Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as a basic method of philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed without it. He anchors his argument in d...(展开全部)

Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics are branches of philosophy concerned with questions about how to assess and ameliorate our representational devices (such as concepts and words). It is a part of philosophy that examines which concepts we should use (and why), how concepts can be improved, when concepts should be abandoned, and how proposals for amelioration can be i...(展开全部)

A Survey of Metaphysics provides a systematic overview of modern metaphysics, covering all of the most important topics likely to be encountered on a metaphysics course. The conception of metaphysics underlying the book is the fairly traditional and widely-shared one that metaphysics deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of re...(展开全部)

This book is an unusually readable and lucid account of the development of Derridaa s work, from his early writings on phenomenology and structuralism to his most recent interventions in debates on psychoanalysis, ethics and politics. Christina Howells gives a clear explanation of many of the key terms of deconstruction -- including differance, trace, supplement and logocentris...(展开全部)

All developed human beings possess a practical mastery of a vast range of concepts, including such basic structural notions as those of identity, truth, existence, material objects, mental states, space, and time; but a practical mastery does not entail theoretical understanding. It is that understanding which philosophy seeks to achieve. In this book one of the most distinguis...(展开全部)

This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he show...(展开全部)

What is right? What is wrong? How do we decide? To a remarkable extent, our decision-making is determined by the origins of the ethical ideas that we employ and the history of their development. "A Short History of Ethics" is an introduction to the subject, presenting in concise form an insightful history of moral philosophy in the West, from the Greeks to contemporary times. I...(展开全部)