play the motivating role of desires; a subjectivist analysis of value; dilemmas in virtue ethics; the problem of evil; problems about self-prediction; social coordination, linguistic and otherwise; alleged duties to rescue distant strangers; toleration as a tacit treaty; nuclear warfare; and punishment. The purpose of this collection, and the two preceding volumes, is to...

This second volume of papers is devoted to Lewis's work in metaphysics and epistemology.

This is the first of a three-volume collection of David Lewis' most recent papers in all the areas to which he has made significant contributions. This first volume is devoted to Lewis' work on philosophical logic from the past twenty-five years. The topics covered include: deploying the methods of formal semantics from artificial formalized languages to natural languages, model-theoretic investigations of intensional logic, contradiction, relevance, the differences between analog and digital representation, and questions arising from the construction of ambitious formalized philosophical...

This book is concerned with the alleged capacity of the human mind to arrive at beliefs and knowledge about the world on the basis of pure reason without any dependence on sensory experience. Most recent philosophers reject the view and argue that all substantive knowledge must be sensory in origin. Laurence BonJour provocatively reopens the debate by presenting the most comprehensive exposition and defense of the rationalist view that a priori insight is a genuine basis for knowledge.

Raymond Martin's book is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the nature of the self, personal identity, and survival. Its distinctive methodology is one that is phenomenologically descriptive rather than metaphysical and normative. This is the first book of analytic philosophy directly on the phenomenology of identity and survival. It aims to build bridges between analytic and phenomenological traditions and, thus, to open up a new field of investigation.

What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and his or her body? In her third book on the philosophy of mind, Lynne Rudder Baker investigates what she terms the person/body problem and offers a detailed account of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Baker's argument is based on the "Constitution View" of persons and bodies, which aims to show what distinguishes persons from all other beings and to show how we can be fully material beings without being identical to our bodies. This book will be of interest to professional philosophers and graduate...