To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Why is God hidden? How might God be pointed out? In this timely study, Chad Engelland provides an original and compelling account of why God the creator is naturally hidden and how God can be intended. Drawing on phenomenology, philosophy of language, and medieval thought, he explores these questions, arguing that if the God in question is the ultimate source of all things, then hiddenness is necessary. Only a creature, rather than the creator, can appear directly in experience. Nonetheless, God the creator can be named as the ultimate source of all through a deferred ostension, which is a way of establishing the reference to a hidden cause through some manifest effect. Moreover, the deferred ostension can be clarified not only through the phenomenology of absent authors, which is a special case of the problem of other minds, but also via the fulfillment of desire in giving thanks for all.
When scholars discuss the question whether Wittgenstein was a relativist, they invariably draw their criteria from recent definitions of relativism. This study tries a different route: it identifies conceptions of relativism that were influential in the early twentieth century, and uses them as foils for interpreting Wittgenstein's philosophy. Section 1 investigates what Wittgenstein meant in speaking of his 'ethnological perspective,' and how this perspective relates to 'cultural relativism' in anthropology around 1900. Section 2 focuses on Wittgenstein's reflections on logic and mathematics as 'ethnological phenomena.' In this context, the ethnological perspective brought Wittgenstein close to positions that many of his contemporaries denounced as 'psychologism' and 'sociologism.' Section 3 highlights the role of the ethnological perspective in Wittgenstein's remarks on 'certainties.' Many of these remarks would have been counted as relativistic by leading members of the 'Vienna Circle.'
Wittgenstein once said that his aim was to make the philosophical problems 'completely disappear', a remark that has baffled philosophers ever since. In this book, Sorin Bangu reconstructs and defends Wittgenstein's unusual idea, and applies it to the traditional problems in philosophy of mathematics, setting out and explaining the subtleties of what is considered the most difficult area of Wittgenstein's views. He also considers how, according to the later Wittgenstein, we should think of the relation between philosophy and mathematics, articulating Wittgenstein's 'normativist' dissolution strategy and explaining his 'therapeutic' vision of the relation between the two disciplines. His book shows how these controversial views sit within the context of current debates in the philosophy of mathematics, and mounts a detailed and convincing defence of the radical eliminative claim – that philosophy of mathematics after Wittgenstein is devoid of its traditional problems.
An investigation into the metaphysics of the logical properties. Textbooks define logical truth and logical consequence in terms of models. But what are models, and why is invoking them a good way to define these properties? The answers take us through questions about the bearers of logical truth, the distinction between logical and non-logical expressions, and, ultimately, to an account of what logic is.
The doctrine of divine simplicity is an important element of major monotheistic religions; not only Islamic and Jewish but also Christian theologians have affirmed and defended the doctrine. However, the historic doctrine is the subject of intense debate within these traditions. Historic expressions of the doctrine are surveyed, important objections are considered, and arguments in favor of the doctrine are summarized.
In this book, Nancy Cartwright, Eileen Munro and John Pemberton introduce a new method for assessing whether plans for how to affect change produced their intended outcome, or whether they are likely to do so in the future. The method offers the prospect of a step-change improvement in the accuracy of policy assessments, based on a new pluralistic theory of causation. This theory, which goes beyond existing ones, synthesises seven tried and tested familiar component accounts so as to license identification and systematisation of a wide range of evidence types. The authors outline well-grounded improvements to methods for policy development and assessment by the systematic use of real-world examples, including notably that of child welfare. Their book will be valuable for the burgeoning audience concerned with the critical issue of how to develop and implement policies that work across domains from welfare to education and economics to medicine.
What ethical norms and obligations apply to economic agents such as companies and consumers? This question sits between two distinct strands of thought: ethics and economics. While economic behaviour often centres on self-interest and competition, ethical thinking emphasises empathy and cooperation. Business ethics seeks to bridge this divide—but past approaches have leaned too heavily toward either moral idealism or economic detachment. This book proposes a more balanced framework, where both ethical and economic reasoning have their place. Drawing on historical and contemporary debates, the authors examine key issues including the profit motive, justice in prices and wages, market harms, the limited liability corporation, and corporate social responsibility. The resulting theory is sensitive to the unique moral dynamics of market contexts and their broader societal consequences. Between Ethics and Economics is essential reading for anyone interested in how ethics and economics intersect in today's marketplace.
The Cambridge Companion to the Byzantine Church explores the intricate dimensions of the Church in Byzantium-its emergence, theology, art, liturgy and histories-and its afterlife, in captivity and in the modern world. Thirty leading theologians and historians of eastern Rome examine how people from Greece to Russia lived out their faith in liturgies, veneration of the saints, and other dimensions of church life, including its iconic art and architecture. The authors provide a rich overview and insights from the latest scholarship on the lives and beliefs of emperors and subjects across the Byzantine empire. The volume thereby fills a prominent gap in current offerings on the development and continuing impacts of the Byzantine church from the fourth to fifteenth centuries, and will serve as a valuable resource for scholars, a companion for students and an introduction for the wider community to this fascinating chapter in the history of Christianity.
Heidegger characterizes the history and essence of metaphysics as ontotheological. Ontotheology concentrates on the being of entities and conceives of this being in two interdependent ways. First, as common to all entities, being serves as the ontological ground for their coherence and intelligibility. Second, being is understood theologically, that is, by recourse to a highest entity that both exemplifies what is common to entities and serves as the causal foundation of entities and their being. Heidegger often speaks of an ontological difference, but what interests him is not simply the difference between entities and their being but what enables us to make this distinction in the first place, that is, being itself. Notoriously, Heidegger accuses the philosophical tradition of neglecting this non-ontotheological, enabling condition. This Element reconstructs and critiques Heidegger's conception of metaphysics as ontotheological. It then examines his non-ontotheological understanding of being itself, God, and divinity.
This Element situates epistemic game theory at the intersection of decision theory, game theory, and interactive epistemology. It provides an overview and a critical assessment of some of the most classical results and contributions in the field: the epistemic characterization of Nash equilibrium, the epistemic interpretation of mixed actions, rationalizability in static games, and sub-game perfect equilibrium in dynamic games. The book furthermore discusses more recent contributions that highlight the importance of correlated beliefs in games, and as well as experimental and empirical findings on higher-order strategic reasoning.
This Element is an introduction to classical computability theory and scientific efforts to use computability-theoretic notions to explain empirical phenomena. It is written for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in philosophy, assuming no prior exposure to computability theory. Its goals are threefold: (1) to introduce some important theoretical tools and results from classical computability theory; (2) to survey some of the ways these have been used to support explanatory projects in computer and cognitive science; and (3) to outline a few of the more prominent philosophical debates surrounding these projects.
What does it mean to be in the world with others? To what degree is sociality a dimension of our experience? This Element explores the social aspects of our experience as shared and common, focusing on Heidegger's thought on this theme in the period surrounding the publication of Being and Time. It begins by situating Heidegger's position in contrast to alternative phenomenological conceptions of the relations between self and others. From there, it continues to address a key challenge to Heidegger's approach: the problem of Dasein's individuation. Finally, in response to this challenge, the work reframes Heidegger's conception of sociality through the prism of part-whole relations. As social, Dasein emerges as a dependent part of an unfolding shared whole, yet as part of a complex social context, it retains its relative wholeness.
In this book I examine many philosophical theories that attempt to explain the epistemological limits and powers of memory. A traditional view is that our epistemic justification from memory in the present directly depends, in part or primarily, on the past. I reject this view, arguing that just the way the present is directly matters for the justification we have from memory now. Another traditional view is that our justification from memory is best accounted for by theories on which justification directly depends on features of the world external to the mind. I argue that the mental life suffices to account for memory justification. I then appeal to the tip of the tongue phenomenon to argue that just a portion of the mental matters for memory justification: what the subject internally accesses. The best epistemology of memory turns out to support a package of extreme and untraditional views.
At a historical moment when democracy experiences a legitimation crisis, demands for 'community' and for a 'democracy of the common' have become central themes in political theory and philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic. Such appeals entail a critique, even a rejection, of liberal constitutional democracy as alienating and inauthentic, as not representing the interests of citizens. This book fundamentally questions the democratic potential of appeals to 'community' and 'the common.' The language of 'community' can be observed especially among conservative and neofascist public intellectuals of the New Right, but it also features surprisingly prominently among post-Marxist philosophers and political theorists of the New Left. Tracing 'community' and 'the common' in contemporary political thought and philosophy, this book argues that they represent a dangerous political romanticism and authoritarian drift incompatible with the normative demands and the emancipatory dimension of liberal constitutional democracy.
Causality extends across many areas of psychiatry, from the purely conceptual and philosophical to the interpretation of genetic, epidemiological, and neurobiological work. This book offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on causation in psychopathology, exploring it in relation to the latest scientific and philosophical advances, as well as through psychiatric research and practice. It features contributions from many internationally known psychologists, clinical researchers, and philosophers of science actively studying the phenomenology of mental illness. The chapters are organized into four sections: The Causes Themselves; Causes, Genes, and Neuroscience; Causality and Nosology; and Causality and Phenomenology. Each main chapter is preceded by a brief introduction written by the editors and a commentary by another author in this volume. By taking a multidisciplinary approach spanning psychiatry, philosophy, and psychology, the book is written to be accessible for members of all three disciplines.
Beauty is significant to us in many different registers, but perhaps the least appreciated has to do with its distinctively metaphysical significance. For Hegel, aesthetic experience offers us its own distinctive perspective on the nature of reality, and in this book David Ciavatta shows how in Hegel's ground-breaking Aesthetics, his astute observations on art and on beauty in nature relate to and illuminate wider themes in his metaphysical thought. To experience and be compelled by the beautiful is, on Hegel's account, to have an intuitive access to certain metaphysical truths concerning the kind of being we are, concerning the divine, concerning the ultimate nature of the natural and historical worlds, and concerning our proper place within and relation to reality overall. Ciavatta's study illuminates the close connection between Hegel's aesthetics and his metaphysics, and links Hegel's thought with important themes in post-Kantian continental philosophy.
In trying to spell out the distinction between activity and passivity and what is special about agency, philosophers have tended to focus on human intentional action as their paradigm case. Yet taking intentional agency as a starting point makes it difficult to offer positive accounts of more elementary forms of agency. I first present this classical approach and discuss some of its limitations. I then consider simpler forms of behavior and the minimal conditions they must meet to be considered genuine forms of agency. I then turn to conscious agency, examining the nature and sources of our conscious agentive states, their reliability and the causal role they may play in shaping our actions. Finally, I discuss joint agency, the different forms of coordination among agents on which the success of joint action depends, and the sense of agency in joint action.
To Galen, Plato was the great authority in philosophy but also had important things to say on health, disease, and the human body. The Timaeus was of enormous significance to Galen's thought on the body's structure and functioning as well as being a key source of inspiration for his teleological world view, in which the idea of cosmic design by a personified creative Nature, the Craftsman, plays a fundamental role. This volume provides critical English translations of key readings of the Timaeus by Galen that were previously accessible only in fragmentary Greek and Arabic and Arabo-Latin versions. The introductions highlight Galen's creative interpretations of the dialogue, especially compared to other imperial explanations, and show how his works informed medieval Islamicate writers' understanding of it. The book should provoke fresh attention to texts that have been unjustly marginalized in the history of Platonism in both the west and Middle East.
Once considered a period of poverty and isolation, devoid of impressive material culture, the Iron Age is now regarded as a pivotal era. It witnessed how the ancient Greeks lost and regained literacy, created lifelike figural representations and monumental architecture, and eventually established new and complex civic polities. The Companion to the Greek Iron Age offers an up to date account of this critical epoch of Greek antiquity. Including archaeological surveys of different regions, it presents focused discussions of the Early Iron Age cultures and states with which Greek regions had contacts and which are integral for understanding cultural developments in this formative period. They include Cyprus, Syro-Anatolia, Italy, and Egypt, regions in which, as in Greece, the Early Iron Age is diverse and unevenly documented. Offering a synthesis of the key developments, The Companion to the Greek Iron Age also demonstrates how new archaeological and theoretical approaches have enlarged and clarified our understanding of this seminal period.