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Nonmonotonic Reasoning
An Overview
Gerhard Brewka, Jürgen Dix, and Kurt Konolige
CSLI, 1997
Nonmonotonic reasoning is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence trying to find more realistic formal models of reasoning than classical logic. In common sense reasoning one often draws conclusions that have to be withdrawn when further information is obtained. The set of conclusions thus does not grow monotonically with the given information. It is this phenomenon that nonmonotonic reasoning methods try to formalize. This volume gives an overview on recent results in the field and points to relevant literature for further study. This up-to-date survey of research in the area of nonmonotonic reasoning includes a concise description of the most influential nonmonotonic logics (e.g. circumscription, autoepistemic logic and default logic), a presentation of recent research in abduction, as well as an overview of semantics for logic programs with default negation. The primary goal of this volume is to make recent results in the field more accessible. An extensive bibliography is included.
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The Rhetoric of Reason
Writing and the Attractions of Argument
James Crosswhite
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996
Responding to skeptics within higher education and critics without, James Crosswhite argues powerfully that the core of a college education should be learning to write a reasoned argument. A trained philosopher and director of a university-wide composition program, Crosswhite challenges his readers—teachers of writing and communication, philosophers, critical theorists, and educational administrators—to reestablish the traditional role of rhetoric in education.
    To those who have lost faith in the abilities of people to reach reasoned mutual agreements, and to others who have attacked the right-or-wrong model of formal logic, this book offers the reminder that the rhetorical tradition has always viewed argumentation as a dialogue, a response to changing situations, an exchange of persuading, listening, and understanding. Crosswhite’s aim is to give new purpose to writing instruction and to students’ writing, to reinvest both with the deep ethical interests of the rhetorical tradition. In laying out the elements of argumentation, for example, he shows that claiming, questioning, and giving reasons are not simple elements of formal logic, but communicative acts with complicated ethical features. Students must learn not only how to construct an argument, but the purposes, responsibilities, and consequences of engaging in one.
    Crosswhite supports his aims through a rhetorical reconstruction of reason, offering new interpretations of Plato and Aristotle and of the concepts of reflection and dialogue from early modernity through Hegel to Gadamer. And, in his conclusion, he ties these theoretical and historical underpinnings to current problems of higher education, the definition of the liberal arts, and, especially, the teaching of written communication.
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On Reason
Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze
Duke University Press, 2008
Given that Enlightenment rationality developed in Europe as European nations aggressively claimed other parts of the world for their own enrichment, scholars have made rationality the subject of postcolonial critique, questioning its universality and objectivity. In On Reason, the late philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze demonstrates that rationality, and by extension philosophy, need not be renounced as manifestations or tools of Western imperialism. Examining reason in connection to the politics of difference—the cluster of issues known variously as cultural diversity, political correctness, the culture wars, and identity politics—Eze expounds a rigorous argument that reason is produced through and because of difference. In so doing, he preserves reason as a human property while at the same time showing that it cannot be thought outside the realities of cultural diversity. Advocating rationality in a multicultural world, he proposes new ways of affirming both identity and difference.

Eze draws on an extraordinary command of Western philosophical thought and a deep knowledge of African philosophy and cultural traditions. He explores models of rationality in the thought of philosophers from Aristotle, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes to Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jacques Derrida, and he considers portrayals of reason in the work of the African thinkers and novelists Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka. Eze reflects on contemporary thought about genetics, race, and postcolonial historiography as well as on the interplay between reason and unreason in the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He contends that while rationality may have a foundational formality, any understanding of its foundation and form is dynamic, always based in historical and cultural circumstances.

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Thinking Your Way to Freedom
A Guide to Owning Your Own Practical Reasoning
Susan T. Gardner
Temple University Press, 2009

Thinking Your Way to Freedom is a critical-thinking textbook with a difference. Rather than focusing exclusively on improving college students’ academic achievement, Susan Gardner seeks to dramatically change how students think through issues that are important in their lives beyond school. Gardner created 66 original and entertaining comic strips—featuring her dogs, Diva and Ben—that add a light touch as they encourage intellectual and personal autonomy. Through a clear step-by-step method of practical reasoning, students are taught how to think impartially and how to neutralize invisible biases that limit their freedom of thought and action. With the help of Diva and Ben, readers learn to evaluate the strengths of arguments and to recognize fallacies, all the while avoiding the paralyzing effects of relativism.

Thinking Your Way to Freedom includes the writing of short essays so that students can improve their critical thinking and writing at the same time. A Teacher’s Manual for this book will be available online.

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Changing the Subject
Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno
Raymond Geuss
Harvard University Press, 2017

“A history of philosophy in twelve thinkers…The whole performance combines polyglot philological rigor with supple intellectual sympathy, and it is all presented…in a spirit of fun…This bracing and approachable book [shows] that there is life in philosophy yet.”
Times Literary Supplement

“Exceptionally engaging…Geuss has a remarkable knack for putting even familiar thinkers in a new light.”
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“Geuss is something like the consummate teacher, his analyses navigable and crystal, his guidance on point.”
—Doug Phillips, Key Reporter

Raymond Geuss explores the ideas of twelve philosophers who broke dramatically with prevailing wisdom, from Socrates and Plato in the ancient world to Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Adorno. The result is a striking account of some of the most innovative thinkers in Western history and an indirect manifesto for how to pursue philosophy today. Geuss cautions that philosophers’ attempts to break from convention do not necessarily make the world a better place. Montaigne’s ideas may have been benign, but the fate of those of Hobbes, Hegel, and Nietzsche has been more varied. Yet in the act of provoking people to think differently, philosophers remind us that we are not fated to live within the systems of thought we inherit.

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Transforming Knowledge 2Nd Edition
Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich
Temple University Press, 2004
This is a book about how we define knowledge and how we think about moral and political questions. It argues that the prevailing systems of knowledge, morality, and politics are rooted in views that are exclusionary and therefore legitimate injustice, patriarchy, and violence. That is, these views divide humans into different kinds along a hierarchy whose elite still defines the systems that shape our lives and misshape our thinking. Like the first edition of Transforming Knowledge, this substantially revised edition calls upon us to continue to liberate our minds and the systems we live within from concepts that rationalize inequality. It engages with the past fifteen years of feminist scholarship and developments in its allied fields (such as Cultural Studies, African American Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies) to critique the deepest and most vicious of old prejudices. This new edition extends Minnich's arguments and connects them with the contemporary academy as well as recent instances of domination, genocide, and sexualized violence.
* Updated to consider recent scholarship in Gender, Multicultural, Postcolonial, Disability, Native American, and Queer Studies, among other fields of study
 * Revised to include an extended analysis of the conceptual errors that legitimate domination, including the construction of kinds ("genders") of human beings
* Revised to include new materials from a variety of cultures and times, and engages with today's contemporary debates about affirmative action, postmodernism, and religion
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Presumptions and Burdens of Proof
An Anthology of Argumentation and the Law
Edited by Hans V. Hansen, Fred J. Kauffeld, James B. Freeman, and Lilian Bermejo-Luque
University of Alabama Press, 2019
An anthology of the most important historical sources, classical and modern, on the subjects of presumptions and burdens of proof

In the last fifty years, the study of argumentation has become one of the most exciting intellectual crossroads in the modern academy. Two of the most central concepts of argumentation theory are presumptions and burdens of proof. Their functions have been explicitly recognized in legal theory since the middle ages, but their pervasive presence in all forms of argumentation and in inquiries beyond the law—including politics, science, religion, philosophy, and interpersonal communication—have been the object of study since the nineteenth century.

However, the documents and essays central to any discussion of presumptions and burdens of proof as devices of argumentation are scattered across a variety of remote sources in rhetoric, law, and philosophy. Presumptions and Burdens of Proof: An Anthology of Argumentation and the Law brings together for the first time key texts relating to the history of the theory of presumptions along with contemporary studies that identify and give insight into the issues facing students and scholars today.

The collection’s first half contains historical sources and begins with excerpts from Aristotle’s Topics and goes on to include the locus classicus chapter from Bishop Whately’s crucial Elements of Rhetoric as well as later reactions to Whately’s views. The second half of the collection contains contemporary essays by contributors from the fields of law, philosophy, rhetoric, and argumentation and communication theory. These essays explore contemporary understandings of presumptions and burdens of proof and their role in numerous contexts today. This anthology is the definitive resource on the subject of these crucial rhetorical modes and will be a vital resource to all scholars of communication and rhetoric, as well as legal scholars and practicing jurists.
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Reasoning, Rationality and Probability
Edited by Maria Carla Galavotti, Roberto Scazzieri, and Patrick Suppes
CSLI, 2008
This volume broadens our concept of reasoning and rationality to allow for a more pluralistic and situational view of human thinking as a practical activity. Drawing on contributors across disciplines including philosophy, economics, psychology, statistics, computer science, engineering, and physics, Reasoning, Rationality, and Probability argues that the search for strong theories should leave room for the construction of context-sensitive conceptual tools. Both science and everyday life, the authors argue, are too complex and multifaceted to be forced into ready-made schemata.
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The Anatomy of Judgment
Philip J. Regal
University of Minnesota Press, 1990

The Anatomy of Judgment was first published in 1990. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

"The Anatomy of Judgment is a unique and valuable contribution to the literature of the social and humanistic contexts for science . . . The book will illuminate dark corners for any reader, and dozens of interesting points come to light." –Neil Greenberg, University of Tennessee

Tracing the emergence of science and the social institutions that govern it, The Anatomy of Judgment is an odyssey into what human thinking or judgment means. Philip Regal moves deftly from the history of Western philosophy to concepts of rationality in non-Western cultures, from the conceptual issues of the Salem witch trials to the basic structure of the human brain. The Anatomy of Judgment offers new perspectives on the workings of individual judgment and the social responsibility it entails.

Philip Regal is a professor of ecology and behavioral biology at the University of Minnesota. He served, during his pre- and postdoctoral work, as Coordinator's Appointee to the Mental Health Training Program at UCLA's Brain Research Institute.

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The Hermeneutics of Original Argument
Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric
P. Christopher Smith
Northwestern University Press, 1998
What, precisely, does the word hermeneutics mean? And in what sense can one speak of the hermeneutics of original argument? In The Hermeneutics of Original Argument, P. Christopher Smith explores these questions in building upon Heidegger's hermeneutical thought. In applying Heidegger's basic notion that hermeneutics is not a doctrine of interpretation but is its actual execution, Christopher Smith penetrates the abstractions that conceal original argument and explores the structure and nature of argument as it originally occurs.
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Return to Reason
Stephen Toulmin
Harvard University Press, 2003

The turmoil and brutality of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult to maintain faith in the ability of reason to fashion a stable and peaceful world. After the ravages of global conflict and a Cold War that divided the world's loyalties, how are we to master our doubts and face the twenty-first century with hope?

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of knowledge. The centuries-old dominance of rationality, a mathematical mode of reasoning modeled on theory and universal certainties, has diminished the value of reasonableness, a system of humane judgments based on personal experience and practice. To this day, academic disciplines such as economics and professions such as law and medicine often value expert knowledge and abstract models above the testimony of diverse cultures and the practical experience of individuals.

Now, at the beginning of a new century, Toulmin sums up a lifetime of distinguished work and issues a powerful call to redress the balance between rationality and reasonableness. His vision does not reject the valuable fruits of science and technology, but requires awareness of the human consequences of our discoveries. Toulmin argues for the need to confront the challenge of an uncertain and unpredictable world, not with inflexible ideologies and abstract theories, but by returning to a more humane and compassionate form of reason, one that accepts the diversity and complexity that is human nature as an essential beginning for all intellectual inquiry.

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Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge
Charles Arthur Willard
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Charles Willard's provocative Argumentation and the Social Grounds of Knowledge is not a celebration of controversy but a sophisticated study that explores the social basis of human knowledge. Drawing upon phenomenologists such as Alfred Schultz, psychologists such as George Kelley, and argumentation philosophers such as Stephen Toulmin, Willard makes a genuine contribution to intellectual inquiry by extending essential consideration about human knowledge. He insightfully demonstrates how "secular sources" provide a fundamental resource in developing religious understanding from argumentative interactions.
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A Theory of Argumentation
Charles Arthur Willard
University of Alabama Press, 1989

Establishes a theoretical context for, and to elaborate the implications of, the claim that argument is a form of interaction in which two or more people maintain what they construe to be incompatible positions

The thesis of this book is that argument is not a kind of logic but a kind of communication—conversation based on disagreement. Claims about the epistemic and political effects of argument get their authority not from logic but from their “fit with the facts” about how communication works. A Theory of Communication thus offers a picture of communication—distilled from elements of symbolic interactionism, personal construct theory, constructivism, and Barbara O’Keefe’s provocative thinking about logics of message design. The picture of argument that emerges from this tapestry is startling, for it forces revisions in thinking about knowledge, rationality, freedom, fallacies, and the structure and content of the argumentation discipline.

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Abductive Reasoning
Douglas Walton
University of Alabama Press, 2005
A study of the role of abductive inference in everyday argumentation and legal evidence

Examines three areas in which abductive reasoning is especially important: medicine, science, and law. The reader is introduced to abduction and shown how it has evolved historically into the framework of conventional wisdom in logic. Discussions draw upon recent techniques used in artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of multi-agent systems and plan recognition, to develop a dialogue model of explanation. Cases of causal explanations in law are analyzed using abductive reasoning, and all the components are finally brought together to build a new account of abductive reasoning.
 
By clarifying the notion of abduction as a common and significant type of reasoning in everyday argumentation, Abductive Reasoning will be useful to scholars and students in many fields, including argumentation, computing and artificial intelligence, psychology and cognitive science, law, philosophy, linguistics, and speech communication and rhetoric.
 
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An Essay on Contraction
André Fuhrmann
CSLI, 1996
Subject: Philosophy; Belief and Doubt; Logic
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Counterfactuals
David K. Lewis
Harvard University Press, 1973

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Defining Reality
Definitions and the Politics of Meaning
Edward Schiappa
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

In Defining Reality, Edward Schiappa argues that definitional disputes should be treated less as philosophical questions of “is”and more as sociopolitical questions of “ought.” Instead of asking “What is X?” he advocates that definitions be considered as proposals for shared knowledge and institutional norms, as in “What should count as X in context Y, given our needs and interests?”

Covering a broad scope of argument in rhetorical theory, as well as in legal, medical, scientific, and environmental debates, Schiappa shows the act of defining to be a specialized and learned behavior, and therefore one that can be studied and improved. In response to theories that deem discourse to be persuasive, the author asserts that all discourse is definitive discourse that contributes to our construction of a shared reality.

Defining Reality sheds light on our methods of creating common truths through language and argumentation and forces us to reconsider the contexts, limitations, and adaptability of our definitions. Hinging on a synthesis of arguments regarding the significance of definitional practices, the book is bolstered by a series of case studies of debates about rape, euthanasia, abortion, and political and environmental issues. These case studies ground Schiappa’s concepts in reality and delineate the power of public discourse within legal contexts. Ranging widely among disciplines from philosophy and classical philology to constitutional law and cognitive psychology, this study substantially contributes to the scholarship of rhetoric and argumentation, particularly as they function in the realm of public discourse.

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Intention
G. E. M. Anscombe
Harvard University Press, 2000
Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.
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Advances in Modal Logic, Volume 1
Edited by Marcus Kracht, Maarten de Rijke, Heinrich Wansing, and Michael Zakhary
CSLI, 1998
Modal logic originated in philosophy as the logic of necessity and possibility. Nowadays it has reached a high level of mathematical sophistication and found many applications in a variety of disciplines, including theoretical and applied computer science, artificial intelligence, the foundations of mathematics, and natural language syntax and semantics. This volume represents the proceedings of the first international workshop on Advances in Modal Logic, held in Berlin, Germany, October 8-10, 1996. It offers an up-to-date perspective on the field, with contributions covering its proof theory, its applications in knowledge representation, computing and mathematics, as well as its theoretical underpinnings. "This collection is a useful resource for anyone working in modal logic. It contains both interesting surveys and cutting-edge technical results" --Edwin D. Mares The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, March 2002
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Modal Logic for Open Minds
Johan van Benthem
CSLI, 2010

In Modal Logic for Open Minds, Johan van Benthem provides an up-to-date introduction to the field of modal logic, outlining its major ideas and exploring the numerous ways in which various academic fields have adopted it. Van Benthem begins with the basic theories of modal logic, semantics, bisimulation, and axiomatics, and also covers more advanced topics, such as expressive power and computational complexity. The book then moves to a wide range of applications, including new developments in information flow, intelligent agency, and games. Taken together, the chapters show modal logic at the crossroads of philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, computer science, and economics. Most of the chapters are followed by exercises, making this volume ideal for undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, computer science, symbolic systems, cognitive science, and linguistics.

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Summa Philosophica
Peter Kreeft
St. Augustine's Press, 2012

Next to the Socratic Method, the best method for organizing a logical debate over a controversial philosophical or theological issue is the method St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologiae. As the charm of the Socratic dialogue is its dramatic length, its uncertainty, and the psychological dimension of a clash between live characters, so the charm of the Summa method is the opposite: its condensation and its impersonality, objectivity, simplicity, directness, and logical clarity. Beginning philosophy students pick up both methods very quickly, and write adept imitations of them. It’s both profitable and fun to do it.    Yet professionally philosophers have not followed these tried-and-true roads. Why not? Probably it is pride, the refusal to stoop to conquer, the confusion of “stooped” with “stupid.”

      Peter Kreeft has written over a dozen books of Socratic dialogues, and readers like them – they like the form, or format, irrespective of the content. There is no reason that the Summa format cannot produce the same results. It is a very simple five-step procedure: (1) the formulation of the question; (2) the opponent’s leading objections to your answer or thesis, formulated as clearly and fairly and strongly as possible; (3) a short argument from some recognized past authority for your thesis; (4) your own longer, original argument; and (5) a refutation of each objection, “deconstructing” it and showing how and where it went wrong . . . all in one or two pages, severely condensed, clear and simple (and therefore usually in syllogisms, the clearest and simplest and most direct form of logical argument).

     Kreeft has taken 110 of the most important and most often argued-about questions in each major division of philosophy and applied this method to it. The answers usually match common sense (and therefore Aristotle’s philosophy and Aquinas’s theology). At the very least, this is a useful philosophical reference book for arguments; not necessarily the elaborate and artificial arguments that might occur to contemporary “analytic” philosophers, but the arguments ordinary people would give, and still give on both sides of these great questions. Why no one has written such a book before is mind-boggling. We fully expect that many readers of this book will imitate it, as Kreeft has imitated Aquinas. This book is pregnant with many children.

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The Engaged Intellect
Philosophical Essays
John McDowell
Harvard University Press, 2013
The Engaged Intellect collects important essays of John McDowell. Each involves a sustained engagement with the views of an important philosopher and is characterized by a modesty that is partly temperamental and partly methodological. It is typical of McDowell to represent his own best insights either as already to be found in the writings of his heroes (Aristotle, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Sellars) or as inevitably emerging from a charitable modification of the views of those (such as Anscombe, Sellars, Davidson, Evans, Rorty, Dreyfus, and Brandom) subjected here to criticism. McDowell therefore develops his own philosophical picture in these pages through a method of indirection. The method is one of intervening in a philosophical dialectic at a characteristic juncture—in which it is difficult to avoid the feeling that further progress is required. McDowell shows how progress is to be achieved by preserving what is most attractive in the views of those he is in conversation with, while whittling away their weaknesses. As he practices this method, what emerges through the volume is the unity of McDowell’s own views. The combination of philosophical breadth with dialectical depth—of intricate argumentative detail with overall philosophical coherence—marks McDowell as one of the most compelling philosophers of our time.
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Philosophical Inquiries
An Introduction to Problems of Philosophy
Nicholas Rescher
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
In Philosophical Inquiries, Nicholas Rescher offers his perspectives on many of the foundational concerns of philosophy and reminds us that the purpose of philosophy is to “question the questions.” Rescher sees the need to inquire as an evolutionary tool for adapting to a hostile environment and shows how philosophy has thus developed in an evolutionary fashion, building upon acquired knowledge and upon itself. In a historical thread that informs and enriches his overview, Rescher recalls the contributions of Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Laplace, Bertrand Russell, and others.

Among his many topics, Rescher discusses knowledge and the unattainablity of absolutes, skepticism and its self-defeating nature, the limits of science vs. the limits of cognition, refuting reality as mind-independent, and idealism and divining our role in nature. He considers the universe and intelligence as the product of intelligent design, science and religion as non-conflicting and purposeful pursuits, and determinism and other fallacies surrounding the concept of free will. Rescher views morality in its hierarchal structure, its applicability to human coexistence, and its ontological commitment to the enhancement of value for ourselves and our world. He examines questions of authority and the problem of judging past actions or knowledge by present standards. Overall, he argues for philosophy as an unavoidable tool for rational, cogent responses to large questions.
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On the Principles of Taxing Beer
and Other Brief Philosophical Essays
James V. Schall
St. Augustine's Press, 2015
What is real and what is noble, as well as what is deranged and wrong, can often be stated briefly. Nietzsche was famous for his succinct aphorisms and epigrams. Aquinas in one of his responses could manage to state clearly what he held to be true. Ultimately, all of our thought needs to be so refined and concentrated that we can see the point. So these are “brief” essays and they are largely of a philosophical “hue.” They touch on things worth thinking about. Indeed, often they consider things we really need to think about if our lives are to make sense.

The advantage of a collection of essays is that it is free to talk about many things. It can speak of them in a learned way or in an amused and humorous way. As Chesterton said, there is no necessary conflict between what is true and what is funny. Oftentimes, the greatest things we learn are through laughter, even laughter at ourselves and our own foibles and faults.

So these essays are “brief.” And they are largely of philosophical import. At first sight, taxing beer may seem to have no serious principle, except perhaps for the brewer and the consumer. But wherever there is reality, we can find something to learn.

Each of these essays begins with the proposition “on”—this is a classical form of essay in the English language. Belloc, one the essay’s greatest masters, wrote a book simply entitled “ON”—and several other books with that introductory “ON” to begin it. The word has the advantage of focusing our attention on some idea, place, book, person, or reality that we happen to come across and notice, then notice again, then wonder about.

These essays are relatively short, often lightsome, hopefully always with a consideration that illumines the world through the mind of the reader. These essays are written in the spirit that the things we encounter provoke us, our minds. We need to come to terms, to understand what we come across in our pathways through this world. Often the best way to know what we observe or confront is to write about it, preferably briefly and with some philosophical insight. This is what we do here.
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Political Philosophy and Revelation
James V. Schall, SJ
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
A collection of Fr. James Schall's recent essays, Political Philosophy and Revelation offers a learned, erudite, and coherent statement on the relationship between reason and revelation in the modern world. It addresses political philosophy in the context of an awareness of other humane and practical sciences, including history, literature, economics, theology, ethics and metaphysics.
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Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue
Olivia Blanchette
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
Metaphysics is not often spoken of as a venue for dialogue about anything, let alone culture or religion, which are more readily associated with phenomenology or hermeneutics in contemporary thinking. This collection of essays, however, by the late Boston College philosopher Oliva Blanchette, maintains the absolute necessity of metaphysics as a prerequisite for examining any particular ‘realm of being,’ in all areas of human inquiry, from the particular sciences to historical cultures and religions. Blanchette proposes metaphysics as a fundamental and necessary level of intelligence presupposed in any exercise of judgment, discourse, or dialogue, among rational beings. At the same time, he defends the idea that dialogue is the first and most fundamental form in which such reasoning takes place in human experience, on a radically intersubjective level through language. Metaphysics is not an abstraction removed from human experience. Rather, it is a science in its own right defining itself in relation to ‘being as being’, its subject matter, as it depends on all the particular sciences and bodies of knowledge. Firmly standing on the ground of human experience, and on the human person as primary analogate of being, it opens up an entire realm of questioning that the particular sciences and bodies of knowledge, operating in functional separation, cannot pose on their own, especially when they take, in a reductionist fashion, their own object to be the prime analogate. Metaphysics, in fact, insinuates itself into each and every particular science in exploring its own subject matter of ‘being as being’ in the analogical sense, advancing to more and more complex stages of analogy through dialogue among different spirits and cultures, and reaching its terminus in the transcendent aspect of spirit and religion. In this sense, metaphysics has much to say to theologians: without metaphysics, theology reduces to mere superstition.
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From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics
William C. Bausman
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

How analyzing scientific practices can alter debates on the relationship between science and reality

Numerous scholarly works focus solely on scientific metaphysics or biological practice, but few attempt to bridge the two subjects. This volume, the latest in the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science series, explores what a scientific metaphysics grounded in biological practices could look like and how it might impact the way we investigate the world around us.

 

From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics examines how to reconcile the methods of biological practice with the methods of metaphysical cosmology, notably regarding the origins of life. The contributors take up a wide range of traditional metaphysics and philosophy of science topics, including natural kinds, medicine, ecology, genetics, scientific pluralism, reductionism, operationalism, mechanisms, the nature of information, and more. Many of the chapters represent the first philosophical treatments of significant biological practices. 

 

From causality and complexity to niche constructions and inference, the contributors review and discuss long-held objections to metaphysics by natural scientists. They illuminate how, in order to learn about the world as it truly is, we must look not only at what scientists say but also what they do: for ontology cannot be read directly from scientific claims.

 

Contributors: Richard Creath, Arizona State U; Marc Ereshefsky, U of Calgary; Marie I. Kaiser, Bielefeld U; Thomas A. C. Reydon, Leibniz U Hannover and Michigan State U; Lauren N. Ross, U of California, Irvine; Rose Trappes, U of Exeter; Marcel Weber, U of Geneva; William C. Wimsatt, U of Chicago.

 

 

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Metaphysics
Bruce Aune
University of Minnesota Press, 1985
A comprehensive introductory study of the key concepts and problems in traditional and contemporary metaphysics. Aune presents and defends a point of view that is naturalistic, nominalistic and pragmatic--an approach that has the overall advantage of providing a coherent, structured view of the topics he discusses. "Aune's book is a welcome tour of the paths taken in contemporary Anglo-American metaphysics." --The Modern Schoolman
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The Voiding of Being
The Doing and Undoing of Metaphysics in Modernity
William Desmond
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
In contemporary philosophy the status, indeed the very viability of metaphysics is a much contested issue. The reflections offered here explore diverse aspects of this contested status and offer a defense of metaphysics. In other works, perhaps most fully in Being and the Between, William Desmond has tried to develop what he calls a metaxological metaphysics in response to different skeptical, if not hostile approaches to metaphysics quite common in our time. The Voiding of Being complements the systematic dimensions of this metaxological metaphysics outlined in Being and the Between. It presents a set of studies which amplify important themes in the unfolding of modern metaphysics, in relation to major earlier and contemporary thinkers, while adding nuance to what is involved in the more systematic articulation of a metaxological metaphysics. There is what the author calls a voiding of being in modernity, expressed in diverse developments of thought. “The Voiding of Being,” might seems to conjure up too negative associations but the aim of the thoughts gathered here is not at all negative. While attempting to understand the voiding of being in modern thought, our appreciation of the promise of metaphysical thinking can also be renewed and indeed extended – extended beyond skepticism and hostility to metaphysics. Desmond engages many interlocutors along the way, from the long tradition, such as Heraclitus, Aquinas and Hegel, as well as more contemporary thinkers like Heidegger and Marion. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it is concerned with the continued doing of metaphysics and not only the contemporary undoing of it.
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Statement and Referent
An Inquiry into the Foundations of our Conceptual Order
David Shwayder
CSLI, 2008

Plato’s Parmenides and Aristotle’s Metaphysics initiated the discussion of the “First Philosophy” in the Western canon. Here, David Shwayder continues this debate by considering statements as the fundamental bearers of truth-values. Systematically moving from action to utterance, Shwayder argues that the category of “bodies” is fundamental to the human scheme of conceptualization and that if we had no capacity to refer to bodies then we would be unable to address referents from other categories.

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Studies in Metaphysics
Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1979

Studies in Metaphysics was first published in 1979. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

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Anchors in the Heavens
The Metaphysical Infrastructure of Human Life
Rémi Brague
St. Augustine's Press, 2017
Imagine you suddenly find yourself in the control room of a vast technological apparatus, sometime in the future, where you are told that science has satisfied all the needs of all living humans. Furthermore, you learn, the next generation of the species will not be produced in the usual way, but instead by this machine, provided only that somebody push a little red button. The catch: you have to give a reason for pushing it. You hesitate: what do you say?
     Our own world is more like this scenario than we at first may be inclined to admit, not least in the fact that, mutatis mutandis, we seem to be struggling to come up with a good answer. The problem, says Rémi Brague, is fundamentally a metaphysical one. Now, mention of ‘metaphysics’ in decent society these days is likely to elicit a smile or an unimpressed shrug. If there is a shelf with that label on it in your typical bookstore you are as likely to find guides to crystals, chakras, or hemp care there as you are treatises by Aristotle, Aquinas, or Kant. And, in spite of the ongoing revival of academic interest in metaphysics, it remains a rather specialist domain, a marginal sub-discipline in departments of philosophy, be they analytical or continental in cast. If you should take it too seriously, you’ll lose your bearings in the real world, and you’ll go adrift in some ethereal sea of dreams.
     It is, in a word, irrelevant – right?
     Wrong, Brague writes. Sustained reflection on the nature of being, undertaken in the hope that something can indeed be said about it, was for millennia considered to be among the most important of intellectual pursuits, and not without reason. With his characteristic combination of erudition and wit, Brague takes us on a sweeping tour of the discipline’s varying fortunes, from its early Athenian practitioners through its Jewish, Muslim, and Christian heirs, to the chorus of critics who in the last few centuries succeeded in putting an end to its dominance.
     But the questions that metaphysics was asking, Brague shows, did not disappear with its demise, and so, whether implicitly or explicitly, metaphysics itself has resisted relegation to the history books. For the nature of being, and especially our relationship to it, has continued to haunt its triumphant critics. One quintessentially metaphysical claim above all, as Brague suggests, seems to have horrified them: the doctrine that all that is, insofar as it is, is good. And yet, in rejecting the “convertibility” of the “transcendentals” of being and goodness, critics of the old metaphysics – Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Carnap, and Levinas among them – in their own ways offered metaphysical counter-claims, even as they turned increasingly anthropological in their interests.
     They also raised the stakes. For, whether the denial of the goodness of being can legitimately be attributed some causal responsibility for a world in which our species could rapidly and deliberately ensure its own extinction, this is the world we live in, and that denial does form the basis of the intellectual background from which we tend to begin our speculations. If we need to be able to articulate reasons for our project not to end, then we also need to rethink the rejection that we have come to take for granted.
     What Brague offers us here is not a narrative of decline, not a Jeremiad, not a nostalgic lament for the thought-world of a bygone era, but a sympathetic outline of some of the major tensions in the philosophical underpinnings of the modernity that we all inhabit. As such, it forms a part of his ongoing effort take modernity “more seriously than it takes itself”, to expose its hidden foundations, and to push it to its logical conclusions. In so doing, he hopes to help clarify where it is that we are going as a species, and to ensure that wherever it is, there is room for us humans in it.
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The Science of Being as Being
Metaphysical Investigations
Gregory T. Doolan
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Scholars present studies on key philosophical and historical issues in the field. Though varied, the investigations address three major metaphysical themes: the subject matter of metaphysics, metaphysical aporiae, and philosophical theology.
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Postures of the Mind
Essays on Mind and Morals
Annette Baier
University of Minnesota Press, 1975

Postures of the Mind was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Annette Baier develops, in these essays, a posture in philosophy of mind and in ethics that grows out of her reading of Hume and the later Wittgenstein, and that challenges several Kantian or analytic articles of faith. She questions the assumption that intellect has authority over all human feelings and traditions; that to recognize order we must recognize universal laws—descriptive or prescriptive; that the essential mental activity is representing; and that mental acts can be analyzed into discrete basic elements, combined according to statable rules of synthesis.

In the first group of essays—"Varieties of Mental Postures"—Baier evaluates the positions taken by philosophers ranging from Descartes to Dennett and Davidson. Among her topics are remembering, intending, realizing, caring, representing, changing one's mind, justifying one's actions and feelings, and having conflicting reasons for them. The second group of essays—"Varieties of Moral Postures" - explores the sort of morality we get when all of these capacities become reflective and self-corrective. Some deal with particular moral issues—our treatment of animals, our policies regarding risk to human life, our contractual obligations; others, with more general questions on the role of moral philosophers and the place of moral theory. These essays respond to the theories of Hobbes, Kant, Rawls, and MacIntyre, but Baier's most positive reaction is to David Hume; Postures of the Mind affirms and cultivates his version of a moral reflection that employs feeling and tradition as well as reason.

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The Structure of Empirical Knowledge
Laurence BonJour
Harvard University Press, 1988

How must our knowledge be systematically organized in order to justify our beliefs? There are two options—the solid securing of the ancient foundationalist pyramid or the risky adventure of the new coherentist raft. For the foundationalist like Descartes each piece of knowledge can be stacked to build a pyramid. Not so, argues Laurence BonJour. What looks like a pyramid is in fact a dead end, a blind alley. Better by far to choose the raft.

Here BonJour sets out the most extensive antifoundationalist argument yet developed. The first part of the book offers a systematic exposition of foundationalist views and formulates a general argument to show that no variety of foundationalism provides an acceptable account of empirical justification. In the second part he explores a coherence theory of empirical knowledge and argues that a defensible theory must incorporate an adequate conception of observation. The book concludes with an account of the correspondence theory of empirical truth and an argument that systems of empirical belief which satisfy the coherentist standard of justification are also likely to be true.

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A Thing of This World
A History of Continental Anti-Realism
Lee Braver
Northwestern University Press, 2007
At a time when the analytic/continental split dominates contemporary philosophy, this ambitious work offers a careful and clear-minded way to bridge that divide.  Combining conceptual rigor and clarity of prose with historical erudition, A Thing of This World shows how one of the standard issues of analytic philosophy--realism and anti-realism--has also been at the heart of continental philosophy. 
 
Using a framework derived from prominent analytic thinkers, Lee Braver traces the roots of anti-realism to Kant's idea that the mind actively organizes experience.  He then shows in depth and in detail how this idea evolves through the works of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida.  This narrative presents an illuminating account of the
history of continental philosophy by explaining how these thinkers build on each other's attempts to develop new concepts of reality and truth in the wake of the rejection of realism.  Braver demonstrates that the analytic and continental traditions have been discussing the same issues, albeit with different vocabularies, interests, and approaches.
By developing a commensurate vocabulary, his book promotes a dialogue between the two branches of philosophy in which each can begin to learn from the other.
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Principles of Knowledge Representation
Gerhard Brewka
CSLI, 1996
Subject: Philosophy; Theory of Knowledge
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The Foundations of Knowing
Roderick M. Chisholm
University of Minnesota Press, 1982

The Foundations of Knowing was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This collection of essays on the foundations of empirical knowledge brings together ten of Roderick M. Chisholm's most important papers in epistemology, three of them published for the first time, the others significantly revised and expanded for this edition. The essays in Part I constitute a thoroughgoing defense of foundationalism—the doctrine that our justification for believing always rests upon a self-evident basis. In Part II, Chisholm applies foundationalist principles to various areas within the theory of knowledge, and in part III he presents a history of twentieth-century American epistemology.

"Roderick M. Chisholm's work has been most influential both in the development of epistemology and in the widespread application of his analytic method. I am sure this publication featuring the unification of his views will be of great value to those working on the central issues of philosophy." Hector-Neri Castañeda, Indiana University

Roderick Chisholm is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Among his books are Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Theory of Knowledge, Person and Object,and The First Person (Minnesota, 1981).

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The Madness of Knowledge
On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing
Steven Connor
Reaktion Books, 2019
Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor’s The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge—the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and “general knowledge,” charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library.

In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.
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Knowledge and the Flow of Information
Fred I. Dretske
CSLI, 1999
An attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form (experience) for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning (or belief content) by viewing meaning as a certain kind of information-carrying role.
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