Analyticity, or the 'analytic/synthetic' distinction is one of the most important and controversial problems in contemporary philosophy. In this outstanding introduction to analyticity Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis provide a clear and thorough survey of the problem.

This collection of essays and excerpts gives a comprehensive overview of Alvin Plantinga's seminal work as a Christian philosopher of religion.

The analytic/synthetic distinction looks simple. It is a distinction between two different kinds of sentence. Synthetic sentences are true in part because of the way the world is, and in part because of what they mean. Analytic sentences - like all bachelors are unmarried and triangles have three sides - are different. They are true in virtue of meaning, so no matter what the world is like, as long as the sentence means what it does, it will be true. This distinction seems powerful because analytic sentences seem to be knowable in a special way. One can know that all bachelors are unmarried, for example, just by thinking about what it means. But many twentieth-century philosophers, with Quine in the lead, argued that there were no analytic sentences, that the idea of analyticity didn't even make sense, and that the analytic/synthetic distinction was therefore an illusion. Others couldn't see how there could fail to be a distinction, however ingenious the arguments of Quine and his supporters. But since the heyday of the debate, things have changed in the philosophy of language. Tools have been refined, confusions cleared up, and most significantly, many philosophers now accept a view of language - semantic externalism - on which it is possible to see how the distinction could fail. One might be tempted to think that ultimately the distinction has fallen for reasons other than those proposed in the original debate. In Truth in Virtue of Meaning, Gillian Russell argues that it hasn't. Using the tools of contemporary philosophy of language, she outlines a view of analytic sentences which is compatible with semantic externalism and defends that view against the old Quinean arguments. She then goes on to draw out the surprising epistemological consequences of her approach.

The major divide in contemporary epistemology is between those who embrace and those who reject a priori knowledge. Albert Casullo provides a systematic treatment of the primary epistemological issues associated with the controversy. By freeing the a priori from traditional assumptions about the nature of knowledge and justification, he offers a novel approach to resolving these issues which assigns a prominent role to empirical evidence. He concludes by arguing that traditional approaches to the a priori, which focus primarily on the concepts of necessity and analyticity, are misguided.

Patrick Suppes is a philosopher and scientist whose contributions range over probability and statistics, mathematical and experimental psychology, the foundations of physics, education theory, the philosophy of language, measurement theory, and the philosophy of science. He has also been a pioneer in the area of computer assisted instruction. In each of these areas, Suppes has provided seminal ideas that in some cases led to shaping the direction of research in the field. The papers contained in this collection were commissioned with the mandate of advancing research in their respective fields rather than retrospectively surveying the contributions that Suppes himself has made. The authors form an interesting mixture of researchers in both formal philosophy of science and science itself all of whom have been inspired by his ideas. To maintain the spirit of constructive dialogue that characterizes Suppes's intellectual style, he has written individual responses to each article. In Volume 1: Probability and Probabilistic Causality, nineteen distinguished philosophers and scientists focus their attention on probabilistic issues. In Part I the contributors explore axiomatic representations of probability theory including qualitative and interval valued probabilities as well as traditional point valued probabilities. Belief structures and the dynamics of belief are also treated in detail. In Part II the rapidly growing field of probabilistic causation is assessed from both formal and empirical viewpoints. For probability theorists, statisticians, economists, philosophers of science, psychologists and those interested in the foundations of mathematical social science. In Volume 2: Philosophy of Physics, Theory Structure, and Measurement Theory, fifteen distinguished philosophers and scientists cover a wide variety of topics. Part III covers issues in quantum theory, geometry, classical mechanics, and computational physics. Part IV explores Suppes's well known set-theoretic account of scientific theories which has served him well throughout his career. Suppes's contributions to measurement theory have been widely used in mathematical psychology and elsewhere, and this material is the subject of Part V. For physicists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sicence, and philosophers of science. In Volume 3: Philosophy of Language and Logic, Learning and Action Theory, fourteen distinguished philosophers and scientists explore issues in the philosophy of language, logic, and philosophical psychology. Suppes's suggestions that quantum theory requires a rethinking of classical logic form a particularly sharp account of that controversial thesis, and Part VI deals with this issue together with topics in the philosophy of language and logic, including relational grammars and anaphora. Part VII deals with issues in psychology, action theory, and robotics, while Part VIII concludes with a general survey of Suppes's views in the philosophy of science. A comprehensive chronological and topical bibliography of Suppes's writings is included in this volume. For philosophers of language, theoretical linguists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sciences, and philosophers of science.

1. A WORD ABOUT PRESUPPOSITIONS This book is addressed to philosophers, and not necessarily to those philosophers whose interests and competence are largely mathematical or logical in the formal sense. It deals for the most part with problems in the theory of partial judgment. These problems are naturally formulated in numerical and logical terms, and it is often not easy to formulate them precisely otherwise. Indeed, the involvement of arithmetical and logical concepts seems essential to the philosophies of mind and action at just the point where they become concerned with partial judgment and" belief. I have tried throughout to use no mathematics that is not quite elementary, for the most part no more than ordinary arithmetic and algebra. There is some rudimentary and philosophically important employment of limits, but no use is made of integrals or differentials. Mathematical induction is rarely and inessentially employed in the text, but is more frequent and important in the apP'endix on set theory and Boolean algebra. • As far as logic is concerned, the book assumes a fair acquaintance with predicate logic and its techniques. The concepts of compactness and maximal consistency turn out to have important employment, which I have tried to keep self-contained, so that extensive knowledge of meta logical topics is not assumed. In a word, the book presupposes no more logical facility than is customary among working philosophers and graduate students, though it may call for unaccustomed vigor in its application.

This is a critical history of analytic philosophy from its inception in the late-19th century to the present day. The book focuses on the connections between the four leading movements in the field - logical realism, logical positivism, ordinary language analysis and linguistic essentialism.

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion contains newly commissioned chapters by 21 prominent experts who cover the field in a comprehensive but accessible manner. Each chapter is expository, critical, and representative of a distinctive viewpoint.