An introduction to the study of philosophy with discussions on several topics including God, politics, science and art.

Ancients and moderns alike have constructed arguments and assessed theories on the basis of common sense and intuitive judgements. This volume brings together a group of philosophers and psychologists to discuss these issues. It contains a collection of essays discussing intuition from two different perspectives. They also cover how psychological research seems to pose serious challenges to traditional intuition-driven philosophical enquiry.

In this landmark work on early conceptual and lexical development, Ellen Markman challenges the fundamental assumptions of traditional theories of language acquisition and proposes a new notion of how children acquire categories.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Claims authorial intention, art history, and morality play a role in our encounter with art works.

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychol ogy through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. The problems posed by metaphor and analogy are among the most challenging that confront the field of knowledge representation. In this study, Eileen Way has drawn upon the combined resources of philosophy, psychology, and computer science in developing a systematic and illuminating theoretical framework for understanding metaphors and analogies. While her work provides solutions to difficult problems of knowledge representation, it goes much further by investigating some of the most important philosophical assumptions that prevail within artificial intelligence today. By exposing the limitations inherent in the assumption that languages are both literal and truth-functional, she has advanced our grasp of the nature of language itself. J.R.F.

What is art? The contributors to Theories of Art Today address the assertion that the term “art” no longer holds meaning. They explore a variety of issues including: aesthetic and institutional theories of art, feminist perspectives on the philosophy of art, the question of whether art is a cluster concept, and the relevance of tribal art to philosophical aesthetics. Contributors to this book include such distinguished philosophers and historians as Arthur Danto, Joseph Margolis, and George Dickie.

There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning considered in this book. The term ‘model’ comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations and are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. The book’s contributors are researchers active in the area of creative reasoning in science and technology.

Mumford outlines a major new theory of natural laws. His book begins with the question of whether there are any genuinely law-like phenomena in nature. The discussion addresses questions currently being debated by metaphysicians such as whether the laws of nature are necessary or contingent and whether a property can be identified independently of its causal role.

Attempts to understand the human condition through dreaming reach back to antiquity, especially in such classical Indian philosophical texts as the Rg Veda and the Upanisads. In a more contemporary vein, Dream Life, Wake Life continues this investigation, as it views the dream as an open window on the waking human condition. The book discusses the major twentieth-century contributions to dream theory, beginning with Freud's 1900 psychoanalytical theory of dreaming and continuing through Jung's transpersonal and Boss's existential approaches. Recent phenomenological, cognitive, and biological developments are also considered. Dream Life, Wake Life addresses human creativity as illuminated by dreaming. While Freud held a "transformative" view of dreaming in which dream life is secondhand, formed by combining memory traces of diverse past waking experiences into novel compositions, Gordon G. Globus sees the process as creative, the fundamental creative action inherent in the human condition.