Philosophy: Books and eBooks

Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead: each of these individuals is an original and historically important thinker; each is an essential contributor to the period, perspective and tradition of classical American philosophy; and each speaks imaginatively and wisely about our global society, its problems, and possibilities for improvement. From the initiative of pragmatism in approximately 1870 to Dewey's final work after World War II, classical American philosophy has come to represent the critical articulation of attitudes, outlooks, and forms of life embedded in the culture from which it arose. John Stuhr has collected the works of these foremost thinkers to present a comprehensive collection in American philosophy, and provides introductory, interpretive and critical thoughts about the vision, strengths, difficulties and contemporary significance of these formative philosophers.

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Widely praised for its accessibility and its concentration on the metaphysical issues that are central to the history of Greek philosophy, this volume offers a valuable introduction to the works of the Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle. For the Second Edition, Professor Allen has provided such new selections as Plato's Crito, Socrates' speech in the Symposium, and the first five chapters of Aristotle's Categories, as well as his own fresh translations of Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Permenides. He has also fully revised and updated his general introduction, selective bibliography, and lists of suggested readings.
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Clear focus on its application of formal logic to ordinary English is the most distinctive feature of this textbook for the introductory course in deductive logic. Great care is taken with the appropriate translation into logical languages of ordinary English sentences. Evaluation of these translations promotes a more effective use of ordinary language.
The Principles of Deductive Logic presents symbolic logic in a fuller and more leisurely fashion than other introductory textbooks. Early chapters cover informal material, including definition and informal fallacies. The remainder of the text is devoted to the treatment of four distinct artificial languages. The Categorical language is the language of syllogistic logic. The Extended Categorical language enriches this first language with the symbolic connectives for conjunction and negation. The Propositional Connective language and the First-Order language (with identity) are the two basic languages of modern logic. Each language is accompanied by a deductive system, and is used as an instrument for exploring ordinary language, including ordinary arguments
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Like Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli was notonly a Nobel laureate and one of the creators of modernphysics, but also an eminent philosopher of modern science.This is the first book in English to include all his famousarticles on physics and epistemology. They were actuallytranslated during Pauli's lifetime by R. Schlapp and are nowedited and annotated by Pauli's former assistant Ch. Enz.Pauli writes about the philosophical significance ofcomplementarity, about space,time and causality, symmetryand the exclusion principle, but also about therole of theunconscious in modern science. His famous article on Kepleris included as well as many historical essays on Bohr,Ehrenfest,and Einstein as well as on the influence of theunconscious on scientific theories.The book addresses not only physicists, philosophers andhistorians of science, but also the general public.

The subject of personal identity is one of the most central and most contested and exciting in philosophy. Ever since Locke, psychological and bodily criteria have vied with one another in conflicting accounts of personal identity. Carol Rovane argues that, as things stand, the debate is unresolvable since both sides hold coherent positions that our common sense will embrace. Our very common sense, she maintains, is conflicted; so any resolution to the debate is bound to be revisionary. She boldly offers such a revisionary theory of personal identity by first inquiring into the nature of persons. Rovane begins with a premise about the distinctive ethical nature of persons to which "all" substantive ethical doctrines, ranging from Kantian to egoist, can subscribe. From this starting point, she derives two startling metaphysical possibilities: there could be "group" persons composed of many human beings and "multiple" persons within a single human being. Her conclusion supports Locke's distinction between persons and human beings, but on altogether new grounds. These grounds lie in her radically normative analysis of the condition of personal identity, as the condition in which a certain normative commitment arises, namely, the commitment to achieve overall rational unity within a rational point of view. It is by virtue of this normative commitment that individual agents can engage one another specifically "as persons," and possess the distinctive ethical status of persons.

Compact but singularly well thought out material of a theological, logical, poetic as well as philosophical nature.

Introduction to Logic offers one of the most clear, interesting and accessible introductions to what has long been considered one of the most challenging subjects in philosophy. Harry Gensler engages students with the basics of logic through practical examples and important arguments both in the history of philosophy and from contemporary philosophy. Using simple and manageable methods for testing arguments, students are led step-by-step to master the complexities of logic.

This introduction to philosophy in the Latin West between 1150 and 1350 combines an historical approach, which concentrates on the sources, forms and backgrounds of the medieval works, with philosophical analysis of thirteenth and fourteenth-century writing in terms comprehensible to a modern reader. Part One looks at the intellectual and historical context of medieval thought. It examines the courses in the medieval universities; the methods of teaching; the forms of written work; the logical techniques used for argument and analysis; the translation and the availability of Ancient Greek, Arab and Jewish philosophical texts; the challenges the new material presented and the various ways in which Western thinkers responded to them. Part Two focuses on one important problem in later medieval thought: the nature of intellectual knowledge. It explains the arguments given by Aristotle, his antique commentators and the Arab philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, and traces how a series of Western thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, developed, modified or rejected them.
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"A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy" is a milestone along the complex and difficult road to significant understanding by Westerners of the Asian peoples and a monumental contribution to the cause of philosophy. It is the first anthology of Chinese philosophy to cover its entire historical development. It provides substantial selections from all the great thinkers and schools in every period--ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary--and includes in their entirety some of the most important classical texts. It deals with the fundamental and technical as well as the more general aspects of Chinese thought. With its new translation of source materials (some translated for the first time), its explanatory aids where necessary, its thoroughgoing scholarly documentation, this volume will be an indispensable guide for scholars, for college students, for serious readers interested in knowing the real China.