Peter Carruthers

Frank Jackson

et al.

Colin McGinn

David Papineau

William G. Lycan

Galen Strawson

Georges Rey

J.J.C. Smart

Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?

Consciousness and Its Place in Nature

Frank Jackson champions the cause of conceptual analysis as a basic method of philosophical inquiry. In recent years conceptual analysis has been undervalued and, Jackson suggests, widely misunderstood; he argues that there is nothing especially mysterious about it and a whole range of important questions cannot be productively addressed without it. He anchors his argument in discussion of specific philosophical issues, starting with the metaphysical doctrine of physicalism and moving on,via free will, meaning, personal identity, motion and change, to the philosophy of colour and to ethics. The significance of different kinds of supervenience theses, Kripke and Putnam's work in the philosophy of modality and language, and the role of intuitions about possible cases receive detailed attention. Jackson concludes with a defence of a version of analytical descriptivism in ethics. In this way the book not only offers a methodological programme for philosophy, but also throws fascinating new light on some much-debated problems and their interrelations.

A Defence of Conceptual Analysis

From Metaphysics to Ethics

Professor of Philosophy Daniel Stoljar

Key papers on one of the most important and provocative thought experiments in philosophy of mind.

Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson's Knowledge Argument

There's Something about Mary

Michael Smith

A guide to today's most exciting research in academic philosophy with more than 30 distinguished scholars to contribute incisive and up-to-date critical surveys of the principal areas of research.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Selected Papers

Mind, Method and Conditionals

Graham Priest

David Lewis's untimely death on 14 October 2001 deprived the philosophical community of one of the outstanding philosophers of the 20th century. As many obituaries remarked, Lewis has an undeniable place in the history of analytical philosophy. His work defines much of the current agenda in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind and language. This volume, an expanded edition of a special issue of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, covers many of the topics for which Lewis was well known, including possible worlds, counterpart theory, vagueness, knowledge, probability, essence, fiction, laws, conditionals, desire and belief, and truth. Many of the papers are by very established philosophers; others are by younger scholars including many he taught. The volume also includes Lewis's Jack Smart Lecture at the Australian National University, How Many Lives has Schrödinger's Cat?, published here for the first time. Lewisian Themes will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying Lewis's work and a major contribution to the many topics that he mastered.

The Philosophy of David K. Lewis

Lewisian Themes

Two ordinary boys from an ordinary town try to solve a century-old mystery that has kept a town gripped in gold fever for a hundred years. Could the key to solving the riddle be a mummified hand of a man dead for over a century? Nick and Monty, "The Danger Boys" use their cunning and their wits to figure out the secret of the Gold of Sirus Grandview!

Nick and Monty the Danger Boys in the Dead Man's Hand

What is the nature of, and what is the relationship between, external objects and our visual perceptual experience of them? In this book, Frank Jackson defends the answers provided by the traditional Representative theory of perception. He argues, among other things that we are never immediately aware of external objects, that they are the causes of our perceptual experiences and that they have only the primary qualities. In the course of the argument, sense data and the distinction between mediate and immediate perception receive detailed defences and the author criticises attempts to reduce perceiving the believing and to show that the Representative theory makes the external world unknowable. Jackson recognises that his views are unfashionable but argues in detail that they are to be preferred to their currently favoured competitors. It will become an obvious point of reference for all future work on the philosophy of perception.

A Representative Theory

Perception

Language, Names, and Information is an important contribution to philosophy of language by one of its foremost scholars, challenging the pervasive view that the description theory of proper names is dead in the water, and defending a version of the description theory from a perspective on language that sees words as a wonderful source of information about the nature of the world we live in. Challenges current pervasive view that the description theory of reference for proper names has been refuted Discusses several topics at the center of current debates, including representation and information, two-dimensionalism, possible worlds, and broad vs. narrow content Maintains the conversational and somewhat informal tone of the original lectures upon which the book is based

Language, Names, and Information

A collection of major philosophical articles on the problem on consciousness.

Frank Jackson

Books

Your next favorite book is out there