Bøger i Toronto Studies in Philosophy serien

The papers in this collection represent some of the best original work being done today on the theodicies of such early modern philosophers as Leibniz, Suarez, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle.

Kant considered it to be scandalous that philosophy still had not found a rational proof of the existence of the external world during his time. Arguably, the scandal continues today because scepticism remains a widely debated and extremely divisive issue among contemporary thinkers. Although scholars have devoted considerable attention to Kant's arguments against Cartesian scepticism, the literature still presents gaps and inaccuracies that obscure a full understanding of this issue and its significance for contemporary philosophy. In Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy, Luigi Caranti corrects this omission, providing a thorough historical analysis of Kant's anti-sceptical arguments from the pre-critical period up to the 'Reflexionen zum Idealismus' (1788-93).Caranti demonstrates how reconstructing Kant's critique of scepticism is crucial for understanding the origin of his philosophy and for avoiding serious mistakes that still serve as obstacles to the proper understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, Caranti shows how the sceptical challenge leads Kant to the critical stage of his thought. Moreover, this study responds to recent criticism of transcendental idealism, showing how it can serve as the main premise of a powerful anti-sceptical argument whose main structure is suggested by Kant in the 1781 Fourth Paralogism. Erudite and engaging, Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy fills an important void in the literature and breathes new life into this field of inquiry.

Complete with original observations and ideas, this study is sure to generate debates about Humean philosophy, critical realism, and the limits of perceptual knowledge.

The contributors to this volume examine the historical and philosophical issues concerning the role that scientific illustration plays in the creation of scientific knowledge.

Substituting comparative censuses for the hedonistic calculus that figures in standard utilitarianism, Braybrooke excludes gratuitous sacrifices also of happiness short of life-sacrifices.

Explores some of the major topics in metaphysics, such as essence, existence, substance, purpose, space, time, mind, causality, God, freedom, and the possibilities of immortality. An excellent companion to metaphysical studies.

Although many philosophers espouse anti-realism, the only sustained arguments for the position are due to Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam. Gardiner's unpretentious style and lucid organization make sense of Dummett's and Putnam's discourse.

A critical but sympathetic treatment of Pierre Bayle. Once known as the 'Arsenal of the Enlightenment,' his concepts were widely adopted by later thinkers, but since his time there has been nothing but disagreement about how Bayle is to be interpreted.

A persuasive new argument and re-evaluation of the revolution in scientific thought in the 17th and 18th centuries by a senior academic in the history of modern philosophy and the philosophy of science.

Issues of free will and determinism, with their far-reaching practical implications, hold a central place in the history of philosophy. In this book Jordan Howard Sobel looks at the many and varied approaches to this complex problem.

In this major re-examination of Descartes's founding principle, cogito, ergo sum, Murray Miles presents a portrait of Descartes as the Father of Modern Philosophy that is very different from the standard one.

Turnbull offers a close and detailed reading of the Parmenides, using his interpretation to illuminate Plato's major late dialogues. The picture presented of Plato's later philosophy is plausible, highly interesting, and original.

In The Sovereignty of Joy, Alex McIntyre suggests that a sense of tragic joy is the legislating experience at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy. A Dionysian exuberance animates all of Nietzsche's central ideas, which McIntyre argues is the political elaboration of the sovereignty of joy.

In each of its five main parts - in turn, focusing on Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Hume, and Sartre - Inroads discusses, from a philosophical rather than a religious or scientific perspective, those questions that make up the common inheritance of academic philosophy and ethico-religious thought.

Commentaries on his intricate works by twelve former colleagues and students explore various aspects of Doull's history and place it within the context of contemporary scholarship, allowing the reader to judge the depth and rigour of Doull's writing.

Richard Johns argues that random events are fully caused and lack only determination by their causes; according to his causal theory of chance, the physical chance of an event is the degree to which the event is determined by its causes.

Russon argues that Hegel has not only taken account of the body in his philosophy, but has done so in a way that integrates both modern work on embodiment and the approach to the body found in ancient Greek philosophy.

Braybrooke challenges received scholarly opinion by arguing that canonical theorists Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau took St Thomas Aquinas as their point of reference, reinforcing rather than departing from his natural law theory.

A Measured Pace is a wide-ranging and substantial contribution to a philosophical understanding of dance.

As a survey of many technical results in probability theory and probability logic, this monograph by two widely respected scholars offers a valuable compendium of the principal aspects of the formal study of probability.

Kant's Intuitionism examines Kant's account of the human cognitive faculties, his views on space, and his reasons for denying that we have knowledge of things as they are in themselves.

The contributors to the volume discuss various approaches to bioethical thinking and the political and institutional contexts of bioethics, addressing underlying concerns about the purposes of its practice.

Sparshott expounds Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as a single continuous argument, a chain of reasoned exposition on the problems of human life.

Real Words presents an original way of understanding one of the most important philosophers in the Western tradition.

Essays by David Braybrooke take up an assortment of practical concerns that ethics brings into politics: people's interests; needs along with preferences; work and commitment to work; participation in social life.

This work defends a realist view of universals, kinds, possibilities, and dispositions, while rejecting contemporary accounts of these that are couched in terms of modal logic and 'possible worlds.'

For nineteenth-century thinkers, the central problem of religious consciousness in the modern West was the tension between prevailing concepts of individual autonomy and the traditional Judaeo-Christian claim for divine revelation. The God Within brings together ten of Professor Emil Fackenheim's essays on the German Idealists who struggled to resolve this tension. All the essays gathered here are concerned with the radical singularity of history and existence on the one hand and the demands of philosophical truth on the other. They are informed by Professor Fackenheim's engagement with the profound philosophical challenges of our day - particularly his efforts, as a Jewish theologian, to confront the horrors of the Holocaust. We see, through Fackenheim's exposition, how these thinkers sought to come to terms with the presence of radical evil, a problem whose modern relevance is explored in this volume's epilogue, the 1988 essay 'Holocaust and Weltanschauung: Philosophical Reflections on Why They Did It.'.

With Boyle on Atheism, J.J. MacIntosh has culled the Boyle manuscripts held at the Royal Society Library in London and transcribed the portions that relate to atheism, arranging them in the order Boyle appears to have intended.

Since its first publication in 1996, Law and Morality has filled a long-standing need for a contemporary Canadian textbook in the philosophy of law. Now in its third edition, this anthology has been thoroughly revised and updated, and includes new chapters on equality, judicial review, and terrorism and the rule of law.

Jeffrey A. Bell here presents a finely constructed survey of the contemporary continental philosophers, focusing on how they have dealt with the problem of difference.