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This book contains chapters by philosophers and scholars working at the interface of Western philosophy and Buddhist Studies. Many have distinguished scholarly records in Western philosophy, with expertise in analytic philosophy and logic, as well as deep interest in Buddhist philosophy. Others have distinguished scholarly records in Buddhist Studies with strong interests in analytic philosophy and logic. All are committed to the enterprise of cross-cultural philosophy and to bringing the insights and techniques of each tradition to bear in order to illuminate problems and ideas of the other. These chapters address a broad range of topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, and demonstrate the fecundity of the interaction between the Buddhist and Western philosophical and logical traditions.

The work of Bertrand Russell had a decisive influence on the emergence of analytic philosophy, and on its subsequent development. The essays collected in this volume, by one of the authorities on Russell's philosophy, all aim at recapturing and articulating aspects of Russell's philosophical vision during his most influential and important period, the two decades following his break with Idealism in 1899. One theme of the collection concerns Russell's views about propositions and their analysis, and the relation of those ideas to his rejection of Idealism. Another theme is the development of Russell's logicism, culminating in Whitehead's and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and the author offers a revealing view of the conception of logic that underlies it. Here again there is an emphasis on Russell's argument against Idealism, on the idea that his logicism was a crucial part of that argument. A further focus of the volume is Russell's views about functions and propositional functions. This theme is part of a contrast that the author draws between Russell's general philosophical position and that of Frege; in particular, there is a close parallel with the quite different views that the two philosophers held about the nature of philosophical analysis. The author also sheds light on the much-disputed idea of an operation, which Wittgenstein advances in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The philosophy of religion as a distinct discipline is an innovation of the last 200 years, but its central topics—the existence and nature of the divine, humankind’s relation to it, the nature of religion, and the place of religion in human life—have been with us since the inception of philosophy. Philosophers have long critically examined the truth of and rational justification for religious claims, and have explored such philosophically interesting phenomena as faith, religious experience, and the distinctive features of religious discourse. The second half of the twentieth century was an especially fruitful period, with philosophers using new developments in logic and epistemology to mount both sophisticated defenses of, and attacks on, religious claims. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion contains newly commissioned chapters by twenty-one prominent experts who cover the field in a comprehensive but accessible manner. Each chapter is expository, critical, and representative of a distinctive viewpoint. The Handbook is divided into two parts. The first, “Problems,” covers the most frequently discussed topics, among them arguments for God’s existence, the nature of God’s attributes, religious pluralism, the problem of evil, and religious epistemology. The second, “Approaches,” contains four essays assessing the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of practicing philosophy of religion—analytic, Wittgensteinian, continental, and feminist.

Relativism has dominated many intellectual circles, past and present, but the 20th century saw it banished to the fringes of mainstream analytic philosophy. Of late, however, it is making something of a comeback within that loosely configured tradition, a comeback that attempts to capitalize on some important ideas in foundational semantics. This book aims not merely to combat analytic relativism but also to combat the foundational ideas in semantics that led to its revival. Doing so requires a proper understanding of the significance of possible worlds semantics, an examination of the relation between truth and the flow of time, an account of putatively relevant data from attitude and speech act reporting, and a careful treatment of various operators. This book contrasts relativism with a view according to which the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth simpliciter and falsity simpliciter. Such propositions, it argues, are the semantic values of sentences (relative to context), the objects of illocutionary acts, and, unsurprisingly, the objects of propositional attitudes.

This book aims to reconcile pragmatism (in both its classical American and its Wittgensteinian forms) with analytic philosophy. It investigates relations between the meaning of linguistic expressions and their use. Giving due weight both to what one has to do in order to count as saying various things and to what one needs to say in order to specify those doings makes it possible to shed new light on the relations between semantics (the theory of the meanings of utterances and the contents of thoughts) and pragmatics (the theory of the functional relations among meaningful or contentful items). Among the vocabularies whose interrelated use and meaning are considered are: logical, indexical, modal, normative, and intentional vocabulary. As the argument proceeds, new ways of thinking about the classical analytic core programs of empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism are offered, as well as novel insights about the ideas of artificial intelligence, the nature of logic, and intentional relations between subjects and objects.

The idea of Continental Philosophy has never been properly explained in philosophical terms. This book attempts finally to succeed where others have failed, although not by giving an account of its internal unity but by showing instead why no such account can be given. Providing a clear picture of the current state of the contemporary philosophical culture, it traces the origins and development of the idea of a distinctive Continental tradition, critiquing current attempts to survey the field of contemporary philosophy. The main argument of the book is that the very idea of a fruitfully distinguishable philosophical tradition of Continental philosophy is part of the mythological history of the movement that came to call itself analytic philosophy: the very idea of such a tradition is best thought of as an item that has its original home in the conceptual armoury of analytic philosophy. In this respect, “Continental philosophy” is less the name for another kind of philosophy than analytic philosophy, but a term that functions within analytic philosophy as the name of its own other, that part of its lexicon which represents what is not part of it: it is “the Other” of analytic philosophy.

This book presents a collection of important new chapters on topics at the intersection of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. The starting-point for the chapters is the brilliant work of the British philosopher Gareth Evans before his untimely death in 1980 at the age of 34. Evans's work on reference and singular thought transformed the Fregean approach to the philosophy of thought and language, showing how seemingly technical issues in philosophical semantics are inextricably linked to fundamental questions about the structure of our thinking about ourselves and about the world. The chapters, all newly written for this book, explore different aspects of Evans's philosophical legacy, showing its importance to central areas in contemporary analytic philosophy. The book includes an introduction that introduces the principal themes in Evans's thought and places the chapters in context.

The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin and the Passionate Life is a return to some of the perennial questions of philosophy, questions about the meaning of life, about death and tragedy, about the respective roles of rationality and passion in the good life, about love, compassion, and revenge, about honesty, deception, and betrayal, about who we are, and how we think about who we are. It is an attempt to save philosophy from a century‐old fiber diet of thin arguments and logical analysis and recover the richness and complexity of life in thought. It tackles the question, loathed by professional philosophers but asked all too often by nonphilosophers, “Has Analytic Philosophy Ruined Philosophy?” The answer is “no,” or at least, “not yet,” but superprofessionalization and a near‐exclusive emphasis on the “thinnest” of philosophical formulations and arguments have either robbed the perennial questions of their gut‐level force or dismissed them altogether as “pseudoquestions” suited only for sophomores. This is a book that tries to put the fun back in philosophy, recapturing the heartfelt confusion and excitement that originally brings us all into philosophy. But it is not a critique of contemporary philosophy so much as it is an attempt to engage in philosophy in a different kind of way, beginning with a reevaluation of Socrates and the nature of philosophy and defending the passionate life in contrast to the calm life of thoughtful contemplation so often held up as an ideal by traditional philosophers. It includes discussions of love as a virtue, Nietzsche's Will to Power, the politics of emotion, rationality in a multicultural perspective, the rationality of emotions, and the rationality of such emotions as sympathy and vengeance, the tragic sense of life, the nature of fate and luck, the denial of death and death fetishism, the nature of personal identity in multicultural and emotional perspective, and the role of deception and self‐deception in philosophy. In short, it is an attempt to recapture the kind of philosophy that Nietzsche celebrated as a “joyful wisdom.” My concern is to break down the walls between academic philosophy and its lost audience, between thin logic and thick rhetoric, between philosophical reason and philosophical passion, between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, and between philosophy and life. As the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda says (of his poetry), the result is an “impure philosophy, as impure as old clothes, as a body with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophesies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations, and taxes.”