Avrum Stroll

Avrum Stroll accepts the ancient tradition that one of the tasks of philosophy is to give an accurate account of the world's features, both animate and inanimate. But, he contends, because these features are inexhaustibly complex, no single theory or conceptual model can provide a complete account. Stroll's approach is piecemeal and example-oriented. In stressing the importance of examples, his work runs counter to one of the most powerful and seductive ways of thinking about the world - the Platonic tradition, which denigrates examples in the search for essences. Stroll favors pluralism, on the ground that this is how the world is.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty was finished just before his death in 1951 and is a running commentary on three of G.E. Moore's greatest epistemological papers. In the early 1930s, Moore had written a lengthy commentary on Wittgenstein, anticipating some of the issues Wittgenstein would discuss in On Certainty. In this book, Avrum Stroll examines the philosophical relationship between these two great philosophers and their overlapping but nevertheless differing views. Both defended the existence of certainty and thus opposed any form of skepticism. However, their defenses and conceptions of certainty diverged widely, as did their understanding of the nature of skepticism and how best to combat it. Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty contains a careful and critical analysis of the two philosophers' differing approaches to a set of fundamental epistemological problems. Stroll extends their account to current issues in cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

"Fiction and nonexistence are closely intertwined because fiction often talks about non-existent entities, such as Hamlet and Sherlock Holmes. In Much Ado About Nonexistence. A. P. Martinich and Avrum Stroll, two of America's leading philosophers, provide a penetrating study of the relationship between fiction, existence, truth, and reference. Included in their discussion is a new theory of fiction, based on the speech act theory of H. P. Grice. The authors also critically discuss two versions of the theory of definite descriptions, Frege's and Russell's, and develop on alternative to Hilary Putnam's account of the relationship between natural kind terms and the world."--BOOK JACKET.

An outstanding introduction to the problems of philosophy by two eminent philosophers in a lucid, informal, & very accessible discussion of Western thought. Annotation. Casting skepticism in a central role, this history of Western philosophy looks at the efforts of major thinkers seeking to overcome skeptical challenges. The role of skepticism in producing new theoretical positions is explicated, and the influence of contemporary skeptics examined. The relative merits of skeptical claims are also debated. Popkin taught philosophy at Washington University. This lucid, informal, and very accessible discussion of Western thought takes the unique approach of interpreting skepticism -- i.e., doubts about knowledge claims and the criteria for making such claims -- as an important stimulus for the development of philosophy. The authors argue that practically every great thinker from the time of the Greeks to the present has produced theories designed to forestall or refute skepticism: from Plato to Moore and Wittgenstein. The influence of and responses to such 20th-century skeptics such as Russell and Derrida are also discussed critically. Popkin and Stroll review each major theory of philosophy chronologically and then further organize these theories into their respective subject areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. This is an outstanding introduction to the problems of philosophy by two eminent philosophers with a gift for presenting the history of ideas in a very lively and clear style.