Books in the SpringerBriefs in Philosophy series

This book analyses an inconsistency within epistemic contextualism known as the factivity problem.

This book offers the first systematic reading of Plato's Laches in English after three decades of scholarly silence. It rekindles interest in this much-neglected dialogue by providing a fresh discussion of the major issues that arise from the text. Among these issues, pride of place is taken by the virtue of courage, for the definition of which Socrates is depicted as engaging in some long-winded dialectical exchange with his interlocutors. Yet, although there is no room for doubt that the Laches is Plato's most explicit treatment of courage, this dialogue ends in perplexity and is thus traditionally thought of as an unsuccessful attempt to define what courage is. The present study challenges this suggestion. This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's Laches. In fact, it constitutes the first systematic attempt to study the dialogue in light of the idea that its composition could well have formed part of Plato's overall plan to establish a well-defined and rigorous justification of the life of philosophical inquiryThe book will be of key interest to classicists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, but will also appeal to students or anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy.

This book provides a systematic analysis of the ethical implications of traditional and complementary medicine (T&CM), focusing on pragmatic solutions.

Panpsychism claims that mentality is ubiquitous to reality, and in combination with dual-aspect monism it claims that anything, from fundamental particles to rocks, trees, and human animals, has two aspects: a physical aspect and a mental aspect.

This book presents a philosophical interpretation to numerical cognition based on dual process theories and heuristics.

In addition, it develops procedures for seeking evidence of mechanisms, for evaluating evidence of mechanisms, and for combining this evaluation with evidence of association in order to yield an overall assessment of effectiveness.

This book deals with philosophical aspects regarding the perception of spatial relationships in two and three-dimensional art.

The personal essays collected in this volume examine such issues as assimilation, the philosophy of neurosis, aneurysmal philosophy, and the connection between Hegel and Neurosis, among others.

They argue that instead of reading Apeiron as a noun, it should be considered an adjective, with reference to the term phusis (nature), and that the phrase phusis apeiros may express the boundless power of nature, responsible for all creation and growth.

The book provides the different forms of materialism, particularly distinguished into claims about the material nature of the world and about the material nature of the mind, and then focus on materialist approaches to body and embodiment, selfhood, ethics, laws of nature, reductionism and determinism, and overall, its relationship to science.

This work explains how different theories of causation confront causal overdetermination. Chapters clarify the problem of overdetermination and explore its fundamental aspects. It is argued that a theory of causation can account for our intuitions in overdetermination cases only by accepting that the adequacy of our claims about causation depends on the context in which they are evaluated.The author proposes arguments for causal contextualism and provides insight which is valuable for resolution of the problem. These chapters enable readers to quickly absorb different perspectives on overdetermination and important theories of causation, therefore it is a work that will have a broad appeal.    

This book presents an overview of postmodernism and its social indicators, and of the postmodern condition in consciousness as an indicator of its modification and development. The book also discusses various forms of multiculturalism, including multiculturalism as multiple modernities and plural modernities, and non-Western contemporaneity.

It relates how Hume wrote his philosophy in a time of tumult, as the millennia-old metaphysical tradition that placed humans and their cognitive abilities in an ontological framework collapsed and gave way to one that placed the autonomy of the individual in its center.

This book offers a new way to justify privacy based on a theory derived from Buddhist insights. It also argues that the new way of conceptualizing privacy, as presented in this book, would go a long way in helping unravel the difficult concept of group privacy.

The diversity of kinds of models one finds in science - ranging from toy models and scale models to theoretical and mathematical models - has attracted attention not only from scientists, but also from philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science.

This book unifies a large part of the vast body of Husserlian phenomenology using a relatively simple set of dynamical laws. By making key Husserlian ideas clear and by formally expressing them, it facilitates efforts to apply Husserlian phenomenology in various domains, in particular to cognitive science.

This book is a contribution both to Aristotle studies and to the philosophy of nature, and not only offers a thorough text based account of time as modally potentiality in Aristotle's account, but also clarifies the process of "actualizing time" as taking time and looks at the implications of conceiving a world without actual time.

This book lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion and operates on the assumption that dialogue between the two disciplines can be fruitful.

Since unary algebras admit only type 1, this book focuses on these algebras to tackle the main problem. It discusses several aspects of unary algebras and proves that the Constraint Satisfaction Problem for relational structures is polynomially equivalent to SysTermSat over unary algebras.

This book describes a novel conception of reality, one that uniquely incorporates an idealistic view of existence with an account of objectivity.

This volume examines Popper's philosophy by analyzing the criticism of his most popular critics: Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos. Starting from the assumption that Hume's criticism of induction is valid, the book explores the central criticism and objections that these three critics have raised.

This book on infinite regress arguments provides (i) an up-to-date overview of the literature on the topic, (ii) ready-to-use insights for all domains of philosophy, and (iii) two case studies to illustrate these insights in some detail. Infinite regress arguments play an important role in all domains of philosophy.

This book explains the first published consistency proof of PA. A notable aspect of the proof is the representation of ordinal numbers that was developed by Gentzen. The topic should interest researchers and students who work on proof theory, history of proof theory or Hilbert's program and who do not mind reading mathematical texts.

This book develops a philosophical analysis of economic reality and economic science from an Aristotelian point of view. It differs from other philosophy of economics books as it also deals with economic reality (not only the science) and approaches its subject from an Aristotelian perspective.

Explores the practical applicability of the philosophy of science to scientific research, but also considers its relevance to practice within the realms of technology, design, crafts, and even within the world of arts and the humanities.

This volume offers a new understanding of Titchener's influential system of psychology popularly known as introspectionism, structuralism and as classical introspective psychology.

Paradoxes provide a vehicle for exposing misinterpretations and misapplications of accepted principles. for instance, startling claims concerning human destiny and the nature of reality are directly related to fallacious reasoning in a betting paradox, and a problem analyzed in philosophy journals is resolved by means of a computer program.

This book provides an introductory overview to the social debate over enhancement technologies with an overview of the transhumanists' call to bypass human nature and conservationists' argument in defense of it.

The aim of the book is to argue for the restoration of theoretical and practical reason to economics. Institutions allow us to deliberate on and guide our decisions about capabilities, through the use of practical reason.