John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.

This book is a philosophical examination of the main stages in our journey from hominid to human. It deals with the nature and origin of language, the self, self-consciousness, and the religious ideal of a return to Eden. It approaches these topics through a philosophical anthropology derived from the later writings of Wittgenstein. The result is an account of our place in nature consistent with both a hard-headed empiricism and a this-worldy but religiously significant mysticism.

Saul Kripke, among others, reads Wittgenstein’s private-language argument as an inference from the idea of rule following: The concept of a private language is inconsistent, because using language entails following rules, and following rules entails being a member of a community. Kripke expresses the key exegetical claim underlying that reading as follows.

. Because of similarities between some implications of Michael Polanyi's theory of personal knowledge and intelligent design, claims have been made that his theory provides support to the project of intelligent design. This essay contends that, when Polanyi's reflections on a Ideological framework for contextualizing evolutionary biology are properly understood as a heuristic vision, his position contrasts sharply with the empirical claims made on behalf of intelligent design.

1. The early philosophy--language as picture -- 2. Logic and ontology -- 3. "My world and its value" -- 4. The later philosophy--views and reviews -- 5. Method and essense -- 6. Meaning -- 7. Criteria -- 8. Knowing, naming, certainty, and idealism -- 9. The private language argument -- 10. Logical necessity and rules -- 11. Philosophy of mathematics -- 12. Persons -- 13. Psychology and conceptual relativity -- 14. Aesthetics, ethics, and religion -- 15. Elective affinities.

The 1982–1983 seminars of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris are here translated as The Greek Imaginary: From Homer to Heraclitus, Seminars 1982–1983. They were originally published in French in 2004, with expert editing and supplemental notes provided by Enrique Escobar, Myrto Gondicas, and Pascal Vernay. For basic introductory information on these seminars, their context, and their content, see their excellent Editors’ Introduction which follows.

This study examines Plato's dialogue on the good life and argues, most centrally, that the "pleasures of learning" exemplify, for Socrates, the possibility of good becoming or change.

Language Games 2 This chapter provides some background necessary for subsequent discussions by sketching in the idea of a language game, thereby giving a ...

In the 'Hippias Major' Socrates uses a counter-example to oppose Hippias‘s view that parts and wholes always have a "continuous" nature. Socrates argues, for example, that even-numbered groups might be made of parts with the opposite character, i.e. odd. As Gadamer has shown, Socrates often uses such examples as a model for understanding language and definitions: numbers and definitions both draw disparate elements into a sum-whole differing from the parts. In this paper I follow Gadamer‘s suggestion that we should focus (...) on the parallel between numbers and definitions in Platonic thought. However, I offer a different interpretation of the lesson implicit in Socrates‘s opposition to Hippias. I argue that, according to Socrates, parts and sum-wholes may share in essential attributes; yet this unity or continuity is neither necessary, as Hippias suggests, nor is it impossible, as Gadamer implies. In closing, I suggest that this seemingly minor difference in logical interpretation has important implications for how we should understand the structure of human communities in a Platonic context. (shrink)

In his commentary on Euclid, Proclus develops what he takes to be an important Platonic critique of the epistemology of abstraction. As I argue, his argument closely reflects terminology and concepts from Plato’s Philebus. Both emphasize the priority—in reality and in our awareness—of the precise over the imprecise. Specifically, Proclus’s famous notion of the psychical “projection” of intermediate mathematical entities, while having no technically exact precedent in Plato, finds a conceptual neighbor in the Philebus’s suggestion that philosophical arithmeticians “posit” pure (...) units for counting. Likewise, for both our self-engagement in mathematical thinking serves to clarify the independence of the precise sciences—both in their content and in their practice—from perception. Thus, as I argue, Plato and Proclus, with their different terms and nuances, develop a shared conception scientific inquiry in which an activity of “creative discovery” plays a central role. (shrink)

Following Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer states that the primordial way we experience the past is through forgetting rather than memory. This essay seeks to explore the various senses of forgetting as it appears in Gadamer’s thought with a particular emphasis on how forgetting and memory structure the unique temporality of the work of art. This exploration reveals that the interplay between forgetting and remembering is more complicated than mere opposition; this interplay is specifically revealed in Gadamer’s analyses of the epochal (...) transition and the transmissive event of history. In both cases, forgetting is revealed not as a lack or lacuna, but as a dynamic generating structure that elevates the work of art from its original past—constituting the immemorial dimension of the work. This essay concludes by gesturing toward the repercussions of forgetting on subjectivity and a theory of time in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. (shrink)

This book deals with some large tracts of Wittgenstein’s writings concerning representation and the mental. Its defining characteristic, and one of its main strengths, is an extensive use of material in the background of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Investigations. Stern quotes from and discusses remarks from unpublished manuscripts, including the Big Typescript, little-studied published writings such as the Tractatus notebooks, “Some Remarks on Logical Form,” Philosophical Remarks, Philosophical Grammar, as well as lecture notes by Moore, King and Lee, and others. How (...) much of these writings the book reproduces is suggested by the fact that its appendix, giving the original German of the previously unpublished matter translated in the main text, is eleven small-print pages long; and there are far more quotations from the published part of the corpus. The result is a work in which, for a run of pages, the ratio of quoted material to comment can be as high as one to one ; and in which most pages contain a significant amount of indented quotation. The main justification offered for the wholesale inclusion of this material is that it provides a context that can help determine what problem Wittgenstein was addressing in a given passage from his two main works. Stern’s mastery of that material is impressive, as shown for example in his pellucid outline of Wittgenstein’s philosophical development after 1920. (shrink)

A follow up to 'The Easter God'. John V. Taylor sets out God's incarnation in Jesus and his interaction with the world.

Cornelius Castoriadis was an important intellectual figure in France for many decades, beginning in the late-1940s. Trained in philosophy, Castoriadis also worked as a practicing economist and psychologist while authoring over twenty major works and numerous articles spanning many traditional philosophical subjects, including politics, economics, psychology, anthropology, and ontology. His oeuvre can be understood broadly as a reflection on the concept of creativity and its implications in various fields. Perhaps most importantly he warned of the dangerous political and ethical consequences (...) of a contemporary world that has lost sight of autonomy, i.e. of the need to set limits or laws for oneself. (shrink)

The nature of representation is a central topic in philosophy. This is the first book to connect problems with understanding representational artifacts, like pictures, diagrams, and inscriptions, to the philosophies of science, mind, and art. Can images be a source of knowledge? Are images merely conventional signs, like words? What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? In this clear and stimulating introduction to the problem John V. Kulvicki explores these questions and more. He discusses: the nature (...) of pictorial experience and "seeing in" recognition, resemblance, pretense, and structural theories of depiction images as aids to scientific discovery and understanding mental imagery and the nature of perceptual content photographs as visual prostheses. In so doing he assesses central problems in the philosophy of images, such as how objects we make come to represent other things, and how we distinguish kinds of representation - pictures, diagrams, graphs - from one another. Essential reading for students and professional philosophers alike, the book also contains chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary. (shrink)

The project of constructing a logic of scientific inference on the basis of mathematical probability theory was first undertaken in a systematic way by the mid-nineteenth-century British logicians Augustus De Morgan, George Boole and William Stanley Jevons. This paper sketches the origins and motivation of that effort, the emergence of the inverse probability (IP) model of theory assessment, and the vicissitudes which that model suffered at the hands of its critics. Particular emphasis is given to the influence which competing interpretations (...) of probability had on the project, and to the role of the 'lottery' or 'ballot box' metaphor in the philosophical imagination of the proponents of the IP model. (shrink)

Presents a chronological survey of some of the central topics in 20th century philosophy in the English-speaking world.

This review discusses Weightman's interpretation of Torrance's appropriation of Polanyi's theory of science; Weightman shows how Torrance develops a contemporary “natural”theology, moving beyond Barthian roots, but he argues Torrance misconstrues Polanyi's understanding of “religion” and God. I support Weightman's account, acknowledging much of his argument regarding the nature of religion, but I question whether his constructivist view of God can support the role it must play in Polanyi's thought.