Russell's classic examination of the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge. It is a rigorous examination of the problems of an empiricist epistemology.

How do we know what we "know"? How did we –as individuals and as a society – come to accept certain knowledge as fact? In Human Knowledge, Bertrand Russell questions the reliability of our assumptions on knowledge. This brilliant and controversial work investigates the relationship between ‘individual’ and ‘scientific’ knowledge. First published in 1948, this provocative work contributed significantly to an explosive intellectual discourse that continues to this day.

From Descartes to Spinoza, Western philosophers have attempted to propose an axiomatic systemization of ethics. However, without consensus on the contents and objects of ethics, the system remains incomplete. This fourvolume set presents a model that highlights a Chinese philosopher’s insights on ethics after a 22-year study. Three essential components of ethics are examined: metaethics, normative ethics, and virtue ethics. This volume mainly studies meta- ethics. The author not only studies the fi ve primitive concepts of ethics— “value,” “good,” “ought,” “right,” and “fact”— and reveals their relationship, but also demonstrates the solution to the classic “Hume’s guillotine”— whether “ought” can be derived from “fact.” His aim is to identify the methods of making excellent moral norms, leading to solutions on how to prove ethical axioms and ethical postulates. Written by a renowned philosopher, the Chinese version of this set sold more than 60,000 copies and has exerted tremendous infl uence on the academic scene in China. The English version will be an essential read for students and scholars of ethics and philosophy in general.

In the extensive study, Systems of Ethics and Value Theory, author William S. Sahakian deconstructs these two complex philosophical systems for a scholarly audience. He covers topics from self-realizationism to free will to dignity with careful analysis and reasoning. His astute contributions to the fields of ethics and value theory provide excellent introductions and open up readers' minds to the complex philosophical concepts and arguments.

John Finnis is a pioneer in the development of a new yet classically-grounded theory of natural law. His work offers a systematic philosophy of practical reasoning and moral choosing that addresses the great questions of the rational foundations of ethical judgments, the identification of moral norms, human agency, and the freedom of the will, personal identity, the common good, the role and functions of law, the meaning of justice, and the relationship of morality and politics to religion and the life of faith. The core of Finnis' theory, articulated in his seminal work Natural Law and Natural Rights, has profoundly influenced later work in the philosophy of law and moral and political philosophy, while his contributions to the ethical debates surrounding nuclear deterrence, abortion, euthanasia, sexual morality, and religious freedom have powerfully demonstrated the practical implications of his natural law theory. This volume, which gathers eminent moral, legal, and political philosophers, and theologians to engage with John Finnis' work, offers the first sustained, critical study of Finnis' contribution across the range of disciplines in which rational and morally upright choosing is a central concern. It includes a substantial response from Finnis himself, in which he comments on each of their 27 essays and defends and develops his ideas and arguments.

This collection showcases the most influential published essays by philosopher Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. One of the most distinguished thinkers working in epistemology today, particularly where the theory of knowledge meets ethics and the philosophy of religion, Zagzebski is well-known for broadening epistemology and refocusing it on epistemic virtue and epistemic value. Her work has greatly influenced the trajectory of contemporary epistemology, opening up new fields in analytic epistemology. The papers collected here are organized into six sections to underline the scope of her impact on six key subject areas of epistemology: (1) knowledge and understanding, (2) intellectual virtue, (3) epistemic value, (4) virtue in religious epistemology, (5) intellectual autonomy and authority, and (6) skepticism and the Gettier problem.

The Continuum Companion to Epistemology offers the definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by epistemology - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Sixteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the area and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to foundationalism, coherentism, infinitism, reliabilism, proper functionalism, evidentialism, skepticism, contextualism, epistemic relativism, intuition and experience. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including an A to Z of key terms and concepts, a chronology, a detailed list of resources and a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary epistemology.

Originally published in 1997, the principal object of the editors in compiling this collection of Robert R. Sterling’s work was to make more of his publications accessible in a convenient form to the academic and professional accounting communities, and to current and future generations of accounting students. While it is not a complete portfolio of his published work to date, this anthology contains all of Sterling’s major articles. Through his long-term quest for a science of accounting, Sterling sought to bring together accounting educators, practitioners, regulators, and researchers in order to identify credible advancements in accounting knowledge, authoritative changes to accounting practice, and transforming improvements to accounting education.

This book has been written primarily for the applied and social scientist and student who longs for an integrated picture of the foundations on which his research must ultimately rest; but hopefully the book may also serve philosophers interested in applied disciplines and in systems methodology. If integration was the major motto, the need for a method ology, appropriate to the teleological peculiarities of all applied sciences, was the main impetus behind the conception of the present work. This need I felt a long time ago in my own area of analytical and empirical research in accounting theory and management science; later I had the opportunity to teach, for almost a decade, graduate seminars in Methodology which offered particular insight into the methodological needs of students of such applied disciplines as business administration, education, engineering, infor matics, etc. Out of this effort grew the present book which among other things tries, on one side, to illuminate the difference and relationship between methods of cognition and methods of decision and on the other, to sketch a framework suitable for depicting means-end relationships in a holistic setting. I believe that a systems methodology which incorporates recent endeavours of deontic logic, decision theory, information economics and related areas would be eminently suited to break the ground for such a future framework. Yet systems theory has two major shortcomings which might prevent it from evolving into the desired methodology of applied science.

This book treats values as the basis for all of philosophy, an approach distinct from critiquing theories of value and far rarer. “First Philosophy,” the effort to justify the foundations for a system of philosophy, is one of the main issues that divide philosophers today. McDonald’s philosophy of values is a comprehensive attempt to replace philosophies of “existence,” “being,” “experience,” the “subject,” or “language,” with a philosophy that locates value as most basic. This transformation is a radical move within Western philosophy as a whole, since it has never been done in such a thoroughgoing way. Hugh P. McDonald makes a comprehensive case against first philosophy as metaphysical, by mounting a case against all metaphysical systems of philosophy. Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values is a fresh start for a rebirth of philosophy. While other movements debate the “death of philosophy,” this book radically re-evaluates the direction of philosophy by discovering values at the basis of all philosophy. This reorientation addresses the question of what the love of wisdom can mean for us today.