Sandra Lapointe

This book presents a series of case studies and reflections on the historiographical assumptions, methods, and approaches that shape the way in which philosophers construct their own past. The chapters in the volume advance discussion of the methods of historians of philosophy, while at the same time illustrating the various ways in which philosophical canons come into existence, debunking the myth of analytical philosophy's ahistoricism, and providing a deeper understanding of the roles historiographical devices play in philosophical thought. More importantly, the contributors attempt to understand history of philosophy in connection with other historical and historiographical approaches: contributors engage classical history of science, sociology of knowledge, history of psychology and historiography, in dialogue with historiographical practices in philosophy more narrowly construed. Additionally, select chapters adopt a more diverse perspective, by making place for non-Western approaches and for efforts to construe new philosophical narratives that do justice to the voice of women across the centuries. Historiography and the Formation of Philosophical Canons will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in history of philosophy, meta-philosophy, philosophy of history, historiography, intellectual history, and sociology of knowledge.

Gary Kemp: Quine's Relationship with Analytic Philosophy: I try to explain why Quine, for all his fame amongst analytic philosophers, has so few explicit followers within analytic philosophy of the past fifty years – despite the fact that naturalism, at least as broadly conceived, is so popular. Partly it's because Quine's particular version of naturalism is so demanding, partly it's because the nature and seriousness of his commitment to extensionalism are not well recognized, and partly because his views were formulated from an extremely general and abstract point of view in the philosophy of science. I focus on the second and especially on the third. Quine is more radical and more alien than is customarily appreciated.

Les Archives-Husserl de Louvain en Belgique furent fondées en 1939, un an après la mort de Husserl, à la suite du sauvetage spectaculaire des quelque 40000pages de manuscrits qu’avait laissées derrière lui le fondateur de la phénoménologie. Ces manuscrits de recherche, ébauches d’articles, fragments inédits, notes de cours,etc. sont rédigés dans la variante développée par Husserl d’un code sténographique, le Gabelsberger, frappé d’obsolescence après la Première Guerre mondiale, et le travail d’édition des œuvres complètes de Husserl dans la collection Husserliana—chez Nijhoff jusqu’en 1988 et depuis chez Kluwer—constitue, pour les raisons qu’on imagine facilement, une entreprise laborieuse et de longue haleine. La nouvelle collection Husserliana Materialien a, semble-t-il, été conçue au début du nouveau millénaire en vue d’accélérer le processus par lequel les écrits de Husserl sont rendus accessibles au public philosophique. Cette décision est d’autant plus opportune qu’après plus d’un demi-siècle d’activité, les Archives-Husserl n’ont pas encore atteint l’objectif visé et ce bien qu’on ne prévoie publier qu’un cinquième environ du matériau dont on dispose. Il y a bien sûr un prix à payer, car les Materialien obéissent à une politique éditoriale simplifiée. L’introduction de l’éditeur ne s’aventure point, contrairement à ce qui est le cas dans les Husserliana, au-delà d’une description de l’agencement, de la condition et de la petite histoire des feuillets réunis. On doit, comme c’est au demeurant aussi fâcheusement le cas dans les Husserliana, renoncer entièrement à l’index rerum et, dans le cas qui nous intéresse ici, se contenter d’un index des noms propres, malheureusement incomplet. Mais la différence essentielle consiste toutefois en ceci que les Materialien ne contiennent pas les remarques éditoriales exhaustives qu’on retrouve dans les Husserliana. Les remarques critiques se limitent à des notes de bas de pages qui ont pour but de rendre compte des modifications jugées les plus importantes—Husserl retravaillait souvent plusieurs fois un même manuscrit—et des références textuelles. L’exégète scrupuleux se retrouve donc à la merci de l’éditeur et peut-être aura-t-il raison de penser qu’il y perd au change.

Philosophy and the Historical Perspective contains fourteen chapters, each of which is an attempt to enrich our conception of the relationship of analytical philosophy to history. Some chapters seek insight from the philosophical canon: Robert Pippin offers an insightful discussion of Hegel's historiographical methodology, and Brian Leiter presents aspects of Nietzsche's. Many of the chapters set research agendas that would deserve entire volumes. For instance, van Ackeren asks whether there are transhistorical philosophical problems, and Thomas Grundmann what philosophical progress looks like. Christof Rapp casts doubt on the idea that hard-core...

Themes from Ontology, Mind and Logic celebrates Peter Simons’s admirable career. The book contains seventeen essays with themes ranging from metaphysics to phenomenology. The contributions by Fabrice Correia, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, Ingvar Johansson, Kathrin Koslicki, Uriah Kriegel, Wolfgang Künne, Edgar Morscher, Kevin Mulligan, Maria Elisabeth Reicher, Maria van der Schaar, Benjamin Schnieder, Johanna Seibt, Ted Sider, David Woodruff Smith, Mark Textor and Jan Woleński, tackle the problems that defined Simons’s work and insights into some of today’s most interesting and significant philosophical questions.

The scope and method of logic as we know it today eminently reflect the ground-breaking developments of set theory and the logical foundations of mathematics at the turn of the 20th century. Unfortunately, little effort has been made to understand the idiosyncrasies of the philosophical context that led to these tremendous innovations in the 19thcentury beyond what is found in the works of mathematicians such as Frege, Hilbert, and Russell. This constitutes a monumental gap in our understanding of the central influences that shaped 19th-century thought, from Kant to Russell, and that helped to create the conditions in which analytic philosophy could emerge. The aim of Logic from Kant to Russell is to document the development of logic in the works of 19th-century philosophers. It contains thirteen original essays written by authors from a broad range of backgrounds—intellectual historians, historians of idealism, philosophers of science, and historians of logic and analytic philosophy. These essays question the standard narratives of analytic philosophy’s past and address concerns that are relevant to the contemporary philosophical study of language, mind, and cognition. The book covers a broad range of influential thinkers in 19th-century philosophy and analytic philosophy, including Kant, Bolzano, Hegel, Herbart, Lotze, the British Algebraists and Idealists, Moore, Russell, the Neo-Kantians, and Frege.

Between the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and Husserl’s Ideas in 1913, the nineteenth century was a pivotal period in the philosophy of mind, witnessing the emergence of the phenomenological and analytical traditions that continue to shape philosophical debate in fundamental ways. The nineteenth century also challenged many prevailing assumptions about the transparency of the mind, particularly in the ideas of Nietzsche and Freud, whilst at the same time witnessing the birth of modern psychology in the work of William James. Covering the main figures of German idealism to the birth of the phenomenological movement under Brentano and Husserl, Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century provides an outstanding survey to these new directions in philosophy of mind. Following an introduction by Sandra Lapointe, fourteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including: German idealism, Bolzano, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Ernst Mach, Helmholtz, Nietzsche, William James, Sigmund Freud, Brentano’s early philosophy of mind, Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Husserl, and Natorp. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, continental philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, and literature.

Analytic philosophy is once again in a methodological frame of mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in metaphysics, whose practitioners and historians are actively reflecting on the nature of ontological questions, the status of their answers, and the relevance of contributions both from other areas within philosophy and beyond. Such reflections are hardly new: the debate between Willard van Orman Quine and Rudolf Carnap about how to understand and resolve ontological questions is widely seen as a turning point in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. And indeed, this volume is occasioned by the fact that the deflationary approach to metaphysics advocated by Carnap in that debate is once again attracting considerable interest and support. Eleven original essays by many of today's leading voices in metametaphysics aim to deepen our understanding of Carnap's contributions to metaontology and to explore how this legacy might be mined for insights into the contemporary debate