Tag: Essays

Free Download M.H. Salmon, "The Philosophy of Logical Mechanism: Essays in Honor of Arthur W. Burks, With his responses"
English | 1990 | ISBN: 9401069336, 0792303253 | DJVU | pages: 563 | 3.8 mb
This work is divided into two parts. Part I contains sixteen critical es says by prominent philosophers and computer scientists. Their papers offer insightful, well-argued contemporary views of a broad range of topics that lie at the heart of philosophy in the second half of the twen tieth century: semantics and ontology, induction, the nature of prob ability, the foundations of science, scientific objectivity, the theory of naming, the logic of conditionals, simulation modeling, the relatiOn be tween minds and machines, and the nature of rules that guide be havior. In this volume honoring Arthur W. Burks, the philosophical breadth of his work is thus manifested in the diverse aspects of that work chosen for discussion and development by the contributors to his Festschrift. Part II consists of a book-length essay by Burks in which he lays out his philosophy of logical mechanism while responding to the papers in Part I. In doing so, he provides a unified and coherent context for the range of problems raised in Part I, and he highlights interesting relationships among the topics that might otherwise have gone un noticed. Part II is followed by a bibliography of Burks’s published works.

Free Download D. Graham Burnett, "Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses"
English | ISBN: 023121118X | 2023 | 376 pages | PDF | 16 MB
Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness―to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces?

Free Download Mark Wilson, "Physics Avoidance: and other essays in conceptual strategy"
English | 2018 | ISBN: 0198803478, 0192849352 | PDF | pages: 446 | 152.0 mb
Mark Wilson presents a series of explorations of our strategies for understanding the world. "Physics avoidance" refers to the fact that we frequently cannot reason about nature in the straightforward manner we anticipate, but must seek alternative policies that allow us to address the questions we want answered in a tractable way. Within both science and everyday life, we find ourselves relying upon thought processes that reach useful answers in opaque and roundabout manners. Conceptual innovators are often puzzled by the techniques they develop, when they stumble across reasoning patterns that are easy to implement but difficult to justify. But simple techniques frequently rest upon complex foundations-a young magician learns how to execute a card-guessing trick without understanding how its progressive steps squeeze in on a proper answer. As we collectively improve our inferential skills in this gradually evolving manner, we often wander into unfamiliar explanatory landscapes in which simple words encode physical information in complex and unanticipated ways. Like our juvenile conjurer, we fail to recognize the true strategic rationales underlying our achievements and may turn instead to preposterous rationalizations for our policies. We have learned how to reach better conclusions in a more fruitful way, but we remain baffled by our own successes.

Free Download Peter Kivy, "Once Upon a Time: Essays in the Philosophy of Literature"
English | ISBN: 1786607344 | 2019 | 140 pages | EPUB, PDF | 2 MB + 3 MB
Once Upon a Time is a collection of essays in the philosophy of literature with two central themes: the significance of story -telling for us and the question of whether the novel, perhaps the art form most closely associated with story-telling, is a legitimate source of human knowledge. Leading philosopher of art Peter Kivy explores why human beings are so enthralled by being told stories and whether story-telling is a significant source of knowledge. Starting with a study of Aristotle’s Poetics, Kivy then undertakes a critical discussion of Noel Carroll’s suggestion that our interaction with the artists of the past is a kind of "conversation." He goes on to defend the thesis that one of the legitimate artistic pleasures we take in novel-reading is the acquiring of knowledge and, furthermore, that the silent reading of a novel is a kind of performance, making the novel one of the performing arts. The volume concludes with a chapter about jokes, and, in particular, whether it is immoral to tell or be amused by an "immoral" joke. This volume of essays is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in literature and the conceptual problems it may raise for philosophers.

Free Download Professor Emily Ogden, "On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays"
English | ISBN: 022675135X | 2022 | 144 pages | PDF | 871 KB
A beautifully written suite of personal essays on the value of not knowing.

Free Download António Pedro Mesquita, "New Essays on Aristotle’s Organon "
English | ISBN: 0367637898 | 2023 | 358 pages | EPUB, PDF | 1263 KB + 15 MB
This collection of new essays by an international group of scholars closely examines the works of Aristotle’s Organon.

Free Download Jack Graham, "Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right"
English | 2018 | ISBN: 1986913996 | EPUB | pages: 414 | 1.0 mb
A software engineer sets out to design a new political ideology, and ends up concluding that the Stewart Dynasty should be reinstated. A cult receives disturbing messages from the future, where the artificial intelligence they worship is displeased with them. A philosopher suffers a mental breakdown and retreats to China, where he finds the terrifying abyss at the heart of modern liberalism.Are these omens of the end times, or just nerds getting up to stupid hijinks? Por que no los dos!Neoreaction a Basilisk is a savage journey into the black heart of our present eschaton. We’re all going to die, and probably horribly. But at least we can laugh at how completely ridiculous it is to be killed by a bunch of frog-worshiping manchildren.Featuring essays on:* Tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe* Deranged internet trolls who believe women playing video games will end western civilization* The black mass in which the President of the United States sacrificed his name* Fringe economists who believe it’s immoral for the government to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth* The cabal of lizard people who run the world* How to become a monster that haunts the future* Why infusing the blood of teenagers for eternal youth is bad and stupid

Free Download Jack Graham, "Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right"
English | 2018 | ISBN: 1986913996 | EPUB | pages: 414 | 1.0 mb
A software engineer sets out to design a new political ideology, and ends up concluding that the Stewart Dynasty should be reinstated. A cult receives disturbing messages from the future, where the artificial intelligence they worship is displeased with them. A philosopher suffers a mental breakdown and retreats to China, where he finds the terrifying abyss at the heart of modern liberalism.Are these omens of the end times, or just nerds getting up to stupid hijinks? Por que no los dos!Neoreaction a Basilisk is a savage journey into the black heart of our present eschaton. We’re all going to die, and probably horribly. But at least we can laugh at how completely ridiculous it is to be killed by a bunch of frog-worshiping manchildren.Featuring essays on:* Tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe* Deranged internet trolls who believe women playing video games will end western civilization* The black mass in which the President of the United States sacrificed his name* Fringe economists who believe it’s immoral for the government to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth* The cabal of lizard people who run the world* How to become a monster that haunts the future* Why infusing the blood of teenagers for eternal youth is bad and stupid

Free Download L. Haaparanta, "Mind, Meaning and Mathematics: Essays on the Philosophical Views of Husserl and Frege"
English | 1994 | ISBN: 9048143667, 0792327039 | DJVU | pages: 296 | 1.9 mb
At the turn of the century, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl both participated in the discussion concerning the foundations of logic and mathematics. Since the 1960s, comparisons have been made between Frege’s semantic views and Husserl’s theory of intentional acts. In quite recent years, new approaches to the two philosophers’ views have appeared. This collection of articles opens with the first English translation of Dagfinn Føllesdal’s early classic on Husserl and Frege of 1958. The book brings together a number of new contributions by well-known authors and gives a survey of recent developments in the field. It shows that Husserl’s thought is coming to occupy a central role in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, as well as in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. The work is primarily meant for philosophers, especially for those working on the problems of language, logic, mathematics, and mind. It can also be used as a textbook in advanced courses in philosophy.

Free Download Conrad-Martius, "Metaphysical Conversations and Phenomenological Essays "
English | ISBN: 3110764393 | 2023 | 190 pages | EPUB, PDF | 2 MB + 3 MB
This is the first translation into English of early phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Metaphysical Conversations, originally published in 1921. Conrad-Martius was one of Husserl’s first students, an important part of the Göttingen Phenomenology Circle and mentor to Edith Stein, Jean Héring, and other early phenomenologists. The present volume provides the full German and English texts of the conversations, a phenomenological discussion of the nature of the human, examining the nature of body, soul, and spirit, and drawing distinctions between plants, animals, humans, and various other beings. The volume also includes two important essays on phenomenology, in which Conrad-Martius distinguishes between the phenomenological approaches of Husserl, Heidegger, and the more ontological approach of the Göttingen school of phenomenology. She is critical of Husserl’s "transcendental" and Heidegger’s "existential" approach. The conversations illustrate her use of the phenomenological method for fundamental investigations into the nature (or Wesen) of things.