Lewis, David Kellogg (1941–2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter van Inwagen
Keyword(s):  
Decision Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Logic ◽  
Rational Decision

David Lewis has made extremely important and influential contributions to many topics in metaphysics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of probability, rational decision theory, and ethics and social philosophy. His work on counterfactuals and the philosophy of modality has been especially influential.

What Is Formal Philosophy?

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 235-241
Author(s):  
Vitaly V. Dolgorukov ◽  
Vera A. Shumilina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Probability Theory ◽  
Decision Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Explanatory Models ◽  
Impossibility Theorem ◽  
Philosophical Logic ◽  
Research Topics ◽  
Open Problems ◽  
Formal Philosophy

The paper focuses on the review of current literature on formal philosophy. Special attention is paid to the review of the book «Introduction to Formal Philosophy» [Hansson, Hendricks, 2018]. The book is a consistent introduction to the problems of formal philosophy, a research tradition that relies on the precise mathematical tools in order to study traditional philosophical problems. The methods of formal philosophy are successfully applied not only to the problems of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of language but also relevant for the problems of ethics, axiology and social philosophy. The book demonstrates that it is not correct to identify formal philosophy with another area of study – philosophical logic, since formal philosophy uses not only logical methods of analysis, but also uses the tools of game theory, decision theory, probability theory, Bayesian statistics, and other theories. Although the book has a propaedeutic character, it also contains some open problems. These problems include the aggregation of the opinions of the group under the condition of a conflicting base of premises in the theory of public choice, there are still open problems in the interpretation of Arrow’s impossibility theorem and others. Certainly, formalization in itself is not a general solution to the particular philosophical problem, but only a tool that allows to formulate a problem in a more rigorous and precise way, which sometimes allows to reveal some unexpected consequences, some implicit contradictions and new solutions. Despite the importance of the concept of coherence in ethics, decision theory, philosophy of law, Bayesian epistemology, philosophy of science, the existing formalizations of the concept of coherence are highly specialized for epistemology, researchers recognize the lack of the relevant explanatory models. Overall, the book is an excellent introduction in to the field of formal philosophy, which provides a general overview of different aspects of formal philosophy and the opportunity to study particular research topics by means of an extensive bibliography accompanying each of the chapters.

The Fragmented Mind

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Belief State ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Mental fragmentation is the thesis that the mind is fragmented, or compartmentalized. Roughly, this means that an agent’s overall belief state is divided into several sub-states—fragments. These fragments need not make for a consistent and deductively closed belief system. The thesis of mental fragmentation became popular through the work of philosophers like Christopher Cherniak, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker in the 1980s. Recently, it has attracted great attention again. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the topic of mental fragmentation. It features important new contributions by leading experts in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Opening with an accessible Introduction providing a systematic overview of the current debate, the fourteen essays cover a wide range of issues: foundational issues and motivations for fragmentation, the rationality or irrationality of fragmentation, fragmentation’s role in language, the relationship between fragmentation and mental files, and the implications of fragmentation for the analysis of implicit attitudes.

John King-Farlow and Roger A. Shiner (Eds.): New Essays in the Philosophy of Mind

Dialogue ◽  
1976 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-685
Author(s):  
Myles Brand
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Action Theory ◽  
General Quality

It is difficult to understand why this volume is named New Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Some of the essays are better classified as metaphysics, some as philosophy of science, and at least one as philosophy of language. But no matter, the name of the volume is unimportant: it is the contents that count. And the contents are very interesting. The general quality of the papers is high, higher than is often found in contemporary journals. The articles all share the methodological trait of being well-argued, and perhaps it is this trait more than anything else that unifies the volume. In what follows, I shall comment briefly on two articles on action theory, and then even more briefly on the remaining six papers.

Perceptual Learning beyond Philosophy of Mind

2019 ◽  
pp. 209-218
Author(s):  
Kevin Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Perceptual Learning ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Color Perception ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Sensory Substitution ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Major Focus

The concluding chapter argues that perceptual learning has relevance for philosophy far beyond philosophy of mind—in epistemology, philosophy of science, and social philosophy, among other domains. The goal of this chapter is to extend one major focus of the book, which is to identify the scope of perceptual learning. Chapters 3 through 7 argued that perceptual learning occurs in all sorts of domains in the philosophy of mind, including natural kind recognition, sensory substitution, multisensory perception, speech perception, and color perception. This chapter extends that scope beyond philosophy of mind and offers some initial sketches of ways in which we can apply knowledge of perceptual learning to those domains.

Understanding

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Grimm ◽  
Michael Hannon
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Science Understanding

Understanding is a kind of cognitive accomplishment, and the objects of understanding—from people, to languages, to scientific theories, to logical proofs—are strikingly varied. As this variety suggests, debates about the nature and value of understanding occur across philosophy. In the philosophy of science, understanding is typically taken to be one of the main goods at which scientific inquiry aims; it is therefore intimately related to issues concerning scientific explanation and to debates about what it is that makes scientific inquiry distinctive. In epistemology, the interest lies in characterizing what kind of cognitive accomplishment understanding is, exactly, and how (if at all) it differs from other cognitive accomplishments such as knowledge and wisdom. In the philosophy of language, a central concern is characterizing what is involved in understanding (or grasping) linguistic items like words, sentences, or languages as a whole; similar questions about what is involved in our understanding or grasp of concepts are crucial to the philosophy of mind. Debates in additional areas will be discussed in this article, but one overarching question is whether the sort of understanding we have of scientific theories, languages, people, and the like are similar in name alone or whether they share certain essential traits. For example, one common thought is that across all of these areas understanding involves the discernment of structure of some kind. It is also commonly thought that to achieve understanding this structure must not be discerned in just any old way, but that it must be “seen” or “grasped.” Just how to understand the metaphors of “seeing” and “grasping” has been a central issue in work on understanding across disciplines.

Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz (1890–1963)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Wolenski
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Decision Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Language

Ajdukiewicz, like other typical members of the Lwów–Warsaw School, the main Polish analytic movement, was basically interested in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of science. In the 1930s, he proposed a form of radical conventionalism, an extension of the conventionalism of Duhem and Poincaré. Later, he rejected this radical conventionalism in favour of a semantic epistemology. In the philosophy of science he tried to build a general theory of fallible inferences based on decision theory. Ajdukiewicz’s most important contribution to logic is his formal notation for syntactic categories.

William L. Harper. A sketch of some recent developments in the theory of conditionals. Ifs, Conditionals, belief, decision, chance, and time, edited by William L. Harper, Robert Stalnaker, and Glenn Pearce, The University of Western Ontario series in philosophy of science, vol. 15, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Boston, and London, 1981, pp. 3–38. - Robert C. Stalnaker. A theory of conditionals. A reprint of XLVII 470. Ifs, Conditionals, belief, decision, chance, and time, edited by William L. Harper, Robert Stalnaker, and Glenn Pearce, The University of Western Ontario series in philosophy of science, vol. 15, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Boston, and London, 1981, pp. 41–55. - David Lewis. Counterfactuals and comparative possibility. Ifs, Conditionals, belief, decision, chance, and time, edited by William L. Harper, Robert Stalnaker, and Glenn Pearce, The University of Western Ontario series in philosophy of science, vol. 15, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Boston, and London, 1981, pp. 57–85. (Reprinted from Journal of philosophical logic, vol. 2 (1973), pp. 418–446; also reprinted in Contemporary research in philosophical logic and linguistic semantics, Proceedings of a conference held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, edited by D. Hockney, W. Harper, and B. Freed, The University of Western Ontario series in philosophy of science, vol. 4, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht and Boston 1975, pp. 1–29.) - Robert C. Stalnaker. A defense of conditional excluded middle. Ifs, Conditionals, belief, decision, chance, and time, edited by William L. Harper, Robert Stalnaker, and Glenn Pearce, The University of Western Ontario series in philosophy of science, vol. 15, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Boston, and London, 1981, pp. 87–104.

1984 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1411-1413
Author(s):  
Barry Loewer
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Publishing Company ◽  
Reidel Publishing Company ◽  
Philosophical Logic ◽  
Contemporary Research ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The University ◽  
Excluded Middle

scholarly journals Notes on Contributors

Philosophy ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-3
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Assistant Professor ◽  
Dartmouth College ◽  
Wellesley College ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Philosophy Department ◽  
The University

Mary Kate McGowanAssistant Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College. She works in metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of science. Forthcoming articles include ‘Gruesome Connections’ in Philosophical Quarterly and ‘Privileging Properties’ in Philosophical Studies.Anthony SkillenRecently retired as lecturer in the Philosophy Department of the University of Kent at Canterbury.Charles D. TarltonProfessor of Political Science at the University of Albany. In recent years he has written on Locke, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. He is currently engaged in an analysis of the structural ambiguities of Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondaments de l'inegalité parmi les hommes.Stephen J. BoulterSenior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University. His research areas include the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science and medieval philosophy.Gabriele De AnnaA tutor in the Philosophy Department at St Andrews and research fellow at the University of Padua, Italy. He has published papers in American, British and Italian journals and is the author of the forthcoming book, Realismo Metafisico e Rappresentazione Mentale (Padua: Il Poligrafo).Roy SorensenRoy Sorensen seeks Fame and Fortune as a Dartmouth College philosophy professor. He is the author of Blindspots, Thought Experiments and Pseudo-Problems, and most recently Vagueness and Contradiction.David BeiseckerAssistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has published articles in the philosophy of mind and language, with an eye towards writing a book on the metaphysics of mind and meaning.

scholarly journals ANALITINĖ KALBOS IR MOKSLO FILOSOFIJA LIETUVOJE

Problemos ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 78 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Jonas Dagys ◽  
Evaldas Nekrašas
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Strong Impact ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama analitinės kalbos ir mokslo filosofijos raida Lietuvoje. Konstatuojama, kad analitinė filosofija Lietuvoje pradėta plėtoti XX amžiaus aštuntajame dešimtmetyje, kai Evaldas Nekrašas ir Rolandas Pavilionis paskelbė savo pirmųjų mokslo filosofijos ir kalbos filosofijos tyrinėjimų, kuriuose remiamasi analitine tradicija, rezultatus. Straipsnyje analizuojami jų ir kitų tyrėjų, kurie rėmėsi ta pačia tradicija, pirmiausia Algirdo Degučio ir Albino Plėšnio darbai. Analitinė filosofija buvo pirmoji nemarksistinės filosofijos kryptis, pradėta plėtoti pokarinėje Lietuvoje, todėl aštuntajame ir devintajame dešimtmečiuose ji atliko svarbų vaidmenį plečiant šalyje filosofinių tyrinėjimų tematiką ir keičiant jų metodologinius pagrindus. Nors pastaruoju metu jos įtaka Lietuvos filosofijoje kiek sumažėjo, ji aiškiai juntama kai kuriuose pastarojo meto darbuose, kuriuose nagrinėjamos sąmonės filosofijos, priežastingumo, humanitarinių ir socialinių mokslų metodologijos problemos. Ji padarė nemažą poveikį ir pozityvizmo raidos bei politinės filosofijos problemų tyrimui.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: Lietuvos filosofija, analitinė filosofija, kalbos filosofija, mokslo filosofija, pozityvizmas.Analytical Philosophy of Language and Science in LithuaniaJonas Dagys, Evaldas Nekrašas SummaryThe paper presents an overview of analytical philosophy in Lithuania. It is observed that analytical philosophy had not been studied or developed in Lithuania before the 1970s, when Evaldas Nekrašas and Rolandas Pavilionis began their work in philosophy of science and philosophy of language, rooted in analytical tradition. The article discusses the works of Nekrašas and Pavilionis, as well as those of others (e.g., Degutis and Plėšnys). It notes that analytical philosophy was the first non-Marxist trend of philosophy to be developed in post-war Lithuania, and thus it was of considerable influence at the time when the Marxist methodology had to be overthrown. Although the influence of analytical philosophy in Lithuania has diminished during later years in favour of postmodern trends, it is still evident in some recent works on philosophy of mind, philosophy of causation, and methodology of the humanities and social sciences. It has also made a strong impact upon the development of political philosophy and research in the history of positivism.Keywords: Lithuanian philosophy, analytical philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, positivism.

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