This book is intended to fill the need for a single volume of primary texts in this area.

It seems clear, on the face of- it, that men act and bodies behave. Philosophers have often drawn our attention to the sorts of actions men perform. Moral choice, it is said, involves an act of will. Knowledge involves an act of judgment, an act of inference, or an act of synthesis. Some say there are acts of apprehension, consciousness, attention, doubting, sensing, remembering. Others include acts of abstraction and acts of spatialization. But one may ask what the evidence is (...) for all of these actions. Do we observe or introspect our acts? Do we merely infer them? If we do not run across contents in our experience which we are willing to call acts, what can we mean by talking of acts at all? Perhaps there are no acts. Perhaps men, like bodies, simply behave. (shrink)

In this challenging study in metaphilosophy, Douglas Browning makes a case for viewing ontology as a legitimate and viable philosophical pursuit. Beginning with a sustained analysis of the process of attempting to construct a system that is true of the whole of reality, he proceeds to focus upon the issues of the need for and availability of controls upon speculative construction. He concludes by arguing for the importance of one such speculative control, namely, an appeal to the structural traits of (...) the practical stratum of our lives. In the course of his discussion Browning also develops original theories of stances, appearing, and the general structure of theoretical investigation. The book is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to consideration of the overall shape of the ontological enterprise as a process of moving from the pole of initial ontological questioning toward the pole of the provision of an acceptable system. While each of these two poles is discussed in turn in some detail, it is the mediating process of inquiry and construction, of "doing" ontology, to which Browning devotes most of his attention. His examination of this process reveals serious difficulties, one of which, he argues, provides the most serious threat to the acceptability of ontology as a viable project. This difficulty centers on the issue of discovering a manner of access to reality that is sufficiently favored over the others to provide a cue for the constructive imagination. In the second part, Browning proposes a way of overcoming this difficulty. After presenting a general argument for the primacy of the practical stance in our lives, he makes and defends a number of proposals regarding the general structure of the arena of acting that this stance discloses. The book ends by showing the extent to which an appeal to this structure would ensure, not the success, but the viability of ontological investigation. (shrink)

IN THIS CHARMINGLY DISARMING FASHION Quine got us off on the wrong foot. No ontologist is interested in the attempt to give a complete inventory of the things which are. He is, indeed, interested in the sorts of things which are, but not just any list of sorts of things would interest him. There are, one might well say, white dogs, brown dogs, and brown and white dogs. Clearly these are some of the sorts of things there are. But such (...) a list is of profound disinterest to ontologists because, I take it, such things are all of a more general sort, and it is the more general sorts of things which interest them. But, of course, dogs and frogs are more general sorts of things and ontologists are not interested in them either. There is something radically uninteresting even about the more general sorts of things so long as they are not in some sense ontologically basic or ultimate. The ontologist, we might say, is very much interested in providing, among other things, a list of the ultimate sorts of things. And here there is much room for disagreement. But, unfortunately, the ontologist’s interest can now no longer be said to be simple or clear, for it is by no means obvious what might be meant by such a phrase as "ontologically basic." It is the aim of this paper to get a little closer than has Quine to an understanding of what this phrase might come to. (shrink)

2. Before getting down to business, two assumptions underlying the subsequent discussion should be made explicit. The first concerns the choice of methods. Our problem is one of the proper description of a distinctive fact of consciousness, but there is an indirect as well as a direct manner of approach. The indirect approach would be to examine the structure of the language used in talk about such a feeling of freedom; the direct approach would be to employ to the full (...) our capacities of attention to the contents of consciousness. These linguistic and phenomenological methods are in many cases complementary, each suggesting to the other directions which might be followed to advantage. In the present case, however, the indirect approach seems ill-fitted to be of any substantial use, for it must be obvious, in the first place, that the relevant talk is found among professional philosophers only and, in the second place, where such talk is found it is confessedly meager beside that to which it is intended to draw our attention. Talk which concerns itself with the importance of attending to the phenomenon itself is peculiarly modest and self-effacing talk. In light of this fact my remarks will be similarly phenomena-oriented. My method will be direct. (shrink)

Presenting Dewey' s new view of philosophical inquiry This critical edition of The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought presents the results of John Dewey' s patient construction, throughout the previous sixteen years, of the radically new view of the methods and concerns of philosophical inquiry. It was a view that he continued to defend for the rest of his life. In the 1910 The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought-- (...) the first collection of Dewey' s previously published, edited essays-- John Dewey provided readers with an overview of the scope and direction of his philosophical vision in one volume. The order in which the eleven essays were presented was a reverse chronology, with more recently published essays appearing first. The collection of eleven essays offered a detailed portrait of Dewey' s proposed reconstruction of the traditional concepts of knowledge and truth. It furthermore elaborated on how his new logic and his proposal regarding knowledge and truth fit comfortably together, not only with each other but also with a pragmatically proper understanding of belief, reality, and experience. Because material in the Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882- 1953 was published chronologically, however, the essays published together in the 1910 Darwin book have appeared in seven different volumes in the Collected Works. This new, critical edition restores a classic collection of essays authored and edited by John Dewey as they originally appeared in the volume. The edition is presented with ancillary materials, including responses by Dewey' s critics and an introduction by Douglas Browning. (shrink)

In this important and challenging contribution to the rapidly developing philosophy of technology Ihde proposes nothing less than a "systematic reformulation of a framework and set of questions regarding technology in its cultural setting". More specifically, he sees his task as twofold: to provide a perspective from which to view "the phenomenon of human-technology relations" and to offer a "framework or 'paradigm' for understanding". Rejecting the distanced, objective, or "bird's-eye" perspective as inappropriate for considering a subject-matter in which we are (...) inextricably immersed, he adopts a perspective which he calls "navigational," one of finding bearings and directions within the fluid and dynamic situations of our technologically textured lifeworld. Remarking that such a perspective is "necessarily relativistic," he claims that, nonetheless, the employment of phenomenology and hermeneutical methods is able to yield a framework for understanding this lifeworld. Ihde makes these points and supports them in the "Introduction" and first four chapters of the book, which together comprise a general introduction to his overall approach, basic assumptions, and methodology. In the three chapters which follow he provides us with some results of his use of these methods in three "programs" which move, as he puts it, from a "phenomenology of technics," through "cultural hermeneutics," to a more speculative consideration of "lifeworld shapes." This movement is avowedly from a more focused and secure description of the essential structures of material human-technology relations to increasingly larger and less secure depictions of our technological culture and lifeworld. He then concludes the book with certain "stewardship recommendations for the inherited earth.". (shrink)