The world's best introduction to philosophy, Knowledge, Reality, and Value explains basic philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, such as: How can we know about the world outside our minds? Is there a God? Do we have free will? Are there objective values? What distinguishes morally right from morally wrong actions? The text succinctly explains the most important theories and arguments about these things, and it does so a lot less boringly than most books written by professors."My work is all a series of footnotes to Mike Huemer." -Plato"This book is way better than my lecture notes." -Aristotle"When I have a little money, I buy Mike Huemer's books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes." -ErasmusContentsPreface Part I: Preliminaries 1. What Is Philosophy? 2. Logic 3. Critical Thinking, 1: Intellectual Virtue 4. Critical Thinking, 2: Fallacies 5. Absolute Truth Part II: Epistemology 6. Skepticism About the External World 7. Global Skepticism vs. Foundationalism 8. Defining "Knowledge" Part III: Metaphysics 9. Arguments for Theism 10. Arguments for Atheism 11. Free Will 12. Personal Identity Part IV: Ethics 13. Metaethics 14. Ethical Theory, 1: Utilitarianism 15. Ethical Theory, 2: Deontology 16. Applied Ethics, 1: The Duty of Charity 17. Applied Ethics, 2: Animal Ethics 18. Concluding Thoughts Appendix: A Guide to Writing GlossaryMichael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, where he has taught since the dawn of time. He is the author of a nearly infinite number of articles in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, in addition to seven other amazing and brilliant books that you should immediately buy.

Were one to characterize the aims of this book ambitiously, it could be said to sketch the philosophical foundations or underpinnings of the scientific world view or, better, of the scientific conception of the world. In any case, it develops a comprehensive philosophical view, one which takes science seri ously as the best method for getting to know the ontological aspects of the world. This view is a kind of scientific realism - causal internal realism, as it is dubbed in the book. This brand of realism is "tough" in matters of ontology but "soft" in matters of semantics and epistemology. An ancestor of the book was published in Finnish under the title Tiede, toiminta ja todellisuus (Gaudeamus, 1983). That book is a shortish undergraduate-level monograph. However, as some research-level chapters have been added, the present book is perhaps best regarded as suited for more advanced readers. I completed the book while my stay at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a Visiting Professor under the Exchange Program between the Universities of Wisconsin and Helsinki. I gratefully acknowledge this support. I also wish to thank Juhani Saalo and Martti Kuokkanen for comments on the manuscript and for editorial help. Dr Matti Sintonen translated the Finnish ancestor of this book into English, to be used as a partial basis for this work. His translation was supported by a grant from Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden edistamisvarat. Finally, and as usual, I wish to thank Mrs.

The notion of practical wisdom is one of Aristotle's greatest inventions. It has inspired philosophers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Thompson, and John McDowell. Now a leading scholar of ancient philosophy offers a challenge to received accounts of practical wisdom by situating it in the larger context of Aristotle's views on knowledge and reality. That happiness is the end pursued by practical wisdom is commonly agreed. What is disputed is whether happiness is to be found in the practical life of political action, in which we exhibit courage, temperance, and other virtues of character, or in the contemplative life, where theoretical wisdom is the essential virtue. C. D. C. Reeve argues that the dichotomy is bogus, that these lives are in fact parts of a single life, which is the best human one. In support of this view, he develops innovative accounts of many of the central notions in Aristotle's metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology, including matter and form, scientific knowledge, dialectic, educatedness, perception, understanding, political science, practical truth, deliberation, and deliberate choice. These accounts are based directly on freshly translated passages from many of Aristotle's writings. Action, Contemplation, and Happiness is an accessible essay not just on practical wisdom but on Aristotle's philosophy as a whole.

This book collects some of McDowell’s most influential papers of the last two decades. The essays deal with themes such as the interpretation of Aristotle’s and Plato’s ethical writings, questions in moral philosophy that arise out of the Greek tradition, Wittengensteinian ideas about reason in action, and issues central to philosophy of mind.

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history.