Ontology Books - Page 11

Pursuit of Truth: Revised Edition

W. V. Quine

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Editorial Review:

In Pursuit of Truth W. V. Quine gives us his latest word on issues to which he has devoted many years. As he says in the preface: "In these pages I have undertaken to update, sum up, and clarify my variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective reference, and the grounds of knowledge?'

The pursuit of truth is a quest that links observation, theory, and the world. Various faulty efforts to forge such links have led to much intellectual confusion. Quine's efforts to get beyond the confusion begin by rejecting the very idea of binding together word and thing, rejecting the focus on the isolated word. For him, observation sentences and theoretical sentences are the alpha and omega ofthe scientific enterprise. Notions like "idea" and "meaning" are vague, but a sentence-now there's something you can sink your teeth into.

Starting thus with sentences, Quine sketches an epistemological setting for the pursuit of truth. He proceeds to show how reification and reference contribute to the elaborate structure that can indeed relate science to its sensory evidence.In this book Quine both summarizes and moves ahead. Rich, lively chapters dissect his major concerns-evidence, reference, meaning, intension, and truth. "Some points;' he writes, "have become clearer in my mind in the eight years since Theories and Things. Some that were already clear in my mind have become clearer on paper. And there are some that have meanwhile undergone substantive change for the better." This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth century. The book is concise and elegantly written, as one would expect, and does not assume the reader's previous acquaintance with Quine's writings. Throughout, it is marked by Quine's wit and economy of style.

Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics Vii-IX

Charlotte Witt

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The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

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Theodor W. Adorno died in 1969 and his last major work, Ästhetische Theorie, was published posthumously a year later. Few philosophers have been as well versed in contemporary art, especially music, as Adorno, and even fewer have written so much that is of interest to the social sciences. Yet only recently have his aesthetic writings begun to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking world. This collection of essays is an important contribution to the growing discussion of Adorno's aesthetics in Anglo-American scholarship.

The essays in the volume, by many of the major Adorno scholars in the United States and Germany, are organized around the twin themes of semblance and subjectivity. Whereas the concept of semblance, or illusion, points to Adorno's links with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the concept of subjectivity recalls his lifelong struggle with a philosophy of consciousness stemming from Kant, Hegel, and Lukács. Adorno's elaboration of the two concepts takes many dialecical twists. Art, despite the taint of illusion that it has carried since Plato's Republic, turns out in Adorno's account of modernism to have a sophisticated capacity to critique illusion, including its own. Adorno's aesthetics emphasizes the connection between aesthetic theory and many other aspects of social theory. The paradoxical genius of Aesthetic Theory is that it turns traditional concepts into a theoretical cutting edge.


Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought

Eco: the Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

Umberto Eco

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The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally as a scholastic theologian. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century.

Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas's conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty--integrity, proportion, and clarity--that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete application of these theories in Aquinas's reflections on God, mankind, music, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas's views on art and compares his poetics with Dante's. In a final chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas's aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas's aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.

Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences

Philip Fisher

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Editorial Review:

Why pause and study this particular painting among so many others ranged on a gallery wall? Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, is at play; it couples surprise with a wish to know more, the pleasurable promise that what is novel or rare may become familiar. This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences.

In three instructive instances--a pair of paintings by Cy Twombly, the famous problem of doubling the area of a square, and the history of attempts to explain rainbows--Philip Fisher examines the experience of wonder as it draws together pleasure, thinking, and the aesthetic features of thought. Through these examples he places wonder in relation to the ordinary and the everyday as well as to its opposite, fear. The remarkable story of how rainbows came to be explained, fraught with errors, half-knowledge, and incomplete understanding, suggests that certain knowledge cannot be what we expect when wonder engages us. Instead, Fisher argues, a detailed familiarity, similar to knowing our way around a building or a painting, is the ultimate meeting point for aesthetic and scientific encounters with novelty, rare experiences, and the genuinely new.

Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics

Oliva Blanchette

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Ever since Kant, attempts to close down metaphysical inquiry in philosophy have proliferated. Yet the interest in metaphysics persists and is showing signs of resurgence among students concerned with raising the most basic questions about life and being as a whole.

This book is an attempt to reopen the fundamental question of being and to pursue that question in a way that is critical and systematic. Oliva Blanchette begins by establishing the necessity of raising the question of being as being after the natural sciences and phenomenology have run their course and pursuing it according to a method that is properly metaphysical as well as critical. He then proceeds to examine how we think of being according to a logic that is at once universal and concrete leading to a transcendental conception of being as analogous. After elaborating on the properties of being as one, active, true, and good, the author inquires into the structure of being and its constitutive principles as becoming and as finite. This brings him to a consideration of how being is communicated among a plurality and a diversity of beings according to a universal order of nature and history. Blanchette concludes by showing the necessity of raising the question of a totally transcendent Being at the end of metaphysics and of answering the question in the affirmative, even though the essence of what we are affirming escapes the grasp of our understanding.

The discourse is thus shown to have a beginning, a middle, and an end of interest to anyone concerned with the defense of metaphysics not only as having a standing in philosophy but also as arriving at such a standing only through a critical reflection on being as given in experience. It requires a special interest in raising the universal question of being, but it is accessible to anyone who has arrived at the point of exercising critical judgment about what there is in reality in the course of any investigation that is scientific or phenomenological.

The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (SPEP)

Galen A. Johnson

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The Illusion of Immortality

Corliss Lamont

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http://www.infidels.org/infidels/products/books/ 4 out of 5 stars.
23 of 25 people found this review helpful.

"_The Illusion of Immortality_ is the only book I know of which details the often ignored scientific evidence against life after death (though a few articles can be found on the subject), but with its first edition published in 1935, the evidence cited is a bit dated. Lamont first outlines different historical views of immortality, from the ancient Greek belief that everyone enters a faded and deteroriating existence in Hades when they die, through the early Hebrew belief that death ends with the annihilation of consciousness, to modern astral body views. Lamont should be credited for pointing out that the notion of immortality does not presuppose that an existence after death will necessarily be a worthwhile immortality--an idea often not considered those who believe in an afterlife--as the ancient Greek notion of Hades illustrates. In addition to addressing different kinds of survival of bodily death and the evidence against it, Lamont considers the problem of what an afterlife environment could possibly be like and arguments that immortality must be guaranteed by the benevolence of God. There is some confusion in Lamont's argument for a kind of reductionist materialism, for in arguing that the mind is a function of the brain, he proposes the existence of "nonphysical ideas"--so it appears that he is actually arguing that the mind is a product of the brain (epiphenomenalism) as opposed to arguing that the mind is identical to the brain (reductionist materialism). Lamont concludes by considering the motivations for belief in life after death and coping with living a finite existence. As a whole, _The Illusion of Immortality_ is a very good introduction to the some of the philosophical issues and scientific evidence against life after death."

Editorial Review:

Written with wisdom and eloquence, this 303-page book thoroughly but sensitively discusses biblical notions of death, the impact of science, the various attempts by immortalists to describe heaven, and the failure of spiritual "proofs." Corliss Lamont also argues for a new, ethical affirmation of life based upon an appreciation of our common mortality.

Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (Focus Series)

D. M. Armstrong, D M Armstrong

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An Excellent Survey of the Subject 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Armstrong's book is what it promises: an opinionated introduction to the problem of universals, which in the most general terms is the problem of how to understand philosophically the phenomenon of similarity or resemblance between different things. Resemblance between things is the basis of classification and generalization, and it is presumably by noticing similarities among numerically distinct things that we form many abstract concepts and general terms. A realist about universals holds that similar things get to be similar by having some entity in common--repeatable features that are present identically in all of them, either as a constituent of the particular or as "instantiated" or "exemplified" by it in some mysterious way, without being in it. These repeatable features he calls "universals"--general things, as it were, to correspond to general terms, as names of particulars correspond to them. A nominalist denies that there are universals, and seeks to account for similarity without positing them. Armstrong spends most of the book comparing the relative merits of five different metaphysical accounts of similarity: natural class nominalism, resemblance nominalism, a realist "bundle theory" of particulars, a realist substance-attribute theory (his own favorite), and finally theories of tropes (that is, particular or non-repeatable properties and relations). Natural class nominalists take the notion of a "natural class", that is, a set of noticeably similar things, as primitive or undefined, and seek to account for similarity in terms of membership in a natural class. Resemblance nominalists take similarity among particulars as primitive instead, and seek to account for similarity among a class of things by way of resemblance to paradigm cases of such things. Both approaches suffer from serious defects, as Armstrong points out, not the least of which is that these are very awkward primitives to have. Next comes the extreme realist, who thinks universals are all there are, and that particulars are nothing but bundles of universals. This theory also has its share of difficulties, not the least of which is that it seems to be unable to explain what the bundling relation is. Next there is the substance-attribute realist, in which camp Armstrong belongs. Such a realist faces the problem of analyzing similarity in terms of identity of universals. Among particulars this is straightforward; the more universals they have in common, the more similar they are. But what about the universals themselves? Isn't the color red, say, more like orange than it is like green? Armstrong says he is working on this problem, but gives little indication how to solve it. Finally, there is the doctrine of tropes, that is, particular properties and relations which are in themselves simple, the doctrine I favor. The trope nominalist can readily substitute for universals equivalence classes of exactly resembling tropes. (No problems analyzing resemblance; unlike the realist, I don't think there is any hope of doing that, and trope nominalism doesn't attempt it.) These will do all the work without having the bizarre problems that beset universals, problem which Armstrong mentions but to which he does not, in my view, give fully satisfying solutions. But whether you agree or disagree, the book is well worth the time of any student of metaphysics.

Editorial Review:

In this short text, a distinguished philosopher turns his attention to one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical problems of all: How it is that we are able to sort and classify different things as being of the same natural class? Professor Armstrong carefully sets out six major theories—ancient, modern, and contemporary—and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each. Recognizing that there are no final victories or defeats in metaphysics, Armstrong nonetheless defends a traditional account of universals as the most satisfactory theory we have.This study is written for advanced students, but as Armstrong goes considerably beyond his earlier work on this topic, it will interest professional scholars as well. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Universals is both a paradigm of exposition and a case study on the value of careful analysis of fundamental issues in philosophy.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art

Julian Young

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A necessary book, although you may disagree with it 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Young's book is billed as the first comprehensive treatment of Nietzsche's philosophy of art to appear in English. This alone makes it a necessity in the library of anyone interested in Nietzsche and Nietzsche's relation to Wagner and to Schopenhauer. But furthermore, Young's evident mastery of the Nietzsche material and his clear writing, make the book not only necessary, but a pleasurable and worthwhile read. Young's "Nietzsche's philosophy of art" calls for a serious reader's engagement even if one must disagree on Young's overall thesis, which this reviewer must do.

Young is clearly prepared to write on Nietzsche's philosophy of art. He has already authored a book on Schopenhauer, called "Willing and Unwilling," and has a demonstrable sensitivity to and experience with artworks and art theory. Young begins his book with a treatment of Schopenhauer and Schopenhauer's philosophy of art -- both in terms of how Nietzsche understood them. Nietzsche's famous philosophical relationship to Schopenhauer is well explained. The brilliant and enthusiastic young Nietzsche devoured Schopenhauer and as Young writes,

"Except for the Greeks, there is no other philosopher he knew with anything like the same intimacy. His writings, all of them, are full not just of quotations and paraphrases from Schopenhauer, but of phrases, allusions, and rhythms both conscious and unconscious. Nietzsche breathed Schopenhauer and cannot be understood without him."

Nietzsche always acknowledged a debt to Schopenhauer, even in his later writings, but it is essential to an understanding of the force of Nietzsche's philosophy (and particularly his central notion of "independence of the soul") to see that after Birth of Tragedy (and somewhat within Birth of Tragedy) Nietzsche sets himself adamantly and effectively against Schopenhauer's and Wagner's romanticism, and against the "cry baby optimism" of his age in general.

Young understands correctly, I think, that Nietzsche turned against Schopenhauer early and Wagner too. But after a series of slight misinterpretations, particularly of Nietzsche's treatment of science, his metaphysics or understanding of the natural world, and his ideas of art in "Human, All to Human," Young's over-arching claim is that Nietzsche fails in his anti-Romantic endeavor to live without metaphysics and redemption, and in the end returns to a Schopenhauerian pessimistic philosophy.

For those who see Nietzsche as accomplishing a systematic rebuttal to Romanticism and transcendental philosophies, Young's conclusion that Nietzsche's philosophy is circular or returns to the foil against which it first defined itself, will be unsatisfactory.

Editorial Review:

This is the first comprehensive treatment of Nietzsche's philosophy of art to appear in English. Julian Young argues that Nietzsche's thought about art can only be understood in the context of his wider philosophy. In particular, he discusses the dramatic changes in Nietzschean aesthetics against the background of the celebrated themes of the death of God, eternal recurrence, and the idea of the Ubermensch. Young then divides Nietzsche's career, and his philosophy of art, into four distinct phases, but suggests that these phases describe a circle. An attempt at world-affirmation is made in the central phases, but Nietzsche is predominantly influenced at the beginning and end of his career by a Schopenhauerian pessimism. At the beginning and end art is important because it "redeems" us from life.