Being and Value and Other Philosophical Essays PDF Download

Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110321343
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Being and Value collects together fifteen essays by Nicholas Rescher on salient issue in metaphysics, axiology and metaphilosophy. In the way in which they shed new light on significant philosophical issues, these deliberations are emblematic of Rescher’s characteristic way of illuminating timeless issues and historical perspectives in a reciprocal interrelationship. The chapter of the book are as follows: Being and Value: On the Prospect of Optimalism; On Evolution and Intelligent Design; Mind and Matter; Fallacies Regarding Free Will; Sophisticating Naïve Realism; Taxonomic Complexity and the Laws of Nature; Practical Vs. Theoretical Reason; Pragmatism as a Growth Industry; Cost Benefit Epistemology; Quantifying Quality; Explanatory Surdity; Can Philosophy be Objective?; On Ontology in Cognitive Perspective; Plenum Theory [Essay Written Jointly with Patrick Grim]; and Onometrics (On Referential Analysis in Philosophy)

Author: Gilbert Harman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198238041
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In this selection of Gilbert Harman's shorter writings in moral philosophy, the essays are divided into four sections, focusing on moral relativism, values and valuing, character traits and virtue ethics, and ways of explaining aspects of morality.

Author: Hilary Putnam
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674013808
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
If philosophy has any business in the world, it is the clarification of our thinking and the clearing away of ideas that cloud the mind. In this book, one of the world's preeminent philosophers takes issue with an idea that has found an all-too-prominent place in popular culture and philosophical thought: the idea that while factual claims can be rationally established or refuted, claims about value are wholly subjective, not capable of being rationally argued for or against. Although it is on occasion important and useful to distinguish between factual claims and value judgments, the distinction becomes, Hilary Putnam argues, positively harmful when identified with a dichotomy between the objective and the purely "subjective." Putnam explores the arguments that led so much of the analytic philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology to become openly hostile to the idea that talk of value and human flourishing can be right or wrong, rational or irrational; and by which, following philosophy, social sciences such as economics have fallen victim to the bankrupt metaphysics of Logical Positivism. Tracing the problem back to Hume's conception of a "matter of fact" as well as to Kant's distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" judgments, Putnam identifies a path forward in the work of Amartya Sen. Lively, concise, and wise, his book prepares the way for a renewed mutual fruition of philosophy and the social sciences.

Author: David Wiggins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198237198
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Needs, Values, Truth brings together of some of the most important and influential writings by a leading contemporary philosopher, drawn from twenty-five years of his work in the broad area of the philosophy of value. The author ranges between problems of ethics, meta-ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of logic and language, looking at questions relating to meaning, truth and objectivity in judgements of value. For this third edition he has added a new essay on incommensurability, in addition to making minor revisions to the existing text. The volume will stand as a definitive summation of his work in this area.

Author: Peter Railton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521426930
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
In our everyday lives we struggle with the notions of why we do what we do and the need to assign values to our actions. Somehow, it seems possible through experience and life to gain knowledge and understanding of such matters. Yet once we start delving deeper into the concepts that underwrite these domains of thought and actions, we face a philosophical disappointment. In contrast to the world of facts, values and morality seem insecure, uncomfortably situated, easily influenced by illusion or ideology. How can we apply this same objectivity and accuracy to the spheres of value and morality? In the essays included in this collection, Peter Railton shows how a fairly sober, naturalistically informed view of the world might nonetheless incorporate objective values and moral knowledge. This book will be of interest to professionals and students working in philosophy and ethics.

Author: Harry G. Frankfurt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521336116
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
A collection of thirteen seminal essays on ethics, free will, and the philosophy of mind, first published in 1988.

Author: Richard Joyce
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048133394
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
What kind of properties are moral qualities, such as rightness, badness, etc? Some ethicists doubt that there are any such properties; they maintain that thinking that something is morally wrong (for example) is comparable to thinking that something is a unicorn or a ghost. These "moral error theorists" argue that the world simply does not contain the kind of properties or objects necessary to render our moral judgments true. This radical form of moral skepticism was championed by the philosopher John Mackie (1917-1981). This anthology is a collection of philosophical essays critically examining Mackie’s view.

Author: Max Scheler
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810106191
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Included are essays in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology by one of the most important twentieth-century continental philosophers.

Author: Susan R. Wolf
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195332814
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
For over thirty years Susan Wolf has been writing about moral and nonmoral values and the relation between them. This volume collects Wolf's most important essays on the topics of morality, love, and meaning, ranging from her classic essay "Moral Saints" to her most recent "The Importance of Love." Wolf's essays warn us against the common tendency to classify values in terms of a dichotomy that contrasts the personal, self-interested, or egoistic with the impersonal, altruistic or moral. On Wolf's view, this tendency ignores or distorts the significance of such values as love, beauty, and truth, and neglects the importance of meaningfulness as a dimension of the good life. These essays show us how a self-conscious recognition of the variety of values leads to new understandings of the point, the content, and the limits of morality and to new ways of thinking about happiness and well-being.

Author: Christi Favor
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804762546
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Essays on Philosophy, Politics, & Economics offers a critical examination of economic, philosophical, and political notions, with an eye towards working across all three, so that students and scholars from can expand their perspectives as they approach the necessarily complex research questions of today and tomorrow.