Michael O'Sullivan
Author
Series
Description
Excited by the possibilities hinted at by the major scientific breakthroughs of the day, Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to construct a science of the mind. 1748's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is the result.
A work that had a huge influence on great thinkers including celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant, An Enquiry is Hume's examination of how we obtain information and form beliefs. He argues that we mainly gain knowledge...
Author
Series
Description
What we think of as the "mind" is little more than an illusion. That's the provocative thesis of British philosopher Gilbert Ryle's 1949 work The Concept of Mind.
Seventeenth-century French writer René Descartes, one of the fathers of philosophy, imagined the mind and body as two separate entities that combine to form a human being. This concept came to be called "mind-body dualism." Ryle set about ridiculing Descartes's idea of, as he put it, a...
Author
Description
A brilliant analysis of the transition in world economics, finance, and power as the era of globalization ends and gives way to new power centers and institutions.
The world is at a turning point similar to the fall of communism. Then, many focused on the collapse itself, and failed to see that a bigger trend, globalization, was about to take hold. The benefits of globalization--through the freer flow of money, people, ideas, and trade--have been...
Author
Series
Description
More than two centuries after its initial publication in 1781, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason remains perhaps the most influential text in modern philosophy. Kant himself claimed his work as a revolutionary document and insisted that it changed the discipline of philosophy as thoroughly as Copernicus had changed astronomy 300 years earlier, when he said the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way round.
Kant argues that metaphysicians...
Author
Series
Description
In Philosophical Investigations, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein presents a radical approach to problems in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. In fact, he sets out a radically new conception of philosophy itself. Published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death, many still consider it one of the finest works of twentieth-century philosophy.
Wittgenstein begins from the insight that most philosophical problems...