Logic from Kant to Russell. Laying the Foundations for Analytic Philosophy

Author(s):  
A. Schumann
Keyword(s):  

Within contemporary, analytic philosophy, “Fictionalism”—broadly understood as a view that uses a notion of fiction in order to resolve certain philosophical problems that do not necessarily have anything to do with fiction—has been on the scene for some time. A well-known collection, Fictionalism in Metaphysics, provided a good indication of the scope of the view (and its problems) as things stood in the early 2000s. But more than a decade has passed since the appearance of that volume and much has happened in philosophy, including in the area of fictionalism. In addition to the fact that fictionalism in philosophy appears to be more popular than ever, there are now competing views about how to tackle some of the issues that fictionalists aim to address. Moreover, fictionalism has branched out into many more areas, and there is a continuing debate about what fictionalism in philosophy actually amounts to and about how precisely it ought to be pursued. There is thus a pressing need for a volume such as Fictionalism in Philosophy. After a detailed discussion in the book’s introductory chapter of how, in the light of these ongoing debates, philosophers should think of fictionalism and its connection to metaontology more generally, the remaining chapters provide readers with some of the most current and up-to-date work on fictionalism, both for and against. As such, the volume will be of interest to professional philosophers as well as to graduate students in philosophy and to advanced undergraduates.


Author(s):  
Ayon Maharaj

This chapter draws upon Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings and mystical testimony in order to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the nature of mystical experience. In recent analytic philosophy of religion, two approaches to mystical experience have been especially influential: perennialism and constructivism. While perennialists maintain that there is a common core of all mystical experiences across various cultures, constructivists claim that a mystic’s cultural conditioning plays a major role in shaping his or her mystical experiences. After identifying the strengths and limitations of these two positions, Maharaj argues that Sri Ramakrishna champions a “manifestationist” approach to mystical experience that provides a powerful dialectical alternative to both perennialism and constructivism. According to Sri Ramakrishna, mystics in various traditions experience different real manifestations of one and the same impersonal-personal Infinite Reality. Sri Ramakrishna’s manifestationist paradigm shares the advantages of both perennialism and constructivism but avoids their respective weaknesses and limitations.


Author(s):  
Craig Callender

How do the views developed in this book connect with traditional work in analytic metaphysics on time? After giving a potted history of the field, the chapter then displays many connections and modifications between that work and the present one. It highlights one major problem with traditional analytic philosophy of time, namely, its focus on bare existence, i.e., what events exist as of when. Almost by definition, existence will play no role in science, so philosophy of time will never be threatened by scientific results. The irony about this maneuver is that creating this safety zone around time leaves philosophers of time unable to do their original job, explaining the temporal phenomena.


Author(s):  
Avner Baz

The chapter argues that empirical studies of first-language acquisition lend support to the Wittgensteinian-Merleau-Pontian conception of language as against the prevailing conception that underwrites the method of cases in either its armchair or experimental version. It offers a non-representationalist model, inspired by the work of Michael Tomasello, for the acquisition of “knowledge,” with the aim of showing that we could fully account for the acquisition of this and other philosophically troublesome words without positing independently existing “items” to which these words refer. The chapter also aims at bringing out and underscoring the striking fact that, whereas many in contemporary analytic philosophy regard and present themselves as open and attentive to empirical science, they have often relied on a conception of language that has been supported by no empirical evidence.


Author(s):  
Fraser MacBride
Keyword(s):  

This Coda reflects upon some of the immediate consequences of the genealogy of universals in early analytic philosophy undertaken here. First consequence: that the particular–universal distinction cannot credibly be claimed to be obvious or intuitive or a truism because it was far from inevitable that the distinction should have become entrenched in contemporary analytic philosophy. Second consequence: that we should be open, as Wittgenstein and Ramsey were, but Peirce and Russell and Armstrong were not, to the possibility that unity, whether of a fact or a proposition or complex whatever, is achieved collectively by the mutual collaboration of elements so unified without there being a privileged element, a relation or universal, there to unify the rest.


1986 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-152
Author(s):  
Charles H. Lambros
Keyword(s):  

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