Books

A comprehensive philosophical analysis of the use of scientific models in historic and contemporary contexts.

Philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is a cultural phenomenon. Yet Rand’s work has until recently received little serious attention from academics. This new series seeks a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The chapters in this volume address the basis of her egoism in a virtue-centered normative ethics; her account of how moral norms in general are themselves based on a fundamental choice by an agent to value his own life; and how her own approach to the foundations of ethics is to be compared and contrasted with familiar approaches in the analytic ethical tradition.

New in Paper

Acampora details an inter-species morality by examining the underlying nature of bodily experience as animate creatures and as human beings.

Unsatisfied with current environmental philosophies, Brian G. Henning developed his own theory inspired by Alfred North Whitehead and several other classical American philosophers. In this work he discusses the theory’s most significant insight, “The Ethics of Creativity.”

Winner, John N. Findlay Book Prize from the Metaphysical Society of America

Voted one of the Top Ten Picks for university press books by Foreword Magazine in 2014.

The first comprehensive chronology of philosophical anecdotes, from antiquity to the current era. Rescher introduces the major thinkers, texts, and historical periods of Western philosophy, recounting many of the stories philosophers have used over time to engage with issues of philosophical concern: questions of meaning, truth, knowledge, value, action, and ethics. Rescher’s anecdotes touch on a wide range of themes—from logic to epistemology, ethics to metaphysics.

Everything we know about what goes on in the world comes to us through reports, information transmitted through human communication. This book offers a clear, accessible introduction to the theory of reporting, with a special emphasis on national security, particularly military and diplomatic reporting, drawing on examples from historical accounts of espionage and statecraft from the Second World War.

Nicholas Rescher presents the first translation of medieval Arabic philosopher al-Farabi’s “Short Commentary on Prior Analytics” in English, and supplements this with an informative introduction and numerous explanatory footnotes.

The fifteen papers in this volume deal with the two overlapping topics of knowledge and experience from the perspective of analytic philosophical inquiry. The topics addressed are prominent in the work of such modern philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, C. I. Lewis, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, and John L. Austin.

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 Honore’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.

The four main essays in this volume investigate new sectors of the theory of decision, preference, act-characteristics, and action analysis. These are complemented by appendices on a study of the logic of norms by Alan Ross Anderson, and Rescher provides an outline of the aspects of action.