Without God or His Doubles : Realism, Relativism and Rorty /
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Without God or His Doubles offers a sympathetic, but critical interpretation of the philosophy of Richard Rorty. Rorty is one of the most widely discussed of contemporary philosophers, but there exist few attempts to deal with the full scope of Rorty's writings in a systematic fashion. This book shows that the unifying theme that runs through Rorty's writings on epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and political philosophy is a quasi-religious conception of human creativity and human freedom. In other words, Rorty's attempt to avoid both realism and relativism is best understood in relationship to his claim that traditional philosophy has been god-obsessed. The animating spirit of Rorty's philosophy is to complete the Enlightenment project, to completely wean philosophy away from both God and the various god-doubles (Reason, Nature, Mind, Man, Science, Art). Rorty believes that a radical secularity will result in a kind of human emancipation and a heightened sense of human freedom. The book concludes with a critique of Rorty's proposal for philosophy and culture after the final departure of all the gods.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004450905
9789004100626
Realism and psychology : collected essays /
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This book is a collection of new, published and revised essays on the place and value of scientific realism in psychology. Through critical analyses of contemporary psychology, essays argue that the realist requirements of a properly scientific psychology are often misunderstood even in the discipline's putatively scientific heart, with profound conceptual and empirical consequences. Against this, and in answer to recent calls to demonstrate the relevance of realism, the essays sketch the elements of a realist program: they discuss the recent history, development and principal features of a distinctive, thoroughgoing, realism for psychology: its theories, concepts, methods and applications. It thus aims to extend realism from philosophy to psychology, articulate a realist metatheory, clarify realism's relevance, and promote its discussion.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9789004194878 :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.
The Positivist and the Ontologist : Bergmann, Carnap and Logical Realism /
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The book contains the first systematic study of the ontology and metaphysics of Gustav Bergmann, tracing their development from early (1940s) criticisms of Carnap's semantical theories in Introduction to Semantics, to their culmination in his 1992 New Foundations of Ontology . This involves a detailed study of the implicit metaphysical doctrines in Carnap's important, but long neglected, 1942 book and their connection to his influential views on reference, truth and modality, (including, contrary to current opinion, Carnap's initiating the development of predicate modal logic) that culminated in Meaning and Necessity . In dealing with various fundamental issues in ontology and metaphysics, the book discusses relevant views of major philosophers, such as Russell, Moore, Bradley, Wittgenstein, Meinong, Brentano, Husserl, Broad, McTaggart, and Quine, and of contemporary and recent figures, including D. M. Armstrong, D. Lewis, S. Kripke, J. Searle, W. Sellars, D. Davidson, J. J. C. Smart, and H. Feigl. Building on the critical studies of Bergmann, Carnap and such other philosophers, the author argues for a form of Logical Realism derived from important, but long misunderstood and ignored, aspects of Russell's theories of descriptions, reference and truth.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004458376
9789042014343