1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-episte mological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, "Introduction", Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely - sometimes quite heavily - on the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the most important problems I will have to solve in the later chapters. The story starts with Kant. Kant thought that the world as we know it, the world of tables, chairs and hippopotami, is constituted in part by the human mind. His cen tral argument relied on an analysis of space and time, and presupposed his famous doctrine that knowledge cannot extend beyond all possible experience. It is a central property of experience - he claimed - that it is structured spatially and temporally. However, for various reasons, space and time cannot be features of the world, as it is independently of our experience. So he concluded that they must be the forms of human sensibility, i. e. necessary ingredients of the way things appear to our senses.

One of the most important Anglo-American philosophers of our time here joins the current philosophical debate about the nature of truth. William P. Alston formulates and defends a realist conception of truth, which he calls alethic realism (from "aletheia," Greek for truth). This idea holds that the truth value of a statement (belief or proposition) depends on whether what the statement is about is as the statement says it is. Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam are two of the prominent and widely influential contemporary philosophers whose anti-realist ideas Alston attacks.

The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium was launched in the early eighties. It began during a particularly lean period in the American economy. But its success is linked as much to the need to be in touch with the rapidly changing currents of the philosophical climate as with the need to insure an adequately stocked professional community in the Philadelphia area faced, perhaps permanently, with the threat of increasing attrition. The member schools of the Consortium now include Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, and Villanova University, that is, the schools of the area that offer advanced degrees in philosophy. The philosophy faculties of these schools form the core of the Consortium, which offers graduate students the instructional and library facilities of each member school. The Consortium is also supported by the associated faculties of other regional schools that do not offer advanced degrees - notably, those at Drexel University, Haverford College, La Salle University, and Swarthmore College - both philosophers and members of other departments as well as interested and professionally qualified persons from the entire region. The affiliated and core professionals now number several hundreds, and the Consortium's various ventures have been received most enthusiastically by the academic community. At this moment, the Consortium is planning its fifth year of what it calls the Conferences on the Philosophy of the Human Studies.

Hilary Putnam, who turned 88 in 2014, is one of the world’s greatest living philosophers. He currently holds the position of Cogan University Professor Emeritus of Harvard. He has been called “one of the 20th century’s true philosophic giants” (by Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in Prospect magazine in 2013). He has been very influential in several different areas of philosophy: philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. This volume in the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers series contains 26 chapters original to this work, each written by a well-known philosopher, including the late Richard Rorty and the late Michael Dummett. The volume also includes Putnam’s reply to each of the 26 critical and descriptive essays, which cover the broad range of Putnam’s thought. They are organized thematically into the following parts: Philosophy and Mathematics, Logic and Language, Knowing and Being, Philosophy of Practice, and Elements of Pragmatism. Readers will also appreciate the extensive Intellectual Autobiography.

In this book the author focuses on the ethical, political, and religious dimensions of what make us uniquely human.

The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy ???The style is fresh and engaging, and it gives a broad and accurate picture of the western philosophical tradition. It is a pleasure to browse in, even if one is not looking for an answer to a particular question.??? David Pears ???Its entries manage to avoid the obscurities of an exaggerated brevity without stretching themselves out, as if seeking to embody whole miniature essays. In short it presents itself as a model of clarity and clarification.??? Alan Montefiore

Concentrating on scholarship over the past four decades, this multidisciplinary approach to representation considers conceptual issues about representation and applies different theories to various arts. Following an introduction that traces the historical debates surrounding the concept of representation, Part One focuses on representation and language, epistemology, politics and history, sacrificial rites, possible world and postmodernism. Part Two applies current theories to painting, photography, literature, music, dance, and film. Writings highlight the vital role representation plays in the formation and appreciation of major genres of art. This work will appeal to art philosophy and aesthetics scholars and to cultural studies and linguistic scholars. Rather than advocate certain theories, the essays illustrate the inherent complexities of representation.

Eli Hirsch has contributed steadily to metaphysics since his ground-breaking (and much cited) work on identity through time. This volume collects Hirsch's essays from the last decade (with the exception of one article from 1978) on ontology and metametaphysics which are very much tied to these debates.

Some of the world's specialists provide in this handbook essays about what kinds of things there are, in what ways they exist, and how they relate to each other. They give the word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness.