Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology. Their approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical data, Bishop and Trout show how people can improve their reasoning by relying (...) on Statistical Prediction Rules. They then develop and articulate the positive core of the book. Their view, Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy. (shrink)

This anthology brings together many of the more significant contributions to Cartesian scholarship, some of which reach far back as the 1930s. Altogether, there are well over 100 detailed analyses and discussions of salient aspects of Descartes' Promethean legacy. Because Descartes intended his system to embrace not only philosophy but also a complete scientific corpus, this collection covers both philosophical issues and scientific views: Volume 1 is devoted to questions of Cartesian Method and epistemology; Volumes 2 and 3 concentrate on (...) his metaphysics; and Volume 4 discusses Descartes' scientific views and achievements. The lucidity and originality of the essays, a number of which are already classics of Cartesian scholarship, will ensure that this anthology becomes a standard in Cartesian philosophy. An invaluable resource, Rene;e Descartes provides a large variety of introductions, analyses, criticisms, and appraisals of the problems which preoccupied Descartes and the solutions he propounded. (shrink)

Strange as it may seem, this volume is the first booklength study of Jaspers in English And it is certainly very welcome and long overdue. The author studied under Jaspers in 1934-1935 at Heidelberg. After a brief biography he clarifies a number of issues which always arise and frequently obfuscate discussions of existential philosophers--such as the problems of demonstration and of clarity. Wallraff then treats in turn: philosophy and science, Jaspers' theory of society and its institutions; the existential themes of (...) freedom, communication, and ultimate situations. The following chapters concern Jaspers' metaphysical views: transcendence, cipher-reading, and the encompassing. Wallraff is thus plainly following the outline of Jaspers' thought which is provided by Jaspers' own magnum opus, Philosophy: I. World-Orientation; II. Existenz-illumination; III. Metaphysics. The treatment is always clear and sympathetic. The author avoids any sustained criticism of Jaspers; nor does he conduct any investigation of the once much discussed relationship between Jaspers and Heidegger. The author also provides his readers with a helpful bibliography of Jasper's works and their English translations.--J. D. C. (shrink)

Erickson has written an exceptionally interesting book which belongs to the growing body of literature seeking to find the common points of philosophic concern that exist between phenomenology and analytic philosophy--to "swim the Channel" as it is put. He thinks primarily in the analytic tradition, but, from a purely quantitative point of view, most of this study is devoted to the analysis of Heidegger's thought. The most frequent analytic references are to Wittgenstein. In the first chapter, he seeks to find (...) some linguistic basis for raising the question of the meaning of Being--and not just of 'Being' and he engages in a lengthy discussion of the possible kinds of participal [[sic]] uses 'Being' might have in Heidegger's celebrated "question of Being." In the second chapter, he argues strongly for the possibility of an extra-linguistic meaning, a possibility uniformly neglected by the analytic "monoscopic" tradition. In Chapter three, he finds a common basis for phenomenology and for the analytic tradition in the "transcendental turn" that contemporary philosophy has taken. He rightly points out that for both phenomenology and analysis it is in language that, as Heidegger says, "things first come into being and are." This is an extremely important observation and fundamental to any bridge-building of these two traditions. The last chapter discusses the fact that Dasein understands itself in terms of its world: self-reflection is mediated by things. Among other things he argues in favor of Heidegger's views on the "ready-to-hand."--The most serious objection one can raise against this book is its character as a book: it has no really apparent beginning, middle and end. It originated in four previously published articles and it is doubtful that Erickson has succeeded in welding them together into a unity. The four chapters considered separately however are insightful and suggestive.--J. D. C. (shrink)

M. Palmier has made a valuable contribution to one of the most controversial issues in contemporary philosophy: the problem of Heidegger and the Nazis. Palmier does not side-step the issue by writing off the political works of 1933-1934 as a regrettable "mistake." "These writings belong to the work of Heidegger as the theological works at Tübingen belong to that of Hegel". He analyzes what is known of Heidegger's early life in a somewhat sketchy way, omitting, e.g., any mention of Karl (...) Braig. After discussing Brentano, Rickert, Lask, and Dilthey, he studies Heidegger's relationship with Cassirer and clears up most convincingly the charge of anti-Semitism levelled against Heidegger in 1950 by Cassirer's wife. This is followed by an equally persuasive and sympathetic account of Heidegger and Husserl. The heart of the book, however, is an analysis of the remark made in 1935 in which Heidegger refers to the "inner truth and grandeur" of the Nazi movement which became so notorious when Heidegger allowed it to appear unchanged in the 1953 edition of those lectures under the title An Introduction to Metaphysics. The grandeur Heidegger has in mind is the confrontation of modern man and planetary technology. This phrase must be understood, Palmier argues, in connection with a book by Ernst Jünger which appeared in 1932 entitled Der Arbeiter. The analysis the author offers is most illuminating. Palmier's interpretation is happily reenforced by an appendix which consists in a selection of texts from Ernst Krieck, an official Party philosopher, in which Heidegger is violently attacked--thus making the distance which Heidegger had put between himself and the Nazis abundantly clear, and effectively counterbalancing Schneeberger's one-sided documentation in Nachlese zu Heidegger.--J. D. C. (shrink)

Like his earlier study The Phenomenological Movement, Spiegelberg’s latest work is a comprehensive overview—not of the phenomenological movement itself —but of its influence on psychology and psychiatry. Its aim is to show that the presence of phenomenology in these disciplines has broadened the perspectives of these empirical sciences and has loosened the death-grip that positivism and naturalism, behaviorism and atomistic associationism, might otherwise have exerted upon them, Spiegelberg does this "concretely" by a wide ranging account of philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists (...) which testifies again to his great erudition and incomparable familiarity with phenomenological literature. The index of authors studied covers six pages of double columns. Part One gives a "general orientation" to the field, discussing first the notion of phenomenological psychology and then the presence of phenomenology in psychology, in psychopathology and psychiatry, in psychoanalysis and in American psychology. The second half of the book is devoted to more concentrated studies of "leading figures" and devotes entire chapters to such thinkers as Jaspers, Binswagner, Minkowski, Buytendijk and Frankl. The American student of phenomenology is once again the beneficiary of Spiegelberg’s conscientious and incisive scholarship the beneficiary of Spiegelberg’s conscientious and incisive scholarship.—J. D. C. (shrink)

This is a collection of essays and lectures which have all been published previously. Heidegger prefaces the volume with a series of remarks, written in 1967, which elaborate upon the title Wegmarken. The path in question is what he has called on numerous occasions his Denkweg. The path is the way of thinking into the truly thought-worthy. The path goes back into what was once thought out and is now covered over, and forward into what is to be thought out (...) but is still concealed. The thinker en route to Being has had his thinking set in motion by Being itself. Thinking travels a troubled path, for it stands in constant danger of being flooded by mere information. Whether or not it can bypass this roadblock is still the essential question for our time. Three of the texts collected here were available only in journals and Festschriften. It is also interesting that Heidegger includes all three segments of Was ist Metaphysik? He does not fuse them into a single text but arranges them separately. The other selections are: Vom Wesen des Grundes; Vom Wesen der Wahrheit; Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit; Brief über den "Humanismus"; Zur Seinsfrage; Kants These über das Sein. Here we see what Heidegger himself has singled out as being representative of, and significant for, the course of his thought. The emphasis upon "path" argues strongly for those who would see in Heidegger's thought an evolving, developing growth. The unity of early and later Heidegger then is not the unity of a single doctrine but the unity of a single search or path, unified by a single object of pursuit.--J. D. C. (shrink)

(2002). Philosophy of Science 72 (January), 198-208.