Skepticism and Cognitivism addresses the fundamental question of epistemology: Is knowledge possible? It approaches this query with an evaluation of the skeptical tradition in Western philosophy, analyzing thinkers who have claimed that we can know nothing. After an introductory chapter lays out the central issues, chapter 2 focuses on the classical skeptics of the Academic and Pyrrhonistic schools and then on the skepticism of David Hume. Chapters 3 through 5 are devoted to contemporary defenders of skepticism—Keith Lehrer, Arne Næss, and Peter Unger. In chapter 6, author Oliver A. Johnson dons the mantle of skeptic himself and develops and adds theories to the skeptical arsenal. He closes with an examination of the relationship between skepticism and cognitivism, reaching and defending conclusions on the nature and extent of possible human knowledge. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1978.

The System of Pragmatic Idealism is of special importance for Nicholas Rescher's philosophical work, because here he has presented the systematic approach at once. Dedicated to his 70th birthday a group of European and U.S-american philosophers discuss the main topics of Rescher's philosophical system. The contributions which are presented here for the first time and Nicholas Rescher's responses cover the most important topics of philosophy and give a deep and detailed insight into the strenght of Rescher's pragmatic idealism. This volume is of interest for philosophers studying Rescher's philosophy and for all those who are interested in systematic philosophy and the vividnes of pragmatism and idealism in present philosophy.

'...the book is very dense with ideas...arguments concerning innumerable interesting points are always worth pondering.'-THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

Moral claims not only assume to be true, but they also guide our choices. This fascinating book presents a new theory of normative judgment, the "standard-based theory," which offers a schematic account of the truth conditions of normative propositions of all kinds, including moral propositions and propositions about reasons. Here, David Copp argues that because any society needs a social moral code in order to enable its members to live together successfully, and because it would be rational for a society to choose such a system, certain moral codes--and the standards they include--are justified. In this work, Copp raises a number of important issues in moral theory, as well as in metaphysics and the philosophy of language.

Ethical naturalism is narrowly construed as the doctrine that there are moral properties and facts, at least some of which are natural properties and facts. Perhaps owing to its having faced, early on, intuitively forceful objections by eliminativists and non-naturalists, ethical naturalism has only recently become a central player in the debates about the status of moral properties and facts which have occupied philosophers over the last century. It has now become a driving force in those debates, one with sufficient resources to challenge not only eliminativism, especially in its various non-cognitivist forms, but also the most sophisticated versions of non-naturalism. This volume brings together twelve new essays which make it clear that, in light of recent developments in analytic philosophy and the social sciences, there are novel grounds for reassessing the doctrines at stake in these debates.

"This book examines a variety of arguments that might be thought to support skepticism about the existence of morality, and it explains how these arguments can be answered by those who believe in objective moral truths. The focus throughout is on discussing questions that frequently trouble thoughtful and reflective individuals, including questions like the following: Does the prevalence of moral disagreement make it reasonable to conclude that there aren't really any moral facts at all? Is morality simply relative to particular societies and times? What could objective moral facts possibly be like? If there were moral facts, how could we ever come to know anything about them? Shouldn't belief in the theory of evolution undermine our confidence that our moral intuitions reliably reveal moral truths? Would moral facts ever actually explain anything at all? Can morality really have the motivating and rational force we normally take it to have? How can one possibly find a place for objective moral values in a scientific worldview? The book explores plausible answers to questions like these and it thus aims to show why the belief in objective morality remains an intellectually reasonable one"--

This is the first volume of a collection of papers in honor of the fiftieth birthday of Jean-Yves Béziau. These 25 papers have been written by internationally distinguished logicians, mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists and philosophers, including Arnon Avron, John Corcoran, Wilfrid Hodges, Laurence Horn, Lloyd Humbertsone, Dale Jacquette, David Makinson, Stephen Read, and Jan Woleński. It is a state-of-the-art source of cutting-edge studies in the new interdisciplinary field of universal logic. The papers touch upon a wide range of topics including combination of logic, non-classical logic, square and other geometrical figures of opposition, categorical logic, set theory, foundation of logic, philosophy and history of logic (Aristotle, Avicenna, Buridan, Schröder, MacColl). This book offers new perspectives and challenges in the study of logic and will be of interest to all students and researchers interested the nature and future of logic.

This book attempts to open up a path towards a phenomenological theory of values (more technically, a phenomenological axiology). By drawing on everyday experience, and dissociating the notion of value from that of tradition, it shows how emotional sensibility can be integrated to practical reason. This project was prompted by the persuasion that the fragility of democracy, and the current public irrelevance of the ideal principles which support it, largely depend on the inability of modern philosophy to overcome the well-entrenched skepticism about the power of practical reason. The book begins with a phenomenology of cynical consciousness, continues with a survey of still influential theories of value rooted in 20th century philosophy, and finally offers an outline of a bottom-up axiology that revives the anti-skeptical legacy of phenomenology, without ignoring the standards set by contemporary metaethics.

This is a book on metaethics and moral epistemology. It asks two fundamental questions: (i) Is there any such thing as (non-relative) moral truth?; and (ii) If there is such truth, how do we come into epistemic contact with it? Roughly the first half of the book is aimed at answering the first question. Its animating idea is that we should take our ordinary, tutored moral judgments seriously—judgments typified by our conviction that it is clearly true that some acts, policies, social norms et al. are morally right or wrong, permissible or impermissible, praiseworthy or condemnable, etc., no matter when, where, or by whom they are performed. In order to provide a firm conceptual basis for such judgments, the book develops a theory of moral truth, based on a theory of moral facts. The account of moral truth and moral facts is further grounded on a theory of moral properties. In short, the book develops a theory of moral realism, roughly, the view that there are indeed non-relative, first-order moral truths. The second half of the book is aimed at answering the second question above. Building squarely on the metaethical theories developed earlier, the book argues for a non-empiricist theory of justified moral belief and knowledge. Pivotal to this project is a careful analysis of various forms of moral skepticism, by which I mean any conception of morality substantially at odds with the general contours of our ordinary moral thinking. All such skepticisms are rejected, and in their place a broadly intuitionist, epistemically fallibilist theory of moral knowledge is advanced. The conclusion reached is that we have very strong reason to believe that our ordinary moral thinking, although certainly liable to error, is fundamentally sound. Moral knowledge is ubiquitous.

Moral skepticism is at present a vibrant topic of philosophical inquiry. Particularly since the turn of the millennium, the debates between moral skeptics of various stripes and their opponents have gained renewed force not only by taking account of innovative ideas in moral philosophy, but also by drawing on novel positions in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language as well as on recent findings in empirical sciences. As a result, new arguments for and against moral skepticism have been devised, while the traditional ones have been reexamined. This collection of original essays will advance the ongoing debates about various forms of moral skepticism by discussing such topics as error theory, disagreement, constructivism, non-naturalism, expressivism, fictionalism, and evolutionary debunking arguments. It will be a valuable resource for academics and advanced students working in metaethics and moral philosophy more generally.