Looking At Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter

Distilled from Donald Palmer's more than 30 years of teaching experiences, this approachable, historically organized text exemplifies Dr. Palmer's very successful light-hearted approach to teaching introduction to philosophy. Through the use of humor, drawings, charts, and diagrams, serious philosophical topics come alive for the readers--without compromising the seriousness of the subject matter. The text can be used as a core text or as a supplement to any reader

Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity, and in the process makes significant contributions to continuing debates about such topics as modality, essence, natural kinds, and the relation between the mental and the physical. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world.

Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila's book is the first comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotions from Plato to Renaissance times, combining careful historical reconstruction with rigorous philosophical analysis. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book.

Philosophers often find that the response I am a philosopher' when given in reply to the question What do you do?' produces a puzzled silence. The puzzle is not one simply about the nature of philosophical thought, it is one about what philosophers actually do . David Hamlyn's enjoyable and illuminating account is the first to consider the history of the practice of philosophy or of philosophy considered as an institution. Being a Philosopher examines the main trends of that practice and how philosophers have been regarded at different times.

This is the only contemporary text to cover both epistemology and philosophy of mind at an introductory level. It also serves as a general introduction to philosophy: it discusses the nature and methods of philosophy as well as basic logical tools of the trade. The book is divided into three parts.