Recent Faculty books

Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-free State

Oxford University Press, 2017

Against Marriage is a radical argument for the abolition of state-recognised marriage. Clare Chambers argues that state-recognised marriage violates both equality and liberty, even when expanded to include same-sex couples. Instead Chambers proposes the marriage-free state: an egalitarian state in which religious or secular marriages are permitted but have no legal status. More...

Kant and the Laws of Nature

Cambridge University Press, 2017

Laws of nature play a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy and are crucial to understanding his philosophy of science in particular. In this volume of new essays, the first systematic investigation of its kind, a distinguished team of scholars explores Kant's views on the laws of nature in the physical and life sciences. More...

Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages

Brepols, 2016

One of the most important texts in the history of medieval philosophy, the Book of Causes was composed in Baghdad in the 9th century mainly from the Arabic translations of Proclus' Elements of Theology. In the 12th century, it was translated from Arabic into Latin, but its importance in the Latin tradition was not properly studied until now. More...

Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

Princeton University Press, 2015

Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers—philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci—tackled the Problem of Paganism. More...

Evidence, Decision and Causality

Cambridge University Press, 2014

Most philosophers agree that causal knowledge is essential to decision-making: agents should choose from the available options those that probably cause the outcomes that they want. This book argues against this theory and in favour of evidential or Bayesian decision theory, which emphasises the symptomatic value of options over their causal role. More...

Aspects of Psychologism

Harvard University Press, 2014

Tim Crane takes a penetrating look into fundamental philosophical questions of consciousness, perception, and the experience we have of our mental lives. Psychologism presents the mind as a single subject-matter to be investigated not only empirically and conceptually but also phenomenologically: through the systematic examination of consciousness and thought from the subject’s point of view. More...

The Limits of Realism

Oxford University Press, 2013

Tim Button explores the relationship between words and world; between semantics and scepticism.
A certain kind of philosopher—the external realist—worries that appearances might be radically deceptive; we might all, for example, be brains in vats, stimulated by an infernal machine. But anyone who entertains the possibility of radical deception must also entertain a further worry: that all of our thoughts are totally contentless. That worry is just incoherent. More...

The Objects of Thought

Oxford University Press, 2013

Tim Crane addresses the ancient question of how it is possible to think about what does not exist. He  argues that the representation of the non-existent is a pervasive feature of our thought about the world, and that we will not adequately understand thought's representational power ('intentionality') unless we have understood the representation of the non-existent. More...

Abelard in Four Dimensions

University of Notre Dame Press, 2013

For readers new to Abelard, this book provides an introduction to his life and works along with discussion of his central ideas in semantics, ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. For specialists, the book contains new arguments about the authenticity and chronology of his logical work, fresh evidence about Abelard’s relations with Anselm and Hugh of St. Victor, a new understanding of how he combines the necessity of divine action with human freedom. More...

Plural Logic

Oxford University Press, 2013

Plural logic deals with plural terms ('Whitehead and Russell', 'Henry VIII's wives', 'the real numbers', 'the square roots of -1', 'they'), plural predicates ('surrounded the fort', 'are prime', 'are consistent', 'imply'), and plural quantification ('some things', 'any things'). Current logic is singularist: its terms stand for at most one thing. By contrast, the foundational thesis of this book is that a particular term may legitimately stand for several things at once; in other words, there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation. More...

Wittgenstein's Tractatus: History and Interpretation

Oxford University Press, 2013

Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism

Cambridge University Press, 2013

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his René Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism... More...