Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Philosophy

Warren Quinn was widely regarded as a moral philosopher of remarkable talent. This collection of his most important contributions to moral philosophy and the philosophy of action has been edited for publication by Philippa Foot.

This book is about the basic metaphysical concepts which apply to the world dealt with by natural science and how they have a basis in simple scientific properties and causal relations.

This book deals with foundational issues in the theory of the nature of action, the intentionality of action, the compatibility of freedom of action with determinism, and the explantion of action. Ginet's is a volitional view: that every action has as its core a 'simple' mental action.

Analyzing Love is concerned with four basic and neglected problems concerning love.

In this collection of essays, Jane Heal argues that central to our ability to arrive at views about others' thoughts is not knowledge of some theory of the mind but rather an ability to imagine alternative worlds and how things appear from another person's point of view.

This book portrays the human mind as a two-level structure, with a non-conscious basic mind supporting a more sophisticated supermind, which is conscious and relies on language. It argues that philosophers and psychologists have failed to distinguish these levels properly, and that this failure has led to problems.

This work presents a version of the correspondence theory of truth based on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Russell's theory of truth and discusses metaphysical issues such as predication, facts and propositions. It will interest those who study the realistic conception of truth and issues related to the correspondence theory of truth.

Driver challenges Aristotle's classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. She argues that we should abandon the highly intellectualist view of virtue and instead adopt a consequentialist perspective which holds that virtue is simply a character trait which systematically produces good consequences.

In this book, Mark Rowlands challenges the Cartesian view of the mind as a self-contained monadic entity, and offers in its place a radical externalist or environmentalist model of cognitive processes. His innovative analysis provides a foundation for an unorthodox but increasingly popular view of the nature of cognition.

Argues that fiction has far-reaching implications for central problems of metaphysics. Develops an 'artifactual' theory of fiction, whereby fictional characters are abstract artifacts as ordinary as laws or symphonies or works of literature. Will interest philosophers concerned with metaphysics and the philosophy of language, and also those in literary theory.

In this interesting and thought-provoking study of issues in the philosophy of time, David Cockburn argues that the notion of 'reasons for emotion' must have a central place in any account of meaning, and that the present should have no priority in our understanding of tense.

Denkel argues that objects are nothing more than bundles of properties, and he tackles some central questions of ontology: how is an object distinct from others; how does it remain the same while it changes through time? A second contention is that properties are particular entities restricted to the objects they inhabit.

This book presents a deflationary theory of the content of semantic notions. It represents a broad range of these notions as being free from substantive metaphysical and empirical presuppositions. It also seeks to explain the intuition that there is a relation of mirroring or semantic correspondence linking thoughts to reality.

This 2004 book presents a strong defense of the common sense tradition, the view that we may take as data for philosophical inquiry many of the things we ordinarily think we know. It discusses the main features of that tradition as expounded by Thomas Reid, G. E. Moore and Roderick Chisholm.

This book addresses some basic questions about intrinsic value: What is it? What has it? What justifies our beliefs about it? The author defends the existence of a plurality of intrinsic goods, the thesis of organic unities, and the view that some goods are 'higher' than others.

This book revives a neglected but important topic in philosophy: the nature of substance. The belief that there are individual substances, for example, material objects and persons, is at the core of our common-sense view of the world yet many metaphysicians deny the very coherence of the concept of substance.

How do we form and modify our beliefs about the world? While accepting that what we believe is determined by evidence, and therefore is not directly under our control, Professor Helm argues that no theory of knowledge is complete without standards for accepting and rejecting evidence as belief-worthy.

This work proposes a way to a naturalistic synthesis, one that accords the mental a place in the physical world alongside the non-mental.

Explaining Attitudes develops an account of propositional attitudes - practical realism. Practical realism is an antidote to the now-dominant 'Standard View', according to which beliefs, if there are any, are identical to or are constituted by brain states. Practical realism takes beliefs to be states of whole persons, rather like states of health.

This study investigates the question of the nature of the normative, as well as a range of topics specific to the philosophy of language, including the nature of the analytic-synthetic distinction, naturalism about meaning, realist and irrealist approaches to meaning, and the nature of translation.

This third volume of Lewis's papers is devoted to his work in ethics and social philosophy. The purpose of this collection, and the two preceding volumes on Logic, and Epistemology and Metaphysics, is to disseminate more widely the work of an eminent and influential contemporary philosopher.

In a clear, even-handed and non-technical discussion D. M. Armstrong makes a compelling case for truthmaking and its importance in philosophy. This book, first published in 2004, marks a significant contribution to the debate and will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in analytical philosophy.

This is a book about sensory states and their apparent characteristics. It confronts a whole series of metaphysical and epistemological questions and presents an argument for type materialism: the view that sensory states are identical with the neural states with which they are correlated.

This book gathers together thirteen of Peter van Inwagen's essays on metaphysics, several of which have acquired the status of modern classics in their field. A specially-written introduction completes the collection, which will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in metaphysics.

In this innovative study E. J. Lowe demonstrates the inadequacy of physicalism, even in its mildest, non-reductionist guises, as a basis for a scientifically and philosophically acceptable account of human beings as subjects of experience, thought and action.

The principal aim of this book is to develop and defend an analysis of the concept of moral obligation. What it seeks to do is to generate solutions to a range of philosophical problems concerning obligation and its application. This study will be of particular interest to all philosophers concerned with normative ethical theory.

H. P. Grice's theory of implicature provides the leading paradigm for research in pragmatics. Wayne Davis argues controversially that Gricean theory does not work. This challenging book offers a searching and systematic critique of one of the most established doctrines in the philosophy of language.

Michael Devitt is a distinguished philosopher of language. In this book he takes up one of the most important difficulties that must be faced by philosophical semantics: namely, the threat posed by holism. This important study will be of particular interest to philosophers of language and mind, and could be used in graduate-level seminars in these areas.

In an important departure from theories of causation, David Owens challenges the ideas of Hume, Davidson and Lewis, and offers alternative solutions to the problems still confronting theorists of causation.

What Minds Can Do, first published in 1997, has two goals: to find a naturalistic or non-semantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behaviour. It addresses issues that are central to contemporary philosophical debate.