Kevin Scharp – författare

Semantics for Reasons is a book about what we mean when we talk about reasons. It not only brings together the theory of reasons and natural language semantics in original ways but also sketches out a litany of implications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. In their account of how the language of reasons works, Bryan R. Weaver and Kevin Scharp propose and defend a view called Question Under Discussion (QUD) Reasons Contextualism. They use this view to argue for a series of novel positions on the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons-to-be- rational debate, moral reasons, and the reasons-first approach.

Kevin Scharp proposes an original theory of the nature and logic of truth on which truth is an inconsistent concept that should be replaced for certain theoretical purposes. Replacing Truth opens with an overview of work on the nature of truth (e.g., correspondence theories, deflationism), work on the liar and related paradoxes, and a comprehensive scheme for combining these two literatures into a unified study of the concept truth. Scharp argues that truth is best understood as an inconsistent concept, and proposes a detailed theory of inconsistent concepts that can be applied to the case of truth. Truth also happens to be a useful concept, but its inconsistency inhibits its utility; as such, it should be replaced with consistent concepts that can do truth's job without giving rise to paradoxes. To this end, Scharp offers a pair of replacements, which he dubs ascending truth and descending truth, along with an axiomatic theory of them and a new kind of possible-worlds semantics for this theory. As for the nature of truth, he goes on to develop Davidson's idea that it is best understood as the core of a measurement system for rational phenomena (e.g., belief, desire, and meaning). The book finishes with a semantic theory that treats truth predicates as assessment-sensitive (i.e., their extension is relative to a context of assessment), and a demonstration of how this theory solves the problems posed by the liar and other paradoxes.

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. He was, Richard Rorty writes, "as original a mind as C. S. Peirce, and it has taken almost as long for the importance of his ideas to be appreciated." This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.The volume presents the most readable of Sellars's essays in a sequence that illuminates what Robert Brandom calls the "inferentialist" conception of meaning at the heart of his work. This conception, laid out in the early essays, is deployed in various epistemological contexts throughout the book so that, upon arriving at the concluding papers on Kant, the reader has been given a tour d'horizon not only of the central topics of philosophy of mind and language, but of much of the history of philosophy as well--and, with this, a sense of what a shifting of analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian stage would entail.

This book focuses on the core foundational issues that underpin conceptual engineering as a philosophical method. In less than a decade, the attention conceptual engineering has attracted across the whole discipline has grown with an explosive intensity. Based on lectures by leading philosophers at the Conceptual Engineering Online Seminar 2020/2022, this volume provides the reader with multiple entry-points in conceptual engineering, from case studies applied to specific concepts of high philosophical, scientific, social or political significance to metaphilosophical investigations into the theoretical foundations of conceptual engineering. It is of great interest to both the professional philosophers, experts in metaphilosophy or interested in applying the methods of conceptual to issues in their own areas of specialization, and philosophy students, eager to get acquainted with the most exciting and dynamic methodological developments of their discipline. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the foundations of conceptual engineering and conceptual change for making things as they stand better.

This book develops novel connections between conceptual engineering and a variety of fields and methods in analytic philosophy. Conceptual engineering is an exciting new movement in contemporary analytic philosophy that focuses on assessing and improving our concepts. In less than a decade, it has successfully spanned across the whole discipline. Based on lectures by leading philosophers at the Conceptual Engineering Online Seminar 2020/2022, this volume offers new perspectives on this wide array of topics and connects them to case studies of high philosophical, scientific, or social/political significance. This book is a must-read for professional philosophers, experts in metaphilosophy or those interested in applying the methods of conceptual engineering to issues in their own areas of specialization. It is also of great interest to philosophy students, eager to get acquainted with the most exciting and dynamic methodological developments of their discipline.