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Aristotle regularly identifies philosophical and scientific concepts as homonymous; indeed, his preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to many subjects and clearly structures his philosophical methodology. In this book, Christopher Shields offers the first full‐length investigation of homonymy in Aristotle's work, in which he explicates and assesses Aristotle's commitment to homonymy in both critical and constructive contexts. Shields identifies homonymy as both a critical tool, with Plato as the target, by means of which Aristotle can emphasize the complexity of core philosophical concepts; and as a constructive method for the discovery of order in multiplicity, which is crucial for genuine scientific inquiry and philosophical progress. In Part I, Shields establishes and examines the general theoretical framework of Aristotle's approach to homonymy. In Ch. 1, Shields discusses the first characterization of homonymy in the Categories, with a view to assessing the role of homonymy in Aristotle's later works; in Chs. 2 to 4 Shields examines some objections to Aristotle's reliance to homonymy, the connection between homonymy and signification, and the notion of core‐dependent homonymy. Part II is an examination of five cases in which we see homonymy at work: Ch. 5 discusses Aristotle's appeal to the homonymy of the body, Ch. 6 to the concept of life, Ch 7, to the concepts of oneness and sameness, and Ch. 8 to goodness. Shields argues that Aristotle is successful in each of these endeavours, particularly so in the case of the homonymy of life, but only partially so in the case of goodness. In Ch. 9, Shield argues that Aristotle fails to establish that being is homonymous. Shields argues that, aside from the attempt to apply homonymy to being, Aristotle's commitment to homonym is well motivated, and it introduces a method of definition that is of genuine and lasting importance. Shields argues that Aristotle is right to advocate homonymy as a form of constructive philosophical analysis, and that it is a framework of enduring value and with prospects for genuine philosophical progress.

The claim that contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases. This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: Only if philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence are data about non-philosophers’ intuitions of any interest to us. Our alleged reliance on the intuitive makes many philosophers who don’t work on meta-philosophy concerned about their own discipline: they are unsure what intuitions are and whether they can carry the evidential weight we allegedly assign to them. The goal of this book is to argue that this concern is unwarranted since the claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively (or even a little bit) on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of ‘intuition’-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: It has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

This volume consists of fourteen chapters that focus on a trio of interrelated themes. First: what are the powers and limits of appeals to intuition in supporting or refuting various sorts of claims? Second: what are the cognitive consequences of engaging with content that is represented as imaginary or otherwise unreal? Third: what are the implications of these issues for the methodology of philosophy more generally? These themes are explored in a variety of cases, including thought experiments in science and philosophy, early childhood pretense, self‐deception, cognitive and emotional engagement with fiction, mental and motor imagery, automatic and habitual behavior, and social categorization. The chapters are organized into two large sections. Those in Part I—six in all—explore the role of intuition and thought experiment in science and philosophy; those in Part II—the remaining eight—look more generally at the role of imagination in a range of domains. Within each section, the chapters are grouped into pairs. In Part I, the first two look at the role of thought experiments in science; the next two at the role of thought experiments in exploring philosophical questions about personal identity; and the final two at a number of issues concerning intuitions and philosophical methodology more generally. In Part II, the first two chapters explore the relation between pretense and belief; the next two look at the phenomenon of imaginative resistance; the next two consider issues of imagination and emotion; and the final two introduce and discuss an attitude that the book calls alief.

Knowledge ascriptions, such as ‘Sam knows that Obama is president of the United States’, play a central role in our cognitive and social lives. For example, they are closely related to epistemic assessments of action. As a result, knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. The line-up for this collection of chapters on knowledge ascriptions consists of world-class philosophers who offer novel approaches to this long-standing topic. The contributions exemplify three recent approaches to knowledge ascriptions. First, a linguistic turn according to which linguistic phenomena and theory are an important resource for providing an adequate account of knowledge ascriptions. Second, a cognitive turn according to which empirical theories from, for example, cognitive psychology as well as experimental philosophy should be invoked in theorizing about knowledge ascriptions. Third, a social turn according to which the social functions of knowledge ascriptions to both individuals and groups are central to understanding knowledge ascriptions. In addition, since knowledge ascriptions have figured very prominently in discussions concerning philosophical methodology, many of the contributions address or exemplify various methodological approaches. The book includes an introduction that gives an overview of the various approaches to this complex debate, their interconnections, and the wide-ranging methodological issues that they raise.

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.

This volume aims to explore and apply a particular methodology in epistemology. The methodology is to consider the point(s) or purpose(s) of our epistemic evaluations, and to pursue epistemological theory in light of such matters. Call this purposeful epistemology. The idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. Several chapters explicitly address this methodology. Other chapters focus on advancing some application of it. For example, some of the chapters focus on the implications for purposeful epistemology for contextualism about epistemic evaluation and for the idea that such evaluation involves “pragmatic encroachment.” Others explore the idea that purposes allow one to understand various conceptual demands on knowing, such as the demand that knowers can give reasons. The text explores how purposeful epistemology might shed light on the debate between internalist and externalist epistemologies. One way in which one might develop a purposeful epistemology is to think of epistemic norms as a kind of social norm in which agents manage to coordinate their individual and group pursuit of true belief. One chapter develops such an approach. Finally, many of the chapters take direction from reflection on Edward Craig’s Knowledge and the State of Nature. For example, one chapter develops ideas in Craig to apply purposeful epistemology to issues regarding testimonial knowledge.

Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Many believe that the causal relation is not directly observable, but that we nevertheless can somehow detect its presence in the world, and much work in the natural and social sciences relies on our ability to detect it. Yet neither common sense, scientific investigation, nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Contemporary philosophical debates about causation are driven by opposing motivations, conflicting intuitions, and unarticulated methodological assumptions. Causation: A User’s Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing landscape. The book guides the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of examples as landmarks. Special attention is given to counterfactual and related analyses of causation. Using a methodological principle based on the close examination of potential counterexamples, the book clarifies the central themes of the debate about causation, develops an account of the methodological rules one should follow when conducting a philosophical exploration of causation, and covers questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, the authors examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency, including proposals based on counterfactual analyses, regularities, causal modeling, contrasts, de facto accounts, and transference of conserved quantities. The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation.