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The essays in this volume are, with some exceptions, efforts to make sense out of difficult or problematic philosophical texts. Some of these readings depart, sometimes radically, from standard readings. Yet the principles of interpretation that underlie these essays are not themselves radical. The interpretations are governed by a semantic principle of charity, namely, that there is a very strong presumption in favor of holding that philosophers meant to say precisely what they did say, and that what they did say means precisely what it seems to mean. This approach encourages close reading of the text.
Six of these essays exhibit this “close reading” approach: “Three Platonic Analogies,” “A Reading of Aquinas's Five Ways,” “Hume and Berkeley on the Proofs of Infinite Divisibility,” “Hume on the Missing Shade of Blue,” “Hume's Worries about Personal Identity,” and, “Wittgenstein on Identity.”
Though driven by the same principle of interpretation, other essays have a broader scope: “The Tendency of Hume's Skepticism,” and “Wittgenstein and Classical Skepticism.” Only two of these essays are technical: “Hamilton's Quantification of the Predicate” and “[Wittgenstein on] Negative Elementary Proposition.”
Keywords: Aquinas; Berkeley; The Divided Line; Hamilton; Hume; identity; Kant; Plato; Wittgenstein
Book. 264 pages. Illustrated.
Subjects: Philosophy
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