This is an excellent book. It is concerned with four problems: what is Being? what is meaning? what is the philosophical significance of language? what is a world? The core of the discussion is an extremely lucid and sensitive exposition of the views of the early Heidegger, valuable comparisons being made with Wittgenstein, Austin, Merleau-Ponty and Wilfred Sellars. Convinced that substantive philosophical questions benefit from both the approach of linguistic analysis and from that of phenomenology, the author uses and describes (...) both viewpoints, explaining their different commitments. This is his reason for sub-titling the book: An Analytic Phenomenology. He is very successful in recasting Heidegger’s view in the vocabulary of analysis. (shrink)

The inter-war period was quite remarkable in the intellectual and cultural life of Poland. ‘Philosophy in particular was the field where talent was abundant and the calibre of contributions surprisingly high. Analytical Philosophy was the embodiment of what was best and most accomplished in the Polish philosophy of that time’. With complete lucidity Professor Skolimowski traces its origins and development, linking it with the entire contemporary analytical movement and following it after the war to the point of its decline in (...) the 1950’s and of its emasculation in the 1960’s. The finest achievements of this movement and the work of its major figures are thoroughly described. (shrink)

This book presents three chapters of a comprehensive French work on experimental psychology, under the general editorship of Paul Fraisse and Jean Piaget. They are expert summaries of concepts and experimental work, with excellent bibliographies.

This is a developmental study of Wittgenstein. It is concerned exclusively with his philosophy of language and is remarkably clear and simple in contrasting the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.

Professor Armstrong defends the view ‘that mental states are nothing but physical states of the brain’. He is aware that it is not humanly possible to prove such an identification. But he feels that it is possible to show that the philosophical and logical objections formulated against it are not valid; possible, also, to refute rival philosophical views and to reach a point where one gives a reasonably complete explanation of all mental states in physical terms. The completeness of the (...) explanation would not prove its truth but would give it force and value. Accordingly, the major part of the book is an attempt ‘to give an account of all mental states as states of the person apt for the bringing about of certain sorts of physical behaviour’. (shrink)

Language and the Pursuit of Truth is a brief, clear and readable introduction to the study of linguistic communication. Intended for the general public, it presents basic considerations about words, statements and truths which are necessary for ‘our rational understanding of language in general, our ability to argue, to answer questions, and to solve problems through the medium of words’. It also introduces the reader to the contemporary practice of linguistic analysis. One may easily have reservations here particularly in the (...) way ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysical statements’ are conceived and presented. But the book is an excellent presentation of semantics to ordinary people. (shrink)

This is a very useful book, a programmed course of the ‘linear’ type, carrying the student along in short steps and continuously testing him by its question-answer format. It provides a considerable amount of solid practice in the areas of logical relations in general, the logic of unanalysed statements and the logic of predicates The kind of selftuition it makes possible should lighten the load of tutorial work.

The following series of questions exemplifies the cluster of problems with which Professor Goodman is concerned.

This book brings together papers presented at a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania and later revised. They are concerned with the concept of rational belief and with the rôle that induction plays in theories of rationality. There are three well-known theories: subjectivism provides the norm that ‘we may believe a proposition if and only if it fits in with those we already believe, and that we must believe it if and only if avoiding the belief would make for some (...) imbalance in the set of all our beliefs’; an empiricist logic argues that probability must be our guide and holds that a rational person believes a proposition if and only if it has a sufficiently high degree of confirmation assessed on the basis of observation; the pragmatist conceives belief as a species of action, assessing it as rational when it contributes to the furtherance of ends. (shrink)

This is an excellent book, providing a broad understanding ‘of the ways of thinking of those contemporary philosophers who apply the tools of symbolic logic to classical philosophical problems’, with a very complete, exact analysis of contemporary problems that bear on the correlation of language and reality. The book should be of great value to the logician, the technical linguist, the mathematician and the philosopher.

This book consists of selections that cover almost thirty years of writing, from Nausea to the essay, Search for a Method which summarizes the Critique of Dialectical Reason The selections succeed in giving us a substantial account of Sartre’s explanation of the nature and conditions of human freedom, and in reflecting also his thinking on contemporary issues which affect human rights. They are arranged chronologically and suggest an actual development of thought. In Nausea Sartre uses Roquentin’s struggle to dramatize his (...) discovery of ‘the key to existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life’; through the void of his own conceptual existence he glimpses the fact and possibilities of his own freedom. In The Psychology of Imagination ’Sartre examines the function of consciousness in creating a world of unrealities, probes the nature of the psychic life and the mind’s complex ties with the outer world, defines the intentional structure of the image and the uniqueness of man’s freedom to create, and concludes that “the imagination is the necessary condition for the freedom of empirical man in the midst of the world”’. The full exposition of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom is given in Being and Nothingness. But for Sartre, a writer must use his own freedom to promote the freedom of all men. There are selections from his writings on freedom from persecution, freedom to write, freedom to do evil, freedom from exploitation. Finally, in Search for a Method there is an excerpt on his positive social theory and his hope that Marxism will take on ‘the human dimension’. (shrink)

This is the paperback edition of Dr Reeves’ valuable book: in the four years since its original publication it has received merited attention and praise for correlating, in substantial detail, the old ‘inspectionist’, ‘picture’ view of thinking with the contemporary ‘action’, ‘process’ conceptions. ‘In the empirical tradition at any rate, and in this tradition much early systematic psychologizing was rooted, interest tended to be focused on the content of thinking, sensation was considered a fundamental source of that content, and thinking, (...) so far as it was an activity, approximated to some form of visual inspection. Ideas, images, their permutations and combinations constituted that which came under this conscious scrutiny’. Excellent chapters on Locke, Spinoza, Freud, Gestalt Psychology and Binet detail the breakdown and rejection of this simple associationist treatment of thought. However ‘in assimilating thinking to action and moving away from the inspectionist viewpoint, we must be careful not to throw away key processes such as recognition, without which it seems impossible to derive constructive, realistic and logical thinking from that which is governed by immediate stimulus and motive’. (shrink)

‘During the 1930’s and early 1940’s a thoughtful observer might well have tended towards the conclusion that logic would break off from the ancient moorings that kept it joined to philosophy, and either link itself to mathematics, or go its own way as an independent discipline’. Professor Rescher finds however, on the contrary, that the literature of the last ten to fifteen years displays a significant cluster of developments in logic that may be called philosophical. Branches of logical theory have (...) been developed with philosophical applications in mind. Foundations have been laid for an exact logic of obligation, preference, choice, command; the traditional problem of universals has been focused from the perspective of mathematical logic; existence, time, tense, change and process is being explored with techniques of logic; literature on the logic of belief, hypothesis and probability is extensive. (shrink)

About the 1930’s there was in Harvard University a group of young American philosophers including Quine, Frankena, Henle, Stevenson, Goheen, Goodman, Isenberg and Leonard. This volume is dedicated to the last named. It is appropriately titled, The Logical Way of Doing Things, for the main activating force in Leonard’s work was the new mathematical logic, and he was one of the first American philosophers who urged the application of logic to non-mathematical areas and who believed in the enormous power and (...) utility of formal language for philosophical enquiry. Nelson Goodman points out: ‘Nowadays it is hard to realize how novel symbolic logic was then. Few American Universities had any courses at all in the subject, and of the two main undergraduate courses in logic, one was concerned with traditional Aristotelian logic, while the other, taught by Lewis in Sheffer’s absence, covered parts of the Survey of Symbolic Logic and of the first volume of Principia Mathematica. Those who went further were largely self-taught’. (shrink)

A theory of intention involves one in the closely-related activities of deciding, choosing, trying, deliberating, wanting, and in mental states generally. It cannot escape being also a theory of mind, for it maps out a large part of mental life and becomes involved in the problem of free will, of man as part of nature. Professor Meiland is very conscious of this and the purpose of his book is simply to provide a necessary prolegomenon, delineating some of the important characteristics (...) of intentions. (shrink)