The word apory stems from the Greek aporia, meaning impasse or perplexing difficulty. In Aporetics, Nicholas Rescher defines an apory as a group of individually plausible but collectively incompatible theses. Rescher examines historic, formulaic, and systematic apories and couples these with aporetic theory from other authors to form this original and comprehensive survey. Citing thinkers from the pre-Socratics through Spinoza, Hegel, and Nicolai Hartmann, he builds a framework for coping with the complexities of divergent theses, and shows in detail how aporetic analysis can be applied to a variety of fields including philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, logic, and intellectual history.Rescher's in-depth examination reveals how aporetic inconsistency can be managed through a plausibility analysis that breaks the chain of inconsistency at its weakest link by deploying right-of-way precedence based on considerations of cognitive centrality. Thus while involvement with cognitive conflicts and inconsistencies are pervasive in human thought, aporetic analysis can provide an effective means of damage control.

The first comprehensive study of the function and value of aporia, or puzzlement, as a key tool in ancient philosophical enquiry.

Although Erich Przywara (1889 1972) was one of the preeminent Catholic theologians of his time and a profound influence on such people as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, he has remained virtually unknown in North America. This volume includes Przywara s groundbreaking Analogia Entis, originally published in 1932, and his subsequent essays on the concept analogia entis -- the analogy between God and creation -- which has currency in philosophical and theological circles today.

In Paul Ricoeur's Renewal of Philosophical Anthropology: Vulnerability, Capability, Justice, Marc de Leeuw argues that Ricoeur’s philosophical project integrates the anthropological tradition while renewing its importance as a hermeneutic anthropology of human capability. Ricoeur posits that our cogito is neither its own absolute master, nor fully transparent to itself, inflicting a “wound” (brisé) and fracturing the center of Cartesian self-certainty. But the Nietzschean disillusionment that ensues does not simply amount to a victorious anti-cogito; it opens another path towards self-understanding. In place of the direct route of intuition is found a more complex way forward, one guided by interpretation. The task of philosophical anthropology is to understand the human through its interpretative, critical, and imaginative ability as well as its capacity to act towards, with, and for others; the interpretation of the world in front of us, the interpretation of “who we are,” and the interpretation of what it means to be among others (as "other selves") coalesces in an anthropology that binds the question of the self to a moral, ethical, and political project, one aiming to reflect our existence-in-common. For Ricoeur, the basic question of our subjective and normative “standing” demands a fundamental response—a response toward our own otherness and to responsibilities triggered by the appeal of Others. In both cases, our vulnerability is inescapable: we can never have an absolute self-knowledge nor an absolute knowledge of Others. Ricoeur turns this fundamental aporia into an affirmative philosophical anthropology of human action, attestation, and justice.

This volume critically examines the role of science in the humanities and social sciences. It studies how cultures and societies in South Asia and Europe underwent a transformation with the adoption or adaptation of scientific methods, turning ancient cultural processes and phenomena into an enhanced scientific structure. The chapters in this book Discuss the development of science as a method in modern and historical contexts and the differences between modern science, scientification and pseudoscience. Study the interactions between bodies of knowledge such as Sanskrit and computer science; mathematics and Vedic mathematics; science and philosophy. Drawing on textual material, extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, Indology, history, linguistics, history and philosophy of science and social science.

Includes book reviews.

Is it Real? is a collection of twenty-eight papers on the most challenging, provocative – and profound – topics related to the quest for real and virtual realities of vision and other senses, and realities that are either constructed or imagined. There was no school, no theory, no methodology, nor any empirical approach in semiotics which was not forced to take a position, whether implicitly or explicitly, in attempting to discuss this issue. Semiotics is a discipline dealing with signs, and, thus, it is commonly thought that if we say of something that it is a “sign”, then it is something “less” real than the thing itself to which it refers. As such, the field of problems which opens from the theme “Is it Real?” is almost endless – but also relevant. This volume presents interactive dialogue related to this question structured under six different headings: five papers on the topic of “Visual Realities”; six on “What is Real?”; five on “Textual Realities”, concentrating on realities revealed from literature or the written language through texts; five on “Constructed Realities”; three on “Virtual Realities”; and, finally, four papers on “Imagery Realities”.