W.H. Capitan was associate professor of philosophy at Oberlin College.
This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the sixth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. The subjects covered include: refuting J. L. Austin's attempt to destroy philosophers' assumptions on the nature and purpose of a “statement;” false premises found in “St. Anselm's Four Ontological Arguments;” pain in connection with brain-state and functional-state theories; aesthetics in light of questions of fraudulence in modern art and music, and an analytical deconstruction of mystical experience.
This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the fifth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. Essays topics include: a dispute of the standard deductivist account of scientific testability; two definitions of “nonsense” that are closely related and correlate to science's concern with truth and philosophy's concern with concepts; contesting the causes of voluntary actions purported in Hart and Honoré's Causation and the Law; distinguishing two kinds of metaphysical tasks-—taxonomic and evaluative; and discussions of “what a thing is” in terms of its qualities and particulars and the distinction between numerical and conceptual differences, universals and individuation.