This book analyses the epistemological problems that Shakespeare explores in Othello. In particular, it uses the methods of analytic philosophy, especially the work of the later Wittgenstein, to characterize these problems and the play. Shakespeare’s Othello is often thought to connect with traditional sceptical problems, and in particular with the problem of other minds. In this book, Richard Gaskin argues that the play does indeed connect in interesting—but also in surprising and so far relatively unexplored—ways with traditional epistemological concerns. Shakespeare presupposes a generally Wittgensteinian model of mind as revealed in behaviour, and communication as necessarily successful in general. Gaskin examines different epistemological models of the tragedy, and argues that it is useful to apply materials from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty to the analysis of Othello’s loss of confidence in Desdemona’s fidelity: Othello treats Desdemona’s fidelity as a ‘hinge certainty’, something that is so fundamental to the language-game that abandoning it results—so Wittgenstein predicts—in chaos and madness. The tragedy arises, Gaskin suggests, from treating the wrong kind of thing as a hinge certainty. Othello and the Problem of Knowledge will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy of literature, Shakespeare, and Wittgenstein.

A "blind spot" suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "reads" the "blind spot" of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "community" into print.

Originally published in 1916. This book reviews the common problems of philosophy and then critiques the varied epistemological theories of the time. A theory of knowledge may be either dualistic or monistic and realistic or idealistic. Examining the resulting doctrines at the beginning, this book then goes on to consider mysticism, psychology, logic, consciousness, intellectualism and then scientific method. A fascinating insight into early Twentieth century philosophy.

This book recovers a sense of the high stakes of Shakespearean comedy, arguing that the comedies, no less than the tragedies, serve to dramatize responses to the condition of being human, responses that invite scholarly investigation and explanation. Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell’s influential readings of Othello and Lear, the book argues that exposure or vulnerability to others is the source of both human happiness and human misery; while the tragedies showcase attempts at the evasion of such vulnerability through the self-defeating pursuit of epistemological certainty, the comedies present the drama and the difficulty of turning away from an epistemological register in order to productively respond to the fact of our humanity. Where Shakespeare’s tragedies might be viewed in Cavellian terms as the drama of skepticism, Shakespeare’s comedies then exemplify the drama of acknowledgement. As a parallel and a preamble, Gottlieb suggests that the field of literary studies is itself a site of such revealing responses: where competing research methods strive to foreclose upon (or, alternatively, rejoice in) epistemological uncertainty, such commitments bespeak an urge to avoid or circumvent the human in the practice of scholarship. Reading Shakespeare’s comedies in tandem with a "defactoist" view of teaching and learning points in the direction of a new humanism, one that eschews both the relativism of old deconstruction and contemporary Presentism and the determinism of various kinds of structural accounts. This book offers something new in scholarly and popular understanding of Shakespeare’s work, doing so with both philosophical rigor and literary attention to the difficult work of reading.

The book raises the issue of morbid obsessions especially Jealousy, It goes deep into the condition of Othello Syndrome, Which is the psychiatric disorder of the mind, where you become obsessed with your partners fidelity, repeated accusations of the partner cheating on you, checking their phone, emails, and social media sites for signs of cheating, and the more bizarre things that you do once you are obsessed, Such as bugging the house, buying a lie detector, having your partner followed, checking up on them at work, checking up on them when they are with their friends, needing evidence and reassurance they are not cheating on you, even to the point of hearing a person of the opposite sex in the background where ever they are, and thinking they are with them and cheating on you. It is natural to have a form of anxiety about a partner, even mild jealousy.

Howard Marchitello's 1997 study of narrative techniques in Renaissance discourse analyses imaginative conjunctions of literary texts, such as those by Shakespeare and Browne, with developments in scientific and technical writing. In Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England he explores the relationship between a range of early modern discourses, such as cartography, anatomy and travel writing, and the developing sense of the importance of narrative in producing meaning. Narrative was used in the Renaissance as both a mode of discourse and an epistemology; it not only produced knowledge, it also dictated how that knowledge should be understood. Marchitello uses a wide range of cultural documents to illustrate the importance of narrative in constructing the Renaissance understanding of time and identity. By highlighting the inherent textual element in imaginative and scientific discourses, his study also evaluates a range of contemporary critical practices and explores their relation to narrative and the production of meaning.

These essays bring together forty years of work in ontology. Intentionality, negation, universals, bare particulars, tropes, general facts, relations, the myth of the 'myth of the given', are among the topics covered. Bergmann, Quine, Sellars, Russell, Wittgenstein, Hume, Bradley, Hochberg, Dummett, Frege, Plato, are among the philosophers discussed. The essays criticize non-Humean notions of cause; they criticize the notion that besides simple atomic facts there are also negative facts and general facts. They defend a realism of properties as universals, against nominalism; bare particulars; a (qualified) realism with regard to logical form; a Russellian account of relations; and an account of minds and intentionality, which is opposed to materialism, but is also a form of (methodological) behaviourism. In general, the ontology is one of logical atomism and empiricist throughout, rooted in a Principle of Acquaintance.

This book repairs and revives the Theory of Knowledge research program of Russell’s Principia era. Chapter 1, 'Introduction and Overview', explains the program’s agenda. Inspired by the non-Fregean logicism of Principia Mathematica, it endorses the revolution within mathematics presenting it as a study of relations. The synthetic a priori logic of Principia is the essence of philosophy considered as a science which exposes the dogmatisms about abstract particulars and metaphysical necessities that create prisons that fetter the mind. Incipient in The Problems of Philosophy, the program’s acquaintance epistemology embraced a multiple-relation theory of belief. It reached an impasse in 1913, having been itself retrofitted with abstract particular logical forms to address problems of direction and compositionality. With its acquaintance epistemology in limbo, Scientific Method in Philosophy became the sequel to Problems. Chapter 2 explains Russell’s feeling intellectually dishonest. Wittgenstein’s demand that logic exclude nonsense belief played no role. The 1919 neutral monist era ensued, but Russell found no epistemology for the logic essential to philosophy. Repairing, Chapters 4–6 solve the impasse. Reviving, Chapters 3 and 7 vigorously defend the facts about Principia. Studies of modality and entailment are viable while Principia remains a universal logic above the civil wars of the metaphysicians.

Reissued with a new essay on Macbeth this famous collection of essays on Shakespeare's tragedies considers these plays as responses to the crisis of knowledge and the emergence of modern skepticism provoked by the new science of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Film has become such an underpinning of art and pop culture that its potential for inspiring serious thought is often overlooked. Our intellectual involvement with film has been minimized as more in the audience want to be merely amazed and entertained. Essays written by both established and cutting-edge philosophers of film concentrate in this work on the value of film in general and the value of certain films in particular for the study and teaching of ideas. The essays explore such topics as the significance of narrative unity for self knowledge in David Lynch's Lost Highway and in Paul Schrader's Affliction; ambiguity and responsibility in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon; consciousness and cognition in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane; skepticism in Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion and David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch; language and gender in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game; Platonic idealism in Chris Marker's La Jetee; race in Spike Lee's Summer of Sam; the concept of the imagination in cognitive film theory; and the role of ideology in feminist film theory. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.